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time with Wolverton.
    The first had been more than a year earlier in North Carolina, at a camp named for PFC John Mackall, the first U.S. paratrooper killed in combat, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, already fighting in the Mediterranean theater. At Camp Mackall, Wolverton had struggled with the perpetual problem of paratroopers: assembling after being scattered in a mass drop. Flares and smoke grenades were one way to guide them, but he needed something audible. Combining a classic instrument of war with the most advanced means of warfare, Wolverton came up with a way to sound the call. It was a bugler named Ross.
    Joe knew him; all the Blues did because of the innumerable mornings Ross had woken them at reveille. He blew loud enough to be heard a half mile away. Wolverton's idea was for him to blow assembly (the traditional bugle call that draws racehorses to the starting line) after a battalion-size drop, then everyone would head for the sound, whether in daylight or darkness.
    But Ross blew a lot better than he jumped. He had beentucked in Wolverton's stick with orders to follow the CO's canopy down to the ground, then start bugling. But he kept his eyes closed till his chute opened, then couldn't find Wolverton's among dozens in the sky, then got caught in a tree a quarter mile away, where he frantically started bugling— and as planned, everyone headed in his direction.
    That was the opposite direction from where Wolverton had landed and the battalion was supposed to assemble. When Joe got there Wolverton was beside himself, but with few others, while a hundred Blues helped Ross out of his tree. When Sink heard how the experiment turned out he sent a memo down suggesting that Wolverton either learn to bugle himself or try a drum.
    Joe's first occasion with Wolverton was at the end of Third Battalion's 142-mile forced march in December 1942. The Currahees were to move from Toccoa to Fort Benning, on the opposite side of Georgia. They had taken a train to Atlanta when news reports—all grim and disheartening in those days—carried a Japanese boast that their army had set a world record for endurance by marching 130 miles in eighty-five hours while whipping the British in Malaya. Those numbers rang Sink's chimes. He ordered Wolverton to break the record and made sure there was plenty of press coverage.
    With full combat loads, including mortars and machine guns, the Blues indeed beat the Japs by several hours, Wolverton leading the whole way, at the end shod in only socks after swollen feet had herniated his boots. Only eleven of the seven hundred Blues who'd set off in the rain from Atlanta failed to complete the march. Blues knew Wolverton was proud of them but also that he was less talker than walker, a foil for Sink whose strong craggy face and Clark Gable mustache seemed designed by Hollywood for a “full bull” colonel's role.
    Wolverton had given Joe a pat on the back for assisting Bray across the finish line, but this summons at Littlecote was unlikely to be a reminiscence. The CO was in the midst of training and planning for the invasion of Hitler's Europe. It was hard for Joe to imagine what possible interest Wolvertonwould have in him, a lowly tech-5, equivalent of a corporal. The only possibility was chilling: warm, ancient brandy.
    Values clashed traumatically in Joe as he straightened his fatigues in the orderly room. He would not draw in anyone from I Company and was steeled to accept Wolverton's penalty for remaining silent. Unless it meant expulsion from the Airborne. Joe was inveterately stubborn but not sure if he could accept that ultimate punishment. It would be the excruciating test between pride and loyalty. He'd do anything to avoid it, call upon Wolverton's sense of soldierly honor as best he could and if he could find the words.
    Like a criminal about to receive sentence, he knocked on the door, was admitted, and snapped his battalion commander an Airborne salute. Wolverton looked like