A warrior's spirit endures unbroken

In the wee-hour darkness, the stocky young colonel stood on an earthen mound gazing into the faces of the 750 warriors before him.
“Men,” he said, “I am not a religious man and I don’t know your feelings in this matter, but I am going to ask you to pray with me for the success of the mission before us. And while we pray, let us get on our knees and not look down, but up with faces raised to the sky.”
In the orchard outside Exeter, England, rifles clanked against helmets as the soldiers descended to their knees in the dew-dampened grass.
“God almighty, in a few short hours we will be in battle with the enemy. We do not join battle afraid. We do not ask favors or indulgence but ask that if you will, use us as your instrument for right and an aid in returning peace to the world.
“We do not know or seek what our fate will be. We ask only this, that if die we must, that we die as men would die, without complaining, without pleading, safe in the feeling that we have done our best for what we believed was right.
“Oh, Lord, protect our loved ones and be near us in the fire ahead and with us now as we each pray to you.”
As the men rose, the colonel called for a battalion reunion in Kansas City on the first D-Day anniversary after the war. The paratroopers then clambered aboard C-47 airplanes for the flight to their drop zone: Normandy, June 6, 1944.
For the colonel, it was the fulfillment of a dream born during his days as a boy picking apples in mountain orchards outside his native Elkins, W.Va. After graduation from West Point, with war looming, he was assigned a battalion in the elite 101st Airborne Division in preparation for the largest invasion in military history.
The moment for which he longed ended instantly.
He was hit in the chest by a series of machine gun rounds as he descended from the heavens into a sea of German artillery fire. By the end of the fighting in Normandy, almost 100 of his men had joined him among the war dead.
Widely scattered but well trained, the survivors soldiered on, seizing a pair of bridges over the Douve River and cutting off routes for German reinforcements at Utah Beach. The colonel’s troops later fought in Operation Market Garden in Holland and the pivotal Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne.
More than 40 members of the outfit showed up June 6, 1946, for the D-Day reunion at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, according to Newsweek and Associated Press accounts. One of the men read the prayer aloud. Others wept.
Memories of 3rd Battalion commander Lt. Col. Robert Lee Wolverton remained vivid more than six decades after the invasion. “There was nobody like him,” Ed Shames, of Virginia Beach, told the colonel’s grandson, the author of this editorial. Shames, a former sergeant in Wolverton’s Headquarters Company, received a battlefield commission after D-Day and was transferred to the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, better known as the “Band of Brothers.”
The colonel and those who perished with him in Normandy embody not only the sacrifice we honor today, but also a uniquely American spirit that transcends eras and debates over the merits of war: “We ask only ... that if die we must, that we die as men would die, without complaining, without pleading, safe in the feeling that we have done our best for what we believed was right.”
It is a spirit which lives in those who have given all and those risk it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pray it forever endures.