A Company of Heroes (9 page)

The grandmother, named Irene Puchalski, continued to act in her profession as a doctor, and constantly took care of people in the prison camp, giving away her provisions. Toward the end of the war, Irene grew sick with dysentery. She had helped other people, but in the end she could not help herself. The grandmother died in the camp. Toni had now lost her father, brother, husband, and mother. It was just her and her young son. Toni herself was sick, thin. One picture survived of her during that time. She has sunken, drawn cheekbones. Her eyes convey hopelessness. There wasn’t much time—or hope—left for her.

Hold that thought, and let me tell you about my father.

Gordon Carson (known as Gordy to his friends) was born July 30, 1924, in Geneva, New York. Unlike Toni, he wasn’t a child of wealth or privilege and he didn’t have an easy upbringing. Gordy’s dad was a former WWI Marine: hardnosed, alcoholic, and a real roaring drunk. Life at home was chaotic, loud, unpredictable, and frightening. His mother was an alcoholic, too. This little short thing, maybe four-foot-ten, could put away an eighteen pack a day and still walk.

Despite the hard times, Gordy grew up learning to be charming, even a bit of a smooth talker. Friends referred to him as the “lovable scoundrel.” He found solace from a difficult home life in sports and threw himself into athletics. At Geneva High School he was the only athlete to letter in five sports in one year: lacrosse, track, basketball, football, and baseball. He dreamed of playing professional baseball someday and had the potential to make it. Everybody said so, except his father. Gordy had a quieter side to him, too, one he rarely showed to anybody. For fun he read Plato and Socrates. He dreamed of going to college one day and studying philosophy. He wanted to make something of his life.

WWII hit, and Gordy and his classmates put plans on hold and enlisted. Gordy found out there was an extra fifty bucks a month for being a paratrooper, so he signed up and was soon on a train bound for Camp Toccoa.

Gordy threw himself headlong into the training. He was one of five men in the company who received highest scores in the physical competition at Toccoa. Yet there was still time for his other “hobbies.” Gordy developed a reputation among the men as a real ladies’ man. The guys in the company even gave him the nickname “Loverboy.”

Gordy kept an extensive journal while at Toccoa, which described the training jumps from airplanes, the running, the marching, the endless physical exertion, and the other members of the outfit. He didn’t like training at Toccoa much, yet on November 29, 1942, wrote of the joy of camaraderie he was experiencing:

While at Camp Benning, he wrote about the thrill of jumping, which also shows you a bit of his personality:

From America, Gordy and Easy Company boarded the troop ship
Samaria
and sailed to England, where more training occurred in Aldbourne. Gordy’s journal also covered this time extensively. He wrote about first seeing England on September 17, 1943:

He wrote simply and poignantly on December 31, 1943:

Wartime England was its own world, filled with dread of the combat that was to come. Some of the men used the opportunity to experience life to the fullest while they still could. Gordy was one of them. Once, Gordy and Sgt. Bill Guarnere smuggled two English girls back to their barracks. They hid the girls in the attic while the tight-lipped Lt. Peacock made rounds. One of the hidden girls slipped, and her legs fell through the ceiling. Peacock busted the soldiers, and Guarnere took the rap for my dad.

The high jinks stopped very soon. Gordy parachuted into Normandy on D-day and survived the intense fighting that followed over the next month as Easy Company helped liberate various French towns.

Gordy jumped again into Holland for Operation Market-Garden. The fighting was fierce, but again, he survived.

Then, in the harsh cold of winter, from December 1944 to February 1945, Easy Company fought the Germans in Bastogne. Conditions were horrible. The men of Easy Company had little food and no proper winter clothing. Days passed, filled with bloodshed. The men endured the constant pounding of German shells. Gordy was in his foxhole one day during a shelling. A German 88 flew in and hit the tree above him and exploded, driving a large jagged arrow of wood into his leg. He was sent to the frontline aid station in the surrounded hospital in Bastogne. Supplies were low in the hospital, and a medic gave Gordy a bottle of booze for pain. It was crème de menthe, and Gordy drank half the bottle. The Germans bombed the town that night and Gordy got on his hands and knees in the hospital to brace himself against the concussions. He threw up—green—in his helmet.

Gordy recovered from his wound and rejoined Easy Company just as they headed through Germany. The war was nearly over, yet there was much work still to be done. For three days and nights as Easy Company drove south, wave after wave of German soldiers marched north in the center of the autobahn, still in ranks but defeated, heading home.

In Germany, Gordy became a clerk for Captain Ron Speirs, who was then Easy Company’s commander. One of Gordy’s jobs was to pick out a company command post (CP) each night in the different occupied villages they came to. Gordy, who had a smattering of high school German, would pick out the best house in each town, knock on the door, and tell the people inside to leave. One evening he knocked on an apartment complex and the residents came out, including one elderly lady who reminded him of his grandmother. Out of compassion, Gordy told her not to worry, and stay where she was.

By the time they got to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s hideout in the Alps, Speirs and Gordy were good buddies. Together they drank bottles of wine, then got out their .45s and shot wine bottles off the Nest’s railing in celebration.

Gordy found Hermann Goering’s car, and he and Speirs immediately hopped in and went for an extended joyride. Upper Brass wanted the car, but before they turned it over, they wondered if the windows were bulletproof. They paced off ten yards, aimed their M1s and fired. The windows were not.

From Germany, the company was sent to Kaprun, Austria, for occupation duties.

Mercifully, the war ended in 1945, and Toni’s captors deserted the prison camp. But she was not free yet. Along with many in the prison camp, she was transferred to a displaced persons’ (DP) camp, which just happened to be in Kaprun, Austria. It was part of the huge humanitarian effort that began to take place. Following World War II, some eleven to twenty million people were considered displaced persons. Allied military and civilian authorities faced considerable logistic, linguistic, and transportation challenges in helping displaced persons find their way home to resettle. It was no simple task. Many DPs were sick, extremely malnourished, and in need of food and medical care. Many, including Toni, had no homes to return to or no way of getting there.

It’s hard for people today to fully understand the depth of what happens during a war the size of World War II. What is it like to displace several million people? That’s the size of several large-scale American cities. Imagine just New York City. Its population is about eight million people today. More than eleven million people died in the Nazi ovens during WWII. A million and a half of those were children. And millions more were displaced from their homes and were taken for slave labor, like my mother, Toni. I don’t think we can fathom the scope of that—how traumatized people were, how scattered they were all over the globe. My whole extended family on my mother’s side disappeared—she and my brother Richard were the only two out of nineteen on that side of the family left alive.

One of Easy Company’s tasks was to help with the DPs. As Easy Company drove into Kaprun, all the DPs were together outside the DP camp on the grass. Gordy, ever the ladies’ man, immediately noticed Toni’s blond hair and went out of his way to meet her. Gordy didn’t speak any Polish, and Toni didn’t speak any English, but they both spoke German and made a connection. Toni and Gordy began to see a lot of each other. He introduced her to his commander. Because Toni spoke five languages, Speirs put her to work for Easy Company as a translator, helping with the DPs. On the side, Speirs also gave Toni a Luger to defend herself, because of all the drunk GIs around. Mom always said you couldn’t imagine how happy people were that the war was over. An atmosphere of jubilance permeated the region.

Toni became a familiar face to Easy Company men. Once, Easy Company was having a party complete with ever-present beer kegs. Toni’s son, Richard, who was about three or four years old by then, turned on the spigot of a keg and emptied out all the beer. Joe Lesniewski, Pat Christenson, and George Luz caught him at it, but laughed it off good-naturedly. Richard became known around Easy Company as “that little blond kid.” We have a picture of Toni with Sgt. Ralph Spina and young Richard. The child is wearing clothes made of parachute material given to Toni from the paratroopers. There weren’t any stores around there where a person could get cloth or baby clothes.

Toni and Gordy were very close, constantly. They spent the summer of 1945 together in Kaprun, taking in the beauty of the countryside, going for long walks, and falling deeper and deeper in love. But by August, many of the men from Easy Company were officially done with their duties, and plans were made to ship them back to Cherbourg, then back to the states. Gordy, as a high-points man, was one of these men. Gordy and Toni parted. Gordy was still in the Army. It wasn’t like he could cart a wife along with him, particularly one with a young Polish son. Or could he? Perhaps it was just a fun summer, they concluded, one bright spot in years of horror. They wondered if they would ever see each other again. They concluded probably not.

Speirs remained in Austria for a short time. With Gordy gone, Speirs discovered that Toni was pregnant with Gordy’s child. Speirs sent word to Gordy, who was then in Cherbourg, inches away from heading home.

Gordy had a decision to make. Like other GIs, he could have claimed that the baby was not his and skipped the country and kept going. Being with Toni would also mean taking on the responsibility of Toni’s other son, Richard. Gordy still had college ahead of him. And dreams of playing professional sports. He had always been known as a ladies’ man—this was just one of those things that happens, right?

Well, it must have been true love, because my father returned to Austria and proposed. On the day of the wedding in October 1945, George Luz had found some kind of rickshaw, like those in Asia. Luz pulled Toni around Kaprun while Gordy finished his day’s duty. All DPs needed to wear white arm bands, but Toni didn’t have hers on. A major drove by in a jeep, stopped, and ordered Toni to put on her arm band. She did, but as soon as he was out of sight, the affable Luz told her not to wear such a thing on her wedding day.

They married, but because there was no married housing, Toni and Richard continued to live in the DP camp while Gordy stayed in the Army camp. The family waited for clearance to come back to the States. It wasn’t easy. Thousands of American men were coming home, some with new families, and America had so far closed its doors to receiving displaced persons.

The night their baby was born, Gordy secured a house in town for Toni so she could be inside and comfortable. A doctor came from Vienna to deliver the baby. Immediately after the birth, mother and baby went back to the DP camp. Their new son, Gary Carson, was born on March 3, 1946. That little baby was me. I was the first son of Easy Company born in Europe. It staggers me when I think about the odds against me being born. Fortunately, my mother had regained her health from her days in the prison camps, and I weighed in at a whopping nine pounds.

Finally the red tape parted and clearances were allowed. My mother and father, along with my half-brother, Richard, and me, came to the States on a troop ship through Ellis Island. My mother and Richard were listed as being Polish, but I was listed as an American citizen, born to an American GI. My brother and I both caught whooping cough while on the ship. I was the sickest, and they thought they were going to lose me. But we both survived. We returned home, a free family, to our new life in the United States. My dad had survived the war. My mother had found her place of freedom and security at last. We were all together, a young family with nothing but hopes ahead.

I wish I could say we all lived happily ever after.

The trauma that both my parents had been through during the war affected the family forever after. I remember some of Mom and Dad’s early arguments. He would say things like, “Well, you don’t know what I went through.” And she would say, “Bullshit, you don’t know what I went through.” I always got a kick out of that, because Dad could never bluff her as to how horrible war is. She went through it all.