Easy Company Soldier (7 page)

Fort Benning, about a hundred miles southwest of Atlanta, was the next stop in our journey to become paratroopers. We hadn't been there long when the sizing-up began. We were coming out of the mess hall when some 82nd Airborne paratroopers spotted us. They looked us up and down with their arms crossed and a few head-nodding smirks.

“So, here come the long-walking, loud-talking,
non-jumping
‘sonobitches' 506ers,” said one.

I'll bet everyone in Easy Company wanted to lunge at those guys with fists flying, but by now, thanks to Sobel, we'd actually learned a touch of discipline. And in some ways, who could blame them for having their shorts in a bunch? Though these guys hadn't seen action, they'd at least jumped out of planes. And some in the 82nd had already fought in North Africa and Sicily. Here at Benning, these guys had heard about our fitness records. Read all the headlines about the world-record march. Heard the stories of our forced marches, the nighttime assaults on Currahee. But we were
newbies at Benning and, to this point, hadn't done anything more than jump out of a parachute tower, harnessed to a cable, and land in a pile of straw. In their eyes, we were over-hyped rookies who hadn't proven a damn thing.

Benning was our chance to change that. Earning your wings as a paratrooper required four steps: The A stage was physical fitness; B involved practice work on the parachute towers and learning landing techniques, some of which we got at Toccoa; C was learning to pack your own chutes (and unpack … and repack, etc.); D was the final week at Benning, when you made your five required jumps.

A and D were the trapdoors for the guys who weren't going to cut it. Though we'd gained a few newcomers, we'd lost dozens of guys who just couldn't manage the physical part of the training. We knew who had lungs and legs. Now, aboard C-47s heading into the skies over Georgia, we were going to find out who had balls. To refuse to jump, even once, was to be bounced from the Airborne. If a guy froze in practice, how the hell could you trust that he was going to jump when the enemy was waiting below?

My worst thought was having to send a letter home saying I'd washed out. I'd be betraying the memory of my two uncles by failing. So, no, I couldn't fail, I thought as we sat, nine to either side of the lumbering two-engine aircraft. We were wearing some team's old football helmets, a scene that probably wouldn't have scared the hell out of the krauts. Nerves were taut. This was it: time for our first jump, though I can honestly say I wasn't scared. Just anxious.

“Stand up and hook up!” the jumpmaster yelled over the thrum of the engines.

You could barely hear him.

“Check equipment!”

I checked mine. I checked the man in front of me.

“Sound off!” The last man in the “stick”—the name given to a group of parachutists—yelled, “Eighteen, OK!” and slapped the guy ahead of him on the back. “Seventeen, OK!” “Sixteen, OK.” “Fifteen, OK!” “Fourteen—”

Suddenly, a guy in front of me panicked and grabbed a parallel support bar on the fuselage of the plane. Those of us who were behind him had to unhook our chutes and re-hook on the other side of him. Later, I learned that it had taken four people from the parachute school to pull him from the plane after it had landed. He was immediately whisked off to the guardhouse. We saw him a few days later at a special battalion ceremony that's still seared into my mind.

It was a “drumming out” ceremony in honor—make that dishonor—of those who couldn't cut it. As hundreds of us watched—were forced to watch—they were stripped of patches from their caps and the 506th patch from their arms. A jeep drove up and dumped each guy's barracks bag, and, with tommy guns at their backs, they were marched away, no longer paratroopers but infantrymen. Frankly, it was sickening, not the proudest day in American military history. Had word got back to Washington, D.C., about this, some heads would have rolled. But the mournful drums kept beating as the men were marched onto the reviewing area, publicly humiliated.

Back in the plane, the jumpmaster was yelling, “Go! Go!”

The line got shorter, my stomach churned harder, part of me scared, but most of me knowing that this was what all the hard work came down to: to step into the unknown with a bunch of other guys who were just as scared as I was but were still willing to leap.

Remember what you've learned, Malarkey: Keep your fingers outside the door. Don't look down. Watch the horizon
—
and the other guys' chutes, to make sure you're heading down at the same rate.

The jumpmaster looked at me. The light on the inside of the aircraft turned from red to green. “Go!”

I jumped. With the cover of my chute attached to the static line, the chute itself would open on its own. I remembered to count to four out loud:
One thousand one.
I heard the crackling of the canopy over my head as the prop blast caught it.
One thousand two.
The connector links whistled past. I clung to the reserve chute on my chest.
One thousand three.
I felt like a rag doll, falling at more than a hundred miles per hour. I held my breath.
One thousand four.
The wind rippled my face, far worse than any gale-force storm I'd experienced on Oregon's windy north coast.

Then, boom, I felt a tug. The canopy had opened.
Breathe.
The ground in front of me stopped swaying quite as much as it initially had. I opened the risers to help the chute fully open, then looked up.
Whew. No blown panels.
Looking around, I realized I was floating down at the same rate as the others, a comforting sign that nothing was out of whack.

The field below was coming at me fast. I pulled on my risers for positioning. Noticed an ambulance to my left.
Gulp.
Then, closer, closer, closer. I turn back into the wind. And then, boots on the ground, a quick jolt of pain, and swirling around like the parachute I was trying to gather in, the fleeting thought that that was a helluva lot farther to fall than from the roof of our house back home.

Later that week, I completed my second and third jumps. Two more and I was home free. “Sound off!” yelled the jumpmaster on our fourth attempt. There was only one
problem: I'd contracted a bad cold and had laryngitis. Could barely get a word out, so I'd quickly asked the guy in front of me to shout my number. He did so, but the jump master knew something was amiss and came back to see me. I had described the problem on a piece of cardboard, which I flashed at him. Convinced I was willing and able, he didn't pull me from the stick.

I successfully completed that jump, then came the all-important fifth. “Go!” I flew into the air. When my boots hit the ground, it was sweet relief. I'd earned my wings. I was a U.S. army paratrooper. After the ceremony, at a party in our honor, we threw back more than a few beers. It had been four months since I'd arrived at Toccoa, wondering if that “W” would stand for “welcome” or “washout.” Now I knew. And Skip had made it, too.

Wings Day was one of proudest days of my life. Not only was I proud of myself, but of every man in Easy Company, period. A few weeks later, the unit publication of the 504th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division—called
Static Line
—encouraged its personnel to show a bit more respect to the 506th. At Benning, the 82nd's 505th and 507th regiments had gone through school with a 21.06 percent washout rate. Ours was 1.53.

Beyond the pride, the wings meant $50 more pay per month. Each month, I would send my mother my $50 jump pay and $15 of my regular pay, with instructions that it was not to be saved for me but to be used for her and dad and my sister. It seemed a meager amount, but out in the cabin, their expenses weren't huge. My mother cooked over a woodstove that also heated the cabin.

I hoped those checks I sent home were somehow reassuring to my mother, and deep down I hoped they might ease
the guilt I felt from pressing on to be a paratrooper against her will. I'm not sure what they meant to my father, if anything.

It was a routine jump. Spring 1943, and we were at our next training stop, Camp Mackall in North Carolina, not far from Fort Bragg. My stick went out over a small lake, the wind blowing enough to nudge jumpers clear of the water. When my chute opened, I followed the split-second protocol of looking at the other guys' chutes to make sure I was descending at the same rate. For the first time ever, that wasn't the case. The other chutes seemed to be going up, which obviously meant I was going down way too fast. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

I looked up at my canopy.
Oh my God!
I had about five blown panels—of the twenty-four total—and five dangling suspension lines. Without much air in the canopy, I was falling like a rock, near the edge of a lake. I reached for my reserve chute but made a major blunder.
Always throw it out in the opposite direction that you're oscillating.
Instead, I pulled the bonehead stunt of throwing it out the
same
way I was turning. It slowed me, but in a split second, I was engulfed in my reserve chute and couldn't see anything.

In seconds, I was crashing through the leaves and limbs of an oak tree. My suspension lines went taut just before I was going to hit the ground, and I just hung there, bouncing a bit as if on a swing. My chute was draped over the tree. Later, I figured out I'd done a Mickey Mouse job of packing my chute. I'd accidentally packed a “shot bag” with my chute—a tube of BBs about eighteen inches long that we'd use to smooth out each panel. The BBs must have broken free and
punctured the panels. Fortunately, it was the last time I'd be required to pack my own chute; after ten jumps, that became someone else's responsibility.

At the time, I was too panicked to put the incident into perspective. Later, I realized how close I'd come to dying that day. Looking back, it's funny how the deeper into war you get, the more the danger becomes almost second nature. And the less you keep believing that you can keep dodging the bullet that has your name on it.

At Mackall, our training became more about weapons and strategy. More sophisticated. We still ran a lot, but the emphasis was now largely unit-oriented. Field problems. Night patrols. Communication between units. “What-if” challenges.

If soldiers, to this point, despised Sobel because of his attitude, now they started doubting his skills. He always wanted us to believe he was smarter than any other man in the company, but he was having trouble proving it. He would make a tactical error in some war game that led us straight into enemy hands. He would linger way too long over a simple map. Or make a decision, then suddenly change his mind.

“That SOB's gonna get us killed” wasn't an uncommon utterance in Easy Company. My thoughts: He was going to get
himself
killed. The only question was who was going to be pulling the trigger—the krauts or us.

Meanwhile, though, I'd realized there wasn't much I could do about who was leading us. All I could do was become the best damn soldier I could be and let the chips fall where they may. To that end, I won a three-day pass to Washington, D.C., for placing first in a weapons competition with the M1 rifle: who could dismantle and reassemble it fastest while blindfolded. I all but flunked the hand-to-hand combat training—Winters gave me a scolding—because I just
couldn't visualize myself poking a bayonet in another man's chest. But I was good with rifles, having done some hunting as a kid.

From June until the end of the year, we bounced around: maneuvers in Kentucky (encountered copperhead snakes) and Tennessee (encountered chiggers, little bugs that burrow in your skin and had so deeply infiltrated my back that the army had me flown to a hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina). Bragg was where the 506th was headed anyway, so the others soon caught up to me.

Bragg was a plush hotel compared to the other camps we'd been at. Our preparation shifted to getting ready to go overseas. There were repeated inspections, vaccination shots we had to get, and equipment handouts, not to mention brawls at the Town Pump Tavern in nearby Fayetteville. Soldiers were getting anxious, the testosterone was thick, and the beer cold. A dangerous combination, especially given the number of paratroopers, known for their cockiness, at Bragg.

In July, ten months after I'd enlisted, E Company gathered for the company photograph. One hundred and seventeen men (a few dozen were no-shows for whatever reasons; 140 men formed the original company). Hands behind their backs, uniforms crisp, trousers bloused above the paratrooper boots. On one hand, ready for war. And yet, looking back, not ready in the least. You could never be totally ready for what you'd find in war.

It was summer 1943. Soon we'd be headed for New York and a trip to England. First, though, we got furloughs. At National Airport in Washington, D.C., flights were full, but a
Red Cross girl walked me to a counter and showed them my “priority” ticket. I was on the next flight west.

At this point, Bernice was back in New York to seek her fame and fortune as a singer; we'd split up again—my idea again—after I'd visited her on a leave and found she'd lost her athletic figure. It had been stupid of me to drop a girl because her dress size had gone up and I was without excuse.

When I arrived home, seeing my military uniform sent my already fragile mother into an emotional tailspin. To her, it said,
My baby's all grown-up.
It said,
Danger ahead.
Grandmother Malarkey was her saintly self, if not clutching her rosary tighter than usual. “I'll pray for you every day, Donnie,” she said. But, like Mom, she found my return less comforting than worrisome; I had to keep reminding myself that she had two sons in Ocean View Cemetery because of war.

I said good-bye to my father, but I'm not sure if he even heard me; as usual, he was just sitting there, in his favorite chair, staring off into something the rest of us could never see. If we already were something of a fractured family, it would only get worse. My younger brother was struggling with anger. He'd soon be expelled from high school for coldcocking a coach with a right hook after a disagreement. At seventeen, he would become an underage enlistee in the navy.