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A s I said befor e, throughout much of the fall of 2007 w e stayed pretty close to home in Pennedepie and Honfleur. Granted, there was a Friday night in Paris to see Mar c and Béatrice’s son, Sebastian , in a m usical review at the old Trianon theater (followed by a four-course dinner at the family’s Paris home that started at 12:30 a m), as well as three different runs to the D-day sites. Still, as that winter came on, I was deep in the w ork with late-afternoon explorations of Upper Normandy,especially the arrayofGerman bunkers still lining the English Channel. And that was when my light bulb fi nally came on. Through the current reality of the war ar ound us I began to see that the F rench countryside and its people might yield far more detail than just the route followed by the 102nd and the different locations where it operated. By late November, with the substantial aid of Marc’s cousin, Christine Bouchon , Susan and I were negotiating every twist and turn of the 102nd as it moved throughout Lower Normandy and Brittany. And we turned up a lot—key unmarked sites and even more endearing people with splendid memories. By December 2007, with a rented diesel Peugeot that got fifty-two clean-burning miles per gallon on the highway —increasingly appreciated as fuel pushed the equivalent of $8.50 a US gallon —we were knocking on doors that e ventually led us to some of the most poignant moments in the life of the 102nd.But let the chaplain guide us there. PA R T T W O France A map of southern England, France, and western Germany, with detail insets of places crucial in The Chaplain’s Conflict. Cartography by Steve Padgett-Vasquez. ...

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