Pillow Talk Crossroads

[Danny Hosford]

Crossroads" is the 5th Episode of Band of Brothers. It again portrays Richard Winters in a leading role. It follows him winning a victory in a charge against German troops, and getting him a promotion as Battalion XO.

Captain Winters is promoted to Executive Officer (XO) of 2nd Battalion and no longer has command of Easy Company. He is transferred to Battalion HQ and tasked with administrative duties which include typing field reports. He finds it difficult to relinquish control of Easy Company and focus on his new tasks.

On October 17, 1944 in Holland at the Schoonderlogt estate, Captain Richard Winters is looking out the window of the room he shares with Captain Lewis "Nix" Nixon III. They've been ordered to the 506th Regiment's HQ, but Nixon refuses to wake up, so Winters takes a cup of nearby liquid and splashes it over a groggy Nixon, which works. Nixon becomes furious, and exclaims that it's his own urine, and throws his pillow at Winters, who begins laughing. As they approach the HQ, Nixon says they are the only unit to have the Germans on the German side of the river Rhine and that if they'd been able to fight back the Germans in Antwerp, they could have made a large advance toward Germany.

Winters is told to give Colonel Sink a fully written battle report about how he took a crossroads with one of Easy's squads about a month before. Winters goes away to do so and begins to recall the events of the battle.

He flashes back to when Liebgott rushed in with the remainder of his patrol; Liebgott has a minor but bleeding neck wound and another of them was severely wounded. After telling them they found a company of Germans nearby, Winters gets Lipton to rally Easy's first squad to come with them to the crossroads.

Scouting the area, they find the German company inexplicably firing an MG-42 toward battalion headquarters, which is miles away and well out of range. Winters arranges an attack, having the mortar squads blast the road. The machine gunners give them covering fire and the rest go up front with Winters to shoot vulnerable soldiers on the road, Winters himself assigning individual men of the German squad to specific men of first squad. They successfully drop several Germans with the attack and retreat quickly to regroup and plot their next attack. Winters and the squad wait until daylight.

Winters orders a charge which he will lead, telling the rest to fix their bayonets and charge on the red smoke while he runs out first. The smoke grenade is slow to deploy, and the soldiers are far behind Winters, who reaches the line first and shoots a young German soldier, then more soldiers. Despite the surprise attack being a success, another German company appears, leading to a full-scale shootout, with Winters calling in heavy artillery strikes.

Private Webster and StSgt. John W. Martin capture a trench of soldiers, one of whom tells them he's Polish, despite speaking German. Martin notices that they are S.S. and balks at the idea that they are Polish. Webster is hit in the foot by a German artillery barrage and is taken to the aid station. The rest of the team overpower the Germans and secure the area.

Martin gathers up 11 prisoners. Winters approaches an angry Liebgott taking potshots at the still-living Germans crawling over the bodies of their dead comrades, trying to escape the field. Winters orders Liebgott to stop shooting and escort Martin's prisoners back to Battalion CP. Believing that the furious Liebgott can't be trusted, Winters orders him to drop all his ammo and removes all but one round from Joe's rifle. He tells him that killing one prisoner will prompt the others to attack and possibly kill him and escape. Winters then sits looking at the young German he shot before. Nixon comes over and offers him a drink of water.

Col. Sink arrives in the aftermath to assess the situation and informs Winters that he's to take the position of battalion commander. Winters accepts and suggests that 1st Lieutenant Fredrick "Moose" Heyliger take his place. Later, while Winters and Heyliger walk together and Winters briefs him on Easy, Heyliger is shot by a jumpy Army sentry. Heyliger will live but his injuries are too severe to allow him to command Easy.

On a brief respite in Mourmelon-le-Grand, France, the company watches Seven Sinners, a movie starring Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne. Winters and Nixon walk in and the movie is stopped. The commanding officers inform the men that they have to ship out immediately for Belgium and that all leave has been canceled. The company rides in trucks a few hundred miles to the small village of Bastogne; it is under attack by an unexpectedly large German force. Col. Sink tells Winters and Easy that they'll have to defend Bastogne, a junction town of about seven roads that is of vital importance to advancing German tank divisions. Col. Strayer arrives just in time, having been on leave in London. The new commander of Easy, 1st Lt. Norman Dike arrives and is grilled by Winters about preparations for the defensive including ammo, cold weather clothing and food packs for the company. A lieutenant, George Rice, brings a Jeep full of ammunition crates. He says he'll make another ammo run if he can and suggests that Easy and the other companies on hand will be surrounded after the last open road is cut soon. Winters tells him that paratroopers are supposed to be surrounded and joins his comrades as they walk into the forest under darkness.

Since we last posted here in December 2022, the Pillow has continued to evolve dynamically in keeping with our five-year strategic plan. An important priority of that plan is strengthening our IDEA work across the organization, as we build capacity to better serve artists, audiences, and staff; erect the re-imagined Doris Duke Theatre; and create the plan and infrastructure for our digital crossroads.

We are firmly committed to this path. We seek to build an equitable and relevant organization. We look forward to staying in touch with our community and to reporting both our progress and our challenges.

If you have questions or have feedback to share with us, we encourage you to write to us at id...@jacobspillow.org, this email address is monitored closely by Pillow staff members who will be able to respond in a timely manner.

We have initiated important changes after an independent External Program Review (noted in our July 2021 statement) concluded that more was needed to address the artistic and professional needs of artists, staff, and audiences with disabilities. Highlights of our progress include:

As we continue to amplify voices in the future, we honor the platform that we have to support legacy and emerging companies and individuals, with values that embrace the rich spectrum of artists and dance makers from all backgrounds and gender identities.

We continue to invest in our goal of increasing attendance by BIPOC audiences, a concern also raised by BIPOC artists who have variously presented or stayed in residency at the Pillow. Our most successful efforts have been through our Community Engagement Department that, over the past six years, has sought to create reciprocal relationships with stakeholder groups in Pittsfield, the city with the highest percentage of people of color in the Berkshires. Our regional partners include the NAACP, Manos Unidas, Latinas 413, Berkshire Black Economic Council, Berkshire Immigrant Center, and Blackshires. However, we have yet to consistently draw larger BIPOC audiences

from Boston and New York metropolitan areas. A position in the Marketing Department has recently been restructured to provide more staff support in this effort.

The Pillow continues to work to expand resources allocated to IDEA. The majority of 2021-2022 artist fees for Pillow Lab and Festival artists were expended to support BIPOC artists and companies. Additionally:

Each committee of the Board is creating a plan to prioritize IDEA in their work, and these actions will be folded into a larger plan to be reviewed and approved by the Board in December of 2021. In addition:

On June 5th this year, in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others, we released a statement in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement (available at the bottom of this page). We made a set of specific commitments at that time, among them the pledge that we would provide our Pillow community with regular updates about what we are doing to put our words into continued, sustained action.

Since 2017, we have been on a sustained and deliberate journey to shift our culture and systems. Aided by Gwendolyn VanSant, Founder and CEO of Multicultural BRIDGE in neighboring Lee, MA, our staff and Board have engaged in cultural competency training sessions. This training is now a permanent part of our orientation for new staff and interns. We believe that real change begins with each individual in an organization understanding their own histories and biases.

This responsibility also means identifying and working to remove social, socio-economic, and cultural barriers to participation, engagement, and understanding. Some of these barriers are tangible, such as the cost of a ticket, access to transportation, and access to our physical spaces, while some are more nuanced, such as embedded norms and customs that seem instinctual to people in power but are alienating to marginalized groups.

We recognize that this work requires care, resilience, trust, resources, and a significant investment of time. Like dance itself, the steps we must learn are simultaneously challenging and rewarding, painful, and exhilarating. We are all works in progress, and while we will make mistakes, we hope that learning and recovering from those mistakes will catalyze change. Partnering with artists and community members, we can feel our culture begin to shift.

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