![]() ![]() I have always been glad that I could not look into the future. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. The stories we heard later the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors “Johnny Got His Gun” and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned just after his discharge, Webster gives a first hand account of life in E Company, 101st Airborne Division, crafting a memoir that resonates with the immediacy of a gripping novel. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans.īut we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. David Kenyon Webster’s memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionally charged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. ![]() ![]() “Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. ![]()
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