Rachel Haines
Honors Period 5

We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from The Band of Brothers Marcus Brotherton brings together a collection of real life stories of men that dealt with the struggles, the hardships and the joys of war in “We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories From The Band of Brothers”. Twenty men tell their heartfelt stories of their life before, during and after World War II. The stories from war start from D-Day, during the invasion of Normandy, all the way to when US soldiers liberated concentration camps in Germany. All of these men have a story to tell, which they have something in common; struggling together to fight for their country that they love. The men of Easy Company were more than honored to share their stories of training, battling, fighting and then finally coming home, for everyone to read. We Who Are Alive and Remain is a non-fiction book that contains autobiographies of twenty men who fought in World War II. Marcus Brotherton compiles these stories to bring to you and show what these men went through on a daily basis. His main point of writing this was to inform you on these soldiers life from before war, when they enlisted into the army, training, fighting, and then when war was over and they were sent home to be with their families. Marcus Brotherton goes in detail with the gentlemen and has them talk about their triumphs but also they talk about their bad times as well. “We Who Are Alive and Remain” starts out with the 20 men telling their own stories of where and how they grew up. Most of these men grew up during the 20’s and 30’s so they suffered like every other American during this time, with struggling for money during the Depression. They tell about their family and what they did as a job growing up. The men then tell about what they were doing and exactly where they were when they found out about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Right after they found out, they had no other choice but to enlist into the army. Leaving their school and putting education on the back burner was their only choice because war was the only thing on their mind. The next step was for the men to go through training. Some of them went to Camp Toccoa in Georgia to train and learn how to jump out of the planes and to be a part of the Parachute Infantry Regiment. A man named Dewitt Lowrey talks about how nervous he was when jumping. “A lot of guys didn’t make the training. When I jumped I was scared. I don’t know about everybody else, but I was scared every time I jumped. I had never been in an airplane before that. Down on the farm, I had no reason to go anywhere on a plane. So I was always on the leery side of that. I figured the good Lord was taking care of me, so I let it go.” Many men just like this story, tell how nervous they were, however they wanted the chance to be a paratrooper in the army so they did whatever they had to do. Not all went to Toccoa, and many were scattered over the United States such as Florida, Texas and others. After the training was over, the soldiers share about how they were transported from the United States to Europe. The men soon