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into shape. But the captain had demoralized Easy’s enlisted men even as they’d needed to muster their confidence for the coming invasion. Harris and several of his fellow noncoms had felt him to be almost sadistic in the punishments he doled out for the most minor breaches of discipline—and in their eyes, his behavior had become more and more irrational as the prospect of jumping into battle had ground on his nerves. In the end, they grew convinced he’d been unfit to lead men into combat and was bound to get them unnecessarily killed.
    If Harris still dwelled on the episode on the eve of D-Day, he kept it to himself. When one of his old Easy platoon commanders had recruited him for the Pathfinder school, he’d eagerly seized the chance. He didn’t care that it was pegged a landing spot for screwups and agitators, or that that was probably the main reason he’d been asked to volunteer. Nor did he care that they were supposedly training for a mission of no return. Figuring he’d deal with whatever the mission might be when he had to, Harris had simply decided Pathfinder duty would give him a fresh start, get him into the thick of the action he craved, and keep him together with some of his closest friends in Easy Company. Dick Wright and Carl “Dutch” Fenstermaker had been steered toward the Pathfinders mainly
because
they were his friends, and both were now aboard Plane 4. Mike Ranny, who had gotten into trouble with Harris during the Sobel incident, also took the special signal training at North Witham, but he’d rejoined Easy when the opening came up.
    Whatever Harris was thinking as his flight approached the DZ, he kept it to himself. He likely had no inkling that Wright and Fenstermaker’s plane had gotten shot out of the air—the flight crew wouldn’t have rushed to share that information—and was focused on his particular responsibilities. Kessler had entrusted him with carrying and rigging one of the stick’s two radar homing beacons, which said everything about how highly he was regarded by the CO. While the light panels were important visual aids for the squadrons flying to Drop Zone C, eighty-one planeloads of airborne infantry were relying heavily on the Eureka sets to bring them in from a distance of twenty miles. Aboard the cockpits of the C-47s, transponder units called Rebecca interrogators would send out timed radar pulses that, upon finding the Eureka beacons on the ground, would be rebroadcast to the Rebeccas on a different frequency and picked up by directional antennas mounted on the planes. It was no coincidence, then, that the word
eureka
was Greek for “I have found it.”
    Now the red signal light blinked, and Lieutenant Kessler gave the orders to stand up and hook up. Harris pushed to his feet and began his equipment checks. Back in England, he’d been called a disgrace to the company he’d helped found, and had the stripes he’d proudly earned at Toccoa peeled from his shoulders. But now he’d be able to show his worth where it counted, on the battlefield. It would be, if not redemption, then a kind of validation for him.
    The green light came on. Salty Harris moved into the aisle, and then was standing in the open doorway. His team’s pilot, Lieutenant Dwight Kroesch, had opted to fly in above rather than under the clouds and had given the go signal at a higher altitude than many of the other flights. Seen in the moonlight, the French countryside below Harris would have resembled a relief map, or one of the sand table dioramas he’d seen at the pre-mission briefings. But there had been neither tracers nor belching antiaircraft guns coming from those scale models.
    He had wanted action and gotten his wish. The enemy defenses were awake and spitting fire up into the sky.
    Ready as any man could be, he jumped into their vicious teeth.
    9.
    Minutes earlier, Captain Frank Lillyman’s team had learned a