The Alamo Defenders

The Alamo unvarnished...  It's the first week in March. You've just survived a blue Texas winter with little to eat, no coat and just a wool blanket to make the difference between misery and hypothermia. You are one of the lucky ones...you have shoes. And now gathered around you, so close you can smell their breakfast cooking each day, are 4,000 men who daydream of putting a bayonet through your gut. That's what you faced as an Alamo defender. There you were...stuck in a rambling, broken down mission complex that would be indefensible even with a thousand able men. There are 187 of you. You know you are going to die brutally. Your only consolation will be in setting the cost of your life to the enemy as high as possible. They will damn sure remember the Alamo!187. That number was set by Amelia Williams during her doctoral research in the late 1920s. We always knew the number was small, certainly less than 250, but she made it exact. All it took was poring over, one by one, tens of th