Late that afternoon, Easy arrives at its old foxholes and Toye eagerly jumps into his. "Aaaah, you gotta be fucking kidding me!" he screams. "Someone's gonna die, someone's gonna fucking die! Look at this shit!" He means it literally. The 1st battalion saw fit to take dumps in every Easy foxhole. Woohoo! Fun with excrement! Gonorrhea attributes it to the soldiers' wimpy refusals to spend any time above ground. Donnie notes in voice-over that the 1st battalion obviously withstood heavy artillery fire in Easy's absence; the broken trees, strewn branches and shards of bark, it seems, were a dead giveaway. No cruel war pun intended.

The men inch closer to visibility, while Donnie watches the Germans in Foy through his binoculars; they're scampering from building to building, setting up heavy guns and scrambling to get in position. "Still couldn't see the artillery, but I knew it was down there," Donnie tells us. He reports to Dike that the Germans have the line zeroed, and appear to be biding their time until it's apparent that Allied troops have reoccupied the position like lambs to the slaughter. The plan is established: hold the line. Good plan, brainiac. I bet he could also explain what sweaters do. Dike then decides he's due at regimental HQ and leaves the fortification of foxholes to people with actual competence.

Donnie helps the men carry logs and enormous leafy branches toward foxholes. As usual, he's more concerned with his comrades' safety than he is in setting up his own secure spot, underscoring yet another inadequacy of Lt. Dike's. "Incoming!" someone screams. The company scrambles to take cover, diving into whatever pits are nearby and trying to shield themselves with foliage. What ensues is madness -- men running to and fro, zig-zagging between potent explosions and a barrage of gunfire. Every shell blows up a tree or hits the snow and shoots up a geyser of dirt and debris. Donnie drops into a shallow hole and watches everything unfold, a strange smile on his face. "For some reason, at that moment in that half-finished foxhole, all I could think about was the Fourth of July when I was a kid. I loved to make my own firecrackers...loved to blow up dirt clods and pop bottles," he remembers aloud to us. "What I saw that day was the most awesome display of firepower I'd seen in my life." A tree blows apart in an awe-inspiring cloud of orange flame. The forest looks like a minefield -- there's no safe spot, which makes it amazing that so many people lived. Of course, not everyone who lived did so in one piece. "I wouldn't have been laughing if I'd known what happened to Joe Toye," Donnie says.