[The following is in regards to an American paratrooper with Easy Company writing home to his family.]
Webster’s attitude was, as he wrote his parents, “I am living on borrowed time. I do not think I shall live through the next jump. If I don’t come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It’s not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected.”
When his mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this attitude (and her worries about his younger brother, who had just joined the paratroopers), Webster was blunt in his reply: “Would you prefer for somebody else’s son to die in the mud? You want us to win the war, but you apparently don’t want to have your sons involved in the actual bloodshed. That’s a strangely contradictory attitude.
”Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy. Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroopers. If the country all had your attitude, nobody would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of a country would that be?”
Source:
Ambrose, Stephen Edward. “Healing Wounds and Scrubbed Missions.” Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004. 63. Print.
Further Reading:
[Private First Class David Kenyon Webster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kenyon_Webster
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