“Me?” Donnelly tried to laugh it off. “What an idea! You couldn’t travel under a phony name in the Army.”
“Say, I’ve always wondered about that name of yours, anyway,” Max said. “Didn’t want to say anything until I knew you better. But you really look as Italian as Tony here, and I know you speak Italian like a native. How come the Irish name?”
“Well—it is an Irish name!” Dick said. “You see—my mother was Italian.”
“Oh, and your father was Irish?” Max asked.
But the sergeant just grinned. “I might as well come out with it,” he said. “No—my father was Italian, too.”
“Then—where did that name Dick Donnelly come from?”
“It really was Irish in the beginning,” the sergeant smiled. He looked out over the rolling hills and watched the heat waves rising from the flat lands. It was pleasant here under the tree, talking to his friends. The war seemed miles away, and yet the war had brought him friends like this, brought him a whole new life. And now that old life was going to come out. If they all hadn’t been so restless between battles, his old life could have stayed buried. It wasn’t that Donnelly was ashamed of it, but just that he wasn’t sure the others would understand.
He was silent, as he thought about it, and the others waited, knowing he was going to tell them something interesting about himself. Their relationship was not the ordinary one of sergeant and lesser ranks. In the parachute troops, men were often thrown closely together when they worked frequently from the same plane, always in the same group. Commissioned officers were more informal and friendlier with the men under them, too. Lieutenant Scotti and Dick Donnelly, for example, were very close friends. They kept to the formalities only in military matters, but in private they called each other “Jerry” and “Dick.”
Dick Donnelly liked Max Burckhardt and Tony Avella. He had been with them at training camp and ever since. They would be going through a lot more together. So it was natural that he should tell them about his other name, his other life.
“Donnelly’s an Irish name, all right,” he said. “And that was my family’s name originally. You see, there were quite a few Irish settled in Italy a few hundred years ago and they just switched their names to the nearest Italian equivalent. My Italian name is Donnelli, of course.”