86th Mountain Regiment

The 86th Mountain Regiment is the army formation through which Ben Givens enters the mountain infantry and the Italian campaign. In his remembered experience, the regiment is at once a demanding training institution, a unit ordered into dangerous advances, and the setting for a war that Ben increasingly cannot bring himself to fight.

Formation and Training at Camp Hale

Ben arrived at Camp Hale, Colorado, in a snowstorm, carrying a duffel bag and six dollars in per diem money. At the station, a sergeant assigned him to L Company, Third Battalion, of the 86th Mountain Regiment. His first night in the barracks passed without sleep: fully dressed beneath two blankets, curled up with his hands in his armpits, he thought of Rachel Lake.

The regiment’s training made physical endurance an immediate test rather than an abstraction. On Ben’s first morning, recruits exercised shirtless on a snow-covered parade ground before marching for three hours at 10,000 feet along the Continental Divide, north of Leadville. They crossed Tennessee Pass as snow thickened; three men collapsed and were left behind. Ben continued in a stupor, short of breath, with numb hands and feet and blood running from his nose. By evening he was in the camp hospital with a fever of 103 degrees. A doctor explained that altitude sickness had affected scores of men in the regiment, with symptoms including respiratory collapse, fever, nausea, and asthma. Ben, meanwhile, considered going absent without leave to Denver once he recovered.

Operations in Italy

During the fighting around Mount Belvedere, the regiment received orders to move toward Monte Della Torraccia. At dawn, P-47s bombed Belvedere’s summit. The 85th Regiment had taken Mount Belvedere and Gorgolesco, and its Third and First Battalions were ordered to defend those gains against counterattacks. The Third Battalion of the 86th, Ben’s unit, was assigned to move through the front lines toward Monte Della Torraccia.

The advance carried the infantry through a landscape already marked by bombardment and loss. Moving in single file from the pines toward Mazzancana, the men met Italian alpini leading mules with dead American soldiers lashed to their backs. Farther uphill, they passed wounded men awaiting litter teams, a dead German soldier seated against a tree, and American casualties of mines and mortar fire. The regiment’s movement toward its objective thus appears not as a clean progression on a map but as passage through the immediate human consequences of combat.

Ben’s Service and Withdrawal from Combat

Ben’s experience within the regiment became increasingly defined by withdrawal. After he gave blood to help resuscitate Bill Stackhouse, he spent three days in the rear under blankets while a division psychiatrist assessed whether he was fit for service. He was returned to the line with replacements from the depot, but spoke to none of them; keeping them nameless, the narrative suggests, would make their eventual loss leave less of a wake.

As the regiment advanced across the Po plain, Ben made no pretense of fighting in the liberation of Bomporto, San Benedetto Po, Villafranca, and Verona. He was called upon more directly during the fighting to liberate Torbole, but crouched behind a wall and did not participate. These episodes distinguish the regiment’s continuing military advance from Ben’s own diminished engagement: he remains within the formation, yet his conduct registers a profound estrangement from its purpose and violence.

After the surrender, Ben was sent to Bolzano. Men from his company commandeered shotguns and pistols from the Beretta factory and guarded a warehouse holding paintings that the Germans had looted from the galleries of Florence. The duties had shifted from combat to guarding the spoils of war, with the Dolomites rising in the distance. The account does not present this as a resolution of Ben’s wartime experience: on the train to Livorno, amid other soldiers’ noisy anticipation of going home, he had nothing to say.

Narrative Significance

The 86th Mountain Regiment gives Ben’s war a concrete institutional and bodily frame. Its training exposes the limits of the body before combat begins; its orders place him within a campaign whose advances are accompanied by dead and wounded men; and its return to the line after medical and psychiatric scrutiny shows how military service continues even when Ben has become inwardly detached from fighting. Through this contrast, the regiment is more than a backdrop to his memories: it is the structure that carries him through the war, while the remembered details of cold, altitude, casualties, and silence reveal what that passage costs him.