Murphy had been with this division since February 1943. He had watched it be rebuilt through replacements, watched his companions replaced by strangers who died before he learned their full names, watched himself promoted through a succession of positions above people who had not survived. The specific psychology of being one of the few men in a division with continuous service from North Africa to Alsace — witnessing the replacement cycle over and over, being one of the people who outlasted it — is part of the context for what he did on January 26.
Men who have been through that replacement cycle long enough develop a complicated relationship with the concept of self-preservation. The men they started with are dead. The men who replaced them are dead. The men who replaced those men are dead. The person who is still alive begins to understand his survival less as an achievement than as a statistical anomaly, and the specific calculation of risk that governs ordinary behavior becomes harder to apply.
Murphy was 19 years old, by his actual birth year, when he climbed onto the burning M10. He had been in continuous combat service for nearly two years. By the time of Holtzwihr, he may have been less afraid than he had been at Licata or Anzio, not because he had become reckless, but because the threshold between life and death had been crossed by everyone around him so many times that his own relationship to it had changed.
## The Colmar Canal and the Frozen Ground