The Real Band of Brothers

William Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron do not consider themselves heroes.

Guarnere, 84, and Heffron, 84, are among the surviving members of the fabled Easy Company memorialized in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers." To them, the real heroes are the men whose bodies stayed buried in that foreign soil and the mothers who sent their sons off to war, praying for a safe return.
It is so their sacrifices are not forgotten that Guarnere and Heffron have written "Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends," recently published by the Berkley Publishing Group.

"Sitting there in the plane, you wonder why you're up there," says Heffron. "You
could be home, but then when you land there, and you go through these villages
and you look at those people's faces ... now you know why we're here."

Sound familiar. I will bet a lot of our men and women in the ME would say the same. These men are the last of the "Greatest Generation." They made it through D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the mistakes of Operation Market Garden, and finally up to Hitler's vacation home, The Eagle's Nest.Both men constantly wonder how it was that they survived the war and went on to such long prosperous lives, and they say they are left with a sense of war's random luck and of the responsibility to remember the men who were not so lucky. "They ain't never going to forgive you if you don't," says Heffron, pointing toward the sky.