At 0740 hours on the morning of December 29th, 1944, Staff Sergeant Daryl Eugene “Shifty” Powers was cold clear down to the bone.

He stood in a frozen foxhole in the Bois Jacques woods above the Belgian village of Foy, his boots sunk in ice, his fingers wrapped around the wooden stock of an M1 Garand that had no scope, no fancy glass, nothing but iron sights and habit.

The men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 56th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, called him “Shifty” because of the way he moved his eyes, always searching, always shifting.

Right now those eyes were fixed on a tree line almost a mile away.

1,600 meters.

To most of the men in the orchard of foxholes, the tree line was just a dark bar against snow. A wall of pines and bare trunks, all of them interchangeable. The Germans were somewhere behind it, dug in on the far side of those woods, watching Bastogne, watching the Americans.

To Powers, that tree line wasn’t a wall.

It was a catalog.

One hundred and forty separate trees, each in its own place, each with its own silhouette. He’d spent five days memorizing it. Every gap. Every branch. Every crooked notch where the sky shone through.

He took a breath. Frost knifed his lungs.

“That tree wasn’t there yesterday,” he said.

First Sergeant Carwood Lipton, crouched beside him, lowered his binoculars and frowned.

“What?” Lipton asked. “Which one?”

Shifty raised the Garand and nestled it into his shoulder. He lined up the rear aperture and front post on the distant pines.

“Right there,” he said. “Up from that big one with the broken top. About sixty feet to the left. Short one. Too even in the branches.”

Lipton brought the Zeiss binoculars back up and tried to find what Shifty was seeing. Through the German glass, the tree line leaped closer, but it still looked like trees and snow and more trees.

“I don’t see it,” he said.

Shifty didn’t look away from his sights.

“I do,” he said. “Because it wasn’t there yesterday.”

Lipton glanced at him, then back at the woods.

There was a reason they called him Shifty.

There was also a reason Lipton listened.

“Talk me through it,” Lipton said.

Shifty adjusted his aim a hair.

“Been counting,” he said. “Two big pines on the left—remember that split trunk? Then a gap. Then three more that lean a little right. Then that dead one with no needles. There’s a little opening past that, could maybe roll a jeep through if you had to. Yesterday, you could see sky through that opening.”

He exhaled, vapor drifting from his mouth.

“Today,” he said, “you can’t.”

Lipton found the split trunk. The dead tree. The little opening. He squinted at the darker patch where Shifty had told him to look.

All he saw was a short, scraggly pine, flocked with snow like the rest. It looked like a hundred thousand other trees in the Ardennes.

“You telling me you memorized the trees?” Lipton asked.

“Yes, First Sergeant,” Shifty said simply.

Lipton watched him for another second, then made a decision.

He ducked down in the foxhole, pulled the handset of the field radio toward him, and keyed it.

“Battalion, this is Easy,” he said. “Possible enemy emplacement at…” He glanced up, confirmed the landmarks, then gave the grid coordinates.

“Can you confirm target?” Battalion asked.

Lipton looked at Shifty. Shifty was still staring down the Garand, still calm.

“I can confirm my observer,” Lipton said. “Request fire mission, time on target.”

He hung up the handset and slid back up beside Shifty.

“You better be right,” he murmured.

Shifty nodded once.

“I am,” he said.

Lipton raised the binoculars again. Shifty kept watching through iron sights, finger a safe distance from the trigger, eyes motionless.

The woods remained quiet.

Somewhere behind them, in another part of the line, someone cursed the cold. A medic coughed. A man in a neighboring hole stamped his feet, trying to feel his toes.

Shifty just watched the tree that wasn’t there yesterday.

Clinchco

Twenty-one years earlier, the trees had been closer.

Closer, and more personal.

Clinchco, Virginia, wasn’t much more than a bend in a narrow valley in Dickinson County. A coal town carved where a river didn’t quite have room to run, hemmed in by slopes so steep the sun disappeared behind the ridgeline by three in the afternoon in winter.

Population: four hundred and something. U.S. Census men came through sometimes and wrote down numbers. The people in the valley counted differently—by families, by shifts, by paydays.

If you didn’t work underground, you left town.

Or you hunted.

Daryl Eugene Powers had started hunting when he was six years old. Too small to go down in the mines, too young to earn a wage. Old enough to carry a single-shot .22.

His father had put the rifle in his hands one frosty morning, the metal cold enough to bite.

“Single-shot bolt action,” his father had said. “You don’t get a second chance. So don’t take the shot unless you’re sure.”

They’d gone up into the hardwoods above town, where gray squirrels flicked tails along branches and the leaf mold swallowed the sound of their boots.

Meat on the table depended on those shots.

A missed squirrel meant a thinner stew.

“Don’t look for the whole squirrel,” his father said, crouched beside him under a hickory tree. “Look for what’s outta place. A bump where there wasn’t one. A twitch that don’t belong. Branches got a weight to ’em. Learn it. You’ll know if something’s sittin’ on ’em.”

So he learned.

He learned to feel wind without a weather report, the way it kissed the side of his face or tugged his earflap. He learned to judge distance without a rangefinder, just from the way trunks narrowed and bark faded. He learned that a squirrel scooting along a branch at twenty feet per second needed a rifle barrel aimed just a hair in front of where he saw fur.

Hard lessons, when every missed shot meant his father’s jaw tightening and another night with more beans, less squirrel.

By twelve, he could watch the woods and tell when something was wrong.

A leaf turning the wrong way. A bird not where it should be. A shape that had no business in that bit of brush.

He’d developed a trick around then, too.

Not a circus trick. A survival one.

He’d stand in a clearing, flip a penny fifteen feet in the air, shoulder the .22, and fire once.

The coin would hit the ground with a hole punched dead through the middle.

Kids from Clinchco thought it was magic or showmanship. Daryl knew better.

Tracking a falling coin, calculating its arc, was the same geometry as leading a squirrel leaping from one branch to another.

No conscious math. Just a brain that had run the problem enough times to know the answer.

You didn’t waste bullets in Clinchco.

You didn’t waste anything.

He brought that with him when he moved from the woods to a factory floor.

Machinist

In 1941, the war had already chewed up Europe and was sniffing around the edges of everything American.

Daryl graduated high school and stepped into a different kind of precision.

Machinist school.

Then Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia.

He traded the .22 for calipers and micrometers, the forest for a shop that smelled of oil and hot metal. His days were spent at lathes and milling machines, shaving steel to tolerances tighter than a human hair.

Plus or minus 0.0001 inches.

Measure twice, cut once.

Screw it up, and a whole part was ruined.

He found that his brain adapted easily. The same spatial sense that let him thread a bullet through a squirrel’s eye let him watch a cutting head and feel when it was a fraction off.

You don’t see a thousandth of an inch.

You sense it.

He’d run a hand along a finished surface, eyes closed, and know whether it would pass inspection.

Outside, the world edged closer to war.

Inside, the machines hummed.

He could’ve stayed there.

He had a steady paycheck, wartime work that would keep him out of the infantry. The Navy yard needed machinists.

But the newspapers brought photos from Europe. The radio carried news of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And on August 14th, 1942, he and his friend Robert “Popeye” Wynn walked into a recruiting office in Richmond.

The recruiter looked up at two good ol’ boys from Appalachia.

“Why the parachute infantry?” the man asked. “You know they jump out of perfectly good airplanes, right?”

“That extra fifty bucks a month jump pay’ll help my family,” Daryl said simply.

The recruiter took their names, their signatures, and did not ask if either of them could shoot.

The army would find out soon enough.

Camp Toccoa

Camp Toccoa, Georgia, was hot, muddy, and full of men who thought they were tough until they met the mountain.

Currahee.

Three miles up, three miles down.

Airborne.

The 56th Parachute Infantry Regiment was forming under Colonel Robert Sink. They ran, they climbed, they marched fifty miles with eighty-pound loads until their feet bled and their shoulders screamed.

They learned how to put on parachutes, how to jump from towers, how to roll, how to get to their feet and fight after hitting the ground.

Somewhere in there, the army handed Daryl an M1 Garand.

Compared to his slender .22, it was a brute. Nine and a half pounds of walnut and steel, gas-operated, .30-06 Springfield punching out of an eight-round en bloc clip with each trigger pull.

Semi-automatic. Designed for volume of fire.

It had iron sights. A front post, a rear aperture.

No scope.

Effective range on the manuals said five hundred yards. Most men couldn’t touch that distance. Not really. Not in any way that counted under pressure.

They went to the qualification range.

Targets popped up at two hundred yards, then three, then five.

The drill sergeants barked. The air filled with the slap of rifle fire and the faint, faraway whack of bullets hitting canvas.

Daryl laid down prone, rested his cheek on the stock, and watched the front sight post settle.

He didn’t calculate the wind in miles per hour. He felt it. On his cheek. In the way the grass leaned.

He didn’t adjust his sights between distances. He’d never had adjustable sights on that old .22. You held higher. You held lower. You knew where gravity would pull the bullet in the time it took to cross the distance.

He squeezed off eight rounds at two hundred yards.

All hits.

Three hundred.

All hits.

Five hundred.

The wind tugged from left to right at maybe fifteen miles per hour. He could see it in the flag that flapped at the backstop.

He nudged his aim off center just the right amount.

Kentucky windage, they called it, even though he was from Virginia.

First Sergeant Carwood Lipton watched through field glasses, calling down to the target markers. After Daryl’s eight shots at five hundred, the markers waved the flag high.

“Six-inch circle,” Lipton said quietly. “Iron sights.”

He filed the information away in the back of his head.

Later, in the barracks, some of the men asked Shifty how he did it.

“How you know where to hold?” one private asked. “You do math up there or somethin’?”

Shifty shrugged.

“Reckon I just know where the bullet wants to go,” he said.

They laughed, called him a hillbilly magic man, asked if he could shoot cigarettes out of mouths.

He didn’t show off.

It wasn’t a trick.

It was just how he saw.

The army didn’t mark him as a sniper. No special course, no scoped Springfield. On the books he was just another rifleman.

The classification system had codes for everything.

Except what he was really good at.

Hedge Row Shadows

The first time the skill saved lives, it wasn’t in snow.

It was in green, tangled hedgerows of Normandy.

On June 6th, 1944, Shifty jumped into France with Easy Company. He tumbled out of the door of a C-47 into flak-riddled darkness, parachute yanking open, the fields of Normandy rising up in a black mess.

He landed in a flooded area near Sainte-Mère-Église, spent half the night in water, lost, trying to figure out where he was. Equipment scattered. Men were all over the countryside in ones and twos.

By June 7th, Easy Company had coalesced near Carentan. Their mission: clear German positions along the Douve River and secure the causeway into town.

The land there was a maze of earthen embankments and old hedges, planted centuries earlier to mark fields and hold in cattle. By 1944 those hedges were breast-high walls of stone and packed dirt, crowned with tangled roots and brush.

Perfect for ambush.

You could walk down a sunken lane and have no idea a German machine gun was fifteen yards away on the other side, muzzle pointed right at the gap in the hedge where you had to pass.

The Germans knew that.

They’d dug in MG42s along the hedgerows, fired a burst, then shifted to a new hole while American artillery shells exploded where they’d been.

On June 12th, Easy Company was working its way along a sunken road when hell opened up from ahead.

An MG42 spat from a hedgerow two hundred yards up. Bullets chewed bark and soil. The men dove for cover, hugging the mud, elbows and faces pressed into France.

“Machine gun front!” someone yelled.

Officers yelled for smoke and suppressive fire. Men fired blind into greenery, trying to pin down a muzzle flash they couldn’t see.

Shifty slid in behind a low rise on the side of the road, propped the Garand on the dirt, and peered through his sights at the hedge.

He didn’t look for a helmet or a gun barrel. Those would be hidden.

He looked for what didn’t belong.

He’d been watching hedgerows for six days now. He knew the way branches grew over stone, the little random gaps where light slipped through.

This hedge had a patch where the darkness was too even. Too solid. A square of shadow about three feet wide that didn’t match the messy patterns on either side.

He pointed with the barrel.

“There,” he told the man next to him.

“I don’t see nothin’,” the man said.

Shifty didn’t argue. He worked the safety off, settled the front sight at the left edge of that wrong shadow, and fired.

Eight shots in quick sequence, walking across the three-foot stretch, touching each piece of that too-perfect dark.

The MG42 stopped.

No more fire from that sector.

When Easy Company reached the hedge, they found two dead Germans in a scraped-out hole behind it. One had a hole in his forehead. The other had two in his chest. Their camouflage netting was shredded.

Lieutenant Richard Winters, Easy’s executive officer, turned to Shifty.

“How’d you see ’em?” Winters asked.

Shifty wiped sweat and dirt with the back of his hand.

“I didn’t,” he said.

Winters blinked. “But you hit ’em.”

“I saw where they wasn’t supposed to be,” Shifty said. “Shadow was wrong.”

Winters didn’t quite understand, but he nodded.

He’d remember that answer later.

Six months later, in a different country, in different weather, the same kind of wrong shadow would be hiding steel that could rip open a company.

Bastogne: Counting Trees

By mid-December 1944, the trees weren’t just cover.

They were the only thing between Easy Company and freezing to death.

The German army had launched a surprise counteroffensive through the Ardennes. Tanks, infantry, artillery—they’d punched a bulge into American lines and surrounded Bastogne.

The 101st Airborne Division, including Shifty’s 56th PIR, had been trucked in to hold the crossroads town.

“Nuts,” the general had told the Germans when they’d demanded surrender.

Easy Company dug in northeast of Bastogne in the Bois Jacques, staring down toward Foy and the open fields beyond.

The army hadn’t expected a winter campaign. No white coats. No proper boots. The men wore wool uniforms, thin gloves, and hope.

They dug foxholes as fast as the ground would let them. Frost-hardened soil chipped away under entrenching tools. Each man’s hole was roughly four feet deep, six feet long. Some had logs over the top. Most just had a poncho.

The German positions sat about 1,600 meters away across a rolling stretch of snow and cold air.

Artillery traded back and forth. German 88mm guns, designed to knock down bombers at thirty thousand feet and punch through armor, were turned horizontal and aimed at infantry.

Shifty and another man shared a foxhole.

They took turns standing watch and trying to sleep. You didn’t sleep deep in Bastogne. You sank into a shallow numbness, then woke with your teeth hurting from the cold and the distant crash of shells in your ears.

On December 22nd, with the siege fully set, Shifty started doing something no one had ordered him to do.

He started counting trees.

He propped himself where he could see a slice of the distant tree line through the gap between two trunks in front of his hole.

He laid the Garand across the lip for stability and sighted along the barrel, tracing each tree along that horizon.

He gave them categories in his mind.

Big split-top there. Leaning twin-trunk there. Short stubby thing, branches like a candelabra. Dead snag, no needles. Gapped section you could maybe thread a jeep through.

He’d move left to right, right to left, memorizing.

What he was really doing was an old Clinchco game, but at a distance.

As a kid, he’d stand on one side of a hollow and memorize every stump, rock, and sapling. Then his father would tell him, “Turn around,” and move one thing—a hat on a stump, a stick leaned against a rock.

“Now what’s wrong?” his father would ask.

Daryl would turn back and scan until he found the one thing that had changed.

In Bastogne, there was no father telling him what was different.

He’d have to notice himself.

He ran that “stick trick” every morning.

Look at the line. Close his eyes. Name the trees in order. Open his eyes. Check if the picture matched.

On December 23rd, the tree line was the same.

On the 24th, the same.

On Christmas Day, the same, except for a little more snow on the branches.

On the 26th, when General Patton’s Third Army finally broke through and relieved the siege, shells still fell, but the trees stayed where they were.

On the 28th, the Germans were moving at night. Men in the line could hear engine noises, metal clanks, shouted commands. The Americans shivered in their holes, fingers never far from triggers.

On the morning of the 29th, Shifty woke from a brief doze, rubbed the frost from his eyelashes, and did his usual thing.

He raised the Garand. He swept the tree line.

Split top. Leaner. Dead snag. Little gap.

He stopped.

The gap wasn’t a gap anymore.

Something sat there that looked like a short pine. Old bark color. Snow on the branches. Perfectly placed between two taller trees.

Perfectly placed where nothing had ever grown in all the days he’d watched.

The branches were… wrong. Too regular. Like someone had built a tree from a diagram instead of watching one grow.

“That tree wasn’t there yesterday,” he said.

Lipton came when he called.

He looked through German-made Zeiss binoculars, the best glass available, and saw nothing but dark green and white.

“It’s a tree, Shifty,” Lipton said.

Shifty shook his head.

“No, First Sergeant,” he said. “It’s where a tree ain’t supposed to be.”

Lipton stared a second longer, then saw something—not the deception Shifty saw, but the certainty in the man’s voice.

He called battalion.

Time on Target

Artillery is a blunt instrument. When it’s good, it’s very good. When it’s bad, it’s killing your own men.

Calling in a fire mission on a patch of trees because a sergeant says a tree “wasn’t there yesterday” was not standard procedure.

Battalion hesitated.

Easy Company’s reputation backed the request.

So did Lipton’s.

So did the fact that, at that moment, the Germans had every incentive to move 88mm guns into forward positions, under cover of woods, where they could slaughter any American infantry crossing open ground and hold Bastogne in their line of fire.

“Time on target,” Lipton repeated.

TOT meant you coordinated the guns so that all the shells landed at the same time. The Germans would have no warning, no chance to dive for cover at the sound of the first ranging round.

At 0820 hours, 105mm howitzers of the 321st Glider Field Artillery Battalion belched fire and metal from emplacements behind Bastogne.

Shells arced up, their paths calculated by slide rules and experience.

Shifty never heard them.

He watched through his sights as the tree line turned briefly into daylight.

The first shells hit at 0823.

They walked right into the grid Shifty had given.

The artificial tree vanished in white flashes and splinters.

A second later, deeper explosions boomed—magazine detonations, ammunition cooking off, the distinct whoomp of something bigger than a tree blowing up.

Shifty saw barrel sections and carriage parts hurled out of the woods.

He lowered the rifle, blinking smoke from his eyes.

Lipton stared, half listening as someone on the other end of the radio line reported secondary explosions.

Later, battalion intelligence confirmed what the men in the foxholes had guessed.

Hidden under that fake tree had been an 88mm Flak 36 anti-aircraft gun, repositioned during the night and dug in along the tree line. It had been carefully camouflaged with winter netting and snow-covered branches, placed in a spot recon aircraft had overflown twice without seeing.

German doctrine.

Do it at night. Use natural cover. Hide in the trees. Kill anything that crosses the fields below.

That gun had been zeroing in on Easy Company’s foxholes and the approaches to Foy, preparing to fire in a direct-fire role against infantry.

One shell from an 88 could wipe out a whole squad if it landed right.

The attack on Foy was scheduled for January 30th. Easy Company, and other units, would have to cross that killing ground in daylight.

The estimates, calculated later, said that 150 men—maybe more—would have died to that gun before American artillery found it.

Instead, it died in the woods, under a fake tree that had existed for less than twelve hours.

All because one hunter from Clinchco had counted the trees.

Foy: The Sixth Window

Bastogne didn’t end with the clearing of that gun.

The siege lifted, but the snow stayed, the cold stayed, and the Germans stayed in the villages dotting the landscape.

On January 13th, 1945, Easy Company attacked Foy.

The village sat crouched below the Bois Jacques, gray stone houses and slate roofs, chimneys cold or smoking, depending on whether they held German or Belgian families—or no one at all.

Elements of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and battered remnants of Panzer units were dug in among the buildings.

Easy advanced over open ground, snow swirling up around their leggings as they trotted-walked, halted, trotted again. Artillery pounded the town before them, but not enough. Machine guns spat from windows and alley mouths.

German snipers had taken positions in upper stories, scopes glinting.

Some of the paratroopers died before they even reached the first house.

It was bad.

Street fighting is always bad.

Shifty moved with his squad along a stone wall that bordered a road leading deeper into town. The air was a mix of brick dust, snow, and acrid cordite.

Rifle fire cracked from ahead. One of the men near Shifty jerked and went down, hands going to his neck, blood blooming between his fingers.

“Sniper!” someone yelled.

The squad dove behind the wall, pressing into its cold stones.

Bullets hit the far side of the wall, throwing chips.

Shifty flattened himself, then eased up until one eye cleared the top edge.

In front of him rose a three-story stone building. Six windows along the top floor. A few shattered panes. Curtains burned or flapping. Nothing obviously moving.

Most men would see six dark rectangles.

He saw six different patterns of shadow.

Five were vaguely irregular, the kind you get when daylight hits an empty room, smudged by old furniture and random junk.

One, the sixth window from the left, had a weird little extra notch of darkness in the upper right corner.

A tight, vertical smear of shadow that didn’t match any structural element he could imagine.

He watched it.

It didn’t move.

He waited.

There—a faint flicker of light, less than a heartbeat, reflected off the interior wall.

Muzzle flash.

The German sniper was back from the window, firing from deep inside the room to avoid being silhouetted, exactly as sniper doctrine taught.

Long sightline. Minimal exposure.

Perfect.

Unless someone on the ground below was counting shadows instead of windows.

“Sniper’s in that top right corner,” Shifty said quietly. “Sixth window. Deep in the room.”

“You sure?” his squad leader hissed.

“Yessir.”

He could have tried to wait him out. He could have asked for a bazooka, or a tank, or tried to sneak around.

Instead, he did something that made the men around him think he’d lost his mind.

He slung his Garand, then unslung it and checked the clip—full.

He stepped back from the wall.

“Stay down,” he said.

Then he walked out into the street.

Snow crunched under his boots. The street was open, no cover. For a second, nothing happened.

Then the sniper saw him.

A shot cracked, viciously loud, the bullet’s sonic snap whipping past his head.

Shifty went to one knee, bringing the M1 up in one smooth motion, cheek to stock, front sight post sliding up into the notch of that sixth-window shadow.

He had maybe a second.

At sixty to seventy meters, with iron sights, most shooters would be happy to hit the window frame.

He wasn’t aiming at the frame.

He was aiming at the ghost of a man at the back of a dark room.

He squeezed.

The Garand recoiled, gas piston cycling, empty casing flipping out with that distinctive ping.

He didn’t fire again.

He stood, turned, and walked back to the wall.

His heart hammered against his ribs—he could feel it in his throat—but his hands were steady.

The men behind the wall looked at him like they weren’t sure whether to cuss him out or thank him.

“Reckon you missed,” one said.

Then they heard it.

A clatter from the street ahead.

A German helmet tumbled out of that sixth window, hit the cobblestones below, and rolled.

When Easy Company cleared the building later, they found the sniper in the attic room, slumped against the far wall. K98k rifle with ZF4 scope still braced in the window. One bullet hole, perfectly centered in his forehead.

Private First Class David Webster, who’d seen the whole thing, would later write that Shifty hadn’t so much aimed as pointed, the way a man points to something he wants touched, and the bullet had followed his finger.

Just another application of the same rural mathematics he’d used on falling coins and squirrels.

After the Shooting Stops

The war didn’t end in Foy. Easy Company pushed on, past the German border, into Bavaria. They climbed the slopes above Berchtesgaden, looked down on Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, took pictures on railings built for Nazis who’d never stand there again.

On May 8th, 1945, the Germans surrendered.

For the men in Easy, it was over in stages.

The army used points—combat time, decorations, family status—to decide who went home first.

Shifty didn’t have enough.

He waited.

In August 1945, Easy Company held a lottery to decide which men would get early transport home.

Shifty won a slot.

He was scheduled to fly out of a French field on August 12th.

On August 10th, he climbed into the back of a truck bound for that airfield.

The convoy rolled along a French road, past farmhouses and hedgerows that looked too green and too peaceful to belong in the same world as Normandy and Bastogne.

A civilian car pulled out ahead of the lead truck.

The driver swerved to avoid it.

The truck carrying Shifty went off the road into a drainage ditch, metal and men slamming into earth.

Shifty was thrown against the truck bed. He felt something in his back give way with a hot white pain, then another crack in his pelvis.

He lay there in the wreck, staring up at a sky that wasn’t full of shells or parachutes, and thought, stupidly, Really?

Not like this.

They got him to a military hospital in France. Fractured pelvis. Three broken vertebrae in his lower back.

The Purple Heart he eventually received was for that accident, not for anything he’d done in the Bois Jacques or Foy. The paperwork didn’t specify where metal had met bone.

Months of recovery in Europe.

More months in a stateside facility.

No parades. No fancy ceremony. No generals pinning medals for trees counted or guns found.

In January 1946, the army discharged Staff Sergeant Daryl “Shifty” Powers and handed him a train ticket home to Clinchco.

Going Home

The town hadn’t changed much.

Coal still went underground, came out on cars. The valley still pinched the daylight early. The same stores lined the same street. The same family names.

He went back to work as a machinist, this time at Clinchfield Coal Corporation. Lathes and mills didn’t freeze you like foxholes. No one shot at you over the top of a Bridgeport.

He married. Raised kids.

He didn’t talk much about Normandy or Bastogne.

If someone at church or the shop asked, “You see combat, Shifty?” he’d say, “I was in Europe.”

If they pushed, he’d say, “Paratrooper,” and let them fill in whatever they wanted from newsreels.

He did not talk about memorized hedgerows or the sniper in the sixth window. He did not tell the story about the fake tree and the gun everyone else had missed.

Years later, after the kids were grown, after grandkids started showing up at holidays, friends and family surprised him with a refurbished M1 Garand. Not his rifle—the army had taken that back—but a cousin.

He’d sit on his porch in Clinchco sometimes, the slant of the valley sun exactly the same as it had been when he was six learning to shoot squirrels.

Set up a target at three hundred yards.

Take a breath.

Raise the rifle.

Bang.

Still hit a six-inch circle more often than not, iron sights only, at eighty years old.

The body slowed.

The eyes didn’t forget.

Telling the Story

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that anyone outside of Easy Company knew what he’d done.

Historian Stephen Ambrose came collecting stories for a book he wanted to write about a company of men who’d jumped into Normandy, fought at Bastogne, and walked into Austria.

Band of Brothers.

Ambrose sat with Shifty in Clinchco, a tape recorder on the table between them.

They talked about Currahee, and the hedgerows, and that awful cold in the Bois Jacques.

Ambrose asked about Bastogne, about the German anti-aircraft gun Shifty had spotted.

“How’d you detect it?” Ambrose asked. “No scope, no training as an observer, and you pick out a camouflaged gun at… what… a mile?”

Shifty shrugged.

“Wasn’t complicated,” he said. “I just memorized the trees. You look at ’em every day. You know where they stand. Then next day, you look again. Somethin’s new, you know it.”

Ambrose blinked.

“Did the army teach you that?” he asked.

“Nah,” Shifty said. “I learned that hunting squirrels in Virginia when I was six.”

The historian wrote it down.

Other men from Easy spoke up too.

Carwood Lipton said Shifty was the best natural soldier he’d ever seen.

Not the best marksman—though he’d argue that, too—but the best observer.

“Shifty could walk through a forest and tell you three days later where every fallen log had been, where every deer trail crossed, where every bird nest was built,” Lipton said. “That saved more lives than any weapon we had.”

The German gun crew at Bastogne had done everything right according to doctrine. Moved at night. Used camouflage. Hid in trees. They’d beaten every reconnaissance pass, every binocular scan.

They’d failed because one American sergeant had a “stick trick” in his head—a childhood game of memorizing landscapes and finding what changed—and he’d applied it to war.

Everything else was just artillery.

Last Shot

Daryl “Shifty” Powers died on June 17th, 2009, at eighty-six, in his home in Clinchco.

Lung cancer.

He’d breathed coal dust and powder smoke and shop fumes for most of his life. His body gave out, as bodies do.

More than a thousand people came to his funeral.

Neighbors, machinists, coal miners. Kids who’d once watched him thread shots through a target at three hundred yards from his porch. Men who’d served in other wars and knew the look in his eyes.

Veterans from Easy Company traveled across the country to be there, older now, hair thinned, backs bent, but with the same faces they’d had in grainy black-and-white photos.

Carwood Lipton was too sick to attend. He died two months later.

They lowered Shifty into Virginia ground under a summer sun, far from Belgian snow and French hedgerows, in a valley where the ridgeline still stole the afternoon light at three.

There were rifles for the salute.

There was a folded flag.

There were stories shared in the parking lot after, of a quiet man who never bragged, who always kept his eyes moving.

Someone mentioned the fake tree. Someone else talked about the sniper in Foy. Someone laughed about the coin trick in Clinchco.

The army, back in 1944, had classification codes for artillery observers, reconnaissance specialists, intelligence officers. It had sniper schools and manuals and scopes.

It did not have a code for men who could look at a landscape, memorize every branch and shadow, and tell you when tree number 141 appeared overnight.

You can’t write that in a field manual.

You can’t teach it in eight weeks.

It’s a skill you build because your family needs squirrel meat and can’t afford missed bullets. Because you spent your childhood with a single-shot rifle and a father who said, “Don’t take the shot unless you’re sure.”

When the United States Army gave that man an M1 Garand and dropped him into Europe, it didn’t know what it had.

The Germans didn’t know what they were up against.

Somewhere in a Belgian pine forest, an 88mm gun crew found out the hard way.

In the end, this isn’t a story about technology, or even about shooting.

It’s about attention.

About a boy who learned to memorize woods because his dinner depended on it, and a man who applied that same relentless noticing to enemy positions.

About a “stick trick” from Clinchco, Virginia—count the trees, remember them, find what moved—that turned into a life-saving method on the Western Front.

Staff Sergeant Daryl “Shifty” Powers wasn’t a super soldier.

He was a machinist from a coal town.

The army taught him to jump out of airplanes and handed him a rifle.

Everything that saved those 150 men above Foy on December 29th, 1944?

That was Virginia.

THE END