Easy Company Soldier (22 page)

In one house, as I rushed in, a fellow American soldier was coming out. It was Eugene Brown, my old classmate from the University of Oregon, the guy whom I'd twice forgotten to salute at Toccoa. I wasn't any more formal here. “Hi, Gene,” I said.

He didn't seem to mind; combat zones lend themselves to informality. Plus, I think he glanced at the stripes on my shoulder. “Malark, great to see you!” he responded.

Whatever Germans were still alive were hightailing it east, toward Noville. The few Tiger tanks followed. The Germans, it turned out, had only been fighting a rearguard action to cover a withdrawal to Noville, behind Foy. Finally, after more than three weeks, Foy was ours. At least for now. The Germans would counterattack the next day, but the 3rd Platoon would hold them off.

As we regrouped for the push to Noville, word spread about Dike freezing up in the heat of battle. It didn't surprise me. From the get-go, I'd been unimpressed with the midlevel officers and their inability to lead when they needed to. It was the only weakness in the 506th, this revolving door of guys who had no business being in charge. Sobel. Evans. Peacock. Dike. Compton's lieutenant who turned to mush in
Holland. A couple of rookies at Hell's Corner who Winters had to take out because they had no idea where our machine-gun positions were in relation to our defensive posture. Was it because the ROTC programs back in the States didn't do a better job of weeding them out? Because too many guys just didn't have their hearts in it, just wanted an extra fifty bucks a month? Or because of politics, some higher-up's “golden boy”—Dike comes to mind—getting foisted on soldiers who deserved better?

Hard to say. All I know is that, at times, Easy Company succeeded not because of the leadership but in spite of it. Oh, we had a few good ones: Harry Welsh, Bob Brewer, even Ron Speirs, despite his “killer” reputation. First Lt. Thomas Meehan, who'd taken over for Sobel, was a good man, but his plane had gone down in Normandy. Dick Winters, who replaced him, was a glowing exception, too; he had that uncommon blend of smarts and concern for the guys. Cool as a cucumber when the pressure was on. Fair to all. And comfortable enough being Dick Winters that you never got the idea he had to stomp on the rest of us to boost his own battle-scarred ego. And he was absolutely willing to go through whatever we went through; hell, I always thought he was happiest when he was with us in the foxholes. I don't think he did ever completely adjust to being in the rear, out of the action. He wanted to be out there with us. And, in a sense, he was.

Dike was permanently relieved of his duties. Speirs was put in command of Easy Company. For now, Easy Company was as exhausted as we'd ever been. Though we slept inside actual structures that night for the first time since Mourmelon, about a month ago, the cold seemed more intense. The next morning, we moved out, heading for
Noville, a larger village just down the road that had been our objective since we'd first dug in, in those Bastogne woods. A light snow fell.

Noville required another risky approach in an open field. It was January 14. We moved out through the snow. Meanwhile, the 1st Battalion advanced far to our left, being pummeled by German 88s. We soon had problems of our own: Machine guns from Noville had opened on us. Speirs set up a couple of machine guns in response. With each burst of fire, we'd advance a little more across a small stream and into position for a morning assault. A horse, its legs shattered by a shell fragment, stood in a nearby field. One of our noncoms put it out of its misery.

Meanwhile, our misery continued. That night, January 14, with no enemy fire, we tucked up under a deep shoulder of land and waited to attack in the morning. It was, some would remember, the coldest night of the war. We shivered through the night, having got plenty sweaty moving to this point. At one point, Winters considered just attacking in the darkness rather than freeze in it, but decided against it for fear we'd shoot our own men.

Early in the morning, Carwood Lipton and a radioman crept forward to assess the situation. He found knocked-out Sherman tanks and lots of bodies of Allied soldiers, frozen like plastic army men, the dead of a battle from nearly a month earlier.

We started the assault at dawn. The village was ours by noon; resistance had been lighter than expected. Now it was on to Rachamps, a tiny village about three kilometers beyond, the last of three objectives we'd had when we arrived here. The 11th Armored Division joined us on our flank, one of the few times we'd have the luxury of such bulk. We
moved north on high ground and found ourselves looking down into a treeless basin with the village nestled amid white fields at the bottom. The snow on the village's front door dipped into a giant bowl, and it was decided we could find good cover if we could just get to the far end of that bowl. But that meant, of course, an approach in a wide-open field.

We started moving forward in snow nearly two feet deep. A soldier's best friend is cover and we had none. It was a strange feeling of vulnerability. But the German garrison must have been apprehensive about our approach. They lobbed some 88s our way, not exploding shells but armor-piercing, and all were too long or too short. Other resistance was light, almost as if they were giving in to the inevitable. We started running to find cover behind fences and buildings. I looked up from behind a wall. A Belgian farmer was standing in the window of a farmhouse, frantically waving and pointing to the cellar of the house. He held up two fingers and pointed down. A pair of Germans were downstairs.

A handful of us moved forward. I opened the back door and could see the stairs to the basement.

“Comeinzeout!” I yelled.

No response. I threw a grenade down.
Boom.
A dog scurried upstairs. I yelled again. Again, no response. I opened fire with a tommy gun as I started down the stairs and finally heard some German words. Finally, two officers slunk up the stairs, one waving a white handkerchief.

I don't remember who interrogated them, but they said they were told they were supposed to fight to the last man or a German 88 unit was going to level the town, including them. We took sixty-five prisoners that day and didn't lose a
man. Late in the day, the two officers were being held in a village barn. Sgt. Earl Hale and a rifleman, Joe Liebgott, were guarding them. One of the prisoners sprang on Hale, slitting his throat. Liebgott killed both. Somehow, Hale survived.

As did Easy Company after nearly a month in this frozen hell. Later that evening, word came down that the 17th Airborne would be relieving us, or whatever was left of us. We had arrived at Bastogne on December 19 with about 120 men; between death, wounds, trench foot, and guys who just couldn't take it anymore, we now had about 60. Among my friends: Muck and Hoobler, dead. Toye, Guarnere, Gordon, Smith, and Perconte, wounded. Compton, gone.

In a letter from Bernice, she'd asked what it was like for me in war. I wrote back, saying, among other things, this:

Then, in the same letter, I obviously remembered the low point of that hell. Skip's death.

In Bastogne, though, the end had finally come. Once Rachamps was secured and we had the POWs together, I was invited to one of the farmhouses whose family had not fled. It was the first time I'd been indoors, in a warm building, in a month. A warm fire was burning in a huge rock fireplace, and I stood in front of those flames and soaked them up like a hungry man who hadn't eaten in weeks, as if I'd forgotten how good a fire could feel. The smell of a fire always takes me back to those summer evenings, as a kid, cooking crawdads or fish over the flames on the Nehalem River.

When Skip came to visit, we were going to do that. We were going to catch sea-run cutthroat and bake them over the flames and drink beer. And I was going to see his old
haunts in upstate New York. Meet Faye, the girl whom I felt I almost knew because Skip had talked so much about her. Maybe be in the wedding.

But that knock on the door in Mourmelon had changed everything.

Combat pushes so much adrenaline through your veins that once you stop fighting, once that rush is over, you come down harder than the morning after an all-night binge. Doubly hard when, arriving by truck at a place in France called Haguenau, you see the 1st Platoon boys arrive and remember he's not with the outfit anymore. Of Skip's 1st Platoon, only eleven of the forty men were still with the unit.

For Easy Company, Haguenau, about 160 miles southeast of Bastogne, was a place of transition. We were joined by a bunch of replacement soldiers, wet-behind-the-ears types who knew the war was winding down but wanted to get in a few licks before the last shot was fired. Some were the real deal. Others just wanted to send a picture back home to convince
everybody that they were a war hero. Still others were a bit of both, like a kid named Hank Jones, a second lieutenant fresh out of West Point who was both cocky and totally green; looked like the kid on your block back home who sold
Grit
magazines door-to-door.

“Sir,” he said when I first met him. “I'm here to be your assistant and you will leave for a while and come back as my assistant.” I liked his pluck, but he'd confused me with Carwood Lipton, who he assumed was going to be up for a battlefield commission.

The idea of being replaced did, frankly, have some appeal to it; by now, I was so tired my mind seemed in a fog. But I wasn't quitting.

“Thanks, Jones,” I said. “But I'm sticking right here with the Second Platoon.”

Beyond the fresh faces, we had a few guys rejoin us who'd been wounded in Normandy or Holland and were now recovered. Among them was Webster, the Harvard man so busy polishing his Bobcat badge that he didn't realize that damn near everybody else was now an Eagle Scout. Or dead. Or, like Toye and Guarnere, lying in some hospital back in England trying to figure out how in the hell to walk on one leg for the rest of their lives.

Webster, who'd taken a single bullet cleanly through the leg in Holland, showed up in Haguenau with the pep of a kid being dropped off at a birthday party—and not smart enough to figure out the rest of us weren't much in a partying mood. He kept asking where so-and-so was. And guys kept telling him: “dead … lost a leg … took a shot in the neck … froze his friggin' feet off….”

I looked at Webster in his fresh uniform, then headed off to find the portable showers that I'd heard had been
trucked in for us. A shower felt good, even if the water wasn't exactly stateside hot. But as I stood there, ignoring the “Hurry it up, pal” impatience of guys in line, I let that water wash over my face, wishing I could wash Bastogne off me like it was nothing more than salmon blood on my hands from a day hauling the seines on the Columbia.

I closed my eyes and there I was, sitting on the edge of that foxhole, Roe's words almost in slow motion:
Malark, I'm sorry, but it's Skip….
Over and over.

Since Bastogne, I'd learned that Muck would never have been in such a vulnerable position had another unit—some non-101st unit—done its job that day and occupied some settlements west of Foy. But they failed, which meant scrubbing the very mission that had moved the 1st Platoon to the front. In other words, Skip shouldn't have been sitting in that foxhole at that moment.

I toweled off my face. Yeah, Haguenau was a place of transition. You sensed the war in Europe was winding down, as if the Germans were just lobbing a few shells here and there to remind us that they weren't scampering home with their tail between their legs. But, suddenly, with time to think, you started wondering if it would ever really be over.

Haguenau sat on the Moder River. I'm sure it was beautiful in the spring and summer; for now, in mid-February and in midwar, it was battered buildings connected by muddy streets. The Germans had launched a diversionary operation in this region to draw American troops out of the Bastogne area. A few of their soldiers, probably not more than a squad, were milling about across the river, not more than a hundred yards from us.