Toccoa

I wanna give you a specific thing that happened in the midst of it.

The first church that we were the pastors at, the-- where I was the lead pastor, I'd worked for a couple years at a, um, large church in Oklahoma where I was the missions pastor, and I did that for a couple years, but I felt God was calling me to be the lead pastor at a church and got a job in, uh, at a small-- at a smaller, uh, church in Toccoa, Georgia.

And we moved to Toccoa, and I became the lead pastor.

I was there for a year.

The first year it was great.

One was the-- One lady was the receptionist, my secretary, the financial director.

She did all the office stuff.

Uh, the other one was a kid in his early 20s that I'd knew from before, and I convinced him to come to Toccoa, and it's gonna be great.

Eddie, Eddie, look on the map.

Habersham Central is Cornelia, Georgia, right? Where Stevens County and Toccoa are next to it.

That's right up your road from you, boy.

Cornelia, it's, like, maybe 50 miles.

And so do you think the men are becoming desensitized to violence? And we saw this with Randleman killing the soldier in the barn as the replacements also looked shocked at the sight of Lieutenant Brewer and the medic on the ground, seriously wounded.

So if we look at the men we've got here in episode five versus those who first arrived at Toccoa, What have they lost psychologically along the way and are they more effective soldiers because of this experience? I would probably be

careful about describing these men as simply desensitized because I think what what we're actually seeing is something a little bit more complicated they've unquestionably have become more effective soldiers because actions which once required conscious thought are now just increasingly instinctive and they understand how to move how to respond to fire and how to recognize danger which allows them to function in situations that would have overwhelmed many of them earlier in the series but what they have learned however is not necessarily how to stop feeling they have learned how to postpone feeling when the situation requires them to function and that distinction becomes particularly important with winters because during the engagement he's almost entirely focused on the immediate problem in front of him it's It's only afterwards when he sits at the typewriter and attempts to reconstruct events that that memory begins intruding upon the orderly version of the battle he's trying to produce for the report.

There's something quite profound in that because combat repeatedly demands that these men defer emotional processing until later without ever guaranteeing when that later moment will arrive.

earlier in the series our image of winters is as a leader frequently defined by movement towards danger and by his physical proximity to the men and as his rank increases, he increasingly watches, waits, receives information and influences events from a greater distance.

And that creates an important contradiction because the army can transfer command through an order, but it can't transfer the trust at the same speed.

Winters has earned his relationship with Easy through Toccoa, Normandy, Carentan and the Netherlands and Holland.

And the men cannot simply reproduce that relationship with another officer because the organisational chart says that they should.

Sobel's now just a footnote within the company.

Only the men that were there at Toccoa know who Sobel is.

To everyone else...

And us, the audience.

And I love it because in one sentence, Bull completely dismantles this false hierarchy that Cobb is trying to create.

And Cobb wants to belong into Easy Company to be determined by what somebody has already endured or by the fact that he lets them.

whereas Bull understands that that military unit can't survive just by continually looking backwards and deciding who's suffered enough to qualify and it also tells us a great deal about Bull you know he's got nothing to prove and therefore he doesn't need to protect his status as a veteran by diminishing somebody else and it shows that his stature as a man to that where it shows the counterpoint in Cobb and his insecurity you know his experience gives him the confidence to bring the replacements into the group rather than keep them outside it and for me that that one exchange captures the central argument of replacements replacements is fundamentally about the instability of belonging both within easy and within the wider war and Easy has developed this incredibly powerful identity through Toccoa and Normandy and everything the original men have suffered together and that shared history is undoubtedly one of the things that make them such an effective unit and the problem is that that same identity which creates that cohesion can also become exclusionary if the veterans begin to believe that nobody who missed those experience can ever truly become one of them and the episode gradually challenges that idea through the replacements themselves you know babe begins forming relationships with the veterans miller stops being simply another replacement becomes someone that we recognize as an individual and while bull demonstrates that experience doesn't have to be used as a way of protecting status or keeping newcomers outside the group and it can be passed on and by the time we reach 9 and combat has begun stripping those distinctions away altogether because now everyone's being shot at wounded carried lost or searched for and and at that point belonging is no longer really about whether someone was at takoa or jumped into normandy it becomes a much more fundamental question of whether you're prepared to treat another man's life as though it has become your responsibility.

And that's where the episode ultimately locates brotherhood.

Anal cancer treatment is considered the third most painful cancer treatment, behind only the treatment for throat cancer and bone marrow cancer treatment plans.

That is what our guest on this episode had to go through, but Susie Sanchez of Toccoa, Georgia, attained survivorship.

She has an inspirational story for anybody diagnosed with cancer, and now we get a chance to hear it.

So Susie, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

So, um, I'm a native Californian, born and raised in California.

I've been an executive assistant for over 20 years.

I currently reside in, um, Northeast Georgia, town called Toccoa, Georgia.

And, um, in my spare time, I like to be with my family and my grandkids.

But I wanted to get something that was a little more niche for this area.

So I live in, in a city called Toccoa, which is – we're fairly small.

I want to say we've got less than 30,000 people in the whole county, not just a little town.

The little town is even smaller than that.

And until that moment, Blythe is essentially a frightened individual wandering through a landscape he doesn't understand.

Then he sees the guys he knows from Toccoa and then suddenly belongs somewhere again.

Yeah.

And that tells us something about what easy company is becoming homes no longer necessarily a geographical place.