At night with his head on his fifty pound backpack, huddled in Army blankets, Pete wrote to Merry that the men had not been issued sleeping bags, and the nights were cold.

What he wanted to say was that the motto carved onto a fellow soldier's machine gun, Sempre Avanti, Always Forward, meant that everytime a victory occurred, the only thing to do was to continue. Often it wasn't until the night before an attack that the men were given maps. Otherwise, they did not know where they were. He wanted to say that the 10th was the arrowhead that led the Allied forces in the mountains of Italy. Victory meant only that they would now move on until the Nazi hold on Northern Italy was destroyed.

But what he wrote to Merry was that the grim endurance training at Camp Hale had served the 10th Mountain Division well. He was alive because of the long cold march of 12,000 soldiers in minus 30 degree weather, in deep snow, at altitudes of 13,000 feet in a month long exercise known as the D series, the details of which Lt Lafitte had never mentioned in his letters home.

Now, on the eve of a major attack on Nazi held mountain territory, Lt Lafitte wrote to his land girl sweetheart that beside a dusty road, some of the men had found a stray cow, and that day they had passed around a helmet full of fresh milk.