That is generally no more than fifteen percent of an organization. You look for the soldiers who perform consistently. With soldiers, a leader develops a sense about which soldiers you can trust. They are people who want to win in combat, just as those who desire to win in sports competition. They have a quiet confidence about them and a swagger that sets them apart. As a leader, you obtain a sense of the better soldiers during training. I hate to use the term ‘killers’ because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. All I had to do was put them into a position where I could use them most effectively. Fortunately, several of my noncommissioned officers and key leaders were present. “If you recall at West Point, I mentioned my ‘killers.’ On D-Day I had to work with the team that I had since most of the company was so widely dispersed after the night jump. Later Sink issued a citation to the 1st Platoon that shouldered the principal burden of the fight.”Ĥ1. I purposely avoided the use of the first personal pronoun ‘I’ because I wanted each soldier to receive credit for what he had done. Colonel Robert Sink, commanding officer of the 506th PIR, ordered me to prepare a written summary of the battle since no senior officer witnessed the engagement. My friend Lieutenant Lewis Nixon and I estimated the enemy casualties as fifty killed, eleven captured, and countless wounded. All but a few casualties resulted from artillery fire after we had destroyed the two SS companies. By late October 5, we had sustained twenty-two casualties of the forty or so soldiers engaged under my personal command. All this was accomplished against numerically superior forces that had an advantage of ten to one in manpower and excellent observation for artillery and mortar support. The destruction of the German artillery battery at Brecourt Manor on D-Day was extremely important to the successful landing at Utah Beach, but this action demonstrated Easy Company’s overall superiority, of every soldier, of every phase of infantry tactics: patrol, defense, attack using a base of fire, withdrawal, and, above all, superior marksmanship with rifles, machine guns, and mortar fire. In my estimation, the actions by Easy Company on that memorable day constituted Easy Company’s crowning achievement of the war and my apogee as a company commander. “At the time our strength was low and our front wide.
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