Free We Who Are Alive and Remain by Marcus Brotherton

Georgia, where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was activated.
    I was surprised at the intensity of physical training at Toccoa. There was a reason to the intensity, and it didn’t take long to figure it out: they wanted the best. If a guy couldn’t do something, he was gone. Just like that.
    I played high school football and considered myself in great shape. Boy, was I in for a surprise. The first day at Toccoa I suited up in the assigned trunks, T-shirt and boots, looked up, and saw Mount Currahee—3½ miles up, 3½ miles back. I thought, Well, we’re going to be here for four months of training; probably by the end of that time we’ll climb to the top of that mountain. The same afternoon somebody blew a whistle and they ran us up to the top and back. A lot of guys dropped out right then.
    The reason I made it that first day? Ahead of me was a guy I considered very old. He was probably twenty-five or twenty-six. He’d been out drinking the night before, and the alcohol fumes were coming off him. I thought, Well, if that old guy can make it, I can, too. He went all the way to the top and back. I did, too. That was Jack Ginn, from Oklahoma.
    After the first day, running Currahee became an everyday thing for us. Captain Herbert Sobel, our company commander, led the group in the runs. People always talk about Sobel’s incompetence, but he could run with the best of them. The guys all complained about Currahee, but it soon began to stand for something. Currahee separated the troops. Sometimes the guys would have a couple of beers at night and someone would say, “Let’s go and run the mountain.” So guys ran Currahee just for the hell of it. We wanted to be the best.
    You have to realize that most guys who tried out for the paratroopers were all highly motivated, physically fit young guys to begin with. Being a paratrooper was voluntary. At Toccoa you could drop out anytime. If a guy dropped out he usually went to a regular infantry outfit. Guys regularly came in for a day or two, tried the training, and were gone by day two or three.
    When I initially joined, I wondered if I could make it. But soon I knew I would. It was an issue of pride. I looked around and knew I was as good as any of the guys there. I knew I could do this. It came back to that persistence thing I learned as a kid.
    Everything at Toccoa was extremely physical. One time we had a bunch of telephone poles. Ten or twelve guys lay on their backs and worked together to do bench presses with the poles. These were huge logs, mind you—it’s a wonder one of them didn’t slip and crush a man.
    I think I was fairly immature at this stage of my life. At Toccoa we had a no-nonsense drill sergeant named Harvey Moorehead. He was tough as nails and played a strong role in having me grow up. One time we were standing at attention and I made some comment to the guy next to me. Sergeant Moorehead barked out a command: “You men are at attention. There is no talking in ranks. And Private Tipper”—he spoke the next phrase very deliberately—“one more word from you and you are out!” I knew he meant it. I chose to shape up right then.
    At the end of our time at Toccoa we went to Atlanta, where we boarded a train for Fort Benning, Georgia. At Benning we made our five jumps and became qualified paratroopers. How did we get from Toccoa to Atlanta? We marched—all 118 miles. I don’t think that will ever be equaled. It started out as a rumor that went around camp. Colonel Sink read a magazine article where the Japanese Army had marched 88 miles in three days, so he wanted to outdo that. He said, “My men can do a hell of a lot better than that.”
    When we heard we were actually going to make the hike, the reaction from the guys was pretty good. “Hell, we can do that,” someone said. We believed we could do anything. So we marched the distance in three days, carrying full equipment. You think of Georgia as having good weather all the time, but when we