10th Mountain Division

The 10th Mountain Division was a United States Army formation recruiting men for mountain service during World War II. The novel introduces it through the ski community that helped identify potential recruits, then follows its importance in Ben Givens’s life from his decision to serve to the reunions that preserve his connection with a fellow veteran.

Formation and Mountain-Service Context

A letter to Ben from Willard Anderson, president of the Leavenworth Ski Club and local chairman of the National Ski Patrol, describes the military developments behind the recruitment effort. Anderson wrote that the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment had been activated at Fort Lewis the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and had trained on the slopes of Mt. Rainier. The 10th Mountain Division followed the regiment and was then recruiting with help from the National Ski Patrol. The letter presents high-country experience and enthusiasm for skiing as reasons a young man might find mountain service an honor and privilege.

Recruitment and Ben’s Assignment

Anderson framed enlistment as a way for Ben to choose how he would meet military service rather than simply go wherever the draft sent him. His appeal explicitly joined the war effort to skiing, urging Ben to meet the war on his own terms and wearing skis. Ben’s father accepted that, if his son had to go, mountain service was a fitting choice, though he wished Ben could stay because he needed him.

Ben later received an order from the adjutant general’s office to report for active service in the 10th Mountain Division. He read the letter twice, his heart pounding, before finding his father in the south orchard laying irrigation pipe. His father stopped the Farmall tractor to read the order; Ben told him he had been accepted. The recruitment letter had offered a possible path, but the official order made that path immediate and personal.

Veterans and Continuing Ties

The division remains present in Ben’s later life through reunions. He saw Bill Stackhouse three times at reunions of the Tenth Mountain Division, where the two men spoke at length about what had happened to them. Stackhouse, who had survived with a limp and a shoulder that ached in cold weather, was slowly writing his memoirs so his descendants would know the story too. The reunions thus connect military experience to later acts of remembrance and testimony.

Narrative Significance

The division’s place in the novel is conveyed through a movement from recruitment to memory: a ski-club letter turns Ben’s mountain skills toward wartime service, an official order confirms his assignment, and veterans’ reunions carry the consequences of that service into old age. Its presence also links the public language of duty and honor with the private costs of separation and the lasting need to speak about what happened. The evidence establishes this personal and commemorative significance without detailing the division’s campaigns or wider military record.