Easy Company Soldier (23 page)

With the 2nd Platoon still without an officer, I was, as a staff sergeant, in charge. Our headquarters was a large house owned by a dentist who, like lots of dentists in Europe, had his practice as part of his home. He was also the mayor of Haguenau. And reportedly a Nazi who'd fled pretty fast when he heard Americans were coming to town. Without much to do one day, we blew open a safe in his house, but all we found was some coins, loose jewelry, and two stamp albums. I gave the coins and jewelry to guys in the company; later, I sent the stamp albums home to my parents.

At Haguenau, I got some mail: a letter from Bernice. We were talking marriage by now, though I kept getting the idea I was more excited about it than she was. “Life without you,” I had written in January from Bastogne, “wouldn't be worth living.” Later, I wrote about having no chance to grieve for those you've lost.

I also got a letter from Joe Toye. Pretty much one-syllable words, which always bothered Joe but not me. Hell, it wasn't how you said something, it was that you took the time to say it. Anyway, they'd cut his leg off within a couple of days of his getting it ripped to shreds at Bastogne. Then again in
England. Then, back in the States, he got gangrene and had to have it cut again. “Tonight,” he said, “they're cuttin' it for the fourth time, and if it's not successful, I've already been told that's it. I die.” Guarnere, we heard, was recovering but had lost his leg.

By now, Easy Company had lost its enthusiasm for war; it didn't help hearing that dozens of our boys had been massacred by the krauts someplace north of Bastogne called Malmédy. I was slipping into a bit more cynicism than usual. When General Maxwell Taylor, back in the war zone after conveniently missing a tiny skirmish called the Battle of the Bulge, came through for an inspection, I mentally rolled my eyes.

“Sergeant, were you wearing your helmet when it was hit?” he asked, looking at a helmet with a chunk missing after I'd taken a bullet from that P-47 that the krauts had apparently stolen and used to dive-bomb us.

I wanted to shake my head and say, “What do you think?” Instead I said, “Yes, sir.”

“Well, in that case you can continue wearing it.”

The incident showed how little the pencil-pushing brass knew about frontline duty. Anyone with a helmet with that kind of damage wouldn't have had a friggin' head if the helmet hadn't been on his head when he was hit. I continued to wear it. And would have even if he'd told me I couldn't.

When word came down that we were going to send a patrol across the Moder River and bring back a few Germans who could cough up some info, nobody leapt to their feet. Nobody, that is, except Jones. I was going, but later word came down from Lt. Dick Winters that he wanted Jones, the West Point rookie, to replace me.

That was fine by me. I wasn't hurt, I was relieved, and so tired that I wouldn't have been a good choice to go anyway. My assignment was, along with Speirs, to provide covering fire from the second floor of a house. The mission was like a deadly game of checkers. We got two of their guys as prisoners and lost two guys; Sgt. Bill Kiehn was killed outright and Eugene Jackson got hammered by the wooden handle of a potato masher.

Poor Jackson. He's the guy who'd taken a large fragment from a mortar in the side of his head in Normandy, then shown up before the Holland jump as if nothing had happened. Now, he was fighting for what little life was left in him. They'd dragged him back across the river, into our headquarters house, but everybody in the room knew he wasn't going to make it. And he didn't. He kept calling over and over for his “mama” to help him. He died as they tried to get him to a military hospital. Of shock—that's what I heard. He was only nineteen, among those soldiers so anxious to get in that he'd lied about his age back when he was sixteen.

The patrol had, in relation to other stuff we'd faced since the jump into Normandy, been pretty small potatoes. But afterward, Jones seemed sufficiently impressed that war was a big boys' ball game. Watching Jackson die, Jones's face was white as a ghost. He remained with the company for a short time, then was transferred to a higher echelon. Rumor had it that the war would soon end, and the West Pointers were being protected to staff peacetime armies.

A few days later, command sent word that they wanted another patrol, needed a few more German soldiers. By then, it had turned colder; a thin layer of ice coated the Moder. Could we have sent that patrol and got those prisoners?
Sure. But Winters didn't want to risk it. He sent in a report that wasn't really true but wasn't really false; it said something like “Unable to secure prisoners. All our men safe.” You never talk about these things at the time, but I think, like us all, he was still a little numb from Bastogne and yet finally hopeful that, if we were careful, we might actually get out of this alive. The first patrol, in my mind, was a waste of two good men. I'm glad Dick made it our last patrol.

Our moods rose. Winters was promoted to major. Some late Christmas presents started arriving, candy and cookies and stuff. My aunt Claudia in Portland was good about sending food, occasionally some Norwegian sardines. That smell would permeate any place we'd open them, though they'd get wolfed down in minutes. Ed Stein, who was Jewish, kept telling me, “Sarge, wait until you taste the strawberries my mother is sending.” Some Jewish delicacy, and a dish that I'm sure is good. When fresh. But it includes sour cream, and after weeks—hell, maybe months—en route I took one whiff and headed for open air. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Stein was savoring each bite.

In the last few days in Haguenau, I started looking forward to a train, not a truck, ride to Mourmelon. I thought a lot about Faye Tanner back in New York, who had, by now, heard there was no need to wait for Skip to come home. With time to think again about something beyond combat—about being patient and getting home and those who wait—I tumbled Milton's “On His Blindness” around in my head:

Returning to Mourmelon, after three weeks in Haguenau, I kept putting it off. There were, after all, other things to consider, like who in the hell had looted our barracks while we were gone. We had stored all our belongings in the center of our barracks living room. When the door opened, all we saw was a huge pile of clothing nearly reaching to the ceiling. We'd been professionally looted, we suspected by some air force rear-echelon folks who'd arrived after we left for Bastogne. Gone were all our souvenirs, guns, cameras, medals, patches, wings, jump boots, knives, daggers. Anything with value. Jeez, you go off to fight one enemy and come back to another. And the guys were supposedly on our side.

I got settled in the winterized tent that would be my home and was going to do it then. But I received a three-day pass to Paris and left immediately, on February 28. When I returned, I couldn't put it off any longer. I wrote her.

March 3, 1945

France

When Lieutenant Speirs offered me a ten-day furlough in England, I grabbed it with gusto. Not only would it be fun, but it would take my mind off other things, such as Skip and the increasingly less enthusiastic letters from Bernice. “Never again say ‘It's hard to keep our love alive when we're so far apart,'” I wrote her in March. “It might be that way for you but not for me. The only thing I find hard about it is trying to quell the intensity of it enough to act normal.”

In England, I played lots of craps, sold a German Schmeisser for $275 to some sailor while crossing the English Channel, and ate frequently at a basement café on Charing Cross Road that specialized in roast duck and browned potatoes. Marvelous. Somewhere along the line, I read that the entire 101st Division had been awarded the Presidential Citation, the second time for the 506th, for its stance near Bastogne. Wearing that uniform with the screaming eagle on it, people knew two things about you: You were a damn good soldier—and half crazy.

One afternoon, in the basement bar of the Regent Palace Hotel, I noticed two red-beret sergeants from the British 1st Airborne Division sitting down the way. In London, these guys were honored above all; nobody in a red beret was to be arrested for drunkenness. Eventually they noticed my 101st Airborne patch, the screaming eagle.

“We owe a tip of the hat to the 101st,” said one. “Got us across the Rhine one black night after we'd been trapped behind enemy lines.”

I jiggled the ice cubes in my Scotch.

“I know,” I said. “That was my company. E Company 506th.”

They scoffed a bit and looked around at each other, obviously thinking I was trying to take some credit that wasn't due me.

“Oh,
really?”
one said with a touch of doubt.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was on the rescue team.”

“Well, of course you were, old chap—so was my dead aunt Lucille,” said one, and they both laughed.

My Scotch was settling in. I paused, then took another sip.

“Say, how's that tank sergeant, the commander from the Seventh Armored Division who headed up that outfit known as the Rats of Tobruk? Guy was in my boat.”

Their eyes widened.

“After we got him safely across the Rhine, he told me his wife had already been a widow five times and he was gettin' out of this ‘bloody war.'”

They froze in silence, then one of them cleared his throat. “To E Company,” he said, holding up his drink. I clinked my glass with the others and nodded, then held mine high. “To E Company.”

When I returned to Mourmelon, there was another letter from Faye. Among other things, she wondered why Skip's family hadn't gotten an official letter from the company, beyond the telegram. It probably got lost in the transition from Dike to Speirs, I figured. At any rate, Skip's mother was still holding out hope that her son was alive. I wrote back.

March 31, 1945

France