Normandy to Paris

The war in Europe was ending, and the mail was not. In the late spring of 1945, the battalion crossed to France, to Rouen, a cathedral city in the war's wake, and to a backlog that dwarfed Birmingham's, working now amid ruins, refugees, and the strange new weather of victory. The system traveled with them: the shifts, the locator file, the standard. So did the watching eyes of two armies and one arrangement, waiting for the experiment to slip. It did not slip. It ran, at a rate, through everything the summer brought.

What the summer brought, one July day on the Rouen road in the rain, was a jeep accident and the deaths of three of their own: Sergeant Delores Browne, Private First Class Mary Bankston, and Private First Class Mary Barlow. The Army that had shipped them to war located, in all its vast accounts, no funds to bury them. So the battalion did what this saga's people have always done. They pooled their pay, shared alike, and buried their sisters with honors purchased out of their own pockets, in the American cemetery ground of Normandy, where the three rest to this day.

The rows they left behind them ran brick neat to the last shift, and in the days after the funerals the battalion built the only memorial it knew how to build: a record day worked in their names, sixty-five thousand pieces, every one delivered. Grief, in this battalion, reported for duty.

From Rouen to Paris, from the victory summer to the long convoy home past the hedgerow graves of a harvested generation, this is the book of the mission's summit and its price, ending at a pier in America where no band waited, no parade formed, no headline held for morning, and a battalion that had run the mail of a war walked down the gangway into a country that had already begun to forget it.