None Left Behind (36 page)

“Sergeant Montgomery,” Colonel Infanti said, “do you remember in
Band of Brothers
when Dick Winters' grandson asks him, ‘Grandpaw, were you a hero?' ”

“No,” Winters had said, “but I served with a lot of them.”

“Sometimes it's easy for us to convince ourselves that the United States is a decadent society,” Infanti said, as much to himself as to the sergeant beside him, “that our young people have gone soft and that we'll never produce another generation like the one that stormed Normandy on D-day. Anyone who thinks that wasn't in The Triangle of Death.”

He went quiet. The two soldiers looked at the faces in the glass case.

“One day my grandchildren will ask me about the 4
^th
Battalion in Iraq,” Infanti continued at last. “I'll tell them these men weren't heroes because they died. They were heroes because of the way they lived.”