Easy Company Soldier (6 page)

We were becoming exactly what Sobel wanted us to be: the best. But just when you were full of that pride—not that he ever told us he was proud of us—he'd find a way to suck it right out of you because you were so friggin' mad at him. You also felt you'd let him, and everyone else, down. You could never tell whether he wanted us to succeed or fail. Was his job to make us great soldiers or drum us out of the army in shame?

“The guy's the devil in jump boots,” Muck said to me once, blowing smoke from a Lucky Strike skyward.

I couldn't disagree. By the time I left Toccoa, I wanted to tie Sobel to a loblolly pine and use him for slingshot practice. In the months to come, things would happen in training that would make a lot of us wonder if he were not only the devil in jump boots, but was going to get us killed in combat someday. When the war ended, I wondered something
else about Herbert Sobel: I wondered if he wasn't a big reason some of us were still alive.

We were a bunch of guys in our early twenties from all over the country: gritty city boys like Guarnere, Southern boys such as Jimmy Alley, a few West Coasters—and everything in between. We'd been born soon after our fathers and uncles had gotten back—or been buried in Europe—after World War I. Had been hardened by a Depression that left some of our families bruised and battered. And inspired, after Pearl Harbor, to roll up our sleeves and serve our country—or at least go find some adventure in some place other than our hometowns. Only a few were married: Frank Perconte, Carwood Lipton, and a guy who'd join us at Fort Bragg, Alton More, come to mind. Most of us were young, single, and, too often, stupid, but as the weeks wore on, we started to bond.

I found myself surrounded by all sorts of guys who came to be my friends. Bain, of course, was the first guy I'd met, and growing up on the Columbia, he knew the difference between a chinook and a sockeye salmon. As a native North-westerner, I appreciated that. Jimmy Alley, a kid from Arkansas, wanted me to believe that grits were actually food; guys like him had no idea how wonderful a crab cocktail or razor clams tasted. Alley was a bundle of energy, but it was sometimes like the energy of a firecracker—prone to blow up in his face. Sobel was always giving him extra duty for this or that.

Joe Toye, from Pittston, Pennsylvania, was Irish like me but far stronger; he was like sprung steel. Toughest guy in the unit, bar none, even if that brute strength seemed to hide
some wounds deep inside. Bill Guarnere arrived with excellent combative credentials, being from South Philly—and with an accent to match. Don Moone, a private in the 3rd Platoon, had a brain that worked on the same wavelength as mine. Good man. Then there was Sal Bellino, a Brooklyn kid with a great singing voice; Ed “Step-and-a-Half” Stein, whose gait was about half again as much as mine; and Father John Maloney, the 506th chaplain, a guy who would somehow find a way to ground us to the deeper things, amid the grit of war. There were others—John Sheehy, Eugene Jackson, Herman Hansen, Earl “One Lung” McLung, Chuck Grant—whom I called my friends. Great guys all.

But of all the men I'd come to know at Toccoa, my closest pal quickly became Skip Muck. Every platoon—about forty-five guys—had four squads that consisted of three rifle squads and a six-man mortar squad. Along with Skip, I was assigned to a mortar squad as a gunner. We were a team, Skip and I. I'd sight. He'd drop the rounds down the tube. We bunked in the same barracks, and when we'd run Currahee, we usually wound up side by side.

“How ya feeling?” he'd ask.

“Like I'd rather be cleaning barnacles off the bottom of a trawler.”

Which is about as much as we'd get in before Sobel and his eagle eyes would catch our lips moving and bust us with fifty push-ups. “Catch up to the rest before we reach the top, dammit, or you'll be scrubbing toilets,” he'd say.

On the run that Sobel surprised us with in the middle of dinner, Skip, like a handful of others, started puking about two-thirds of the way up. He stopped and bent over.

“The men of Easy Company do not quit!” Sobel shouted, his eyes boring down on Skip. “Do you understand me?”

Instinctively, I grabbed Skip's arm to keep him going. “Skip, com'n, pal, you can do this.
We
can do this. No quitting.” He wiped his face with his white paratrooper's undershirt, nodded slightly, and continued on.

Warren H. Muck was about the millionth kid our age to be named after Warren Harding, a fairly popular president from 1921 to 1923, when a lot of us World War II kids were being born. No wonder he preferred “Skip.”

We were different in some ways. We couldn't have grown up farther apart—Oregon and New York. He was from Tonawanda, just north of Buffalo and along the Niagara River. My roots were Irish, his German; he even spoke a fair amount of it. When it came to drinking and gambling, I was a major leaguer while Skip was happy to bounce around the minors, playing here and there, but the more we got to know each other, the more we realized we had lots in common.

We both had that adventurous spirit; while I was swinging across ravines on the branches of Douglas firs in Oregon's woods, Skip was swimming across the Niagara River in New York. We were both about five-seven or five-eight, he a bit more wiry. We were both a little ornery, mischievous, and athletic; he played wide receiver in football and was on the swim team.

Both of us liked a good laugh. Both of us were nuts for music: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James, The Mills Brothers singing “Paper Doll,” and Frank Sinatra's “Moonlight Serenade.” At the end of a day, we'd go to the PX—it wasn't much bigger than a boxcar—and were usually so tired that we'd sit on the floor, our backs to the wall, and with a beer or Coke in our hands listen to that jukebox until I thought we were going to wear out the grooves in those
78rpm records. It wasn't just the sound of the music, it was what it could do to you inside: take you away from endless days of sweating, grunting, and cussing beneath your breath at Sobel.

Skip and I both had girlfriends back home. OK, Skip had a girlfriend and I
sort
of had a girlfriend. I'd broken things off with Bernice back in college, but away from home, I missed her terribly and we began exchanging letters again. She'd gone to summer music school at Mills College, then to New York City to be a professional singer. Skip's girlfriend was Faye Tanner, a cheerleader he'd met from another high school in the place he grew up. The more we talked about our girls, the more we realized that even they were similar. Pretty. Catholic. Loyal—Bernice even when I didn't deserve it. Their letters picked us up on many a Toccoa day.

The Depression had been hard on both our families. In some ways, we both were forced to become the “man of the house.” My dad essentially bailed out in 1938; his dad abandoned his family in about 1930, deciding he'd rather play in a jazz band and travel the country than be a father. Beyond that, we both were happy-go-lucky, witty, a little nutty, prickly when provoked, and, here and there, prone to laugh in the face of the odds if we thought, after doing so, we'd survive to live another day. How else do you explain our trying to become paratroopers? How else do you explain a guy swimming the Niagara? Or me defying an ROTC colonel?

Skip was the real deal; didn't have a phony bone in his body. Unassuming and yet had a personality that drew people to him like cold hands to a fire. He was the barracks peacekeeper on occasion. Not the guy who demanded to be in the spotlight but probably the best-liked man in the company. A guy who could make each of us feel as if he were his
best friend. Deep down, I felt honored that he even had time for a maverick like me.

Others soon realized we were best buddies. Burr Smith, an Easy Company soldier who'd been to a private military school in southern California, would write this about Muck and me when the war was over:

In some ways, Skip had replaced my family and my pals at the Sigma Nu house as the person I was closest to on earth. Once, on our way back to the barracks from the PX, Skip and I were having a smoke when he asked me why I chose airborne. I told him about growing up with the stories about my uncles both giving their lives for their country.

“I dunno, Skip, I think I was just born to do this,” I said.

His response didn't surprise me in the least: “Me, too, Malark.”

But we never talked about
not
making it home. We only talked about what it would be like when we
did,
how we'd visit each other and he'd show me where he'd swum the Niagara
and I'd take him fishing on the Nehalem, maybe out in the ocean for salmon.

“Going out over the Columbia River bar makes swimming the Niagara look like kiddy stuff,” I huffed.

“We'll do it,” he said. “But, remember, I swam the Niagara at
night.
”

By November 1942, Easy Company was becoming a finely tuned company—even if, for the second time, I'd run into Eugene Brown, my old University of Oregon classmate, and called him Eugene instead of showing him the proper respect as an officer. We'd done a fifty-mile Friday-night march through the Chattahoochee National Forest where you couldn't eat, drink, talk, or smoke; you just put your head down and went. It may have been the most difficult thing we did. But those were the things that drew us together, like we were one unit instead of a hundred-plus guys.

We hadn't jumped yet, our practice limited to jumping from thirty-foot towers in parachute harnesses suspended by steel cables, but we were prepared to take on anything on the ground. So our West Point colonel, William Sink, decided to
try just that. Someone had shown him a
Reader's Digest
article that said a Japanese army battalion had set a world record by marching a hundred miles in seventy-two hours. Sink decided we'd do the Japanese one better. He ordered his best battalion, the 2nd, to do a forced march from Toccoa southwest to Atlanta. More than one hundred men marching 118 miles. Under Sobel's orders, we were not to cross roads when we stopped for breaks. And the real killer: We were to do all this with full field equipment.

That was bad enough for regular guys carrying guns, especially the guys like Walter Gordon who had machine guns. But for mortarmen, like Skip and me, it was like being asked to climb Mount Everest with a pack full of bricks on our backs. The parts of a mortar unit weighed sixty-five pounds. Still, the challenge was intriguing, as if our team were finally getting in a game to see what we were made of.

It was late November. We marched about forty-five miles the first day in wind, rain, and cold. I felt good. The second day, hail and sleet joined the mix. My legs started giving me trouble from the constant pounding on concrete; the sixty-five-pound mortar seemed to double in weight. I was dying of thirst.

About noon, we were taking a break when a woman in front of a farmhouse, across a road, asked if we could use some water. I looked around. Lieutenant Winters was up at the head of the formation. I couldn't see Sobel, so I told my squad leader, Bill Guarnere, that I was going for it. I ran across the road and filled two canteens for me and the guys. Suddenly, I saw him down the road, heading my way like a Labrador to a downed bird—Sobel.

“I want that man's name!” he shouted, a finger pointing my way.

Just then, though, the column started moving forward and Sobel's path to me was blocked by marching soldiers. I scampered back across the road and into the mass of olive drab, having dodged a dangerous bullet. Skip was proud. But over the last day and a half my legs had gotten progressively worse and I barely made that evening's destination, Oglethorpe University, on Atlanta's outskirts.

Skip put up our pup tents and I lay down to rest. In the distance, I could hear Joe Toye singing some Irish song that had been passed down from his folks. At chow call, I couldn't even stand up. I started to literally crawl on my hands and knees through the woods to the chow line. Skip stopped me, grabbed my mess kit, and said, “No friend of mine crawls anywhere.” He filled both our plates and came back to eat with me. After dinner, I just sat there, my mind numb, my legs on fire.

“My shins are killin' me, Skip. I don't know if I can make it.”

“Almost there, buddy. Only thirty-eight miles.”

“
Only
thirty-eight?”

“Eighty down. You can do this, Malark.
We can
do this.”

“I dunno, Skip.”

“I'll get you to Atlanta if I have to drag you.”

Later, Lieutenant Winters came to see me in the tent. He figured I had severe shin splints.

“Why don't you plan on going the rest of the way in a rig, Malarkey.”

“Sir, give me a night's rest,” I said, glancing at Skip. “I think I can make it.”

Winters paused, then shook his head sideways. “Whatever you think.”

I made Atlanta. We all made Atlanta—seventy-five hours
from the time we started. As we marched down Peachtree Street to Five Corners in Atlanta, a few national radio networks announced to the world what we had done—beat the Japanese record, and beat it good. Afterward, my legs were terribly swollen. I spent three days in bed. But I'd made it. That's partly because when we got close to Atlanta, we were joined by either a military or university band that led us; that music inspired me. And partly because to quit was to be like someone back home whom I didn't want to be like. And partly because Skip Muck was in my ear the whole time, telling me I was going to make it if he had to throw me over his shoulder.