Easy Company Soldier (18 page)

We'd been given the same light uniforms we'd used in Holland. We hadn't been given a winter issue of clothes; our boots were neither lined nor waterproof. We'd all gotten wool army overcoats, but we had no long underwear or wool socks. We were an odd combination of vets and rookies; Easy Company's 2nd Platoon even had a replacement machine-gun
crew that was Polish, though the guys' physical size at least inspired hope. While standing at ease, the gunner picked up the .30-caliber machine gun as if it were a cap gun.

We were starting to load into high-sided cattle trucks—a few hundred of them—when I remembered the money. I had well over $3,000 in my money belt that I wasn't exactly thrilled about taking into combat with me. I scrambled around and found Compton.

“Buck, can you take care of this? Get it put in a safe place?”

He found a division fiscal officer who said he could take the money as a soldier's deposit, but it could only be returned to me on discharge. I had no choice, stuffing a receipt for $3,600 in my pocket and thinking that someday, instead of washing dishes at the Liberty Grill or tossing salmon on the Columbia, I might finish at the University of Oregon and get a decent job.

Late in the afternoon, we loaded into a large convoy. It was cold. Soldiers were blowing on their hands. All sorts of rumors spun through the ranks:
The Germans had run over an entire American army and couldn't be stopped.
Worry hung in the air like the fog of our breath.

“Guess this means football practice is canceled today,” muttered someone.

A truck with Skip Muck in back rolled by ours. I nodded and half-smiled. He did the same back. So much for hot showers, the Champagne Bowl, and New Year's in Paris.

More info spread. The Germans—the same guys we'd thought were too busy licking their wounds en route back to their homeland—had launched a counteroffensive. They'd blasted a hole in the western front, and American forces
were retreating. We were headed for the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, where the Germans were rolling through with their eye on eventually taking Antwerp, the key Allied port in Belgium. Specifically, headed to someplace called Bastogne, which had seven roads leading to it and so was a prized possession for an advancing army. For now, we knew it only as another place we would fight. In time, it would be known as one of the stages for the largest engagement ever fought by the U.S. Army, the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans would have a three-to-one advantage in manpower and a two-to-one advantage in tanks. By the time it was over, twenty thousand U.S. soldiers—two towns the size of Astoria at the time—would be dead. But I would only seriously grieve the loss of one.

Packed into a cattle truck with no benches, I couldn't help but feel as if we were animals heading off for slaughter. Given what we'd find on arrival, that wasn't far off the mark. The trip took a day and a half, our convoy stretching for miles and miles. With the high sides, you couldn't see a thing other than the already weary looks on the other guys crammed in like sardines. With rutted roads, our stomachs were jostled from here to hell's half acre. Guys would puke in their helmets and we'd toss it over the side; it reminded me of deep-sea fishing off Astoria. I tried to stay sane by reciting to myself Kipling's “Gunga Din,” a gritty poem that seemed to fit, written, as it was, from the viewpoint of a British soldier about a native water-bearer, the “lower order” who saves his life. En route to Bastogne, with little in the way of equipment, you couldn't help but feel like the lower order:

With too many helmets filled, we snaked our way through the Ardennes Forest, on a high plateau, near the city of Bastogne. We were about eight miles west of the Belgium-Luxembourg border. It was raining lightly, the day so dank that the countryside, sprinkled with groves of fir trees, looked like some black-and-white photo. We bailed out of the trucks a couple miles west of Bastogne, the only part of the circle around the town the Germans hadn't quite closed. We moved into the village in a route march formation, hearing artillery fire far to the north and east. Unlike in Holland, nobody was outside waving orange flags and giving us cigars and free drinks and blowing us kisses. Except for soldiers, there was no life anywhere in Bastogne.

The 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment was preceding us so there was no need for scouts or other security. But as we marched along, oh, how I wanted a little of that Georgia heat we'd had while training.

“Malark, whataya got in terms of ammo?” Buck Compton asked. I did a quick inventory of my nearly empty pouches and pockets.

“One clip and a couple of grenades. No carbine ammo at all. In other words, squat.”

He reached into his pocket and handed me a clip, then asked the same question of the guys behind me. It was like asking beggars for money.

The 501st had moved straight through the city, heading east, and immediately met German troops. They fought till dark. We of the 506th headed northeast on the Bastogne-Foy highway. That's where I saw the sorriest sight I've seen in my life: soldiers—American soldiers—walking the other way, alongside the road, against us. Heads down. Some bloodied. Boots covered with mud. Retreating.

“What the hell is this?” I said to nobody in particular. “Where they going?”

“It's not where they're going,” said Toye. “It's what they're runnin‘
from.'”

We watched in near disbelief as hundreds and hundreds of beat-up soldiers passed us. Two of their three infantry regiments had been encircled and captured. Most of those retreating were quiet, not even looking up. A few mumbled this or that. One supposedly told Babe Heffron, “They'll kill you all.” I'll never forget the look in their eyes: fear, a sort of winter version of the stories I'd heard of loggers trying to outrun the Tillamook Burn.

Like me, Heffron was a cocky Irishman. “Don't worry,
fellas,” he said to the quitters. “We'll take care of 'em for ya.”

Maybe so, though the retreat didn't exactly instill confidence in us. But what could you do? We started mooching anything we could off the bastards: ammo, food, the works. Hell, if they couldn't do the job, they could at least give us stuff so we could.

I saw a Sherman tank on the west side of the highway; probably out of fuel. On its far side, sure enough, I found an engineer's shovel. It seemed like a small thing at the time—a theft by a desperate soldier—but would save some lives in the weeks to come, which would absolve me from any lingering guilt.

We came over a rise in the road and could see the villages of Foy and Noville below in the distance. A massive wave of German armor was sweeping through Noville, about two miles northeast. We stood and watched. The scene caught us off guard and made our hearts beat just a little faster. Nobody said a word. We just stared. We'd never seen the enemy in such numbers before.

Once we reached Foy, we were ordered to high, wooded ground southeast of the town; in war, it's always an advantage to be above your enemy. In Normandy, we'd burrowed into hedgerows. In Holland, we'd used dikes for cover. Here, we were hunkering down in a forest thick with midsized pine and firs that gave way to a grazing field sloping down to Foy and, beyond that, Noville. Thick not only with trees, but bodies. Our guys and theirs. There had already been fighting in these woods. Intense fighting.

“Hell of an idea—that shovel,” said Rod Bain, my pal from across the Columbia River, as we feverishly dug foxholes for Easy Company. “You'd think the army might have thought we could use those.”

“Just pretend we're after long necks,” I said, “really big ones, deep in the sand.”

“God, Malark, what I'd give to taste a clam again.”

The ground was wet and cold, though not yet frozen. Taking turns with just a few shovels, we started digging our foxholes, making what would become our homes for however long we were here. We outposted a man as our watch about fifty yards out in an open field, then, clothes and all, slid into our mummy bags, two guys to a foxhole, and tried to catch whatever sleep we could. It wasn't easy. Like the others, I hadn't slept for nearly two full days and was dead tired, but I couldn't help thinking about the mass of German soldiers I'd seen just down the hill, in Noville.

In some ways, my war ended in Bastogne. In some ways it began there. The first day was surprisingly quiet. Eerily quiet, the forest wrapped in fog, the trees like thick masts in Warrenton's harbor on some November morning. It was the kind of quiet you sensed would not last, even if it lulled you into thinking otherwise.

We heard bursts of machine-gun fire and an occasional whump of an 88 in the distance, but clearly the Germans were, at least for now, doing business with our buddies and not us. We couldn't see much. And the Germans apparently couldn't see much more, given that a kraut wandered within shouting distance and crouched to take a crap. We took him prisoner.

We were hunkered down in a dense forest that ran west to
east between Foy and Bizory called the Bois Jacques. We just came to call it Jack's Woods. The 506th was spread out along about a five-hundred-yard front, meaning, with 150 or so men, we were already stretched thin. Easy Company was on the left as we faced Foy.

To bide our time in the first few days, we'd expand our foxholes, which was getting harder to do as the temperatures dropped and the ground froze. But we chipped away, a little at a time. When we'd finish an L-shaped hole, it'd be about six feet in length by two feet wide, the long stretch for sleeping, the short for shooting. Three or four feet deep.

The resemblance to coffins wasn't lost on Easy Company, though the amount of joking dropped with the temperature. We were exhausted. And it was getting colder.

“Give me the forty-five degrees and rain of an Astoria winter any day,” I muttered to Bain, my “roommate.”

“Hell, Malark, compared to Ilwaco, Astoria has winter drought. We get more than eighty inches a year.”

I blew on my hands for the umpteenth time. Nearby, Walter Gordon Jr., a quick-witted machine-gunner from Louisiana, was sitting next to his machine gun as if a mannequin, his head wrapped in a big towel with his helmet on top.

“Jeez, Smoky,” I said, “why not just put a big arrow pointing to your head that says, ‘Krauts, shoot here.'” He just looked at me, rolled his eyes, and shivered.

Bastogne was miserable and cold, but, for now, dry. No mud. Ice formed on mud puddles. And because of the cold and light casualties, none of the “death smell” of Normandy. An occasional whiff of coffee, cigarette smoke, and a navy-bean fart—that was Bastogne.

The snow started on the second day, December 20. Growing
up, snow was rare in Astoria, though I'd sometimes run into it crossing over the Coast Range while heading to or from the Willamette Valley. In Bastogne, it fell softly at first, then with great gusto. Just like our exchanges with the Germans. A few small skirmishes occurred here and there, but not much else.

Father Maloney quietly gathered Easy's Catholics and others who felt the need for some spiritual encouragement. It was Skip's idea. Alex Penkala, another close friend of Skip's, was there; like Muck, he was a pretty serious Catholic. Perconte would make fun of him for still being a virgin. Me? I prayed a lot during the war that I could somehow just make it back to the banks of the Nehalem River with a blackberry tin in my hand. I was no Father Maloney. What a trouper he was, having jumped with us into Normandy and Holland, and being with us now in Bastogne. In the stillness of the woods, his words were soft assurance on the jagged edge of war: “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

As the group broke up, Skip and I made our ways to each other, having not seen one another since Mourmelon. Our eyes—tired eyes—met. He was holding the rosary he carried with him everywhere.

“Stay safe, Skipper,” I said.

“You, too, Malark. See you when we get outa this friggin' icebox.”

We shook hands. He left to rejoin the 1st Platoon. I returned to my foxhole a few hundred yards away. By then, the
Jerries had moved machine gunners along the Foy-Bizory road. But all we could do was wait, knowing either they would attack or we would. Some will tell you that fear is a soldier's worst enemy. I disagree. Too much and you're paralyzed. But too little and you're dead. Fear helps you take care of yourself so something bad won't happen to you. If you don't have at least some fear, you're going to be a damn poor soldier and get yourself wounded or killed. Yeah, too much can kill you. But a little of it can save your life.

Sometimes, I worried as much about having rookies to the left and right of me as I did about the enemy. You'd always get a bit more nervous if you had some replacement beside you. And for whatever reason, they were the guys who seemed to get killed or wounded faster. Maybe it was because they just weren't as gritty. Or maybe because they weren't as well trained. In either case, they seemed to disappear quicker than the Toccoa guys.