Were Richard Winters around to take my advice I’d try to tell him to get himself a better ghost writer--Sebastian Junger, for example. This one makes a lot of grammatical mistakes the editor seems to have been little better at catching and writes like a newspaper reporter. In the second place this present memoir adds little to what has already been published in Ambrose’ Band of Brothers and David Kenyon’s even better Parachute Infantry upon which the former seems largely based. Ironic that Kenyon’s book was unpublishable until Tom Hanks and Company made the mini-series. The present tome was written 60 years too late in reaction to the previously noted publications.
Somehow I managed to miss the fact that the same production team did a similar project on the war in the Pacific. Must check that out.
One thing an 80-something vet does feel free to write about is the number of friendly-fire deaths that occurred even during WW#2. Modern weapons and targeting technology makes hand to hand combat less frequent. Snipers can shoot miles, artillery hundreds, cruise missiles frightening distances, bombs can be dropped from 5 miles up, lasers can target from space. When you consider that NASA mis-programmed to miss Mars by 500,000 miles with a 10-billion dollar rocket the fact that unplanned targets get hit is not surprising.
If Winters wrote this memoir to ‘set the record straight’ then the one thing he does do is show how the writing of a good movie script serves to conflate characters, alter the order of events, and make selective use of the facts. A book tells you what happened, a movie shows you what happened. In the end, of course, as Winters points out the facts of the matter are those seen by the writer from his vantage point and each individual will have a different version of any one engagement.
