The Book Passed Around the Veterans Table

The paperback came back to me in June with a coffee ring on the cover and Dale's pencil marks crowding the margins. That is the short version of how three copies of Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose made the rounds of our Thursday morning table at the post, and it is the reason I keep recommending a book to people who ask me what to buy a veteran.

It started with Walt Nowak's funeral in mid January. A few days afterward I stopped at Marge's house with a loaf of banana bread and saw Walt's flag still folded in its plastic sleeve on her kitchen table. I went home that afternoon and took my father Earl's flag out of the dresser drawer where it had sat since 2009. That is a longer story than this one. What matters here is that by the first week of March I was in a buying frame of mind, and I ordered three paperback copies in one order along with a few other things. My own money, nothing sent to me, nothing borrowed to write about.

I should say plainly that I am not a veteran. I was too young for the draft and I never served, and the men at that table know it. Ray is my brother, 74, Navy from 1970 to 1974. Dale was a Marine in the 1980s. Hank retired out of the Air Force after twenty years working on aircraft. I make the coffee and set out the chairs on Thursday at nine and I go along with Ray. That is my standing at the post and I do not dress it up.

I read my copy first, over about three weeks in March, mostly in the chair by the fireplace with the ballgame on mute. Then I handed the other two to Ray and Dale, and Ray passed his along to Hank when he was done. By April the four of us had settled into talking over a chapter or two once the regular business of the morning wound down. No sign up sheet, no leader, about forty minutes, sometimes less if the pot ran dry. We finished in June.

What it is, in plain terms: the Simon and Schuster paperback from Stephen E. Ambrose, 336 pages, about Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from training through Normandy and on to the Eagle's Nest. Dick Winters comes through clearer than anyone else in it. If you have seen the miniseries you already have his face in your head, and that helps, because the book hands you a great many names in a hurry.

Ray and I watched the miniseries together on his DVD set some years back, so the two of us had that going in. Hank and Dale had not seen it. What the four of us landed on, and this is four men at one table and not a survey of anybody, is that the series is easier to follow and the book is easier to argue with. Ray said it first and nobody improved on it.

The series is easier to follow. The book is easier to argue with. Ray said it first and nobody at the table improved on it.

Dale is the marker. He had a system with letters in the margin and by June that copy looked like it had been through weather. He is also the one who hit the wall on names. There are a lot of them, and Stephen E. Ambrose does not stop to remind you who a man is, so Dale read the first sixty pages twice before they stuck. Hank did not have that trouble. Hank reads differently than Dale does, and he will tell you so at length.

The print is small. I am 68 and I read under a lamp, and there were nights I wanted a larger edition. Ray put on his reading glasses and said nothing, which for Ray means it bothered him some. The combat chapters are hard going. I do not mean hard to read, I mean hard, and I set the book down for two days in the middle of it. Nobody at the table thought less of me for that.

The object itself is easy to live with. It measures 6.25 by 1 by 9.25 inches and weighs 1.2 pounds, so it drops into a coat pocket or the side of a truck seat the way a hardcover will not. Ray carried his out to the truck and back for a month before he passed it on to Hank. That is about the highest compliment a book gets from Ray.

The talk was the part I did not expect. Four men who mostly discuss weather and brakes spent a whole summer on the same book, and the arguments were better than anything on the television. Hank and Dale still go at each other about one stretch of it, and I have learned to pour the coffee and stay out of the way.

So one thing I would say to anyone buying this as a gift. It is not for a man who does not want to walk back over that ground. Dale and Hank were both glad they read it. Ray was glad too and said so once, which is his way. But I know men at that post who would take a new fishing rod over this book every time, and they would not be wrong. A gift that sits unread on a shelf is not a gift, it is a nice thought in a paper bag.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Buy one copy first. Read a chapter yourself before you decide, the way I did in March, because you will know inside twenty pages whether the man you have in mind will take to it. If he is a series watcher, tell him straight that the book goes further and slower and that the names take a while to settle. If his eyes are not what they were, say so out loud and look for a larger print edition before you wrap anything. And do not hand it over as a lesson. It is a book, not a lecture. Give it the way Ray gave his to Hank, with no ceremony at all, and let him decide what he thinks.