What General Eisenhower Did When He Found a 17-Year-Old Soldier Hiding in a Truck

Описание: England. May 1944.

Three weeks before D-Day.

A surprise inspection at a forward staging area.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower noticed movement under a tarp in the back of a supply truck.

He pulled back the tarp himself.

A 17-year-old soldier — Private Jacob Williams — was hiding.

He had been an underage AWOL — caught and returned twice.

He had run away from his unit because the artillery shelling in training had broken him.

He was crying.

Eisenhower did not have him arrested.

He sat down in the back of the truck beside him.

He talked to him for 90 minutes.

About fear. About courage. About what their fathers had asked them to become.

He arranged the boy's discharge — honorable — sent him home to Pennsylvania.

Williams lived to age 89.

He told that story at every veterans' meeting for 70 years.