A Company of Heroes (24 page)

When we were in Paris, I met Bill Guarnere. We got to talking and I said, “All the stories I hear about my daddy, it seemed like he really liked the women”—of course he wasn’t married then—“and he liked to drink.”

And Bill said, “Well, honey, that was the way we all were back then. We never knew if we were going to be alive the next day. We liked the women and we liked the booze.”

It just seemed that Daddy let the drinking get such a hold of him. The war created the bad situation, but after the war, if guys didn’t rein it in, it took over their lives.

From talking to the other veterans, it gave me so much more respect for what my dad went through and helped me understand it so much more. I feel really bad that I didn’t understand more of it when he was alive. I was so upset with him most of the time.

I still respect my daddy. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t help him somehow. Why didn’t we do more? Why didn’t we handle this better? But it doesn’t matter. It probably wouldn’t have happened anyway.

What’s the one thing I would want people to know about my father? Basically, that he was a good man. He fought and lived that war his whole life, and it tormented him to the end. That’s a hard thing to fight against all those years. At least he came home and got an education. He worked with kids. And he loved history. He wanted to teach history to teach kids to tell them what our country is all about. He just let the alcohol get the best of him.

 

 

 

Eugene “Doc” Roe Sr. was featured prominently in the HBO miniseries as the soft-spoken Cajun medic who cared for the men during the worst of times. Episode 6 was almost completely devoted to Doc Roe’s struggles to treat the wounded in the snow and cold of Bastogne. The men were running desperately low of medical equipment, and Doc Roe moved from foxhole to foxhole, scrounging bandages and morphine syrettes. He also befriended a Belgian nurse in Bastogne, who was later killed during a German bombing raid.

Despite a lot of airtime in the miniseries, Stephen Ambrose mentioned Doc Roe only three times in the book. The most prominent mention is as follows:

Doc Roe seldom talked about the war to his family, but he was a colorful man in other ways. His grandson, Chris Langlois, remembers him simply by the affectionate nickname
Paw-Paw
. In contrast to Chris’s other grandparents, who were more straitlaced and reserved, Chris’s Paw-Paw was rougher and tougher. Doc Roe always wore cowboy boots, always smoked, and was always deeply tanned and weathered by the sun. He owned acreage and ran a heavy-duty construction business from it. The grandchildren were always welcome to come over and play in the dirt pits and on the backhoes, bulldozers, and tractors that lay scattered around his yard.

This is the story of the real Doc Roe.

Doc Roe’s son, Eugene Roe Jr., shares the same name as his dad. What’s that been like for him?

“Well, nobody said a thing about it until the series came out,” Eugene Jr. said. “Then I started getting a lot of letters and calls from fans of the series. Mostly, it’s been good.”

Eugene Jr. noted that even though the series portrayed his father as a Louisiana gentleman, the portrayal wasn’t as accurate as it might have been. “He was much rougher and poorer than that. He didn’t have nearly as strong a Cajun accent as the movie portrayed, and although everybody in the movie called him Doc Roe, he wasn’t a doctor by any means. He only had a sixth-grade education.”

Why only sixth grade? “Well, that’s just the way things were, growing up on the bayou back then,” said Eugene Jr. “Dad contracted polio as a child, which slowed down his schooling a bit. But he got past that, and it didn’t have any lasting effects on him. Basically, he quit school because there wasn’t that much emphasis on education where and how he grew up. His family expected him to go to work—which is what he did. Funny enough, he was pretty adamant about me going to school though.”

Doc Roe grew up in Bayou Chene, a town that doesn’t exist anymore. If you study the history of that town, noted Eugene Jr., it was a backwater community of about five hundred swampers, lumberjacks, trappers, farmers, fisherman, and moss pickers.

“That’s the climate in which Dad grew up,” Eugene Jr. said. “His daddy worked on boats. There were five children in his family—three boys and two girls. Even though they were poor, he had a fairly happy childhood and didn’t speak of any bad memories from back then. When he went to school, he took a boat, a type of waterbus. That’s how they all lived, close to the river like that.”

After Doc Roe quit school, he worked on shrimp boats and miscellaneous jobs to help support the family. In the 1920s, oil drilling began in the area, and water from the Mississippi was rerouted to build a spillway that flooded the town. The government told the people they’d have to leave. When the levees came through, the Roe family moved to Morgan City, Louisiana, which is where Doc Roe grew up as a teenager. After he came back from the war, he moved to Baton Rouge.

In the series it says that Doc Roe’s grandmother was a
traiteur
, a traditional Cajun faith healer, but that was contrived by Hollywood, noted the family.

The family was never told anything about his enlistment, but daughter Marlene Langlois noted the big wartime story was about how her father met her mother. When Easy Company was stationed in Aldbourne, Doc Roe met a striking British girl who told him her name was Maxine. They met in Swindon, where she was assigned to work in a munitions factory. With all the British men going off to war, the young women were needed to keep the town running.

Maxine wasn’t very impressed with Doc Roe at first, but he was persistent. One weekend he followed her to her boarding house. When he knocked on the door and asked for Maxine, “There’s no one named Maxine here,” came the stern reply.

Doc Roe was flummoxed. He had watched her enter the house. She had to be there.

It turns out that Maxine had given him a fake name. It was popular for the British girls to not reveal their real names to the Yanks. Her real name was Vera.

Sometime later, when Vera and Doc Roe were married, they named one of their daughters Maxine, in honor of the joke. The other daughter, Marlene, was named after the popular WWII song “Lili Marlene.”

Vera and Doc Roe courted during his stay in Aldbourne and wrote letters when he was stationed elsewhere. The family has a picture their dad gave their mother from that era. It’s signed on the front, “All my love to the dearest person in the world, ‘My Rat.’ Your old Rip, Gene.”

During their courtship in England, Doc Roe visited Dartmouth several times. Vera talked about how Doc brought gifts to her family: chocolate and cigarettes, prized possessions in wartime England. He also gave her a silver-plated pistol with pearl grips. On one side it had his picture; on the other it had hers. When she went home with the pistol, her brother made her throw it into the channel. Vera had eleven siblings, and times were financially hard for her family. They couldn’t even take care of all their children, so a few of them boarded with other families.

A wedding was scheduled for a beautiful weekend in early June 1944. What bride wouldn’t want a June wedding? Vera showed up at the church with her white dress on, but Doc Roe didn’t show. Their wedding date had been set for June 6, the D-day invasion, and the groom was jumping into combat. None of the men knew the exact date of the invasion, and Doc Roe wasn’t able to get word back to his fiancée when he found out.

They decided to plan for a new wedding date as soon as the war in Europe was over and he could get back to England for a time. V-E Day was May 8, 1945, and Doc Roe married Vera in July 1945. They wanted a quiet, quick wedding and went to a justice of the peace. A taxi driver was one of their witnesses along with somebody else they didn’t know.

In the series it shows Doc Roe developing a friendship with the nurse in the hospital in Bastogne. The family noted that’s mostly made up. The nurse was a real person named Renée LeMaire, and it was probable that Doc Roe ran across her while bringing wounded back and forth to Bastogne, but there’s no indication he had any sort of relationship with her or shared chocolate bars as is shown in the series. The series is correct, however, when it shows that the hospital/church was bombed and she was killed. A Congolese nurse is also shown in the series. In real life she was named Augusta Chiwi and worked in an aid station several blocks away. She survived the bombings.

Grandson Kyle Tircuit remembered a few war stories his grandfather told him. Immediately before the men were shipped overseas, some of them stopped up a tub, filled it with peroxide, and bleached their hair as a prank. Doc Roe was one of them.

Kyle also remembers his grandpa telling him about a time he treated someone with a head wound in Bastogne. Supplies were low, and the wound was serious, so the ever-resourceful Doc Roe took mud and snow and packed the man’s brains back in his head. He was able to buy enough time to get the man to help.

Easy Company veteran Earl McClung told the family a story about when the men were in Holland, positioned on the dike. A shell came in and hit the foxhole two ahead of McClung’s. The soldiers in the foxhole didn’t climb out or make any sounds. By the size of the blast, McClung figured they were torn up badly but probably not dead. He shouted for a medic. Doc Roe came running and jumped in the foxhole where the two men were. It turned out the two weren’t hurt at all. McClung said, “I felt so guilty for putting Roe in a situation like that—running in the middle of an artillery barrage, when no one was hurt.”

McClung told another story that happened in Holland. Someone was wounded on a flatland area, and a medic was tasked with running out and picking him up. Doc Roe asked McClung to go along as a stretcher-bearer. McClung said yes and picked up his rifle.

“You can’t take that with you,” Roe said. “We’re going as medics.”

“There’s no way I’m going out there without my rifle,” McClung said.

Roe nodded. “Oh yes you are.” They went out, weaponless, and brought the wounded man back to safety.

Doc Roe was injured in the fighting in Holland for Operation Market-Garden. When he jumped from the plane, he landed on some barbed wire and cut his calf. He eventually received more than one Purple Heart, but the family is not sure of the circumstances around his other injuries.

When E Company went to Eagle’s Nest, the men raided Hitler’s wine cellars, and one of Doc Roe’s unofficial duties was to drive a big delivery truck around with all the liquor in it. The generals and colonels commandeered the champagne and fine brandies. The enlisted men got the wine and beer.

The wedding present that E Company gave Doc Roe and Vera came from Berchtesgaden—a set of forks and knives from the Eagle’s Nest. There were no spoons, just forks and knives, with fine etchings on them. Years later, Doc Roe was inducted into the Louisiana World War II Museum’s Hall of Honor at Baton Rouge. The family donated the forks and knives to the museum to be put on display.

When the war was over, Doc Roe came home first. His new wife came over later on the
Queen Mary
and emigrated through Ellis Island.

When Doc Roe came home he brought a German Luger home as a souvenir. It had a swastika on it. His mother took one look at it and said, “We’re not having any of that in the house.” She threw it in the bayou.

Grandson Chris noted that his Paw-Paw seldom spoke of the war except to talk about the good times he had and the friends he had made. In 1992, Chris’s parents brought him a copy of the book, signed by his grandfather. “I was twenty at the time,” Chris said, “at Louisiana State University. The first thing I did was go to the appendix and look for his name. He was listed just three times. I remember closing the book and saying to myself, ‘Well, I guess Paw-Paw didn’t do much in the war.’”

But that thought changed completely in 2001 when Chris and his family went to Paris for the world premiere of the series. “Whenever I said I was with the Roe family, people’s eyes lit up,” Chris said. “Other veterans would shake my hand like I had done something important. They’d say, ‘Your grandfather was a wonderful man, an angel, a hero.’ You don’t ever think about those tough men using a word like ‘angel’—but that’s the word they used to describe my grandfather. Several said they would never want to be a medic, because when the shelling began, they were at least able to duck in foxholes, but the medic was the guy who had to get up and run through the middle of it. I kick myself a million times for not sitting down with him when he was alive and begging him to tell me more about his experiences.”

With the war over, Doc Roe and his new wife settled in Baton Rouge, where three children were born. Doc Roe was a good father who pursued outdoor activities with his children such as hunting, fishing, and horse-back riding. He always owned horses.

One of Marlene’s first memories of her father is of his rough, hardened skin from having to work out in hot weather so much. He often laid asphalt in south Louisiana where the temperatures regularly climbed to 95 degrees. He was dark brown from working all day in the sun.