Donnie wanders through the forest to check on all his men, making sure they're okay and set up in foxholes. He voice-overs that the question of Dike's whereabouts had plagued him, due to long stretches of time when the CO wandered away without warning. "Wouldn't have been so bad if he was just one of the guys in the company, but Lt. Dike was supposed to be leading the company," Donnie says. His narration is really quite flat, although that monotone does reinforce the idea that this is a journal entry reenacted. Donnie stops to help the men dig, pats them on the shoulders, and basically behaves impressively. He muses in voice-over that Winters was a CO everyone adored and respected, and Moose Heyliger never had a chance to follow in those footsteps because a jumpy Allied sentry felled him with a bullet in Holland. "Then came Norman Dike," Donnie tells us. "Dike wasn't a bad leader because he made bad decisions. He was a bad leader because he made no decisions."

We see Dike instructing a handful of officers and NCOs as to a battle plan involving the movement toward Foy. He blathers about tight security, then explains that the battalion is planning an S-3 move, "so I'll probably be called away regularly." Shit leaks out the coward Dike's eyeballs, so full is he of his own crap. "Uh, yeah," Buck says, biting his lip. "What's the formation you want us to go for?" Dike says, "At present, per usual, but I'll clarify that with you at a later time," but he's thinking, "It doesn't matter, because I'll be running in the opposite direction." Then, Dike does the strangest thing: He yawns. It occurs to me that despite the hardship, and the difficulty of sleeping in cold trenches with intermittent gunfire, one rarely sees an Easy soldier yawn. "All right, uh, I gotta make a call," Dike says before fleeing. Everyone watches him go, slightly disgusted at how accustomed they are to seeing this man's backside in motion. "Let's move out," Compton says wryly.

Donnie explains that someone at division HQ liked Dike, stationing him with Easy Company just to get him the combat experience he needed to climb up the ladder. Dike treated his post with the according lack of commitment, like "something unpleasant he had to get through before continuing his march up the ladder." That clicking noise you hear is Dike's offspring changing the channel and canceling HBO. Gonorrhea moans that the boys are screwed. Pvt. Extra announces that he's glad Dike is gone. "We're doing all right, even with Foxhole Norman," argues Malarkey. Gonorrhea takes issue with this -- yeah, they're fine now. "In case you ain't noticed, there's a town down the hill, and in that town are these guys. These guys are called Germans, and these Germans got tanks," Gonorrhea sasses, finishing that they're headed right into that town to knock on their doors. "We gotta do all this with a CO who's got his head so far up his fucking ass that the lump in his throat is his nose," Gonorrhea growls. I love him. He's the type of guy whose glass is half-empty, and he'll swear a blue streak at it for having the audacity to stay that way. But he's also a hell of a soldier and loyal to the end. He's charmingly brash. Apparently, I've developed a love affair with all these people. I am such a slut.