Chapter 1: Embarkation: New York City

So here's how it began ... Chapter 1, page 1


Embarkation: New York City

In that desperate and graceless spring of 1943 late on a somber
afternoon, a long single file of soldiers labored up a gangplank,
crossed a battle gray deck, and descended into the stuffy hold of a
nameless ship. The anonymity of the ship fitted those dark and
secret times, as did the identical khaki-colored woolens of the men.
For me and all those men on the long-awaited day of embarkation
had finally come. We knew it could be a significant moment.
After months of continuous and mostly boring training, the
unwanted adventure of sailing to some foreign land, to take part in
a far-off and unwished-for war, of joining a multitude of men who
in times past had done the same thing-the moment was at last
upon us.

Whatever thoughts I had projected about the event, what emotions
I had atthe moment of boarding, whatever gestures of looking
back I may have wanted to make--all were submerged in the swift
act of embarkation. The overriding feeling was a pain in the shoulder,
a raw bruise from the unaccustomed full field pack and Ml rifle.
Corp. Jim Hurley of Asheville, North Carolina; ex-sergeant
now private Danny Moore of Pennsylvania; PFC Leonard Goldberg
of Chicago, I, and 15,000 other men of the Eighty-second Airborne
Division had boarded a train south of Plymouth Rock at Buzzard's
Bay in Massachusetts. We rode unheralded through numerous
small towns and underground, unseen and unseeing, through New
York City to within four hundred yards of a slate gray ship with
black spots. We unloaded, adjusted the pack and rifle, and, lugging
a heavy and as yet unfaded blue denim barracks bag, marched
unceremoniously to the gangplank, were checked off, and went
aboard.

What I do remember about the event is how "un-Hollywood"
it all seemed.