Disclaimer: I don't mean any disrespect to any of the real men of Easy Company. This is a fic based on the miniseries inspired by their lives. However, some of the events casually mentioned in the story actually did happen in the lives of the real-life men. (But definitely not all.)

I initially completed this story in April of 2011, but came back to update it in December of 2014. Now, in January of 2019, I think I'm finally done with this story and fine-tuning it, but who knows lol! Either way, if you've read it before and are coming back to read it again and remember it being different, that's the reason. I originally wrote this story when I was thirteen and, looking back on it now, I felt like it didn't represent what I thought it had back then because I was just so young and inexperienced. I didn't know how to express myself or even what a real relationship might look like. Because of those things, I decided to revise it.

Also, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported this story, whether you joined at the very beginning or are just discovering it now. You've helped a young girl discover a love for writing and given me that little extra encouragement to keep working at it. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

Anyway, whether you're reading it for the first time or not, either way, please drop me a review and let me know what you think! Feedback is always welcome, whether it's purely positive or constructive criticism. I hope you enjoy! :)

Chapter 1 — Currahee!

…

May 19, 1942

Toccoa, Georgia

My hand was shaking when I reached for the doorknob and turned it, but I stepped inside the cabin and shut the door behind me anyway, looking around at the men hanging out around their beds in various attitudes of casualness. There was a circle of poker going on with a few guys involved and almost everyone else watching from their bunks. But then eyes swiveled towards me and I just kind of stood there awkwardly, looking around for an empty bed to put my stuff, trying to avoid looking at all of the men now openly sizing me up.

There was an open bunk against the wall near the door and I swung my stuff onto it as casually as I could with so many eyes watching me.

"Well, fellas," I said, turning around to face them again. "Ain't this a warm welcome."

A short guy with tan skin and dark eyes swaggered up in a slightly exaggerated manner and folded his arms across his chest like he was trying to intimidate me, even though I probably had a full inch on him and I barely topped five feet six inches in boots.

"Who're you?"

"A new guy," I said, turning and standing practically toe to toe with him and folding my arms to mirror him. "I thought that was pretty obvious."

He stared at me for a few seconds before his face split into a grin and he held out his hand for me to shake.

"You're alright, kid. Frank Perconte."

I almost asked him who he was calling kid – I was barely shorter than him, after all – but I shook his hand anyway.

When I opened my mouth to introduce myself, my alias came out smoothly. I'd been in the army for a few weeks now; I'd had practice introducing myself with my brand new name.

"Daniel Shoemaker," I said.

My nickname in W Company had been "Shoes." Really imaginative, I have to say.

"Let me introduce the guys," he said, waving his arm around the cabin and then he started pointing and spouting names. All I could do was nod at everybody and hope I was going to remember a few of them later and not make an idiot of myself by calling everybody the wrong name. If I did, well… I hadn't really been planning on making friends anyway, given the delicate nature of my situation.

I sat on my bunk and Perconte went back to whatever he was doing and everyone turned back to watching the poker game.

Wait. What the hell was Perconte doing?

"Hey, Perconte," I said, "What the hell are you putting your boots on for?"

He looked at me like I was some kind of an idiot.

"So I can blouse my trousers, of course."

I looked at him like he was some kind of an idiot. Was there something I didn't know? Were we supposed to be blousing our trousers during basic?

"You're gonna get caught,"one of the poker players said, looking over his shoulder at Perconte, who was tucking his trousers into the tops of his laced boots. "You know they said we're not supposed to blouse until we've got our jump wings."

"Yeah, yeah, Christenson," Perconte waved it off. "Nobody's gonna know. And when we've got our wings and my trousers look better than yours 'cause I've been practicing, don't come running to me to teach you how to do it proper."

…

"You people are at the position of attention!"

Well, no shit, Captain Obvious. That was pretty clear. My back was dripping with sweat and aching from standing up ramrod straight for twenty minutes on end. The air was hot, hotter than hot; an oven in the atmosphere of the world. The mosquitoes were everywhere and the gnats everywhere else, darting at our eyes and into our noses and our mouths if we tried to talk and even crawling into our ears.

I hated Georgia. And I didn't think I liked being in the army either, if this was what it was like.

The guy marching around us and yelling about how we were unfit to go into combat was our commanding officer, this asshole named Sobel. I was starting to think I was going to like him even less than the gnats if that was even possible. He kept marching around and he kept yelling and really, man, like, you couldn't wait to have this conversation inside or something where there weren't any bugs?

"Private Perconte, have you been blousing your trousers over your boots like a paratrooper?"

I was so close to laughing. So, so close.

"No, sir!"

"Then explain the creases at the bottom."

Well, he had a good point there.

"No excuse, sir!"

I really didn't know how I was going to get away with this. I was — how to put it — too female to be legally enlisted in the Army, although they never actually ask you if you're girl or boy when you're enlisting. It's just kind of understood that men belong in war, apparently. And maybe they did belong in paratrooper infantry. The only thing I'd actually had a problem with was the physical inspection, which is required to enlist, and I'd walked in to have my inspection and stuck a fifty dollar bill in the doctor's face and waited for him to say yes.

Really, it wasn't even that hard to pull off. But I was just starting to realize that maybe this hadn't been the most brilliant idea in the world. A girl has to do what a girl has to do to run away from her problems, but joining the Airborne was apparently not as great of a solution as I'd first thought.

And Sobel kept walking around and yelling at men and revoking weekend passes.

"Name!"

The private said it so fast, I couldn't quite catch it and I couldn't see his face since I was standing behind him. It almost sounded like he said Judge Fuzz, but there was no way that was right.

"Dirt in the rear side aperture, pass revoked."

And then he searched the ranks for someone else to pick on. I thought his eyes landed on me for one second, standing stiffly in the very back of the far right line, but his gaze either moved on or he never even saw me at all. Instead, he was all, "When did you sew on these chevrons, Sergeant Lipton?" and "Rust on the butt-plate hinge spring, Private Bullshit."

Yeah, I officially decided I didn't really like Sobel that much. Private Bullshit — I later found out his name was actually Malarkey — seemed really disappointed that he wouldn't get to go to town that weekend.

Sobel slapped some guy's head with his own bayonet — he obviously didn't know that bayonets are for stabbing people, not hitting them on the head — and then held up the bayonet to use as an example as he continued yelling: "I wouldn't take this rusty piece of shit to war, and I will not take you to war in your condition." He threw the bayonet into the ground. Thump. Someone was into being overly dramatic. "Now thanks to these men and their infractions, every man in the company who had a weekend pass has lost it. Change into your P.T. gear, we're running Currahee."

Yes, because throwing a supposedly dull and rusty bayonet into the ground is going to make it not only cleaner, but also sharper. That made perfect sense.

I really needed to keep a lid on my sass if I was going to make it in the army.

Almost exactly two minutes later, everyone in my cabin was just about ready to go.

"I ain't going up that hill," Perconte protested from where he was still sitting on his bunk.

"I don't think we've got much choice," I retorted as I finished lacing my boots.

A man burst through the door of the cabin, tying his shorts' drawstrings.

"Hey, Perconte, what are you thinking of, blousin' your pants?" He demanded, storming past us.

"Shut up, Martin, alright? He gigged everybody." Perconte retorted.

"Yeah, well, you should know better. Don't give him no excuses!"

"Excuses? Why don't you come here, look at these trousers, get down and you tell me if there's a crease on 'em?"

Even in PT gear, I managed to escape suspicion with my bandaged chest, which actually wasn't even noticeable under the white shirt. Since I'd never exactly been well-endowed, it wasn't that hard to hide what I did have. I'd even stuffed my pants, attempting to help myself keep disguised should I have to take off my trousers, if you know what I mean.

To be honest, I wasn't too concerned about passing as a man. I know that might sound weird to say, but ever since I'd cut my hair in preparation for it, people had been mistaking me for a man left and right, so I had sufficient cause to believe I could get away with it.

I was only lucky that I didn't have snow white cheeks that blushed with the tint of autumn or some shit like that. I wasn't overly feminine appearance-wise. I had full lips and high cheekbones and I was really short for a man, but other than that there wasn't anything too noticeably womanly about me. Straight nose. Straight teeth. Green-brown eyes that weren't quite hazel. Dirty blonde hair that looked a bit mousy now that it was buzzed down to an inch long. Nothing spectacular.

Of course, I doubt if the men would've even noticed if I looked like Rita Hayworth as long as my hair was buzzed and my chest was bandaged. They weren't exactly the most observant people I'd ever met. Perconte and Martin were still arguing about the bloused trousers when the sergeant came in to herd us all out to run Currahee. Rolling my eyes at Perconte's stubborn hardheadedness, I took off my jacket and threw it across my bunk on my way out. It was time to find out if I could actually get away with this or not. After all, I'd already made it out of W Company, which meant I was already past the toughest part.

Theoretically.

I'd already done some PT in W Company and nobody had noticed anything strange, so I knew it was possible to get away with it. And I knew that once I got in with these new men, once they got used to me, it was unlikely they'd notice something unless they noticed something at the beginning. After they got used to me, they'd become less observant. So I decided to escape scrutiny by jogging in the very middle of the crowd. It couldn't be that hard, right?

Wrong. Damn shit fucking idiotically wrong. Completely and totally wrong.

When they say that Currahee means "stand alone," it's notbecause it's the only mountain or hill around and there's nothing else anywhere, so it just stands there alone. That makes sense, but that's not why. It's because if you try to run up with a bunch of other people, you're going to be standing at the top by yourself, simply because unless they're being forced to, nobody in their right minds would actually try to run Currahee.

Unfortunately, we were being forced to.

My lungs were burning and my legs were burning and the bandage was sweaty and my face was sweaty and dripping and oh my dear God almighty I couldn't go on—

But I did — I did go on. Every time I was about to give up, Sobel would say something in his stupid, stupid voice and I would look at him running like a weird, flapping duck, and I would decidesomething along the lines of "Hell, if he can do it, I can do it," and I would keep going. A guy up at the front tripped and almost fell.

"Do not help that man! Do not help that man!" Sobel was yelling at us yet again. He always seemed to be yelling, the son of a bitch. A few of the guys helped the tripper anyway. "We do not stop! You've got thirty minutes to get to the top of this mountain if you want to serve in the paratroopers. Hi-ho, Silver!" Sobel somehow found the strength to speed up and forge into the steepening incline. Finally, some twenty impossibly long minutes after starting, I was almost to the top, and I could hear Sobel's voice, yelling: "We are coming on twenty-three minutes! That may be good enough for the rest of the 506th, but that is not good enough for Easy company!"

Lieutenant Winters was encouraging the men as they clambered to the top to tag the stone Sobel was standing next to with a stopwatch. We were all panting, our tongues hanging out of our mouths, breaths coming heavily, our lungs tight and straining, our shirts drenched in sweat, our muscles complaining. And through it all, I couldn't help but think one thing, during the very exhausting scramble up the final incline: the man in front of me had a decidedly nice ass.

…

Like I mentioned before, I really wasn't looking to make friends there. It was going to mess up my ability to stay disconnected, to keep from being discovered. If I made friends and I got comfortable, I was going to slip up and say something I shouldn't say, something damning, something about — oh, I don't know, bleeding once a month. So I tried to remain inconspicuous and unknown by keeping the talking to a minimum and for the most part it went pretty well.

That all changed one fateful lunch about three days after I'd arrived. I was contemplating the "food" — slop, more like — rather intently when I was kicked out of my eating trance by the guy sitting next to me.

"What's your name again?"

What's your name again? Really?

"Well, that's a very interesting question," I retorted before even so much as looking up or thinking. What's your name again, my ass. "So original. I've never been asked that question before in my entire life."

I was rather irritable that day. We'd just finished a Currahee run and I was just done with everybody's shit. So I was maybe a little bitchy when he asked me my name that day and maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was.

When I glanced up at the guy when he didn't go away, I half-recognized a man I'd seen somewhere before. He was probably in my cabin, which would make sense. I'd stayed pretty quiet so far, so most of them probably didn't even remember my name. Guys were always getting kicked out or dropping out. I think everybody just assumed that since I was so short, I would eventually end up leaving either way anyway and so they didn't bother even trying to become friends with me. Not to mention that I was fresh from W Company and, as I'd quickly learned, the expectations were very different between W and Easy.

He was a bit taller than me, but that's not really surprising. I was probably one the shortest people in the entire army. Either way, he probably had about half a foot on me. He was looking at me waiting for an answer and I finally shrugged mentally. He looked like he wasn't going to go away until he knew my name at least. He was looking at me expectantly, his eyebrows raised.

"Shoemaker," I told him. "My name's Shoemaker."

"Jesus, I can't call you that. That's a terrible name. What's your first name?"

"Daniel."

Great alias, wasn't it. Daniel Shoemaker. Too bad I hadn't actually come up with it.

"Danny it is. George Luz. Where you from?"

Oh. Judge Fuzz.

"Maine," I answered, wondering when he was going to go away. "What about you?"

"Rhode Island."

"No way," I said, because I didn't really know what else to say.

"Yeah, why — have you ever been there?"

"No, I was just trying to sound interested."

He stared at me for a second.

And then quite suddenly he started laughing and slapped me on my back.

"Sassy son of a bitch, aren't ya," he said, like he'd just decided to adopt me. And even if he'd decided to adopt me, it took me a couple of minutes longer to be convinced I wanted to be his friend too. He plopped himself down on the bench next to me and started eating his food and that was that.

George had large dark eyes, dark hair, a dimple when he smiled and sometimes when he talked. His eyes got this certain sparkle whenever he was about to play a prank. He was really quite cute, actually, and we became friends quickly, mostly because he liked playing pranks and I was always up for a little mischief. Call it a character flaw, but once I found out that he was great at mimicking voices, I was sold on him becoming my friend because I knew we'd get into some pretty great trouble. And, subsequently, since he was arguably the most popular fucker in the unit, it then became impossible to be "inconspicuous and unknown" since I was his partner in crime in most of the endeavors he undertook. The name Danny stuck and that was what everyone started calling me.

Thanks, George.

My newfound and unplanned notoriety wasn't a good thing sometimes. Since George made a place for himself very quickly as the company jokester and I always naturally joined in, having excellent hearing and being naturally mischievously inclined, I didn't escape attention quite like I'd originally planned.

For instance, there was this one time about a week after I'd arrived when George decided our cabin needed a bit of "group bonding." And while that might sound like a good thing, what with us probably eventually going into combat with each other, his idea of "group bonding" was… strange, to say the least. We were gathered around engaging in card games and Perconte started telling us about an awkward sex story he'd endured once and pretty soon everyone was pitching in their own awkward sexual encounters — everyone had one — and then it was just me and this one other guy named Roe who hadn't spoken up about our experiences with "the other gender."

Gene Roe was quiet, but not necessarily because he was actually shy or anything like that. He was just self-contained, self-possessed, respectable and respectful, polite — grown up. He was mature. In other words, he was everything most of the other guys weren't. We — the other guys and I — never messed around with him too much in basic or, now that I think about it, most of the time we spent in the army. We felt bad doing it, like we were overstepping our boundaries. The most we ever got out of him was a smile. He became more and more reserved later, when we'd seen actual bloodshed, but he was quiet even in those first days.

That being said, that made it nearly impossible for the guys to pick on him about anything related to sex, so when there was a lull in the conversation — which there inevitably was — and George looked around the room, his eyes landed on Gene Roe and then on me, and so of course it was me he decided to give a hard time, simply because I wasn't the nice one out of the two left.

I hadn't joined in comparing awkward sex stories because I was a girl and girls had different awkward sex stories than guys, obviously. And I couldn't tell anybody stories about the one time I'd been on a date with a guy and he'd gotten aroused in the middle of dinner for whatever reason and then had tried to hide it with a napkin. (That hadn't worked out too well for him. I'd tried to be nice about it and ignore it — come on, it was the 1940's, not the eighteenth century, for Christ's sake, we weren't prudes — but it was still ridiculously awkward.) But telling that story would have made it obvious that I was either a girl or homosexual and I had a feeling either of those revelations would make the guys uncomfortable. And I was uncomfortable with the thought of having to make up a story about a girl and how I was a guy and I had parts that I didn't actually have and something happened that was really awkward—

No, thanks anyway. I didn't feel like having to use my imagination to go into the kind of detail that some of the guys were going into.

So that's why when George piped up and said, "What's the matter, Danny? Why're you being so quiet? C'mon, tell us a story," I opened my mouth and stuttered for a few seconds. I honestly had no idea what to say for probably the first time in my life.

When George saw how hesitant I was, he practically pounced on me.

"Aw," he crooned. "What, is Danny uncomfortable with talking about sex? Is Danny—" His eyes got big and exaggeratedly wide and he grinned like some kind of evil maniacal villain. "Is Danny a virgin?"

"No!" I protested, because I knew where he was going with this, but he just kept grinning and talking about how I was a virgin and finally I gave in and told them yes, I was a virgin and I was terrible around girls for some reason and my hands always got clammy and—

Honestly, I was just glad to have a way out of having that conversation, regardless of whether or not I would have to endure seemingly incessant teasing about it later.

My eyes caught Gene Roe's gaze and he was watching me from his bunk where he'd been reading a book and he looked at me like he knew I wasn't telling the truth about being terrible around girls and my hands getting clammy.

Or maybe I was just self-conscious and Roe just had a keen gaze so I felt more conspicuous than I actually was. Either way, for a moment, I thought he knew.

I always made a conscious effort to not shower at the same time as the other guys. Since the showers were open showers with only a tarp separating your shower from the rest of the world and most of the men went at the same time, it was kind of hard to take off all of my clothes and take my bandage off and shower without somebody noticing that I had things that men didn't have and I didn't have things that men had.

So usually I just showered during free time. It actually wasn't that hard to find a time when nobody was in there, since everyone usually showered at the same time anyway, like I said.

Another thing that separated me from the other guys was the mail. It sounds like a small thing, sure, but all of the guys had their families and friends and sweethearts writing them letters. Sometimes Sobel confiscated said letters, but at least they had people who were writing to them.

George, on one of the many occasions he was mailing his weekly letter to his ma, realized he'd never seen me send post before.

"Jesus, Danny, you know how stamps work, right?"

I rolled my eyes at him.

"Yeah, George," I replied. "I know how fucking stamps work."

"How come I've never seen you use one before then?"

My choices seemed relatively clear; either I made up a shitty excuse about why I never sent anyone letters, or I confessed that my home life was shit and I didn't have someone worth writing to.

"Well, Jesus, George, I wonder why that would be," I pretended to ponder, shooting him a glare.

He went back to writing his home address on the envelope. I'd seen him write so many of those damn letters, I'd memorized the address myself and I'd never even been there.

It was a common thing though; everyone wrote letters regularly, it seemed, except for me. There was one person I cared to write to, my cousin Geoff, but he lived in Germany, and I wasn't about to send post addressed there. Not when we were being trained every day to look out for spies in our midst. I had a letter from him as a keepsake, but I kept it in the safest place I could find, which was usually in the deepest recesses of my bag, stowed under the cot the army liked to call my bed.

And once a month, when we were paid, I sent part of my wage to my aunt in Maine. I gave my return address, since I knew she wouldn't try to find me, and for my name, I just wrote "Shoemaker." She would know who it was from. It wasn't like she had many people sending her mail.

She didn't reply until the third month I'd done it. I got a letter from her that read:

I don't need your filthy kraut money. Go to hell and leave me alone for once in your goddamn life.

It wasn't addressed to me except by "Shoemaker" on the envelope; she didn't even bother signing her name.

George saw it and raised an eyebrow, especially at the word kraut. I just shrugged and said she was batshit crazy.

I didn't send her any money after that though. I figured I might as well save it for myself, since she was going to be a bitch about it.

…

I'd joined to send money to her, but I stayed after she rejected my money because of Sobel.

The training was hard, obviously. Sobel put us through hell physically. I'm not really surprised that only one out of ten guys made it into the Airborne. Sometimes Sobel's face was literally the only thing keeping me going, just because I just really didn't want to give him the satisfaction of telling me I was out of the Airborne and I wasn't good enough and I wasn't strong enough and actually knowing he was right.

He liked sending us on ridiculous night-time marches or making us run Currahee, often double-time with a full pack.

We all mutually hated him. Sometimes — more often than you'd think — some guys would get together a group and go run Currahee at night for a little extra workout. Everything was geared towards showing Sobel up and making him quit his whining about how we weren't going to cut it.

The training only seemed to get tougher. Sobel seemed to have a tendency to try and think of the most ridiculous, exhausting exercise he could think of and then he would make us do it. In his defense, most of the time he was right there with us, yelling at us in our faces about how we weren't good enough, but still. That didn't stop us from hating him all the more.

In those days, we were focused primarily on getting through each day of training without giving up or giving Sobel satisfaction in some way, on using our relaxation time to its full advantages. George and I became almost inseparable quickly, but even when we were apart, I found my eyes straying towards him, seeking him out in a room, especially when I heard him laughing.

George invented a "game" — if that's what you want to call it — called Grab Fanny. If the name itself doesn't tip you off, George liked grabbing asses and he liked having an excuse to do it, so he devised a game where you got points for grabbing someone's ass without making them mad (in Easy Company that wasn't particularly easy) and you got points depending on how easy-going the target was, the scale of points being from one to ten. Easier target, less points. For example, Liebgott would probably be somewhere around a nine during basic training, simply because he was literally always angry about something and it was pretty complicated getting him to cheer up enough to not mind you copping a feel.

Also, extra points were awarded per the target's rank, but that rule wasn't actually established until much, much later. (And to be specific, it was established after Lieutenant Welsh joined us, if you know what I mean.)

Whoever had the most points after a week won. At first the winner didn't really win a prize or anything. The first couple of weeks were just for George's own amusement. But then somebody came up with the genius idea of betting on who the winner would be and of course I protested that you couldn't bet on somebody's chances without giving them something for winning as well, so that's when the betting started. The pot always got larger as the week went on. To bet on who would win, you had to put in a small amount in the winner's pot.

Obviously, it wore out after a while but there were a few minor revivals of it whenever we got particularly bored.

George tended to cheat. Or, at least, we claimed he was cheating, because he was so funny that it was pretty rare someone actually got mad at him for grabbing their ass. Usually, he'd do it, crack a joke, and then they'd say something along the lines of "Alright, alright, Luz," push him off, and then he'd be triumphant.

...

One Friday night, we were marching along the road, almost back to the camp, completely dehydrated, when Bull Randleman started complaining to Lieutenant Winters about Sobel making us march without water and how he must hate Easy Company and Lieutenant Winters, handling it like it was nothing at all, replied that Sobel didn't actually hate Easy Company — he just hated Randleman.

Of course, that pleased Bull. A lot.

"Seriously though," I said to Smokey Gordon, who was walking next to me. "Does Sobel not realize how ridiculously stupid this is? He doesn't even march with us on these stupid walks and we're not allowed to drink water, which is of course terrible for us. We're out here dehydrated and deliberately dehydrating us is going to do literally nothing to make us more ready for combat, it's just going to screw with our immune systems."

"Well then, Danny," Smokey drawled in what seemed to be amusement. "How do you know so much about my immune system?"

I glanced over at him and rolled my eyes because he was ignoring my point, but allowed him to distract me from my rant anyway. Talking about my thirst and how ridiculous it was just made me thirstier.

"I lived with my granddad for a while. He was a doctor. I picked up a few things."

"So basically if I get hit by a bullet, you're the guy who's going to rescue me?"

"No, Smokey," I retorted. "That's a medic."

We got back to the camp maybe thirty minutes later and by that time I was almost drooling at the thought of water. Georgia summers were hot even at night and my body still hadn't finished adjusting to the extreme weather shift, plus we were in full gear and our packs were heavy and stifling and we were sweating.

Sobel paced in front of us and eyed us up and down for a few seconds, as though we were supposed to have come back magically laden with huge muscles and great stamina. Nope. We were all exhausted and sweating and really, really pissed off that we hadn't had any water to drink in God knows how long it had been.

"Lieutenant Winters, I want canteens out of belts with the caps unscrewed," Sobel said. I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me I was about to hate him even more, if that was even possible.

"Easy Company, canteens out and open."

"On my command, they will pour the contents onto the ground."

"On the CO's order, you will upend your canteen."

"Now, Lieutenant."

"Pour them!"

I turned the open canteen upside down and when I saw all that beautiful, sparkling, life-giving, thirst-quenching water come pouring out to splatter uselessly so the dirt could soak it up, I felt murderous. Dehydrating me and forcing me to march twelve miles for nothing but his own stupid ideas of what physical fitness is—

I did my best to not look at the seeming river coming out of my canteen. It just served to make me more mad and more thirsty and at that point, it was hard telling the difference between the two because they were both related.

Sobel paced in front of us, watching this display with something akin to a sick kind of glee. Then his eye caught on something in my direction and my breath hitched, afraid that I'd done something wrong or he'd heard about that joke I had told at his expense and had decided to punish me for it in front of the men or — even worse — he'd found out about me or spotted something different about me and he was marching straight for me and my heart practically stopped beating and—

He went straight past me to the man behind me in the ranks and I almost sighed I was so relieved.

"Private Christenson! Why is there no water in your canteen? You drank from your canteen, didn't you?"

"Sir, I was—"

And then Sobel made a huge deal out of asking Lieutenant Winters whether or not he'd specifically told everyone to not drink out of their canteens for that night's march, creating a big spectacle and just being overly dramatic in general just because one guy had gotten dehydrated and drank some water from his canteen like a normal human being, and—

"Private Christenson, you disobeyed a direct order. You will fill your canteen and repeat all twelve miles of the march immediately!"

Holy shit.

As Christenson hurried to do exactly what Sobel had told him to, I lowered my canteen, which, by this time, had run out of water.

Sobel marched back to the front of the company, pointing to the ground where he wanted Winters to stand and started talking to him. Well, maybe not talking to him. More like talking at him. I didn't exactly strain my ears to hear it, but I automatically assumed that Sobel was blaming Winters for literally everything possible. That happened a lot, more than actually realistic. I had a suspicion that Winters hated Sobel even more than the rest of us did and was just either too polite or too self-controlled to let it show.

We were dismissed. I went to bed after a very long shower.

The next day was Saturday, but since we'd all had our weekend passes taken away earlier in the week for some stupid "infraction," Sobel decided we would run Currahee and — for the first time in what felt like forever — we were just in our PT gear, not in our full kit and caboodle. I was running next to George and I just kept thinking about the night before and how ridiculous it was that Sobel was doing this to us and physically torturing us on purpose, what with the dehydration and everything. Poor Christenson was so bent out of shape that he was struggling running Currahee in just his PT gear and it had been a while since we'd actually sincerely struggled with that, especially since our muscles were really starting to develop and our lungs were getting used to being so active.

I decided that I needed a little bit of revenge. For my sake and for Christenson and for everybody else. We just needed some good old-fashioned revenge.

So I waited until the boys piped up into one of the usual marching songs.

"George," I said, as quietly as I could, which wasn't that quiet. "Are you up for humiliating Sobel a little?"

"Any day," he said, matching my tone.

I told him my idea. He grinned. I liked his smile. I liked making him smile.

"Alright," he agreed. "Split off little by little and then give me the signal."

Slowly, very slowly, I started to veer away from him and I let a few guys come between us, slowing down until I was somewhere near the back of the group. There were always three groups of runners and Sobel always ran in front of the second and behind the first for most of the three miles up. We were only about halfway through, so he was still in his usual position.

George glanced back at me as discreetly as he possibly could and I gave him a thumbs up. And just then, the marching ditty ended and there was a very pregnant pause. Suddenly, there was a wolf whistle — George — and a voice that definitely didn't belong to anyone in Easy Company — also George — yelled, "Captain Sobel's got some nice girly legs."

Sobel nearly tripped over himself. He stopped in his tracks and looked around wildly.

"Who said that?" He demanded, obviously taken aback and quite frankly furious at the blatant disrespect. "Who the hell said that?" Everyone else just kept running. We knew not to stop when he stopped.

I waited until we were past him so he couldn't see who was talking to him and I tried to pitch my voice deeper than usual and I slipped into a Jersey accent I'd learned from a kid at primary school and I yelled, "Hey, Cap'n Sobel, wanna come to the movies with me this weekend? I need a nice girl on my arm."

Sobel was fuming. I could tell by the way his voice cracked when he demanded to know who was talking.

Then, quite unexpectedly, there was another wolf whistle from the third group and then another proposition from the group ahead of me and suddenly there were pick-up lines and whistles shooting at Sobel so fast, he couldn't even yell anymore.

Project Humiliation was an even better success than I'd imagined it would be. I sped up just enough to catch back up to George before Sobel would notice we were ever apart and we just grinned at each other. George's dimple didn't disappear for the rest of the Currahee run that day; he kept looking over at me and winking.

Running Currahee suddenly didn't seem so hard.

Sobel's face was priceless. He couldn't court-martial all of us and there was no way to be sure which of us had actually done anything, but we already knew for sure that there was no way we were getting weekend passes for a very long time and our PT was about to be even more grueling and our cabins were going to be very thoroughly searched and most of our stuff was going to be deemed contraband and taken away from us, since that was the only real control Sobel had over us.

It was all worth it anyway.

And from that day on, Sobel never wore his PT shorts in front of us ever again. He always wore his olive green uniform trousers, even though we were running Currahee and at that point it was still the middle of the summer.

Revenge was sweet.

But as time continued to pass, as the weeks stretched on and my secret went undiscovered, I realized more and more that my stakes were climbing higher and higher. As I grew closer to my jump wings, my attachment to the men around me strengthened. We were brought together as a family in those moments of hating Sobel, running up Currahee, learning discipline in the strangest and most grueling ways, becoming each other's support systems. Sobel tore us down and we built each other back up.

And as my eyes strayed towards George more and more, as I caught myself watching how his hands moved when he talked and noticing how emphatically he swallowed when eating food, I became more and more afraid that the discovery of my secret would mean my alienation from my newfound family.

I was lying to everyone around me, my new brothers – the same men who had taken up teasing me about my supposed virginity and started calling me Danny – and I didn't know how it could end, when it could end. What if my secret was discovered on a battlefield when they searched my dead body for a letter to send home to my family? What if we all survived this war and I had to pretend to be a man every time I went to a reunion?

I wasn't necessarily thinking that far in the future. Every day, I was focused on not being discovered that specific day. I could worry about everything else when it came. But every time I caught George's eyes from across the room, I still found myself wondering: Would it be the same if he knew? Or would something be different?

It wasn't long before I had to find out.

…

There was a sudden noise to my left and my head jerked around. Perconte was staring at me with his mouth hanging wide open.

"Shit," I growled. I knew I was royally screwed.

I was in the shower and there'd been literally no one else in there because hey, it was free time and no one was ever in there during free time and I'd been having some trouble with putting my bandage back on and my elbow had somehow knocked open the tarp curtain slightly, but since my hands were rather busy tying my bandage back together, it really wasn't such a good idea to put the tarp back in place. And since no one else was actually in there anyway—

Until Perconte had apparently walked in like a fucking silent ninja, anyway.

"You… you're…"

I'm surprised he didn't faint right on the spot.

There was only one way I could deal with this. I had to pretend like it was as normal as possible so he at least knew it was me he was dealing with, his friend, a fellow mischief-maker. If he remembered it was me, maybe he wouldn't turn me in.

"What's the matter, Perco? Haven't you ever seen a girl before?"

He looked a little queasy. He'd been in the same platoon as me for a few months and he'd never once suspected I was any different from him and maybe he was remembering that one time George had decided to do the "group bonding" thing with the awkward sex stories and Perconte had told us about how one time he was about to have sex with this girl and she'd started laughing—

He turned to go, but I darted forward and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, giving him no choice but to stay right where he was and look at me, and I stared right into his eyes to let him know that I meant what I was about to say.

"Now listen," I said, "I've been a girl for the last three goddamn months and I am going to get those jump wings so I have to be here for another three whole goddamn months, and you're not going to fucking blow my cover, alright? You are not going to tell anyone. And if you do, I swear to God, I will attack you with my bayonet in the middle of the night when you're asleep and least expecting it and I'll chop off some bits you might want to keep around, no matter how small they might be, if you get my drift. Do you understand?"

He nodded as quickly as he physically could, his head bobbing up and down emphatically, almost eagerly, like he wanted me to know exactly how well he understood me.

"It's still me, Perco," I said quietly, before I finally let him go and turned back to fixing my bandage, but this time he didn't go anywhere right away. He just stood there and stared at me. But by the time I turned back around to slide on my t-shirt — fully prepared to threaten him with another weapon (maybe a grenade this time) if he didn't stop looking at me like I was from the moon — he was gone.

I lived in terror in the minutes after that, terrified he would tell someone, anyone, but everything was quiet for a few days. Perconte gave me a few odd looks here and there, but once he figured out I was the same person I had been for the last few months and I wasn't about to chop off his nuts unless he actually told somebody, he settled down.

And then, one Saturday, we were in town on one of the rare weekend passes we actually got to have, and George and I were walking into a bar, when suddenly he laughed and said, "Hey, you know what, that reminds me — Perc told me this joke the other day about you being a girl and having tits and I think we should include him in more pranks because his poker face is superb."

Jesus Christ.

I'd stopped in my tracks as soon as George got to the part about me being a girl.

Perconte had told somebody. And it had been George. And now George knew.

And then George stopped and saw my face before I could figure out how to react, before I could respond intelligently, and started smiling again as he spoke and I couldn't say anything to stop him as I waited for him to come to the realization of what I was.

"Jesus, Danny, it's all good, it's not like a few girl jokes here and there aren't normal—" He started to say, and then I think maybe something clicked in his head because of the way I was looking at him and he just stumbled back a few feet from me and his eyes got really wide. "Jesus Christ. Danny—?"

There it was.

It was time to face the truth.

I grabbed his arm and yanked him into an alleyway right next to the bar, untucked my shirt, and flashed him with the bandage. His face turned so white so fast, it was almost comical. For a second there I was pretty sure he was going to faint.

"Jesus," he breathed, staring at me. Or, more specifically, my chest. "Are those new?"

"Oh, yeah, George," I retorted, glaring at him for the amount of stupidity in that question, tense and anxious in the face of how long it was taking him to grasp the issue. "I magically grew tits overnight last week. I haven't really known how to tell you. It didn't seem normal to wake up one morning looking like a woman."

He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Then again, how are you supposed to react to the news that your best friend is a woman and you've thought she was a man for the last couple of months? He was doing pretty well, all things considered.

"Jesus, Danny," he said, folding his arms and still gaping at me but starting to look a little irritated at the same time. "The least you could've done is, oh, I don't know — tell me?" His voice trailed up a little at the end and got pretty shrill and it would've actually been rather funny if the situation hadn't been so confrontational.

"And what, have you react like this on base?" I retorted defensively. There was no way I was going to tell him and let him react this way where everyone else could easily overhear. "I'm gonna kill Perco. I specifically told him not to tell anyone. Did he tell anybody else?"

"I don't know," George shrugged absently. "Wait, wait. If you have tits, does that mean—"

I rolled my eyes at him.

"Yes, George. It means I have a hole where men have a pole. No need to get childish about it."

"Childish?" He sputtered. "I'm not being childish. I'm just trying to confirm things, you know, adjust a bit. It's kinda weird waking up one morning thinking your friend's got a dick and really he's a she and she doesn't have a dick."

"Well, would you rather if she had a dick?" I asked him. His eyes bulged out and he stopped breathing for about three seconds straight and I thought he was about to have a heart attack right on the spot. His expression in itself was funny enough to make me laugh, despite the situation we were in.

"Jesus, why am I friends with you." He said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. "You need to work on your goddamn comedic timing."

I didn't say anything in return. I was waiting for him to say something meaningful, something like "Fuck you," before he walked off and left me in that bar by myself, alone with my secrets and my bandaged tits.

But he didn't.

"Well," he said instead, "I need a goddamn beer."

And that was that.

We continued into the bar. George purposely cut me off in the door and then laughed at the look on my face, his brown eyes twinkling at me in mischief.

So much for ladies going first.

We got inside and sat down and ordered beers. George looked around to make sure nobody from the company was sitting around us and then leaned towards me, his elbow on the table, tilting his head in my direction for the private conversation that he was about to initiate, and then said, "So, there's no way your name's actually Daniel Shoemaker unless your parents were really shitty and thought it'd be great to name their daughter with a man's name."

"No," I said. "My name definitely isn't Daniel Shoemaker."

"So what is it?" He asked, cocking his head to one side in that way he had. It occasionally reminded me of a curious puppy.

"Delvina," I replied.

"Jesus, that's not really much better. Am I supposed to start calling you Del now? Like, what do I even say. I can't make a nickname out of that. Not unless you actually like being called Del, in which case I'm sorry for you—"

"Shut up," I told him, punching his shoulder and laughing. It was good to have him making fun of me; it at least eased my fears that his discovery of my secret would change our entire dynamic, our entire relationship. He was the same man he'd always been, just as I was the same girl I'd always been, even if he hadn't known it. "That's my name you're making fun of."

I tried my best to ignore the bit of foam at the corner of his mouth from the beer, just as I usually tried to ignore his mouth in general; how his lips moved when he spoke, how his teeth flashed when he grinned, how his smile always brightened his whole face.

"So, how'd you do it?" He asked.

"Do what?"

"Join the Airborne," he clarified, like it was obvious what he'd been asking and I was supposed to just automatically know what he'd been talking about.

Sorry, not a psychic here.

"I stole the real Daniel Shoemaker's draft summons."

"Simple as that?" He raised his eyebrows at me incredulously. "You stole some guy's draft summons and then impersonated him?"

"Basically, yes," I said, slightly unwilling to go into details. "I worked at a bar before — you know, back when I was still dressing like a girl. And he — Daniel Shoemaker, I mean — he got drunk after he got his summons and he walked out and accidentally left it at the bar and I found it and — I don't know. It just made sense, I guess. Of course, I had to find somebody who could forge a driver's license and then I had to dress up like a man and cut my hair, but otherwise…" I shrugged. "Surprisingly not that hard."

He gave me a speculative look and thought for a couple of seconds.

"What about the physical examination?" He asked. "You had to have gone through a physical examination."

I grinned at him, somewhat proud of my ingenuity.

"It's really not that hard to hand a doctor some money and tell him to put you down as 1A," I told him. "Shit, the doctor probably would've put that I was six feet tall or something if I'd paid him enough."

I'd been fortunate enough to have an apathetic doctor doing my examination. If it had been a more caring doctor, I probably would've been screwed.

"You're a terrible person, Danny — I mean, uh — Del." He tried out my newfound name and wrinkled his nose. "I don't like it. I might as well just call you 'Delicious' or something."

"Don't get creative, George," I told him, wrinkling my nose at the pun. "It doesn't suit you too well."

"So what am I supposed to call you now then?" He asked.

"Ah, I don't care," I answered, shrugging. "Just call me Dani. I joined the army and disguised myself as a man. Having a masculine nickname is literally the least of my problems."

There was silence for a couple of seconds while he took a sip of his beer before he turned back to me and just watched me for a couple of seconds.

"Can I help you?" I asked him when he'd been staring at me for over ten seconds and still not said anything.

"Why'd you join?" He asked, suddenly completely serious. "Of all the things you could've done instead — why the hell would you impersonate a man to jump out of an airplane and kill people?"

Well, when he put it like that…

"Well, aren't you nosy," I said, stalling for time as I tried — and failed — to think of a good lie I could tell so he would leave me alone and I wouldn't have to tell him the truth. He was still watching me, so I knew he wasn't going to let it go until he had an answer. "I'm an idiot?" I told him, shrugging and taking a swig of my beer and trying to play it off.

He waited for a few seconds for me to continue before rolling his eyes.

"Oh, yeah, that explains everything, Dani, just leave off right there. I have all the information I wanted. More than enough, actually. Jesus, stop babbling so much. I don't care about your life at all."

I couldn't help but laugh at him.

"I'm an idiot, George," I said, shrugging again, still not sure of what else I could say. The 'I'm an idiot' line was all I'd had. And, unfortunately, I was being honest. "Does it really matter why I did it? I wanted to leave. I felt trapped. My home situation wasn't great. I was living with my aunt at the time, who kind of hates me, and she always told me I was worthless and useless and I had a friend who was joining the Airborne and told me about the pay and… and so, I don't know, somehow I came up with the notion that disguising myself as a man and joining the army and sending my aunt a hundred dollars for a couple months in a row to prove I wasn't a failure was a fucking great idea. Don't ask me. I used to be a dumbass."

It was the truth, or at least the uncomplicated version of it. And as soon as I'd boarded the bus that would take me to basic, I'd known it was all a fucking terrible idea and the only thing that had kept me on that bus — the only thing that had kept me from jumping ship and going to find a sensible, orthodox job like waitressing or factory work — was my ridiculous amount of pride.

I hated backing down or giving up or admitting I wasn't good enough or strong enough or whatever enough.

"'Used to be a dumbass?' Dani, it's literally been only a couple of months since you joined," he retorted. There was a smirk forming on his lips, like he was starting to find the whole thing almost hilarious. Finally. It sure had taken him long enough.

"I've matured since then," I protested, but he just started laughing.

Well, at least he still found me amusing.

"Well, needless to say — Dani, I think I can now officially say that you are simultaneously both the stupidest and the most insane girl I have ever met in my entire life."

Well. He probably wasn't wrong there.

"Del?" Somebody asked from behind me. I already knew who it was before I turned to look. I knew that voice too well to possibly think it was anyone else.

I turned to look anyway.

"Ron," I exclaimed, grinning, hopping off my bar stool and holding my arms out for a hug, which I didn't receive.

"It's Lieutenant Speirs to you now," he said coolly, regarding me with something akin to disdain, almost like he didn't even know me. He gave me a once-over and I had a feeling he didn't miss very much in that one sweep of his steely blue eyes.

Well, shit. He'd gotten more intimidating with army training.

"Oh, yes sir, Lieutenant Speirs, sir," I said, saluting for good measure. "Pardon me, Lieutenant Speirs, sir."

He let me wither under his irritated glare for a couple seconds longer before his lips finally quirked into a smile and he gave me a short, brusque hug. The little shit. He was always scaring the shit out of someone and had been for as long as I'd known him. I was an idiot for assuming the army would've cured him of it. I knew his odd greeting — if you could call it that — wasn't because he didn't care. It was just his way. Ron Speirs had been the one who'd taught me that playing pranks on people was good, clean — or rather, not so clean — fun. And his poker face was an impressive thing to behold.

"It's good to see you," I told him, but he was already back into his "It's Lieutenant Speirs to you" mode and he just harrumphed and said something about how he hadn't been expecting to see me stationed there and we'd have to find each other sometime and have "a proper talk" — whatever the hell that meant — and then he walked off rather stiffly.

I turned back to George — who was practically gaping at me — and I sat back on my stool and went back to drinking my beer.

"You were saying?" I asked George once I'd drained my glass. "What was that about me being the most insane girl you've ever met in your entire life?"

"Yeah," he said, still staring at me strangely. "I wasn't wrong. Haven't you heard about that guy? How do you even know him?"

"That's a story for another time," I said, waving him off and raising my hand to order another glass.

I didn't really feel like delving into my fucked up family dynamics just then, or how Ron Speirs had come to be my next door neighbor for some odd years.

"Well," George said, draining his glass too. "Now's as good of a time as any to confess that you being a girl makes a whole lot of sense."

I waited for him to explain what he meant, but he just ordered another couple of beers for us.

When he finally looked back at me, I raised my eyebrows at him, indicating I was still waiting.

"There was this one time we were running PT and I checked out your ass," he said, rather matter-of-fact about it.

"Just one?" was the only reply I could manage while imagining George, my very attractive and very funny and very charming new best friend, checking out my ass.

…

Other guys gradually found out about me being a girl. Skip Muck found out when he overheard George and Perconte discussing it in hushed whispers on the way to the showers. Skip told Alex Penkala and Malarkey. Joe Toye found out somehow, probably because Malarkey exclaimed in surprise when he found out, the little drama queen. Then, of course, Bill Guarnere found out. And then, because Guarnere was such a gossip, just about everyone in the company found out pretty quickly after that, with only a few exceptions.

When I found out that was what had happened, well—

"Goddamn," I complained. "Guarnere's name should be gonorrhea; if you give him something, it's not long before everyone else has it."

It stuck. And it didn't help that his name actually sounded kind of like the word 'gonorrhea.'

I'd be lying if I said everyone accepted my presence there easily. I got a few glares at first, but mostly just stares. A lot of stares, actually. I knew they were talking about me when I sat down at a table for lunch mess and heads kept turning to look at me. Nobody really talked to me for a few days except George and Perc.

The first time I was in my PT gear after everyone found out, George's eyes went straight to my ass and then stayed there for about five seconds. Then he made a show of rubbing his eyes and looking again, even harder, as if looking at it longer would change what he saw.

"Jesus, Dani," he said. "How the hell did I think a guy had an ass like that?"

Apparently he liked what he saw.

They learned to accept me eventually, though. Of course, they still treated me a little bit differently, but over time even that started to fade. When you live with men who are talking about you, they're forced to either ostracize you or accept you for what and who you are. And once they figured out I was still the exact same person I had been when they thought I was a man — except now I could actually offer stories about awkward sexual encounters instead of pretending to be a virgin because making up sex stories about being a guy was just too weird — everything ended up okay.

There was no way Sobel knew. If he had, he would've gotten rid of me. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But he still seemed to have a personal vendetta against me. I'm not really sure why. Maybe because I was the shortest of all of the men and he didn't think I was good enough to be in the Airborne. I'm really not sure. All I knew was that he thought I was weak and small and he always picked on me whenever he had the slightest provocation. There was that one time he had Lieutenant Winters feed us spaghetti before a Currahee run and when I started retching about ten minutes in, he got in my face and started yelling about how I wasn't good enough and I would never be good enough and I should just give up and go home and accept the fact that I was too weak and too short and I was a goddamned dwarf—

I thought about trying to swallow the food back and keep it down and try to finish the run with grace and dignity, but right about when George decided he'd had enough of Sobel being stupid, I felt the spaghetti sliding back up my throat, and I made one of the snap decisions that I eventually became almost infamous for in the company.

I let the food come up and I aimed for Sobel.

Since he was yelling at me, his face a mere six inches from my own, running in very close proximity to me, he made an easy target. And I figured that since this was his fault anyway, hey, he deserved it, so I threw up all over his shiny boots. Some of it splattered on his trousers. It was absolutely disgusting and horrible and I was fantastically proud of myself and my digestive system.

But I knew there was a possibility he would blame this all on me, so I garbled out a "Sorry, sir!" as his steps faltered and he looked in disbelief as we kept running past him and everyone else picked up the Airborne marching song George had chosen.

We pull upon the risers,

We fall upon the grass.

We never land upon our feet,

We always hit our ass.

Hi-hi, Christ Almighty,

Who the hell are we?

Zim-zam, goddamn,

We're Airborne Infantry—

In the midst of all of that, wiping my hand over my mouth and trying to forget about the foul taste of my mouth — spaghetti vomit, yum — I was lagging behind George a little, trying to recover a little bit from throwing up while running, when I looked up and realized that George's ass was the one I'd been admiring on my very first Currahee run, back before I'd actually known him.

Well. It was a small world, wasn't it.

…

The first time George mailed a letter after he discovered my secret, he paused as he was addressing it and looked over at me.

"You don't have anyone to write to, do you," he said, and it wasn't really a question.

"Wow, Luz," I said, trying to avoid answering. "Intrusive much?"

"How about I start writing you letters?" He asked, grinning. "Would you like that?"

He was insulting me, I could already tell, but might as well let him get it over with.

"Sure, George," I said, rolling my eyes.

He grabbed another sheet of paper, scribbled something, folded it into a roughly rectangular shape, wrote an incorrect address – something about a cobbler, probably a play on my fake name Shoemaker – and handed it to me.

He'd written, Your ass looks great in shorts.

"Damn, George," I said, my tone flat, but my smile giving my amusement away. "You shouldn't have. I'm overwhelmed by how much care you put into this. A real love letter. Pure eloquence."

"You know me," he said airily, eyes twinkling. "I'm a ladies' man, through and through."

…

There can't be enough emphasis put on how hard basic training was. For the first few weeks, every run up Currahee left you—

Shit, I'm not sure if there's a proper expression for feeling like you're about to puke your guts out and completely stop breathing and faint and sweat out blood and die of heat exhaustion and everything else all at once.

Everything was some kind of physical training in the beginning. Like I mentioned before, only one out of ten guys who enlisted made it into the Airborne. There's a reason for that and it wasn't just Sobel, although I'm sure he played a huge part in it for Easy Company. I also know that he played a huge part in the guys that stayed just to prove him wrong. It was completely a matter of pride and stubbornness and determination.

Probably the best-remembered moment at Toccoa was Thanksgiving Day. Colonel Sink had issued an order that on Thanksgiving Day, the regiment could eat and relax and take a day off from training.

Major Strayer decided it was time for a holiday of a different sort: a two-day field exercise for Second Battalion — yours truly — including long marches, an attack against a defended position, a gas alarm in the middle of the night, and an introduction to K-rations instead of the Thanksgiving feast everyone else got. Strayer decided to make it even better and stretch fence wire across a field with just enough room for a man to army-crawl under. Machine-gunners fired blanks over the top of the wires as the men crawled the field and rolled through ditches — ditches, they discovered, that Strayer had ordered to be sprinkled liberally with pig innards.

I adored showers after that.

A day or so before we left Toccoa to head to Fort Benning, Colonel Sink just so happened to read an article that said a Japanese army battalion had set a world record for marching endurance by covering one hundred miles in seventy-two hours. And of course, we simply couldn't let the Japs be the best at anything, so we had to break that record by marching all the way to Atlanta.

So First and Third Battalions took the train to Fort Benning and Second Battalion was chosen to march the distance, carrying our gear and weapons. The riflemen got off easy compared to Smokey Gordon, who carried a machine-gun, or Malarkey, who was in the mortar squad and had to carry the stand. That shit was heavy.

Strayer had managed to choose the route that had one hundred miles of back-country unpaved roads and decided to do it when we had freezing rain and even some snow, which made for slippery walking conditions. We woke up the second morning of the march to find everything covered in frost and our boots and socks frozen solid. We had to take the shoestrings out of the boots to get the damn things onto our swollen feet. Rifles, mortars and machine-guns were frozen to the ground.

It only got worse from there.

The third night, Malarkey, who had pitched his pup tent next to mine, couldn't stand and literally had to crawl on his hands and knees to the chow line. Lieutenant Winters told him to go the rest of the way in an ambulance. And yet somehow the next day, Malark decided to keep walking, which was probably because of Skip Muck and his quiet encouragement.

Good guy, Skip Muck.

We covered one hundred and eighteen miles in seventy-five hours. We broke the Japanese record easily and we were damn proud of ourselves and of our accomplishments, but we still definitely hated Colonel Sink with a passion for a few months after that.

…

If anything, Fort Benning was an even more miserable place than Toccoa, especially the Frying Pan, which was where the jump training took place. It was basically a desert shaped like a frying pan and it was ridiculously hot, practically boiling. Of course — of course — the Army picked the worst place possible to train people how to jump off of a platform and land on the ground correctly.

But finally, finally, after sweating like a pig in line and jumping off of a tower platform and rolling around on my ass for a whole week, I found myself standing in a rumbling plane, hooked up to the line, preparing to jump out of an airplane for the first time, seriously wondering for the first time in six months if I was completely insane or had a death wish.

And I was fucking terrified.

They'd already given us a speech about how we couldn't bail out now, that we had to make the jump ourselves or we wouldn't get our jump wings and we'd be reassigned to a different division of the army. Nobody liked the idea of that.

But goddamn it shit fuck I was fucking terrified.

"GET READY! STAND UP! HOOK UP!"

Standing up, I quickly hooked up the line that was attached to the cover of my backpack, making sure the safety was closed, my hands shaking. I tried to steady them, but they wouldn't stop shaking.

"CHECK EQUIPMENT!"

I quickly checked the man's equipment in front of me, hoping I wasn't missing anything because I was so scared. My mind had gone numb. My knees were weak. I was panicking.

"SOUND OFF FOR EQUIPMENT CHECK!"

I suddenly realized I wanted to piss before I jumped out of an airplane. Of course, everyone else had managed to go about three times while we were waiting, but not me, oh no. I hadn't needed to go, but it's funny how much your perspective on things can change once you realize you might be about to fucking die.

But that was all too late to think about now, because they were starting to sound off for equipment check and then we were supposed to jump out into the air and hope our chute deployed and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck—

"Nine okay!"

"Eight okay!"

"Seven okay!"

"Six okay!"

"Five okay!"

Someone roughly slapped my arm, telling me it was my turn to sound off and that my equipment was in good order.

"Four okay!" I shouted at the top of my lungs.

"Three okay!"

"Two okay!"

"One okay!"

"STAND IN THE DOOR!"

Shit shit shit buggering shit fuck shit—

"GO, GO, GO!"

First man jumped out, then the second and the third and—

It was my turn. Petrified and hyper-sensitive, I stepped up to the door and then froze, feeling the wind whipping at me from the open plane door.

"GO!" The jump instructor yelled in my ear and I really wanted him to just fucking push me so I wouldn't have to actually jump, but if I didn't jump then I didn't get my wings and fuck if I didn't want my wings, but I didn't want to jump out of the perfectly good aircraft either—

And then, quite suddenly, Sobel's face flashed in front of my face and I thought about how pleased he'd be if I failed my jump training and how he'd be proven right about me being a failure and then suddenly, I was jumping into thin air.

For four very unholy seconds, I was free-falling and my training took over and I was screaming as loud as I could and I couldn't stop there was no way I could stop but I had to count off so I just screamed it, I screamed the one-thousand two-thousand three-thousand four-thousand count just the way I'd been trained to do — although maybe I'd been trained to do it a little bit more calmly — and I was free-falling free-falling through thin air and I knew I was about to fucking die and then there was a violent tug and my fast descent towards the earth abruptly slowed and I looked up to see my parachute working perfectly with all the panels of the chute intact.

Well then. That was a relief.

When my legs folded into the ground and I started trying to haul my parachute back together, my legs and arms shaking from the adrenaline rush, Perconte noticed me from where he was wrangling with his own chute. He must've been in the same stick as me. I'd been too terrified to notice.

"Dani, you scream like a girl!" He yelled across the field to me, grinning ear to ear from his own adrenaline rush.

"Yeah, no shit, Perco," I called back. "At least no one's ever laughed at my genitalia before."

"Asshole."

I couldn't believe I had to do that four more times to get my jump wings, but now that I knew what to expect, it didn't seem so bad. In fact, the adrenaline high from the jump was downright addictive and I was almost anticipating the next one.

On the sixth of December, 1942, the fifth and final jump, we each received a certificate stating our ability as an enlisted paratrooper. There was a ceremony for the pinning of our jump wings, the moment of glory that may as well have been handed to us on a silver platter. It was a moment no one could take away from us, an achievement that we had earned all by yourself and yet surrounded by our newly found brothers in arms.

Of course there was a party, because soldiers love to party. Nothing too big, just a hell of a lot of beer and a bunch of guys in uniforms with jump wings. Perconte acted like an idiot in front of Sergeant Martin, talking about how he was blousing his pants. Guarnere nearly drowned himself in beer. Colonel Sink paid us a visit and told us how damn proud he was. Christenson passed out in a chair and then very slowly flopped to the floor. Talbert started dancing with a chair as a substitute for a girl to prove to some of the other guys that he really could dance and then ended up tripping all over it and almost getting a concussion.

In the morning, we all had hangovers, but Christenson's was terrible. He usually got pretty drunk when we had passes on the weekends, but this was worse than usual. He partied like he was about to die. Which I guess I couldn't blame him for. I think we'd all thought we were going to die jumping from those planes and so of course we all drank a bit more than usual. Either way, no matter what the reason for exactly how epic his hangover was — and it was epic — we dragged him to the medic station, where Gene Roe was waiting, like he intuitively knew we were all going to bombard him and beg for mercy from our splitting headaches. He gave us aspirin and water and told us to take it easy.

"It's been a pleasure, Doc," I told him, taking the aspirin. "But please, next time you see me drinking more than I can handle, stop me. As much as I love seeing your face, I don't really like seeing it when I have a splitting headache."

None of us really knew what we were going to face later. I envy the innocence we had that first day of being real bonafide paratroopers. And most of all, more than anything, I wish we could have it back.

During our time of training, we'd all gotten to know each other pretty well. I knew George had daddy issues, that his pops was an unlikeable asshole who liked to drink and didn't know when to keep his mouth closed. I knew Joe Toye couldn't do arithmetic very well because he'd been working in the mines when everyone else had been in school. I knew Perconte considered himself a spaghetti aficionado, however the fuck you become one of those. I knew Tipper could grill a mean steak. We were friends, almost family, bonded together, with the officers as our rather disciplinary but fair parents.

And then there was Sobel.

Whatever shit shield Sobel had been using to hide what he was really like from his superiors before, his true colors slowly emerged at Camp Mackall in North Carolina, which was where we were transferred to after we got our jump wings.

We were doing a training exercise — kind of like capture the flag — but the objective was to ambush the other teams and somehow surprise them, thereby gaining the upper hand. Sobel put us in a ditch and we sat there for a few minutes in perfect cover, waiting for the other team to come in our killing zone. Then Sobel realized he'd misread the map. He made us all move and then the other team ambushed us out in the open and we all looked like fucking idiots. We'd already had our misgivings about Sobel being a leader, but after that particular exercise, we didn't anymore.

We knew he was absolute shit.

Of course, there was talk amongst the men about how the men higher up didn't like Sobel's antsy miss-step. We got a new officer, Lieutenant Harry Welsh, from the 82. He was in charge of First Platoon. Tipper and I were gossiping and he told me that he'd heard a rumor that Welsh had been a sergeant three times before getting his OCs but had kept getting busted to private because he kept getting in fights. You wouldn't think it to look at him. I mean, gap between the teeth, really short, usually pretty cheerful — he didn't look like the type.

Anyway, we weren't in Camp Mackall much longer after that. We didn't know where we were going or where the trucks were taking us, but it felt like it was time. We all piled into the backs of some troop trucks and were soon rumbling over bumpy roads. A few of the guys had been arguing about what the chances of Sobel getting killed in combat were and the likelihood of us getting killed by his stupidity.

"I'm telling you," I told the truck of guys I was with. "If that son of a bitch gets us killed and he survives, I'm coming back to haunt him into his grave. He won't be able to sleep because I'll be doing drills next to his bed all night."

"I'll come to your funeral," Lieb told me, winking cheerfully. "And I'll be dancing and singing when they lower you into an early grave."

"Not if you annoy me too much," I replied. "I might just snap and kill you before we ever even see combat, Lebby." And I dropped a mocking wink right back at him.

"Hey, fuck you," he said, but it seemed like he almost said it automatically, like it was his catchphrase or something.

We took a train to Kentucky, where we made a two month pit stop so they could train us some more, which by that point seemed a bit old hat. The only thing I really remember about Kentucky is a conversation I had with George after another training session about disassembling our rifles. We were walking back to the barracks and he was snarking about Alex Penkala's old lady baking him an apple pie. I looked over at him and said, "Hey, George—"

Before I could continue, he looked over and said, "Hey Dani," in response, laughing at me when I tried to smack him on the arm for trying to make a joke out of me trying to get his attention. He dodged my hit and I finally gave up on getting revenge.

"Everyone's saying that we're gonna make the jump soon."

"Yeah?" He said, pulling out a cigarette. He seemed to always have a never-ending supply. "So what?"

"So — I dunno — like have you thought about how we might not be alive in a few months?"

He looked over at me, his eyebrows raised. His eyes said that he really didn't want to talk about this. I pressed on though, not letting his expression dissuade me.

"I mean, I know that we can't really control what happens to us once we jump, wherever we jump, but this is our first combat and none of us have any experience and what if they drop us in a fucking machine gun zone and they just pat-pat-pat or what if worse yet Sobel leads us into a fucking machine gun zone and—"

I'd been thinking about it a lot. The longer we trained, the closer we got to the jump. Even though nobody knew when or where we were jumping, we all had that unexplainable feeling that we were going to be deployed soon. It just made sense. And so with the rumors and speculations, there came concerns about how we could all die and none of us knew what to expect because we'd never been in combat and how we were still following Sobel and were therefore probably doomed.

"Dani," George interrupted me, stopping right where he was and turning to me and looking me straight in the eyes. "Stop thinking so goddamn much." We stared at each other for a few seconds, his cigarette still stuck between his lips. "Okay?" He asked, his voice a little bit more gentle, as if regretting his harshness. "We're gonna be fine, just fine."

I nodded, still not completely satisfied, but I tried to do what he said and stop thinking so much. We couldn't help what was going to happen by worrying about it.

Like I said, we were only there for a couple of months before we were shipped off to Camp Shanks in New York and then at last herded into a shipyard after some final processing, by which point it was early September.

When we got down to the ship sleeping quarters — well. There were levels of bunks stretching all the way to the ceiling and it seemed like every one of them was quickly claimed and the amount of body heat in that room, however large it was, was overwhelming. The room was meant to hold a lot of men, but it was still over-crowded. The cigarette smoke was stifling.

My bunk was right next to Gene Roe's. George and I had been separated in the mix of things and so I'd just picked a random bunk and slung my stuff onto it. I was sitting Indian-style on my bunk out of the way of the other men, trying not to gag on the putrid mix of body odor and heavy cigarette smoke, already sweating profusely from all the body heat. George suddenly swung himself up next to me, sitting on the bar.

"Dani," he greeted me, already sweating too. "Where the fuck you been? I've been looking for you all over the place."

"Well, George," I said, "I was on dry land, but then I boarded this boat—"

He swatted at my head.

"Smartass. Come to my bunk, I've got something to show you." He winked at me before clambering back out of my bunk and into the sea of men milling around the room. I followed him reluctantly, not really wanting to immerse myself back into the sweat-soaked crowd.

When I climbed into his bunk, he told me to stay there and he had to go get something from one of the guys but he'd be right back, so I sat back and listened to the conversations of the guys around me.

By that point, we'd figured out that if we were sailing from New York, that meant we were most likely going to Europe, so Skip Muck was complaining that he didn't get to go to the Pacific and see the naked native girls like some lucky bastard on a tropical island and Joe Toye was planning on getting ten grand a year for the rest of his life for killing Hitler.

"But what if we don't go to Europe? What if they send us to North Africa?" Smokey Gordon asked.

"My brother's in North Africa. He says it's hot," Bill Guarnere commented.

"Really? It's hot in Africa?" Malarkey retorted. I laughed. He'd been around me too long.

"Shut up," Bill told him. "Jesus Christ, you're getting as bad as Dani."

"Hey!" I protested, still laughing at the annoyed look on Bill's face. "Don't bring me into this!"

Then the age-old argument about whether or not we would follow Sobel into combat started. George climbed back up to his bunk and sat next to me.

"Hey, guess what," he said, his eyes sparkling. "I found a few cases of whiskey."

Once everyone else found out, George was immediately the most popular man on the ship. I had maybe two shots of whiskey before — during a very rare moment of wisdom — I realized it was a terrible idea to get drunk on a boat at sea, especially since I'd never been on a boat before and I had no idea if I got seasick or not yet and so to avoid temptation, I went back to my own bunk.

"Hey, Doc," I saluted him. He didn't look too excited.

"Shoemaker," he greeted me in return, his brow furrowing as he watched the men's desperate scramble for whiskey safely from his bunk. He gave me a questioning look as I grabbed a deck of cards from my bag and climbed into his bunk and settled myself down, not even asking for his permission to be there.

"Luz has a case of whiskey," I explained, since I knew he was wondering what was going on. "And I learned my lesson from the last time I got drunk. And something tells me having a hangover is even worse when you're on a ship. Cards?"

"Yeah, sure," he said, taking one last look at the man-pile that had once been George's bunk.

That night was fun.

The next morning, however, was not.

The men — being used to only beer — got thoroughly wasted. Bull Randleman found Christenson literally making out with the toilet. The bunks were a miserable affair. Almost everyone in the company had a massive hangover. Gene's bunk turned into a miniature aid station where he handed out a shitload of aspirin and told the men to just try to drink plenty of water. Since I was sober and my bunk was next to his, I figured I might as well help Gene out by taking a share of the aspirin too. And then Gene — being the kind of guy that he was — started tending to the guys who got seasick and I figured I might as well help him with that too. I had nothing better to do with my time.

When he asked me as a conversation starter why I was so comfortable taking care of guys who were puking all over the floor, I told him the truth — that it was because my grandfather had been a doctor and I'd helped him on his rounds when I'd lived with him after my parents died, learned everything he felt like teaching me. I didn't mention the fact that he'd lived in Germany at that point. It didn't seem relevant at the time.

The Samaria had been an Indian mail liner and passenger ship before it was converted to a troop transport. The ship was originally intended to hold a thousand passengers. She carried five thousand to England.

That ship — for lack of a better word — was disgusting. It was greasy and smelly and hot and sticky. The mess hall stank like rotten eggs. The bunks smelled like vomit and sweat and onions. The food was horrible — boiled fish and tomatoes — but we ate it anyway because we weren't sure what else we were supposed to do with it. None of us suffered from food poisoning, so I guess it ended up okay.

Our only entertainment consisted of walking the decks, leaning on the rails while watching the convoy, and gambling. Oh, God, the gambling. It seemed like that's all any of us did. The gambling never stopped, it was continuous: poker, blackjack, craps. Large amounts of money changed hands quickly. A man would be lucky and his winnings would be over a hundred one night, then lose it all the next day. We had very few books, so reading was out. Sobel tried to lead us in calisthenics, but there wasn't any room and we just laughed at it.

…

We landed in Liverpool on the fifteenth of September and we were greeted by German radio clearly saying: "Welcome, the 101st Airborne." They knew we were there, they just didn't know what our plans were. The next day, we boarded a train that took us south. We got to our barracks in Aldbourne that night. Our barracks were only nissen huts heated by twin pot-belly stoves. Our beds were cot frames and mattress covers we were told to stuff with straw and wool blankets that were heavy and itchy.

We trained some more in England. Hand-to-hand combat, bayonets, lectures on live-or-die stuff like magnetic declination, a basic guide on how to dig a foxhole, and the occasional maneuver lecture.

We had weekend passes again. Sobel couldn't take them away too often, since we were preparing to actually be deployed and he couldn't deprive us of our fun when we knew we could be dead within the next few months.

The first weekend we were there, we got passes to go to Swindon for a dance. It was Saturday night, but Sobel just didn't want to let us off so he put out a regulation: no man would take his blouse off while dancing.

Someone did.

His name was Burgess and he was from Illinois. He took the blouse off while dancing, which Sobel called him out on and made him wear the fatigues all week while he was sleeping, walking, everything.

Every week, we were given seven packs of cigarettes, three candy bars, one pack of gum, one cake of soap, and one package of razor blades. Even if you didn't put all of that to use every week, you could trade it away to another guy for something you actually wanted.

The only real problem any of us could find with Aldbourne was that the British drank their beer warm. None of us Americans really liked it, but it was beer, so we drank it anyway.

Most of the British men were off in Italy, so there were lonely women all over the place. The beer was cheap and plentiful, even if it was warm. We got weekend passes fairly often. In other words, Aldbourne was heaven compared to the other places we'd been training, even if it wasn't even America. Needless to say, some interesting stories came out of those weekend revelries — like the story with Bill Guarnere and Peacock and two girls in an attic and a leg breaking through the roof or the story with me and George and a very drunk Ramirez and some toilet paper — but those are stories for another time.

There was this one time when we were running a field scrimmage and Sobel kept getting lost. Poor Tipper had been assigned to be Sobel's runner in Mackall and was holding the map. Sobel kept asking for it. He looked at it so many times, you'd think he'd at least be able to figure out where we were, but Tipper — poor Tips, he looked almost as aggravated as that one time when George stole the letter he was writing to his girlfriend and read it in a spot-on impression of him and embarrassed him for being such a sap in front of the entire company — kept having to point out where we were. I don't think Sobel listened to him though, because Sobel kept asking for the map to make sure we were where we needed to be, which we apparently weren't.

"Why is there a fence here? There should be no fence here." And he looked at the map yet again. But this time it must've been even worse, because he told us to 'take cover' behind an outcropping of trees a little way away.

"Hey, Perco." I hissed, trying to get his attention as we reached the cover of the trees and knelt down to wait for Sobel to figure things out.

"Yeah?"

"Sobel's lost again, right?"

"Yeah, he's lost." Perconte looked decidedly disgusted. And then suddenly he smirked and he turned to look at the other men. "Hey, Luz!" George looked up. "Luz!" Perconte gestured for him to come over to us.

"Huh?" George appeared next to me, looking to Perconte, who was looking at him with an expression somewhere between enlightened, excited, and downright gleeful.

"Can you do Major Horton?" Perc asked him, obviously referring to George's skill of doing impersonations. George had only really used it for shits and giggles on long marches but when Perconte got that twinkle in his eyes, it usually meant all hell was about to break loose. The last time I'd seen him with that same twinkle in his eyes, he'd just blown up the latrine. It had smelled like putrid eggs and sausage for weeks afterwards.

"Does a wild bear crap in the woods, son?" George answered, letting his near-perfect impersonation of Major Horton speak for itself.

Perconte hurriedly shushed everyone's snickers. George had established himself as the funny man of the company by that point, so basically all he had to do was open his mouth and someone was bound to think it was funny.

"Maybe the good major can goose this schmuck, get us moving?" Perconte asked him. I was waiting for the light to come on in George's eyes and for him to get that mischievous smile that always meant he was about to pull a prank.

I already knew him way too well by that point.

But George could be court-martialed and probably even discharged for impersonating an officer and he knew it. (He knew the rules by heart. All good pranksters had to know their boundaries.)

"No, no way, I'm not gonna—" He protested. "I'm not stupid. I could get caught."

Everyone around immediately started piping up with their own opinions.

"Oh, come on, Luz, please? You gotta, you gotta," Skinny Sisk begged.

"What're you talking about—" George kept resisting, but it didn't last much longer.

"Luz, you got it, you got it. Come on." Skip Muck pleaded.

He looked over at me for a second, his eyes meeting mine, studying my face. Then he smiled and that light came on in his eyes and then he was suddenly grinning.

I knew that look.

He was about to play a prank.

"Alright, just this once," he finally relented, as if he was never going to pull another prank after this one, as if this was some kind of grand finale. As if. We both knew he'd been thinking about how to rig McClung's cot just the day before. Things weren't about to change just because he'd decided to push the boundaries a little too far.

He cleared his throat a few times, said a prayer, crossed himself a few times, hesitated, crossed himself once more for good measure, and then—

"Is there a problem, Captain Sobel?" He called out in Major Horton's voice.

"Who said that? Who broke silence?" Sobel's voice demanded back. George didn't identify himself as the Major because that really would be impersonating an officer and he could definitely be punished if he was caught. There was a tense silence for a few seconds before George looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.

I knew what he was silently asking me to do. We'd pulled enough pranks together that we'd developed an unofficial, silent shared language in these situations.

I eased off my helmet since the damn thing always made me feel half-deaf and belly-crawled to the edge of the trees where I could see Sobel and Tipper. Tipper looked like he was having the hardest time not laughing. He'd been at the butt end of George's impersonations before and he obviously knew exactly what was going on.

Good old Tips kept it together though. Whatever he said was enough to make Sobel look freaked out. I gave George a thumbs-up.

"What is the gawdamned hold-up, Mister Sobel?" He yelled, sounding even more like Major Horton this time, the drawl more pronounced, the pitch of his voice getting little by little closer to absolute perfection.

While the rest of us choked on our laughter, Sobel's reply came floating back, this time with the proper respect befitting Major Horton, who was — of course — not actually present. Wasted respect from Sobel.

"A fence, sir, a…" Sobel paused. "A barbwire fence."

"Oh, that dog just ain't gonna hunt!" George had to shush the guys around him before he could continue because we were all struggling so hard to contain our laughter. "Now you cut that fence and get this gawdamn platoon on the move!"

"Yes, sir!"

Some cows ended up in the Battalion HQ building. Strayer was apparently pissed. Tipper came up to us when he finally got off duty as Sobel's runner and told us Sobel had been going through a shit storm the entire day.

"No shit, guys," he said, his grin practically stretching from one ear to the other. "You should've heard Strayer chew him out. One of the cows chewed up some secretary's paperwork and there was cow shit on the front steps and Sink stepped in it."

Tipper was our inside ears, our reliable source of information, the gossip queen of Easy Company. He wasn't the type to actually spread information — he just found out about things and then told me or Perconte or Liebgott and then everyone else found out. He was the queen bee of the beehive and he let the drone bees do all the work spreading the news. We kept him well supplied with smokes as a reward. It was the least we could do.

"Yeah, well, we kinda owe you, Tipster," I told him, patting him on the arm. "There was no way in hell he would've figured out it was supposed to be Major Strayer if you hadn't said something. He's way too stupid to recognize an accent if he doesn't even know his way around a fucking map grid at this point."