We Who Are Alive and Remain (33 page)

My favorite rifle? I like to shoot my M-1. It’s nine pounds. I tell my wife, “That doggone rifle has gotten fatter since the war.” Ammunition for M-1s is hard to come by sometimes, but my friends will bring me clips. I have a .22 with a scope which helps my eyesight, so I shoot that, too. Then I have a Luger that I shoot, and a .22 pistol, which I like to shoot. As a last resort I have a BB gun out on the deck. I just shoot targets—’course, I don’t hit them all the time, but I hear the gun and smell the smoke, so I enjoy that.

My wife, Dorothy, and I have been married for fifty-four years. We have two kids, a boy and a girl, four grandchildren, and two great-grandkids. Throughout my lifetime, I’ve never given a thought to having piles of money or being rich or doing anything like that. Now, I worked hard, and if I wanted something, I liked being able to afford it. But to me, success is those happy times with my family, being able to go fishing and hunting, and just getting out in the woods and enjoying yourself, looking at trees, or watching water go across rocks in a trout stream, things like that. That’s always what really mattered to me. My life has been good. All the way back, I’ve always enjoyed it.

Thoughts on Heroism

Today I often speak to students in schools. The number-one question I get asked is, “Did you kill anyone?” My answer is, “Yes, it was war, and I know I did. But there’s more to the story that you need to know.”

Were we heroes? There’s no such thing as a live hero. Damn good soldiers, yes, but heroes, no. You do your job and everybody does it with you.

I don’t consider myself a hero. It was just a job. Sometimes today I get treated as a hero, but I always try to turn it around and talk about the greatness of the guys who served. I’m just me. The people who are heroes are the ones who gave their lives for our freedom.

You know, while we were warming up to take off to Normandy, they replaced me and put Ernie Oats on the plane I was supposed to be on, plane 66. That’s always been a sobering fact to me. That’s the plane that went down in flames, killing all aboard.
²
For some reason God chose to spare me. Why? I don’t know, but my life’s goal now is to help others realize how important it is to know God—that’s what my life is all about today.

Our heroes are over there where the white crosses are. We’re survivors over here. None of us are heroes. I don’t think you’ll talk to a man who says we are. You figure a hero is someone who does above and beyond the call of duty, and when you give your life that’s as above and beyond as you can get.

People come up to you and say you’re a hero. I can’t claim to that. “I was just an ordinary soldier with a bunch of good guys.” That’s all I can say about that.

Being a hero? I don’t even care for the word. I’m an individual that had a job to do. I don’t feel that I’m any kind of a hero. I’m just an ordinary guy like I’m supposed to be. To me, the work had to be done. I was asked to do it. So I did. When I lecture to kids I tell them the same thing: don’t brag that you’re anything more than you are.

Do I think I’m a hero? No. The only heroes we have in Easy Company are the guys who got themselves on a KIA list. The word “hero” is not a word any of the guys would use on anyone they know or on themselves. Everybody did what they had to do at the time it needed to be done.

What would I want today’s generations to know about World War II? It’s important that we relate World War II to what’s going on today. We have to realize there are always going to be people out there who want what we have. The only way this country exists today is because there are 3.5 million men and women (from 1776 to today) who have died in the name of liberty for the United States. It does no good to wish that other countries would simply lay down their arms and be nice to us. It ain’t going to happen. Unless you’re willing to stand up and be counted for what you believe in, you will lose all of the freedoms that are important to you.

In closing, I think of the family friends, neighborhood buddies, high school classmates, and college dormmates who didn’t come home, not to mention the E Company guys who were killed.

Freedom isn’t, and never will be, free.

Heroes? I think they’re all dead. These guys who saw a lot of combat, I really respect them, but I think they’d agree with that statement—the real heroes are no longer with us.

Like Major Winters said, I’m not a hero, but I fought with a company of heroes.

I feel honored that I have been one of the chosen few to tell of my experiences. My hope is that my story and those of others will encourage today’s youth to carry on a legacy of freedom for all. I hope we can open the eyes of today’s younger people to what is going on in the world and awaken them before it is too late. We are too apathetic today. The dictators we had in the World War II era, they’re similar to the dictators of today. Freedom is never free. My message to the new generation is to value the freedoms that you enjoy.

I want to say this: no man comes out of war intact. It leaves lasting scars on the mightiest of men. For the men still returning from wars today, it helps to talk.

After I was discharged from the army I buried any thoughts of the war and resolved to have no contact with the men. My mind was always tormented. Nights for me were long and often sleepless. When I closed my eyes I saw many horrible sights from the battlefield. The only time I escaped was when I was busy with family, work, or hobbies. My body suffered, too. My ears had taken a beating from the loud shelling, screaming meemies, and explosions that I endured for such long periods of time. Today I am totally deaf in one ear and almost so in the other. There are many activities that I just have to avoid altogether because of what they do to my ears. I had suffered from long periods of dizziness and headaches all those years.

In 2001 I got my letter saying that Easy Company and our families were all invited to Paris for the premiere of the
Band of Brothers
movie. My first reaction was to throw it away, just as I had the letters I had gotten way earlier from Stephen Ambrose, but we also got called on the phone and so did some of my kids. Of course, everyone wanted to go to Paris. I said, “No!” as loud as I could. One day my wife asked me why. I told her how I never wanted to remember the war again. She asked a tough question: “How is your strategy working so far?”

I just looked at her and said, “Nothing works.”

“Well, why not try something different?” she asked. “What do you have to lose?”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s go,” and it all started.

We gathered up the kids and went to the premiere in Paris and the memorial service in Normandy. There, I experienced the extreme gratitude of the people who attended the service. People came up to us in tears, hugged us, and thanked us for liberating their parents. I discovered that they have been having memorial services and celebrating their liberation every year since the war was over. They never forgot. Since then, my wife and I have attended every Easy Company reunion and have made three trips to Europe. One to France, one to Germany and one to Belgium.

Has talking about the war helped? I still have many sleepless nights, but I don’t see the horrors. I still have dizzy spells and headaches, but not anything like they were for all those years. So, I would have to say, yes, it has all slowed down, and the visions are gone. It certainly didn’t get worse, as I feared it would. I have really enjoyed seeing some old friends from Easy Company, and I will continue to go to all the reunions as long as I physically can.

The idea of being a hero is ridiculous. You just did what you had to do.

When I was a teenager I took freedom for granted until I got through the army and saw what the Nazis had done in Germany. Then I realized that freedom isn’t automatic; it has a price.

World War II was a justified and necessary war. Last year I met five survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp. The things that happened to those people should never have happened to any human being.

Do I think my actions in the war were heroic? No, I don’t. I’m even uncomfortable with the word. I was part of a generation of young men who did what had to be done.

I don’t consider myself a hero. Most of us were just doing a job: here’s a rifle, you guard this—that’s not being a hero. I look at the guys who went through Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne as heroes.

What would I want people today to know about World War II? The children today have to know more about what happened in the past or they will be destined to relive it. Kids today don’t get enough history. I talk in front of classes of schools today, and the question I get asked most often is, “How many Germans did you shoot?” But often the high school students are more interested in the overall picture. That’s a good sign for our country. That’s how we figure what life’s about.

What does it mean to be a hero? I don’t know how to answer that. Were my actions heroic in the war? I’ll say this: all the heroes are the ones buried over there—the men who never came back.

I think of the guys who started at the beginning and went all the way through as being heroes. I’ve never thought of myself as being a hero.

Thoughts on war? I think you should stay out of them if you can, but if you get in ’em, you should win. These people right now who’re talking about cutting and running out of Iraq, that irritates me. If you’re going to do something, do it. Once you go in, you don’t change your mind. You’ve got to win it. During World War II, if somebody wanted us to cut and run, they would have hung him.

Nowadays it’s nothing unusual to meet people and have them know who you are. They’ll say, “You’re a regular hero.” But we don’t look upon ourselves as heroes—at least I don’t. We had too many people left over there.

IN MEMORIAM

 

Norman Neitzke died December 8, 2008, at age eighy-two,
while this book was in the final stages of production.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In August 1992 I moved to Los Angeles and began a graduate program. I had registered late, and all the on-campus housing was filled at the university. The only room I could find to rent was from my adviser’s father, a World War II veteran named Nate Miller.

Nate was seventy-two. His wife had recently died, so his son thought it might be good for him to have company. Nate had lived in the same bungalow in Buena Park since the war, raised two sons, and enjoyed a quiet life since his days in combat. Other than from high school history classes, I knew little about World War II or what its veterans had been through. I was clueless about what might come next.

Nate kept a big russet Doberman named Diana that did business all over the front lawn. Fairly soon after arriving, I mentioned to my new landlord that it might be appropriate to have the stuff picked up once in a while. “Aw, that ain’t nothing,” Nate said. “You should see a Kraut’s helmet lying on the ground when it’s still got his brains in it.”

Underneath his pillow Nate kept a loaded pistol. He warned, “If you come home late, make sure you yell so I know it’s you. I might blow a hole in your guts.” Most evenings Nate fell asleep in front of the TV. The only way into the house was through the front door, near the TV. I’d come home and face a dilemma: should I shout and wake the old man, or let him sleep and risk a bullet?

Nate spoke in monologues, often repeating stories. Most were coarse and ornery tales fit for the pool halls he frequented. His themes usually revolved around how some guy did something dumb and everybody laughed at him, or how some guy insulted somebody else and skulls were cracked and the first guy vowed he’d never do that again. But one story he told was unlike the others:

Nate was fighting in Huertgen Forest, late 1944. It was winter and freezing, with blood on the ground and heavy machine gun fire and artillery resistance. The forest was so ripped full of lead you couldn’t even cut down a tree for firewood because you’d break the saw, Nate said.

In a lull in the fighting, a group of the world’s toughest soldiers scraped snow from fallen logs, and a chaplain came and held a church service for the men. Some soldiers sat on the logs, some crouched on the snow, some stood. As many times as Nate repeated this story, he always ended with the same line: “I seen a lot of fancy churches while in Europe—huge cathedrals—but that was by far the best church I ever went to.”

Nate said it in sincerity, not to disparage cathedrals, but to mark the solemnity of the moment. For all his rough edges, Nate was a reverent man. He loved his country. He loved freedom. There was more to this man than his outer veneer ever let on.

 

In 2006 my agent phoned about a book project. Lieutenant Buck Compton wanted to write his memoirs. I agreed to the project immediately, then in a quieter moment wondered what I had done. What did I know about war? I wasn’t an expert in military history, like Stephen Ambrose. I wasn’t a thirty-year army veteran, like Colonel Kingseed, who penned Major Dick Winters’s memoirs. All I knew about war was from renting a room for one semester from Nate Miller.

As work began on Buck’s book, strangely, I felt that my ignorance brought vitality to the work. Since I didn’t know anything, I needed to ask Buck
everything
. What’s a regiment? Why do they award Silver Stars? How does a Thompson differ from an M-1? Buck was ever patient. He’d look at me, sometimes incredulous at the questions I asked, but always open and willing to explain.