A Company of Heroes (38 page)

Alex was originally buried in France. He was exhumed and reburied in the American cemetery in Luxembourg, the same cemetery General Patton was buried in. There are five Easy Company KIA members buried there, including Skip Muck. We have two burial flags—it’s possible one flag came from each cemetery. Alex was one of the many first generation Americans who ended up being buried in Europe, families who emigrated to America from Europe, then their sons went back to Europe to fight.

I told Eileen O’Hara, Skip Muck’s niece, that our families were bonded together forever that one dark night in 1945. Recently we invited Eileen and her husband, Tom, to a Penkala family reunion. The Muck and Penkala families are close even today, more than sixty years later.

What’s the one thing I’d want people to know about my uncle? All the vets I’ve talked to say these things: He was a good soldier. He always did his job. You could always count on him. Alex Penkala Jr. saw what he had to do and did it. He made the supreme sacrifice. That’s how I’d want people to remember him.

 

 

 

As a little girl, Gariann Wrenchey had always wondered about the picture on her Grandma Susie’s bedside table. She knew she would never meet the dashing young man shown in the picture. He was gone. But Gariann always felt like she had a connection with her great-uncle, Robert Van Klinken. His sacrifice to his country was something the family had never forgotten.

When she was grown, Gariann began to ask questions. At first, no one wanted to talk. But her grandmother brought out from the closet a box with the young man’s personal effects. The box hadn’t been touched in fifty years, just a pile of photographs, news clippings, certificates, and documents with some other effects at the top. Gariann went to work.

Inside the box was an old wallet with a dollar bill inside that had been signed by a few buddies, a ring with the initial “R” on it, a few foreign coins with holes drilled through them, and an address for a veteran named Bill Wingett.

There was a patch torn from green military clothing. The patch showed a swastika surrounded with a red border with oak leaves above it. Gariann found it a bit creepy. It looked like the patch had been hacked with a bayonet from somebody’s clothes. The bayonet was also still in the box.

An original set of paratrooper jump wings was there, along with a note to Gariann’s grandmother. “Susie don’t lose these, you have to realize what I went through to earn them.”

Inside the wallet was a photograph of two young women eating an ice cream sundae and grinning. On the back of the picture was written, “Hello Cake Face.”

Then there were letters. Most were still in their envelopes with post-marks from Toccoa, South Carolina, and England. They were written in clean, strong handwriting, often in pencil, and many on military stationery, now yellowed and fading. Gariann read them all.

Robert Van Klinken wrote to two sets of people. The first bunch of letters was to his parents. The information was shorter, tidier, and less revealing. The second set was addressed to Susie (Robert’s sister and Gariann’s grandmother), Johnny (Susie’s husband and Robert’s best buddy), and their young son, Walt. In this second bunch of letters, Robert spoke more freely.

What follows is the story of Robert Van Klinken, as revealed by family members and Robert’s own letters.

Robert Van Klinken was born October 31, 1919, in Loomis, Washington, a city close to the Canadian border known for its mining. In the early 1920s, Robert and his family moved to Twisp, another small town in Washington State, where he grew up.

He was a country boy who loved to hunt and fish. Pictures show him dressed in overalls and standing next to chickens and old barns.

His parents had emigrated from the Netherlands and become tenant apple orchardists in the United States. They were very poor and never owned their own farm, but even during the Great Depression, they always had food. Robert’s sister Susie was known to be spoiled, even though the family was so poor. Her father taught her horse how to jump fences because he didn’t think his little girl should have to get off her horse and open gates. The kids didn’t fight and got along well. Susie looked up to Robert like he was her hero.

Robert graduated from high school in 1939. There’s a picture of him with his graduating class up on the wall in the old Twisp High School. Susie graduated the next year, 1940, and immediately married Johnny Klinkert, Bob’s good friend. There was another brother in the family, Gene, but he was much younger, and Robert never addressed any letters to him.

Robert became a diesel mechanic who sometimes worked in logging. He was a good natured young man who dated a lot and dreamed of getting married someday.

When war broke out, he was in his mid-twenties and initially thought he was too old to go to war. That he went into the Army in the first place only makes his story more poignant. Right before he joined, he had a job offer with a defense industry company in Alaska. It would have meant a fortune for him, and it would have also kept him out of the war. Robert wrote:

After being drafted, one of his first letters home was to Susie’s new husband, Johnny, with whom Robert often fished and hunted. The letter was postmarked August 19, 1942, and sent from the reception center at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Robert made a prime candidate for the paratroopers. He was in good shape, certainly not afraid of shooting a rifle, and impressed with the fifty dollars a month extra pay.

A month later, September 28, 1942, Robert wrote again, this time from Camp Toccoa. Always the ladies’ man, Robert talked about eating a meal at his girlfriend’s house down in Georgia. He must have met her right away, because the men hadn’t been at the camp for very long.

In another letter, Robert described being in E Company to his folks: “This is the best and toughest outfit in the army. It beats the regular army and the navy. It’s like the Marines parachute troops. The definition of a paratrooper is a soldier who lands in hell in a parachute and runs the devil out with his own fork.”

He talked about being on maneuvers in the “frying pan” in Alabama. He joked with his parents about not liking his uniform (evidently they had sent him a letter saying this in the meantime). “Well, the army’s only got two sizes of clothes: too big and too small.”

His letters were written on different camp stationeries to addresses with no streets or zip codes, often as simple as to “Mrs. W. Van Klinken, Pateros, Washington.” He often wrote folksy, newsy notes home to his sister and brother-in-law. In one, postmarked October 12, 1942, from Toccoa, he wrote:

More folksy letters followed with more news of training.

Robert’s parents were known to be reserved and strict, people who didn’t show affection around each other. They spoke Dutch to each other when they wanted to have private conversations. Robert’s father was twenty years older than his mother. His mother was a very religious and stoic person who dug her own basement, canned her own food, and worked hard around the farm.

Two letters described the march from Toccoa to Atlanta, both before and after, one to his parents, one to Johnny and Susie:

Right before Christmas 1942, Robert wrote his folks a short letter, which was inserted into a Christmas card, then wrote Johnny and Susie a longer letter describing his jumping and some information about a girlfriend he was becoming serious about.