We Who Are Alive and Remain (29 page)

I had eighty-one points, just shy of the eighty-five needed to be sent home early. I came home in August 1945. I reenlisted right away, had ninety days off before going back to Fort Bragg, then was sent back to Frankfurt, Germany, where I was stationed for three years. The Nuremberg trials were just starting. When I was in Berchtesgaden at the end of the war I had found a collection of stamps. There were two books, Mike Massaconi took one, I took the other. Within the stamp collection were lists of Nazis, their names, and when they became Nazis. I took the book home after the war, then took it with me when I went back to Germany. I turned it over to the judges at Nuremberg. When it was all over they gave it back. I sent the book home to my mother, who sold it for five hundred dollars. What are you going to do—shoot your mother? Mike kept his a few more years and sold it for something like thirty thousand dollars.

I was probably one of the last to leave. I was in Paris toward the end, then left for the States from Southampton, England. I had been transferred to the 82nd Airborne by then, and the division came home all together. It was January 1946. We came back on the
Queen Mary
. Conditions were pretty good. We got off the ship, then were sent to Fort Bragg, where I got discharged. Then we were sent to a camp in New Jersey to get new boots and all spit and polished. They had a parade for us in New York on Fifth Avenue, called GI Joe Day. The new boots gave us all blisters. Still, it was nice to march down Fifth Avenue. That’s about all I remember about that.

When it was time to leave, I got my orders to ship out for home. We left for the States from Le Havre, France, on the
Queen Mary
. It took her only three days to get to New York Harbor—no submarines to dodge—and then we were taken to Camp Shanks.

As we sailed into New York Harbor I couldn’t help but notice the Statue of Liberty. It had a dazzling brilliance in the sunlight, a huge difference from how it looked in the blackout when I left three years earlier.

My unit was commissioned to march in the ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York on January 12, 1946, with the 82nd Airborne Division, 505th Regiment.

We were trucked back to Camp Shanks after the parade, and some of us prepared to go home; others were reenlisting. I was sent to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, to be discharged. All I wanted to do was to go back home and get a job and start living the good American life. I had enough of war and all its horrors. It was time to just be in the great outdoors without having to look over my shoulder every minute.

From England they sent me back to the States to heal. Altogether after the war, I was in different hospitals for about a year while I healed up.

The army fitted my eye with a plastic blank. Then the Veterans Administration sent me to a place in Detroit where they made artificial eyes. But the eye they made me was so bad I couldn’t wear it at all. I wore a patch for about a year. Then I heard about a place in Chicago where a guy made glass eyes. I contacted him and he thought I might be allergic to something in my previously fitted plastic eye. I got a glass eye and wore that for ten years. By that time the technology in making plastic eyes had improved to the place I could wear one of those. (Plastic eyes are superior because they won’t break if dropped.)

As it has turned out, my wounds I received in Carentan have proved to be very little of a handicap in life. I’ve been physically active all my life after the war. My right ankle has a limitation of movement. I can’t bend it enough to cross-country ski, but I can downhill ski. I got my driver’s license, and my driving record has been fine. I couldn’t be a policeman, pilot, or miner, but those are about the only jobs I couldn’t do. I played four-wall handball for years. The one thing I could never do was play Ping-Pong, because I can’t judge depth of field that well. The ball bounces too fast. But overall, it’s been much better than I thought.

Right after getting hit, I was in quite bad shape for several weeks. The first week or so in the hospital I had the same dream every night. I dreamed I was still in the hospital and needed to set up a defense perimeter in the ward to repel an enemy attack. In my dream I got eight or ten patients mobile, gave them weapons, and set them up around the hospital. But no attack ever came. We were always ready, waiting, nervous, tense—that was it. I had the same dream night after night—the danger was imminent, the attack was coming, we had to be ready for the attack. That dream stopped after about ten days.

After the war I had a different recurring dream, but one that was not as threatening. I’ve had it all my life. The dream is that I need to go fight another war. But this time my friends in the paratroopers are all going back to fight another war together. I’ve had that dream consistently for more than fifty years. It’s the same men in my dream that I knew at Toccoa, but in the dream they’re at whatever ages they are in real life, no matter when I have the dream. They’re all forty-five or sixty or eighty-five—and we’re all going back for another battle. In the dream some of the guys who were killed in World War II are alive again. It’s not a nightmare, I don’t wake up screaming. The location varies—sometimes we’re in the States getting ready to go back. Other times we’re already in the battle. But we feel in control of this battle. I’ve never especially thought about what it means. Why are we all together? Why are we going to fight again? I never resist the idea of going to fight again—even when all the guys in the dream are sixty-five years old or whatever. We all appear to be okay with the idea of going back to war and are willing to do it.

The last four or five years I’ve had a third recurring dream. This dream is about the guys more in the context of reunions. In this dream the war is over. We’re just getting together now. We no longer go back and fight a second war. There is a friendship with these guys that will never change. There’s a closeness about all we went through. Almost any combat veteran I meet, I feel a connection and rapport with him more than any other person. We’re immediately able to talk and get along fine.

Lives in Freedom

After the war you could feel an economic boom. There seemed to be better incomes for everybody, better living conditions.

I was discharged mid-October 1945. When I had worked at Bethlehem Steel before the war I had bought a newer car, a 1942 Chevy Impala. It was still at home, waiting for me.

I visited my old high school principal. He was very interested in what I was doing and helped me enroll in a teachers’ college. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Then I went to New York University for a master’s degree. It was all on the GI Bill. I feel good about the service and about how they treated us after the war.

So I got my education right away and started teaching school in Norfolk, Virginia. They were paying more money in Virginia than they were in Pennsylvania. Over the years I taught junior high and high school industrial arts, drafting, electronics, and woodwork. I always liked to work with my hands. I had a minor in social studies, so I taught a bit of that. I taught from 1949 to 1977, then retired from teaching. I always did some extra work outside and moonlighted as a cabinetmaker. When I retired from teaching I went full-time as a cabinetmaker. I finally gave it up in the early 1990s. I still do a little bit now and then. I have a hobby of carving songbirds. I also repair and refurbish antique cars. Right now I have a ’67 Mustang convertible, a ’29 model A Ford, a ’74 Triumph Spitfire, and an ’84 Corvette. I’ve done a number of other cars over the years that I’ve sold. They grow on you. But I’m slowing down now. I’m getting too old for that stuff now.

When I started teaching in Norfolk, my future wife, Harriet, was teaching across the hall. We got married in 1949 and have two children, a son and daughter, and two grandchildren. One is a navy pilot in Afghanistan.

The guys from Easy Company that I get together with, whenever we get together, we always talk about fun things, never the hard times.

Why did I reenlist? I liked that kind of life. Not the combat, mind you. But I liked the military. It was hard, but it was good. When I was sent back to Frankfurt in late 1945 I was a squad leader, then a platoon leader. We left there and came back to Fort Mackall. That’s where I was in the Recon units, the precursor to Special Forces. We did six weeks desert training, six weeks of mountain training, six weeks jungle and swamp training, then six weeks of commando training.

Korea came along and I went with the 187th Airborne and made two drops in Korea. After that, Indochina. Then I got hurt pretty bad, so that ended my career. I was a master sergeant when I resigned from the military in 1959. I jumped in a practice jump and came down aimed straight at a wire fence. I oscillated to miss it, came down wrong, and tore the hell out of my left knee. I was about ready to get out of the army anyway. I was tired of the bureaucracy. I’ve never felt the army owed me anything.

After I got out I moved to Florida and worked as a marketing director for Carvel Ice Cream. I worked there for quite a while. Then about eight years ago I had a heart attack, so after that I drove a van delivering food to various seniors’ sites. I just retired this year. Why not keep working? I enjoyed it.

I got married for the first time in 1946. We had three children. My oldest son retired from Special Forces here not too long ago. The next son died. My daughter lives in Florida. In 1971 I married the wife I have now. She has three kids, so we’ve got six kids total, nine grandkids. So here we are.

I was discharged in August 1945. I had a total of two years in E Company and one year in army hospitals.

When I came out of the army I walked with a cane and wore an eye patch. The thing I remember most was the tremendous response of everybody I met to do everything they could do to show support for the military. Maybe the support felt exaggerated to me because I had clearly been shot up and wounded. Whenever I ate at a restaurant I went to the cashier and there was almost never a bill. Or the waitress nodded her head and said, “A gentleman over at that table has paid.” Of course, I was home a year ahead of everybody else. But that sort of thing happened to me a lot.

The war opened doors for me. It was always my goal to get into the University of Michigan, but my high school record was spotty and I didn’t qualify. I had an admissions interview and they stretched the rules for me—just did everything they could—to get me in. I didn’t have any problems academically once I was in.

I might not have received all these courtesies if I had come home later. But it’s been the same way with Easy Company and the Band of Brothers. We were just one airborne company among many who served in World War II. For some reason we got the benefits and credits when so many others haven’t.

I wanted to get out of Detroit and go somewhere with mountains and fresh air. Detroit was a place to move away from. I graduated from the University of Michigan, then went to Colorado to get a master’s in English at the University of Northern Colorado. My career goal was to become a high school teacher. When I graduated from my master’s program I had difficulty finding a job, so I worked in construction for a short while. I had been told by my university counselors that I could never teach because I was blind in one eye. They thought that the minute I got in front of a classroom the kids would run around to my blind side, misbehave, and I wouldn’t be able to teach them. I soon got a job teaching. I taught thirty years, and that never happened.

Before the war I had been dating a girl from the University of North Carolina. Her family was fairly wealthy. Her father was sympathetic with me, but her mother felt that with my background and my ambition to become a teacher, I was not the man for her daughter. I can understand that. The girl and I had planned to get married after my first year of college, but the objections of her mother became obvious and we broke up. It all worked out for the best.

I stayed single for a long time. I dated and was even engaged at one point, but I think I was always expecting too much. My career continued to go well, though. In 1961 I was one of about thirty high school teachers who won a national award for excellence in teaching. It was called the John Hay Fellowship, and it included a full-tuition scholarship plus my yearly salary paid to me to attend UC Berkeley for that year. I went on that and temporarily became a member of the faculty at Berkeley.

Teaching was always my first focus—it was the only thing I really ever wanted to do. Still, almost all teachers need to find ways to make additional money. In my midforties I bought a small apartment building and ran it on the side. I did well with it, and it never distracted from my teaching. Pretty soon I had two apartment complexes and was doing quite well.

By age sixty-one I was still single. One of my former students, Ronald Ross, and his wife, Mary, headed to Costa Rica when Ronald got a job there as a professor of linguistics at the University of Costa Rica. I liked to travel, and after I retired went down to visit them. I loved Costa Rica and spent a couple weeks there, then came back a few years later to stay for a few months. When I came back, my friend’s wife introduced me to a friend of hers, Rosie, whom she had taught school with. Rosie had just returned to Costa Rica from a four-year British government scholarship in genetics.

Rosie was thirty-four. I was sixty-one. That alone raised eyebrows, but if you didn’t look at the obvious differences such as our age, we were extremely compatible. We dated about a year. She was the woman of my dreams, and I didn’t back off. We were married soon after. More than twenty-five years later we’re still together. The marriage has been very successful. My wife is phenomenal. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.