Steve Zaley

Harry Shaw I had the opportunity to buy Steve’s excellent book at Division Review this year in May. I was also able to meet up and talk with Steve in Washington DC at the 82nd Airborne Association’s convention in August. Moreover, I believe Steve has managed to publish something on the scale of absolute perfection!! I mean it. It does for the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, what Ross Carter’s book, THOSE DEVILS IN BAGGY PANTS, did for the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. In fact, I’d go so far to say that Zaley’s book is, in fact, “a more perfect union” of a shared memory of the regiment in World War Two. Steve has done a marvelous thing here. I am not sure he really understands the magnitude of how great his effort actually is. Steve has managed to tell his father’s story from the vantage point of a loving son. In doing so, he gives old Paratroopers, like myself, hope that the stories we share with our families, and retell, and retell again and again, (and again) over the years at conventions and gatherings and ALL AMERICAN WEEK at Fort Bragg every year. He gives me a sincere hope that perhaps, just perhaps, that people are actually listening to the stories we Paratroopers tell. They are listening and what is more, these stories are cherished as much by our friends and loved ones. These stories matter. My wife has told me many times that she pretty much knows all of my paratrooper stories by heart by now. She has also said, that hearing somebody else who served along side of me, retell those very same stories, that somehow it makes the story more perfect and and special to her. Because, it is in the retelling of these experiences that it adds and compounds a value that does not merely exist in someone who merely recites a first-hand memory. What occurs is something bordering on the creation of myth. With myth, our stories cease belonging just to us anymore and now belong to every one who chooses to listen—anyone who chooses to read. These myths now belong to everyone who chooses to read for themselves about these brave and Intrepid souls and what they did. It is a story of when doing what they did had tremendous consequences and life-defining gravitas. By doing this, Steve Zaley is focusing attention where attention so rightly belongs—on that generation of Americans who did these near-impossible deeds. By doing this, Steve is writing as a loving son. He is affirming to his father that what he did matters. What he did matters and that “he was listening.” We are listening.....