[fic] Oh But You're Lovely

[scandalinbohemia]

Title: Oh But You're Lovely
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Pairing/Characters: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 6,026
Tags: Pre-Canon, Music, Nonverbal Communication, First Time, First Kiss, Semi-Public Sex
Notes: Written for the LLSS prompt: "first hookup at OCS".

Dick, Nix, a jukebox. In the early days before they learn to read each other's mind, they find a way to communicate that doesn't require talking.

[Review] Parachute Infantry by David Kenyon Webster

[muccamukk]

Or, more properly, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich by David Kenyon Webster, who some of you will remember as the blue-eyed Harvard slacker from Band of Brothers.

This is a difficult book to assess because it's really still a draft, which Webster put together largely based on his letters home, shopped around a bit, got distracted by sharks, got eaten by sharks, and never finished. I wouldn't even call it a first draft so much as somewhat connected sections with the occasional literary flourish. We miss large chunks of events he wasn't allowed to write letters about, or didn't have the heart to, such as most of Normandy, and the pacing is all over the place. Most of the book feels like it's set during long months of doing as little as possible in Austria. I can't help feeling that with some editorial direction, Webster would have written a better book.

In terms of prose, it's got bits of beauty and insight that shine out like the worried-over stones they are, and a very poor ear for dialogue. Every character sound exactly the same, and the big speeches don't sound like something any human ever said. There's not much in the sense of pacing even within scenes, and honestly it was a bit of a trudge in places. I found myself unable to scrape up much sympathy for Webster, who is constantly complaining about being treated unfairly by the army, but just as constantly bragging about being a goldbricker who spends most the war avoiding combat when possible and hoping to get wounded just badly enough to get sent home. He talks about companionship with the other guys, but we don't get much of a feeling of a strong bond with any of them except after most of them die, and he's sad.

Other than Webster being ridiculous (pancakes!) and some technical details on how army stuff works (mostly from his unbearably pretentious letters home, which are pinned onto the end), there's not a whole lot of fandom material in this book, at least not that I found useful. There's some good Speirs stuff, if you're into him, but mostly characters that were in the show don't appear that much. The book is more unflinching in dealing with the US Army behaving badly than most of the related books I've read have been. Though that's coming from someone who is kind of the worst and assumes everyone else is likewise.