Easy Company Soldier (25 page)

In late May, Moone overheard a conversation between a second lieutenant and Captain Speirs.

“You should bust Malarkey,” said the lieutenant.

“And why should I do that?” asked Speirs.

“Because guys in his outfit are fraternizing with Austrian girls.”

“Well, I'm not busting Sergeant Malarkey,” Speirs said. “He'll go to Japan with us—but I'm not so sure about you.”

Moone was always hearing this tip or that. Once, he asked if I had any teeth that needed filling and took me to the house of a Dr. Franz Pasler, an Austrian dentist who worked on my teeth as Moone visited with his wife. As we were leaving, I noticed a number of photographs of a young athlete, both in ski and track attire. It was the couple's son, who had been a member of the Austrian Olympics team in both sports for the 1936 Olympics.

On a return visit—the doctor's wife was making us some good deals on jewelry she was getting from her husband's cousin in Vienna—we heard a noise upstairs. When we pressed them about who it was, she broke down and admitted it was her son, who had been forced into the German army, had become an officer, but fled.

“Please,” she said. “My son will not hurt anyone.”

The deeper we'd gotten into war, and into Germany, the more we'd realized that their soldiers weren't much different than ours. I was serving my country when asked; they were only doing the same.

I looked at Moone. He looked at me. We moved to the hallway to talk in private, then returned to where Mrs. Pasler was standing.

“Son?” I said. “What son?” And we left, never regretting not reporting him.

Over, yes. But that didn't mean all was bliss. Guys who'd survived a year of war were getting killed in car wrecks. Starting to lose their edge of discipline. James Alley and a bunch of others got busted for being drunk.

One night, some replacement guy in our company got liquored up and killed a couple of German soldiers at a patrol spot on a road. The 2nd Platoon fanned out to find this guy, who was loose, drunk, and brandishing a gun. Sgt. Chuck Grant flushed him out of a building and brought his arm up under the guy's hand to dislodge his gun. It went off, the bullet going through Grant's head. Blood streamed down his face, around his ear, and down his neck.

Grant was still alive, but barely. We got Chuck to the hospital and the German doctor who examined him said it was useless; he'd die from the shock of the operation. At that point, Hank “Hack” Hansen went berserk, pulling a gun on the doc. Hansen was Grant's best friend.

“Save him or I'll kill you!” he said, jamming the gun to the guy's head. “Save him!”

The doctor reconsidered. He came out hours later and said the patient was still alive. The doctor was amazed. “Toughest man I've ever seen,” he told us in broken English.

Our manners toward the doctor improved after Chuck recovered. In fact, in June, Captain Speirs organized a company banquet at a low-level ski lodge to honor the man for saving Chuck's life. I wound up sitting next to the doctor. He told me he'd never seen anyone so far gone survive. During the dinner, he leaned over to me and in broken English
said, “By the way, do you think that man would have shot me?”

I didn't hesitate in my response. “Yes.” I nodded. “I think he would have. I really do.”

The man looked and me and nodded his head slightly. “Please thank him for pulling the gun on me.”

One day a few of us took a ski lift to the top of a mountain. Six months earlier, I'd been curled up in a ball in a frozen foxhole in the darkness of a forest, trying to come to terms with the death of my best friend. Now, I was looking out at a vista like none other I'd ever seen, white-capped peaks stretching forever, sharply contrasting with a sky that couldn't have been painted any bluer. It was summer. A slight breeze cooled us. Looking east, you could see Germany and imagine where we'd been: Belgium, Holland, England, France. Even imagine where we
might
be: across that giant puddle between here and America, where I'd be going to see two special women—my girl, Bernice, and Skip's girl, Faye—then on to Oregon. I wanted to marry Bernice, then get into some sort of foreign-trade business, thinking that would be a good future because of America's new, and hard-earned, power in the world.

But I continued to have doubts about my future with Bernice. On June 6, the one-year anniversary of D-day, I wrote to Bernice and suggested that perhaps she'd “outgrown” me. She was aspiring to be a famous singer. “I'm still and always will be an ordinary sort of guy. Because of that, I'm now skeptical as to whether we'll get married. The smartest thing you could do would be to grab some rich young bachelor. It's going to be a long, hard road with me, darling, I know it.

I really don't have any right to ask you to marry me. All I have to offer you is love. …”

In previous letters, she'd encouraged me to write a book about my war experiences. “You flattered me so much I'm bewildered,” I wrote, “[but] right now I'm not capable of writing anything. I have been deeply hurt and the wounds won't heal for awhile.” I was referring to my status within Easy Company, how someone had tried to get me busted out. How everything had changed since I'd gone into the hospital. Some new leadership. Some new fears. At one point, I was so angry and frustrated with how I was being treated that I offered to turn in my stripes, but my superior wouldn't accept them.

Truth be told, I was also deeply hurt by Bernice. Her letters were fewer and farther in between. “I don't know whether I should keep writing you or not,” I wrote. “I'd hate to experience what my friend R.B. [“Burr”] Smith did. He wrote his girl, almost daily, for three months. Letters that were dripping with love and enduring promises. He hadn't heard from her for some time and credited the lapse to the fact that he had been hospitalized for awhile and as a result his mail delayed. In the end one of his friends finally told him what the story was. She was married.”

On that same June day that I'd written Bernice, we in Easy Company celebrated the one-year anniversary since our drop into Normandy that began what, without doubt, would be the most adventurous, uplifting, and anguishing year of our lives.

Easy Company was about to break up. The 506th was being inactivated; those from the 101st would be redeployed to the Pacific after a winter furlough back home. Meanwhile, General Taylor—the guy not smart enough to figure out
that any live soldier wearing a helmet with a chunk of it missing must have been wearing it at the time he was hit—ordered the division to begin a full training regime. Our hearts weren't in it.

At Kaprun, Easy Company lined up for a final photo, the 506th flag being waved in the middle, me way off to the left. Soon after the photo session, Winters called me to battalion.

“Don,” he said, “you've been selected by the division to be technical adviser to an Airborne display in a very nice place. It's called Paris. In fact, right beneath the Eiffel Tower. You'll be on detached service to the air force.”

Sounded a helluva lot better than Japan. I reached out to shake his hand, my eyes locked on his, knowing what he was really telling me was that I'd given enough. And this was my reward.

“Thank you, sir, for everything.”

“I'll personally take you to the airport in Salzburg tomorrow.”

I saluted him. Instead of saluting back, he extended a hand to shake.

The next day I was picked up by Winters in a command car. On the way, we stopped at Division supply for fuel. While we waited, Dick spotted someone.

“Watch who comes out,” he said.

In a moment, there was Sobel, who was now a supply officer for the regiment. Sobel noticed me first, not Winters. He looked at me with furrowed brow.

“You Malarkey?” he said.

I nodded as he looked at my uniform. He'd left me as a private; I was now a platoon sergeant. “Hmmm,” he said. “Looks like you've done some things since I last saw you.”

Until then, our last interaction, by letter, had been regarding a motorcycle and sidecar taken from Normandy.

Winters cleared his throat. “Don't you salute a superior officer?”

Sobel realized who it was and froze.

“You're not saluting the man, you're saluting the rank,” said Winters.

Sobel whipped the fastest salute I'd ever seen. With the war over, I found myself with a kind of odd respect for Herbert Sobel. I didn't like him, but I didn't hate him either. Sometimes, the people we've struggled with can help us get through the toughest times of our lives.

My father quit. I vowed I wouldn't. Then I was flung into this thing called war, where the whole idea is just that: Make the other guy give up. You throw shells and mortars and grenades and bullets at him. You mix in the elements: rain, fog, mud, snow, ice, and cold like you've never known them. Then you add the stuff they don't talk much about in war, the stuff that got to a guy like Buck Compton: the heartache of two buddies, legs blown apart, helpless in the snow. Suddenly you're standing around that fire in Bastogne, thinking of putting a bullet through your leg. Then your best friend is killed, and you want to curl up and die.
Quit.

But somewhere, deep down, you hear that voice as you're running up Currahee: “The men of Easy Company do not quit! Do you
understand me?”
And so you don't. If anything, that's the legacy of Easy Company. Not that we were bigger, stronger, faster, or more skilled. But that we didn't give in when it hurt, didn't give up when we wanted to. Didn't quit.

Sobel's inspiration was hidden so deeply in us—and obscured so badly by his pain-in-the-ass style—that most of us
may not even have noticed it. But despite his cruelty, he did manage to develop in us an esprit de corps that's never left us, a bond born of going through hell for the SOB. Winters, the man now driving me away from this war, was the best damn leader I've ever known, though it took me decades to tell him that. Those two men, and the bonds with every man around us, made the “band of brothers” what we were.

Winters nodded at Sobel, the two exchanging a hint of respect, then pulled away. I rolled down my window, leaned my head back, and, smiling, imagined the smell of late-summer blackberries in Oregon.

Officially, I parted ways with Uncle Sam on November 29, 1945, at Fort Dix in New Jersey. I was given my back pay, my craps earnings, and asked if I had claims to make against the U.S. government. No, our slates were clean; they'd thrown me together with the greatest group of men imaginable. I'd helped them win a war. In return, I got a certificate of appreciation. “Proud to help out,” I told the guy who stamped my discharge papers. With a few signatures, the army was suddenly behind me.

Thanks, of course, to an atomic bomb. After it was dropped in August, more than three months before my discharge, the Japanese had surrendered. After about six years—nearly four of U.S. involvement—World War II was
over. By now, soldiers were flooding back home and I was damn glad to be one of them.

I wanted to see two people in New York upon my return, but after lots of wrangling in my mind, I realized I had the guts to see only one: Bernice. She and her mother came to see me at Fort Dix, shortly before I was discharged. It was a happy reunion, though, as always with Bernice and me, tinged with uncertainty.

I checked in to the Henry Hudson Hotel. I fell asleep in America for the first time in more than three years as a civilian again. The Hudson was no Astor Hotel, but you spend enough nights in a foxhole or a henhouse and anything that's soft, roomy, and doesn't smell like chicken manure makes you feel like a king. I slept well.

In the days and nights to come, Bernice and I did a bunch of fast-paced catching up: her singing with the Phil Spitalny All-Girl Orchestra; my time in postwar Paris. Her practice schedule; my plans to fly back home. Her family; my family, or what was left of it, given Grandma Malarkey's death and my father's continuing funk.

Bernice and I spent three days together. Going to clubs. Running errands, including getting my craps money in a bank. Talking about the future. Our future.

“Why don't we look at engagement rings?” I asked.

She hesitated. “There's plenty of time for that, Don. Why don't we wait a bit, let you get back home and get unpacked.”

I agreed. Meanwhile, I realized that with Bernice busy with singing practice and performances, I could make a quick trip north to Kenmore, New York, and keep my promise to Faye. We'd talked about it in letters we'd exchanged
since Skip's death. Yes, I needed to do that. But when I arrived at Grand Central Station, I couldn't get on that train. Looking back, it'd be funny if it weren't so sad. I'd just survived World War II, but I couldn't go to my dead friend's fiancée like I'd promised her I would.

It wasn't that I was afraid of all the emotions that my visit would unleash, what with both of us thinking the world of a guy who was now just a picture on her mantel. And it wasn't that I didn't
want
to see her; hell, I wanted to see her in the worst way.

That
was the problem. After listening to Skip talk about Faye for a couple of years and after writing her back and forth after his death, I felt that I knew her almost as well as I knew Bernice. Plus, in some strange way, I suppose I thought being with her would somehow bring a little bit of Skip back. To be blunt, what kept me from going to see Faye Tanner was that I was convinced that if I met her, I'd fall in love with her right on the spot.

And I couldn't do that to Skip. It wouldn't be fair to take a guy's girl when he wasn't even around to fight back, especially when that guy was the best friend you'd ever had.

On my last day in New York, I dressed in the only clothes I had—the 101st eagle stitched on the shoulder of my jacket—and got on the hotel elevator, along with some upper-floor tenants. Across the elevator stood a distinguished-looking man, a mink muffler wrapped around his neck, holding a jeweled umbrella and wearing a homburg. After looking at me, he quickly removed his hat.