Captains paced their decks. Pilots tapped their gauges. Commanders pored over maps, fully aware that for all the months of meticulous planning, everything could go wrong -- the winds, the tides, the element of surprise -- and above all, the audacious bet that what waited on the other side of the Channel would compel men not to shrink away, but to charge ahead.
Everybody was fūcking nervous as hell, officers and grunts alike. Those trained to rule the skies, the land, and the sea were all nervous. The leaders studied all the maps and made plans, but knew that their plans might not play out as expected. Chaos theory might rear its ugly head. A rhinoceros might fart on the serenghetti plains, and as a result New Orleans is buried under fifty meters of water in a category 5 hurricane while simultaneously London is blanketed with heavy, wet snow. Mostly,
they were worried about the fact that their men might choke. Faced with nasty Germans holding real guns, would their American and English soldiers have the courage to fight those bastards to the death, or would they run away like schoolgirls and old women who encounter spiders in their cupboards?
