Robert Burr Smith was born on May 2, 1924 in Tacoma, Washington and he grew up in the Los Angeles, California area. At age 14 he was sent to Brown Military Academy in Pacific Beach, California. He enlisted in the Army at age 18 on August 18, 1942, and quickly signed up to be a paratrooper, assigned to Easy Company. He entered from Rochester, New York, where his parents had moved.

Apparently Burr and Skip Muck met up on the way to Georgia. Becoming a soldier would have a lifelong effect on Burr as in one way or another, he devoted his life in one way or another to soldiering and the art of war.

He recalls his first impressions of Camp Toccoa in 1942 in his writings entitled "One Last Look Back", written in 1982 just before his death:

Burr died before he could finish this.

In attempting to encapsulate the "506 Experience" from Toccoa to Kaprun (for the latter is where my association with the regiment ended) I will undoubtedly, and almost inevitably, fall prey to a failing memory, on the one hand, and to an admittedly active imagination on the other, which in my case, tends to minimize the retention of the horrors of those years and retains only memories of the warm, the human, the humorous and the heroic happenings of those three years. I will not apologize for those times when my memory differs from yours. I will, however, ask that you remember the immediately-after-action debriefing reports of S.L.A. Marshall, who demonstrated, for all the world to see, that soldiers can't even agree on the details of a small unit action in which they took part hours, or a day, before the mass debriefings he conducted, and forgive me.

The engine behind this aide memoir is that unconquerable warrior, Bill Guarnere (l), who has been my friend for nearly forty years, and my most severe critic for the same length of time. "Willy-Willy-Deuce" was not my only war, nor is Bill the only superbly brave soldier with whom I have served, but he stands out, head and shoulders, above them all. My hero worship of the incredibly tough "South Philly Wop" is a strictly personal appreciation, but you won't find many Easy Company survivors who will find fault with my selection, right, guys?

Dick Winters (right with Susan Eisenhower), sometime Easy Company platoon leader, company commander, and 2nd Battalion staff officer, is a photo-

finish second, but even he (I would bet a bundle) would vote for Bill as "Soldier of any Year". In all wars, and in

most company-sized units which sustained heavy casualties, one can say with certainty that the real heroes didn't survive their bravery, but in this case, they did… Their bravery, revealed in Normandy, and sustained through Holland and the Bulge, grew stronger with each firefight and each encounter with the enemy, retaining its bright luster until the day they were separated from active service. That neither man was awarded the CMH remains an unsolved mystery to me…as much as the continuing mystery of Harrison Summer's DS, which exceeds CMH standards by a country mile. The currency of U.S. military decorations has been shamefully devalued in recent years, first by the Air Force with their Cracker Jack Box proliferation of the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and later by the Army, with Bronze Stars going to thousands of non-combatant soldiery. Thru all of this the 101st, almost alone, in my opinion, resisted the temptation to dump cheap decorations on its soldiers…reserving its two Congressional Medals for men who died in combat within a few days of each other, and its DSC's and Silver Stars to a comparative handful of truly distinguished soldiers. (There were a few exceptions to this general rule, but even these can be suffered in silence because they were so few, and because those awards had redeeming virtue in the mirth they caused among those 'who knew'.)
I digress. In brief, this short work is dedicated in part to Bill Guarnere and Dick Winters, my personal heroes, and in equal part to those who didn't survive the war and were seldom cited for bravery. To the later we owe the greatest gratitude of all…for to them we owe our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.