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Dick Winters, of Band of Brothers
There was only one thing to do. I withdrew my men to an adjoining gully to assess the situation. I got in touch with company headquarters and told them to send up the reserve platoon. After I was joined by another platoon and some additional machine guns, I went off by myself a little way to assess the situation and decide what to do. My group was the only thing separating the Germans from the rear of my battalion. So I decided we must charge them. I returned to the gully where the rest of the platoon was, and after ordering fixed bayonets, which makes every man have a second thought, I signaled when to throw a smoke grenade. This was the order to charge. As I leap off and begin the charge I am pretty pumped up. In fact, I have never been more pumped up in my life. I ran faster across the field separating us from the Germans than I have ever run in my life. All the men in the company are behind me, but they seem to be moving so slow. Nobody seemed to be moving normally, only me. When I got up to the road where the Germans were, there was a German in front of me, so I shot him. I then turn to my right, and there I see a whole company of Germans. I began firing into them, and they seemed to be moving so slow and then the rest of the company joined me. As the boys said later, it was a duck shoot. They never had a target like that before. We had caught two companies of SS soldiers pinned to the dike, and as they retreated we poured fire into them, and then I called in artillery fire. We destroyed those two companies.Funny that after writing about military folks' demand for high degree of accuracy and low tolerance for spin I find proof that it's nothing new. They didn't need milbloggers in Ernie Pyle's day, but there's an example of the same motivation.I remember when I was interviewed for the movie, I told one of the writers that as I shot the German, he looked up at me and smiled. Well, I kept going with my story, but later, as it turns out, the writer wanted to play up the thing about the smile. He wanted to play that up as a flashback, the type of bad flashbacks you can have. I have flashbacks every day. But the writer wanted to play up that point. And that is why in the series that German is portrayed as a kid and why later on when I am in Paris they portray me looking at this kid on the train and having another flashback. It's stupid, but I didn't get the chance to review the scenes.
That's not his main point though. Read the whole thing - an American hero, a living definition of leadership, explaining leadership.
