06/14/2026
He could throw a coin in the air and hit it with a rifle.
He never once thought that was remarkable.
That was simply how the mountains of southwest Virginia raised a person. 🕊️
His name was Darrell Cecil Powers.
But nobody called him Darrell.
He was Shifty, a nickname born on a basketball court in Clinchco, Virginia, from the particular quickness of foot that made him impossible to guard. The name attached itself to him in youth and never left, following him from the coal mining community of Dickenson County all the way to Toccoa and Normandy and the frozen forests of Belgium and back again.
He was born on March 13, 1923, in Clinchco, a remote community tucked into the folds of the Appalachian coalfields of southwest Virginia, the kind of place that the modern world had not yet fully absorbed and where the old skills of the mountain hunting, fishing, reading the land, and making a clean shot were still the daily currency of ordinary life.
His father was an excellent rifle and pistol shot. The best Shifty ever saw, he said, and said it for the rest of his life, with the particular humility of a man who could throw a coin in the air and shoot it and still believed someone else had done it better.
His father taught him young.
They went out together into the Virginia woods, and the boy learned what the mountains were willing to teach: patience, stillness, the breath held at the right moment, the trigger squeeze that was not a pull but a decision.
He finished high school. He worked as a machinist at a Navy port. He met a man named Robert Wynn Popeye, the man who would later get shot in the backside at Brecourt Manor and apologise to Dick Winters for it, and the two of them volunteered for the paratroopers together.
On August 14, 1942, Darrell Powers enlisted in the United States Army at Richmond, Virginia.
He was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
He ran Currahee.
He became one of the 140 original Toccoa men.
In Aldbourne, England, waiting for the invasion, Shifty looked out at the people of the village preparing to defend themselves against a potential German invasion.
They were drilling with garden implements.
Picks. Shovels. The tools of civilian life against the weapons of an invading army.
He thought about it for a long time.
He never forgot it.
He spent the rest of his life believing that the right to keep and bear arms was not an abstraction but a lesson he had learned with his own eyes in an English village in 1944.
June 6, 1944.
Powers jumped into Normandy on D-Day and missed his drop zone, landing in the scattered chaos that the anti-aircraft fire and the cloud cover had made of the planned operation. He found Floyd Talbert in the Norman dark. The two of them made their way to Easy Company in time for the fighting at Carentan.
He was one of the very few men in Easy Company to go through the entire European campaign without being wounded.
Not because he was careful. Because the mountain had built something in him that functioned in combat the way it had always functioned in the woods of southwest Virginia, calm, precise, present, unhurried.
At Bastogne, in the frozen Bois Jacques, Shifty was sitting in his foxhole when he noticed something.
The German artillery had been falling in the same pattern, day after day. He had been watching it the way a hunter watches the behaviour of the animals he knows.
He went to his commanding officer.
He said: If you move the men from this position to that one, indicating the location the shells will miss them.
The men were moved.
The shells fell exactly where Shifty said they would.
Exactly where the men had been.
Carwood Lipton later described this moment as one of the most remarkable demonstrations of fieldcraft he had witnessed in the entire war, the Virginia mountain man in a Belgian forest, reading the artillery the way his father had taught him to read the woods.
January 13, 1945. Foy, Belgium.
Easy Company was attacking the town.
A German sniper had already shot three members of the company. The men were down, taking cover, unable to advance.
Carwood Lipton found Shifty.
With Lipton's assistance in locating the sniper's position, his voice guiding the shot, his eye finding the geometry, Shifty raised his M1 Garand.
He fired once.
The German sniper was hit between the eyes.
The company's members later said that Powers had saved many lives in that single moment.
Shifty said he had just done what needed doing.
He survived the war without a scratch.
He survived it the way the mountain had prepared him to survive things quietly, by paying attention, by reading what was in front of him with the patience of someone who had never needed to be loud about what he knew.
He came home to Clinchco.
He married Dorothy. They were married for sixty years at the time of his death.
He moved to California for a few years of machinist work, a government contract, the brief encounter with a wider world before the contract ended, and the family returned to the mountains. He went to work as a machinist for the Clinchfield Coal Corporation in Clinchco and stayed for more than twenty years.
He fished. He hunted. He worked in his vegetable garden. He shot at targets from his front porch.
He never left Dickenson County for long.
He had been born there, and he always came back, and in the end, he died there.
In his later years, his health declined. His family said he fell into depression, the particular weight that settles on old soldiers when the world they were part of becomes a thing of books and television, and nobody who was actually there is left to say what it was really like.
Then the HBO miniseries aired in 2001.
The letters came. The speaking engagements came. The people who had watched the series and wanted to find the real men behind the portraits came looking for Shifty Powers, the quiet Virginia mountain man who had been the best shot in Easy Company, who had read the artillery at Bastogne and killed a sniper at Foy, and never once thought any of it was remarkable.
His family said the series brought him out of the depression.
They said it bought him extra years of life.
He was portrayed by actor Peter Youngblood Hills, a portrayal the surviving veterans considered accurate to the man.
Marcus Brotherton wrote his full authorised biography, Shifty's War: The Authorised Biography of Sergeant Darrell 'Shifty' Powers, the Legendary Sharpshooter from the Band of Brothers, published in 2011.
Staff Sergeant Darrell Cecil "Shifty" Powers died on June 17, 2009, in Dickenson County, Virginia.
He was 86 years old.
He died in the county where he was born, in the mountains that had made him, on the ground that had taught him everything the war would eventually need from him.
Dick Winters, who was 91 years old when Shifty died and had known him since Toccoa, was asked for a comment.
He gave it in six words.
"We have lost a great soldier."
He was born in a coal mining town in southwest Virginia.
His father taught him to shoot.
He could throw a coin in the air and hit it with a rifle.
He told the Army about the artillery pattern the men moved, and the shells fell where the men had been.
He shot the sniper at Foy between the eyes.
He came home and went back to work as a machinist and fished from the banks of the creeks he had always fished from.
He was the best shot in Easy Company.
He never thought that was remarkable.
The mountains made him that way.
And the mountains brought him home. 🕊️🇺🇸 🦅♠️♠️
This true story is based on historical records and shared for educational purposes only.
