A Company of Heroes (19 page)

After Dad retired, the government couldn’t find his records and told him he had never been in the war. “
Never been in the war!”
You talk about someone who was mad then. Still, he didn’t want us to know what he was feeling. “
Humph, I don’t care,”
was his only response.

He didn’t have any amount of money or insurance, so he started going back and forth to the VA. He had no other choice. They kept telling him there were no records, but finally they relented and started to give him medicine.

The government got things straightened out. I don’t know what level of disability Dad finally received, but it was the least amount possible. That made him even madder. They started sending him checks, amounts such as $1.60 a month. It was an insult, Dad said. He wasn’t cashing them, and he wasn’t returning them because “it wasn’t worth the trouble.” We kept a photocopy of the highest disability check he ever received. It came in 1997, for fourteen dollars.

Dad found out he had an aneurism in his stomach and needed surgery. He didn’t want to have it done. We all had to coax him. He ended up in Dayton at the VA hospital. They did the surgery, and that’s when they found the cancer. Three days after the surgery, he got on a bus by himself and rode back to Columbus. He wouldn’t stay at the VA hospital. He didn’t want anything from them, he said. He chose not to do anything about the cancer.

My mom passed away in 2004. I spent a lot of time with her before she died. I loved her a lot and miss her a great deal.

In July 2005, things started getting really bad for Dad with the cancer, and he grew very frail. He soon became too sick to say or do much about anything. Hospice people came; they took him to Grant Hospital, here in Columbus, and got him settled. There was a mix-up between nurses and other family members about whether to give him medication or not, and when I arrived, my dad was in so much pain, I could hear him from down the hall. He was screaming, “Let me die, let me die, let me die.”

He had signed me the power of attorney over his health. We got him some pain medication. I just wanted him to die in peace. Dad started relaxing. In a while he was calm. After several more hours his breathing was different. You could tell he was ready to go.

He passed away later that day, July 30, 2005. I was with him in the hospital room, sitting near him at the bottom of the bed. My sister was sitting beside him holding his hand. I watched him take his last breath. The first thing that came to mind was “My dad’s no longer fighting a war.”

I deeply miss my dad now that he is gone, but what I really miss is the man my dad could have been if not for the war. I’m just comforted with the fact that he is finally at peace, no longer fighting a war. I don’t think my dad ever lived the kind of life he wanted to live. I think he gave his life for his country while he was still overseas, and when he came home, it wasn’t really him. He fought the war from age eighteen to eighty-one, and he never let that war go.

He had always talked about being buried in Dayton National Cemetery for veterans. We got him a beautiful casket. It was for a soldier and had parachutes and flags on it. They held a military funeral for him with a twenty-one-gun salute and military honors. He had what he wanted. Those honors are what he deserved and needed to have. Getting my dad into Dayton National Cemetery brought a measure of peace for me. I felt like it ended the way Dad wanted it to end.

I do know he had a good side. He didn’t want anybody to know about it, but he cared about all of us in his own way. When I think through his life, I see now that he was so young, yet he had to grow up so fast. At age fourteen he was working to help support his mom and dad. At seventeen, he was a soldier fighting to defend his country. At twenty-one, he was taking care of a wife and child as well as his parents. How I wish things could have been different. I can’t imagine what he went through. We all handle things differently, and sometimes we don’t understand how our actions affect other people. Maybe my dad didn’t understand, either.

I think too much of that good man was left overseas. The big theme of my dad’s life was that he should have sought help. Things could have been different. I believe that. Things can be different—I think anyone coming home from war needs to hear that.

 

 

 

Robert Rader was mentioned in the original book but not portrayed in the miniseries. Nonetheless, he was an integral part of Easy Company. His family has always been proud of him and enjoys telling his story. Robert was one of the few vets who talked openly about the war to his family, though not in great detail. He stood tall his whole life, and his family thanks him for being a positive example. This is his story.

Robert Rader was born October 9, 1923, in Manchester, a small town on the Ohio River. His mother had family who fought in the Revolutionary War, and they were given land along the river as payment. His father was in the All-American Division in WWI, fought in five major battles in Europe, and was wounded and gassed. After the war, he worked as a stone-cutter for cemetery markers, and times were very hard financially. They lived along a road and if someone’s rooster got hit by a car, they were out there quick to retrieve it for the dinner pot. Robert’s father was in poor health after the war and passed away in 1942, just before his son went into the service. He gave him the simple, sound advice, “Just do your job and come home.”

Robert grew up during the Depression. He was one of six children. Still in school, he, along with his older brothers, enlisted in the Ohio National Guard, basically so they could get food and the rest of the food in the family could go to the youngsters. Robert was sixteen when he enlisted with the Guard. They made seventy-nine cents a day.

Pearl Harbor happened in 1941 while Robert was in the National Guard. Right after that, the Guard discovered he was underage and kicked him out. Fortunately, they gave him an honorable discharge. The certificate meant he didn’t have to go into the war. He went back to high school and graduated in 1942, the first in his family.

Robert and two hometown friends, Don Hoobler and William Howell, volunteered for the 101st. It was Hoobler’s idea to join the paratroopers. The idea of the extra money appealed to the men. They also wanted to be the best.

Robert had grown up with Don Hoobler. They played baseball, swam in the Ohio River together, and stole watermelons from the other side to bring back. Robert always enjoyed sports. He was a skinny kid, six feet, two inches tall, and actually gained weight during the war. In high school he played football, basketball and baseball. His school was so small that if you didn’t play football, you weren’t allowed to play any other sports.

After the friends enlisted, they were sent to Camp Toccoa. Robert was with the 101st from beginning to end. Bill Guarnere gave him the nickname “Rook,” but Robert wasn’t a chess player. His family speculates it was loosely the Italian version of his last name.

The family has a picture of Robert, Hoobler, and Howell at Toccoa. They were country boys and called themselves the “three hillbillies.” Others thought they talked funny with their Appalachian twangs. They palled around with a guy from Colorado named Bill Dukeman. Howell was blown out of a foxhole in Bastogne, wounded, but lived and made it home. Hoobler accidently shot himself in the leg with a souvenir Luger. The bullet hit a main artery and he bled to death. Robert talked about Hoobler’s death every once in a while after the war. It shook him up quite badly. Robert’s son, Donald, is named in honor of Don Hoobler, and his son’s middle name is Dukeman, in honor of Bill Dukeman, who also died in the war. “It’s always been an honor to me to share these men’s names,” Donald said, “I’ve never taken it for granted, what they gave for our country.”

The men trained a lot. Robert told his family about the big spaghetti lunch they had at Toccoa, and how the men puked it up later because Captain Sobel made them run up Mt. Currahee right afterward. Robert also told his family that despite his dislike for the man, he respected Sobel too, because Captain Sobel helped make the men tough so they could survive the war.

Robert enjoyed parachute training, particularly jumping out of the high training tower. He liked it so much he did it more times than was required. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant and became the push master, the last person out of the plane. During one training jump, his chute didn’t deploy properly. He was the last to jump, but the first to hit the ground. He got in trouble because whoever was in charge didn’t believe he had problems with this chute.

On another practice jump, he was hit in the head by an ammunition holder, a large metal box. The piece of equipment had broken loose and was falling while the men were jumping, which wasn’t uncommon. Robert suffered a detached retina, but was otherwise okay.

The men were transported across the Atlantic for more training in Aldbourne, England. Sometimes during a practice jump, men landed some distance from the rest of the unit, and needed to hike back to their unit on their own. When that happened, the men sometimes took advantage of the extra time and scrounged for lardy cakes along the way, a type of English donut made out of fried flour, butter, cinnamon and sugar. They dropped in at the local towns, picked up the cakes, and ate them in the woods on the way back.

Robert talked about free time in Aldbourne. Sometimes the men played basketball and baseball. They met a lot of townspeople this way. Years after the war, Robert visited Aldbourne and still knew a lot of people there. On their last practice jump, the majority of the people of Aldbourne came out to wish them good-bye.

On the plane ride over to Normandy, a shell blasted through their plane’s body and flew directly between Robert and Johnny Martin, so close they could feel the burn. They talked about it for years after. Later, they found out the plane they were in took 250 hits while they were flying to Normandy.

Robert made the jump from an elevation of under two hundred feet. The green light that indicated when they were to get out of the plane had been shot off. So they used a bell to tell the men when to jump. The co-pilot was wounded. He took shrapnel in the leg, and there was a miscommunication with the pilot, who thought all the men were already out of the plane. The pilot turned the plane around and started heading back to England with them all inside. That’s when they all bailed out.

Robert wore a leg bag during the jump that flew off as soon as he was outside the plane. He lost his weapons in the jump, hit the ground hard, and hurt his back. He landed in a cow pasture next to a sharp pole. Later he was found to have three fractured vertebrae. Nothing was ever done for it and he continued on. The first person he ran into after landing was Burr Smith, who gave him a cricket, a .45, and a sack of grenades.

Robert had landed near Ste. Mère-Église. He and some men fought a minor firefight, not against the Germans themselves, but against some white Russians and Polish troops who were fighting on Germany’s side because they hated Stalin more than the Nazis.

When the assault against Brécourt Manor happened, Robert and others were deployed between the 88s at the manor and the beach to help offer protection for the assault at the manor, making sure that no Germans stationed near the beach ran back to help during the fray.

Near Carentan, Robert’s squad came across a bivouacked group of Hitler Youth, who engaged in a firefight with the men. Robert told his family the youths yelled in German, “I will die for the Führer.” The men had no choice but to take them out, which really shook Robert up. After the firefight, he saw the bodies, both of the German troops and also the Americans that had been killed. Robert vowed at that moment to spend the rest of his life devoted to helping kids. Later he made good on that vow and became a schoolteacher. After a month of fighting in Normandy, the men went back to Aldbourne.

The next big jump was Market-Garden in Holland. They jumped in daylight Sunday, September 17, 1944, and were in constant contact with the enemy for seventy-nine days. At one point the men were hunkered down in a barn. A man was cleaning his .45. It discharged and hit Robert in his elbow. He went to the aid station, but they were unable to ship him out due to the enemy’s presence. So they bandaged it up and he went back to the line. Shortly after, he was in a bayonet charge.

After Holland, the men went to Mourmelon. Somebody made up a vat of hot chocolate, but something was wrong with it, so whoever drank it got diarrhea. On the way up to Bastogne in the back of a truck, Robert said he was feeling very sick, still from the chocolate.

In Bastogne, the men were surrounded and underequipped, with a lack of winter clothing and ammunition. Robert’s eyelids actually froze open once. His feet, legs, and hands grew so cold he could hardly feel any of his extremities. He took a bullet in the hip, but was so cold he didn’t realize it until a CAT scan in 1987 showed he had been hit.

Robert and Hoobler volunteered for guard duty on Christmas Eve as a Christmas present to the rest of the guys. Hoobler was a corporal, and they usually didn’t let two noncoms pull guard duty together because they were too far away from the line. Robert told his family that the night was very cold. The men lay in the snow in the dark and whispered about Christmas dinner back home and what their families were doing.

Near the fighting at Foy, Robert instructed his squad to dig their foxholes out in a field, not near the trees. A couple of men in his squad thought he was crazy. They were going to get killed out in the open like that. But when the shells came in, they flew right over and straight into the trees. So his squad wasn’t hurt.