A Company of Heroes (28 page)

 

 

 

The last photographs of Frederick “Moose” Heyliger show him looking like an aged Abraham Lincoln, a tall, wiry figure with a white, bushy beard and no mustache. That was his trademark look in his later years, said his family, but, in spite of the wooly wraparound, Moose was never Amish. He watched a lot of old movies after he retired, and that’s where the look sprang from. As a younger man, he was always clean shaven, and no matter what the stage of his life, he was seldom seen without his pipe.

“He was a cross between John Wayne and Archie Bunker,” said his youngest son, Jon Heyliger. “That’s how I’d describe his personality. He loved being outdoors like John Wayne, and spent as much time there as he could. If he had one flaw, he could sometimes be a bit of a loudmouth like Archie Bunker, though I can’t think of any instances where he outright offended anybody. He was a pretty straightforward type of guy. What you saw is what you got.”

Fred Heyliger Jr., his eldest son, laughs good-naturedly at how quickwitted his father could be. Years ago they were at a Boy Scout meeting. Heyliger was the leader and told the boys to recite the creed. When they came to the part about being “morally straight,” some kid piped up: “What does that mean?”

“It means you can’t sleep on a spiral staircase,” Heyliger said.

“That line captures his personality,” Fred Jr. said. “He could be very funny, on the good side of things. But also, he could choose to not deal with serious issues. Avoidance was one way he coped with life. He simply sidestepped certain subjects.”

Like war.

The war always seemed just under the surface for him—never visible but always there. Once when Fred Jr. was fifteen, a neighbor named Ray offered to take them all deer hunting. “If you want to go hunting with Ray, go ahead,” Moose told his son. “I’ve got this old shotgun and you can have it, because I’m never going to shoot a gun again.”

Moose seldom talked about the war with his family, although the boys remember him having nightmares about it. One of the first times Moose ever spoke openly was when his family went to Normandy in 2001 for the premiere of the HBO series. During the first showing (which was the second episode, about the Normandy landing), Moose watched the first five minutes of it, then said: “Get me out of here, it’s time to go. I know everybody gets shot. I saw it once, and I don’t need to see it again.” His sons urged him to stay and finish the showing. Reluctantly, he stayed.

Afterward, as they walked with him across the parade ground in front of the memorial, Jon asked him: “Dad, what were you doing when all that fighting was going on?”

“I had my ass up against a barbwire fence and was trying to not get shot,” Moose said. That was the end of the discussion.

Moose, in fact, played no small part in the war. He led Easy Company during a critical season toward the Holland campaign’s end, and his command became sandwiched between two other leaders at opposite ends of the respect spectrum. He followed the much-revered Dick Winters, and was the forerunner to Norman Dike, whom the men disparagingly referred to as “Foxhole Norman.”

Moose’s leadership style leaned more toward Winters’s approach. Ambrose, after interviewing Winters, described Moose this way: “A good CO. He visited the outposts at night. He went on patrols by himself. He saw to the men as best he could, [and] like the men in the foxholes, he never relaxed. He bore up under the responsibility well, took the strain, did his duty.”
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Moose was born on June 23, 1916, which made him one of the older men in Easy Company. He was twenty-eight when he became company commander.

Moose came from a large Dutch family and had five brothers and a sister. The family settled in Concord, Massachusetts. His father was a lawyer for an insurance company and had an asparagus farm on the side. (His dad had moved the family to the farm because he thought a farm was a good place to raise boys.) Moose refused to eat asparagus as an adult, saying he had eaten enough as a child to last a lifetime. The kids used to sleep sideways, three to a bed when they were young, which reflected the family financial situation. They did better later on, shown in that Moose attended the private Lawrence Academy in Groton for the last two years of high school.

One winter day as a child, Moose was heading outside with his brothers and grabbed his oldest brother’s boots by mistake. The boots were far too big for him, and as the boys walked across the snow, one of the other brothers said, “Hey—look at the moose tracks.” The nickname stuck, and Fred Heyliger was called “Moose” from then on. As a young man he stood six feet tall and weighed about 210 pounds, one of the larger paratroopers.

Moose loved being outdoors. He set muskrat traps as a child and checked them before he went to school. On the spur of the moment, he and his brother Ted decided to go winter camping one weekend. They grabbed sleeping bags and food and hiked to a beach where they spent the night. It was December, freezing. Ted said he was never so cold in all his life. But Moose loved it.

Moose was a military man prior to the war. He spent three years as a private in the National Guard with H Company, the 182nd Infantry. His character was described by military records as “excellent,” and he qualified as a marksman in 1934. His term of service expired, and he was honorably discharged July 24, 1936.

Moose enrolled at the University of Michigan where his older brother, Vic, excelled as a hockey player. Before finishing college, Moose was drafted into the 51st Field Artillery Brigade and trained as a machine gunner at Camp Edwards for a year. In 1942 he completed Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, sent to Camp Chaffee in Portsmouth, and then to the 506th PIR at Toccoa. He was promoted to First Lieutenant in February 1943.

Moose’s first choice, militarily, was always to go into the Air Force, but it never worked out for him. He explained to his sons that he “could get the planes up, but couldn’t land the damn things.” He also tried tanks before becoming a paratrooper, but didn’t like them. He joked about the tank brigade by referring to an old Bill Mauldin cartoon. Two guys look at a tank and say to each other, “There’s something about a moving foxhole that attracts the eye.”

So Moose switched to the Airborne. He described the hike from Toccoa to Atlanta as a “miserable experience,” and added, “If Colonel Sink hadn’t been so drunk when he read that article about the Japanese paratroopers marching, we never woulda had to do it.”

While in the service, he married his first wife, Evelyn. They had a son, Fred Jr., in 1943, born the day Moose sailed overseas on the
Samaria.
The couple later had one daughter, Diane.

In handwritten notes kept by his second wife, Mary, he described how he parachuted into Normandy and landed in a pasture about 1:30 a.m., June 6, 1944. “It was black as the insides of a cow,” he wrote. He figured himself about three miles off his drop mark and hiked to Utah Beach, arriving there about 7 a.m. He met up with other men and they worked their way north toward Cherbourg. He took over guard duty for some soldiers from the 4th Division, then stayed with the 4th for about a week before rejoining his unit.

In September that year, Moose jumped into Holland for Operation Market-Garden, where he was in charge of the company’s mortar platoon.

During the night of October 22, 1944, he was chosen to head a rescue expedition across the Rhine River with twenty-four E Company men. Using portable boats, Easy Company successfully rescued 138 British 6th Airborne troops, ten Dutch resistance fighters, and five American pilots trapped behind German lines on the other side of the river. Lifeboats were left on the shore of the river, and the next morning, “The Germans blew the boats to smithereens,” he noted.

Reports from Colonel Robert Sink commended Moose for his “gallantry, outstanding planning, and execution of the operation with no injuries.” The men from Easy Company on the patrol were commended for “bravery, aggressive spirit, prompt obedience of orders, and devotion to duty.”

Moose went on patrol Halloween night, 1944, along with Captain Winters. The two men were checking on machine gun positions when Moose forgot the password and was shot twice by one of his own men. The experience is shown in the miniseries. Winters dove into the bushes and wasn’t hit. “I still don’t remember the password,” Moose wrote years later.

“Dad never talked about his injury,” Fred Jr. said. “Not a word. But he had a good-sized scar on his shoulder and the whole calf on the back of his right leg was virtually gone. Dad always wore shorts in the summer, and I remember seeing his scars as a kid. He wore ski boots, the old leather kind that attached into spring bindings. He said the whole bottom of his foot was numb, and that the ski boots were the best sole he could find to make sure that he didn’t step on something and not know it. Plus, the ski boots were heavy and he said, ‘I need the workout.’”

After he was shot, Moose was in a variety of hospitals for the next two and a half years in Scotland, New York, and Atlantic City, until his discharge from the service in 1947.

After the war, he decided to return to college, this time to the University of Massachusetts. He attended on the GI Bill and graduated in 1950 with a degree in ornamental horticulture.

Moose was employed as a salesman for various landscape and agricultural chemical companies for more than forty years and didn’t retire fully until after his eightieth birthday. At first, he was a warehouse manager for the Eastern States Farmers Exchange, where he sold feed and fertilizer, anything he could get that kept him close to the outdoors, where he always longed to be. Later he worked for the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, then for another company that sold agricultural chemicals and seed to golf courses, cemeteries, and park departments all over eastern New England. He took side jobs landscaping and frequently helped out neighbors with landscaping and gardening projects for free.

“His career goal was pretty basic,” Fred Jr. said. “He wanted to experience the outdoors full-time. He never quite achieved that. Sales was always his primary occupation. The work in horticulture was always on the side.”

“I think he was basically happy with his work,” Jon said. “I took for granted how much knowledge he had. He grew the most amazing gardens and flowerbeds you’d ever seen in front of our house. He had me plant apple trees as a kid, and we grew corn. He was always weeding and watering. As a kid I got to sell some of the stuff we grew.”

Fred Jr. describes his father as a somewhat distant parent, almost unsure how to raise his children. But there were good times, too. When he and his sister were very young, Fred remembers fondly their dad hooking up their Chevy coupe and a one-wheel trailer. The family headed out from their home in Acton, Massachusetts, and set out for Truckee, California, where Easy Company member Bob Brewer lived. The family camped all across the country, there and back.

For years, Moose was a Boy Scout leader and took his pack to the mountains annually for a snowball fight. He was the chairman of the town’s recreation commission and worked to get the town to buy valuable recreational land to set aside for public use. Rare and unusual plants grew on the recreation land, and Moose knew both the common and Latin names of them all.

He was constantly in touch with nature. “He’d get a bunch of neighborhood kids together on a cold day,” Fred Jr., said, “and say, ‘let’s go to Crane’s Beach today, pack a lunch,’ and we’d all suit up in our winter clothes and go to the beach. Dad could tell us all the names of the birds, and where they came from.” He kept plastic bags in the car, because if he found a particularly colorful bird dead along the road, he stopped and picked it up. Whenever he found one, he identified it by name, an indigo bunting, or a cardinal, or a Baltimore oriole, or whatever, and said something like, “Well I know a guy up in Freeport who ties flies, and he can use these orange feathers.”

Moose and his first wife separated in the early 1960s, when Fred Jr. was nineteen, and divorced a short time later. The parents moved about twenty miles apart. Moose married his second wife, Mary, in 1966. She had four children from a previous marriage. Moose had two. Jon was born as the result of the new marriage. Moose was forty-nine when Jon was born.

“He took on a lot,” Jon said. “When he met my mother, she already had four kids, and I’m sure that’s not an easy thing to walk into. He must have really loved her. He took us many places, like to the Cape in the winter so we could play on the sand dunes, or up skiing, or hiking up to Mount Monadnock. He knew a lot about birds, trees, different plants. He could tell you the constellations. It was nice for a kid to take in all that information. He had a lot to offer.”

One time one of the younger boys found a turtle, boxed it, and took it home. Moose made him take the turtle back and set it free. Another time Jon and a friend were at a sandpit and spotted a couple of birds. The boys thought their mother had abandoned them, so they took them home. Moose made them take the birds back and set them free.

“He was always making us dig somewhere or prune something or clear land,” Jon said, “which seemed like a drag as boys—other kids didn’t have to work on weekends. When my parents bought their house in Shirley, it was just a residential lot with all these thorny trees with humongous spikes everywhere. All told, we must have spent a couple years cleaning up the fields and brush.

“But he could also be very thoughtful at times,” Jon added. “One time we were camping, and my hands were really cold. He boiled some eggs and told me to put them in my pockets to keep my hands warm. It was all practical stuff with him. He never wanted you to have a bad time.”