We Who Are Alive and Remain (36 page)

In the 1960s, author George Koskimaki was writing a book about the 101st Airborne and sent my father a questionnaire. Through Floyd Talbert’s brother, Bob, I was later able to get a copy of the questionnaire that showed Dad’s recollections of D-day. Dad was originally slated to be in the Easy Company Headquarters plane that went down on D-day [flight 66, with company commander Thomas Meehan and all Headquarters staff aboard], and was pulled off the flight just prior to takeoff by Dick Winters, thus saving his life. Nobody seems to know exactly why, except the plane was probably overcrowded. Dad flew to Normandy in another plane. Beforehand in the marshaling area, Dad described hearing pop music blaring through speakers before the flight, hit songs such as “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree.” The men ate steaks and ice cream as a last meal. Dad got airsick on the way over and threw up shortly after landing in an apple orchard in Normandy. He was a demolitions specialist and was tasked with blowing cables in a certain manhole, but he never reached the vicinity. This was a skill that came in handy later in his job as a case officer for the CIA in Laos.

Shortly after landing he paired up with Bob Rader, who ended up being a lifelong friend. They soon found Frank Perconte, who had been injured in the jump. The three joined with others. They “engaged in a minor firefight with ‘White Russians’ near St. Come-au-Mont.” Then “disengaged and continued to press on toward Vierville.” At dawn they joined with Easy Company.

Dad was wounded twice in World War II, once by shrapnel on D-day plus six in Carentan, France, and another time in the attack on Foy, Belgium, on January 13, 1945, earning him two Purple Hearts. After a stay in the hospital with Frank Perconte, who was wounded the same day, he rejoined Easy Company in Germany prior to the end of the war.

One of the most important things I ever learned about my father’s character was found in a condolence letter written in 1944 to the family of the late Salty Harris, one of Dad’s good friends who had died in Carentan a few days after the D-day invasion. Dad wrote, “Anything I can say or do is absolutely worthless, I know. The only course open is to pledge myself to the cause of making sure that things he died for are not forgotten.”

That statement gave me such insight into my father’s motivation for living. His was an ironic calling. On one hand he was a cultured man who enjoyed books, music, art, animals, and the outdoors. On the other hand he dedicated his life to being “an expert in violence,” as he later described himself. I truly believe that Dad believed he had a calling to be a soldier, the same way doctors are called into medicine or priests are called into the ministry. He wanted to make the world a safer place for his children, something his colleagues in later years repeated to me often. One of the air force pilots who flew in Laos when my father was there wrote me a letter in 2001 describing this calling:

After World War II Dad came home to Los Angeles, where he married my mother, Mary Jane, and they had my brother, Scott, my sister, Sandra, and me. They settled in the San Francisco Bay Area after my brother was born to raise their family. Dad was a lithographer by trade, but he never really enjoyed it. He told me once that he had somehow settled for a life of mowing the lawn and paying the mortgage; at least that’s how he felt. He always seemed restless to me, anxious for adventure. My mother often said she thought he had a “death wish.” He stayed active in the Army Reserves and rose to the rank of major over the years. In the 1960s he received Special Forces training and became a Green Beret. He was soon recruited by the CIA to be a paramilitary specialist in the “secret” war in Laos, where he went in 1966. His job as a case officer was to assist and train the Hmong hill tribe and other irregular forces to fight the Communist forces during the Vietnam war.

I was able to visit Dad twice while he was in Laos. I saved all of his letters to me during the seven years he was assigned there. He wrote to me about books I should read, or music he was enjoying, college and career advice, or comments on my boyfriends—all the typical father- teenage daughter stuff. In 1969, when things on the American home front were really heating up, I wrote a letter to Dad expressing my confusion. He wrote back to me, commenting on the irony of the times we lived in then:

Dad seemed to find his life’s calling in Southeast Asia, although his time there was not easy. He was wounded in 1970 and also contracted malaria, dysentery, and pneumonia. He stayed in Laos until 1974, when he returned to the United States, settling near the CIA headquarters in Virginia. While in Southeast Asia, he continued to perform his Army Reserve duties, and possibly rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. (We have had trouble verifying this with the army. My father told me and several friends that he made lieutenant colonel, but this remains unconfirmed, although we had this rank placed on my dad’s grave.) Several of my father’s CIA and other military friends tell me today that he used to talk to them about his days in Easy Company, saying his Easy Company comrades were the best soldiers he ever fought with. In addition to the fighting, Dad worked with U.S. relief agencies and family and friends to get food, clothing, and other donations for the Hmong villages, especially the children. He built a home for several young Hmong soldiers, orphans that he felt were too young to fight the war, and taught English to the Hmong children in his quiet evening hours. One of those boys, Da Yang, became like a son to him, and my sister and I met him on one of our visits. I recently located Da, and he still calls my father “Dad” and remarks on his kindness. I have a picture of Dad shaking hands with Savang Vatthana, the last king of Laos.

Dad returned to the States and became the CIA’s liaison officer to the first newly formed Delta Force, an elite military group that rescues American hostages anywhere in the world. He trained for about two years with Delta Force and took part in their failed mission in 1980 to free American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. He fortunately returned safely from that mission. During the debriefings the following week he was proud to tell us he had met President Jimmy Carter.

The weekend after he returned from the Mideast, my father went hang gliding. He did it to relax—that’s the type of man he was. He enjoyed hiking, fishing, and camping, even in the snow (which makes sense now that I know more about what Easy Company endured in Bastogne), and being active in the outdoors in some manner. While up in the air, the unthinkable happened: Dad stalled in a wind gradient and plunged about a hundred feet to the ground. After long months in the hospital for bone grafts and nerve splicing, he retired from the CIA on a medical disability and moved west to be closer to us. He wanted to spend his last years with my mother and be near the rest of the family. My father and mother always stayed married, but I know it was a difficult marriage for both of them. He was not a perfect person by any means. I think he was always trying to find himself. Still, in the end, he chose my mother to come home to when he knew he didn’t have long to live.

While recovering from injuries sustained in the accident, doctors performed another bone graft in his leg, but this one wouldn’t take. His body was rejecting the graft, and we discovered that Dad had lung cancer. In the following months I probably spent more time with my father on a day-to-day basis than in my entire adult lifetime to that point. I lived near him in Arizona, and eventually we both moved back in with my mother in San Diego. I sat up nights talking to him about life and death. Oddly enough, we did not discuss his World War II years, although they were heavy on his mind as his friends called and visited him a lot during that time. We talked about movies he wanted to see, books he wanted to read, people he wanted to visit.

Dad knew his time was short. He drove a motorcycle then, and in his last few months often zipped around on the cycle to visit friends from Easy Company, including Buck Compton, who lived nearby, in San Diego County, at the time. He corresponded with or talked on the phone to Dick Winters, Don Malarkey, Bill Guarnere, Bob Rader, Mike Ranney, Pat Christenson, Bull Randleman, and many more. The guys wrote to encourage him, saying, “Hang tough.” I still have all those cards and letters from those times. Many of the men of Easy Company have since told me that they came to visit Dad in his last weeks. Others tried but never touched base. The devotion of the men really means a lot to me. I think my father would be astonished but proud that I became friends with many of those men and their families in later years.

Dad fought the cancer tooth and nail. He had spent so many years in near-death situations that to die of cancer felt degrading. “To die over a lousy pack of cigarettes is just plain embarrassing,” he told me once. As sick as he was, he kept lists in his pockets of things he wanted to do, trips he wanted to take, household remodeling tasks, letters to friends he wanted to write.

The illness left Dad so tired and depressed. “If this isn’t dying, what does dying feel like?” he said to me once. Around Thanksgiving of that year he decided to go hang gliding again. He wanted to fly in the air one last time. When he walked out the door, my mother and I both wondered aloud if he was going to jump off a cliff and end his life, choosing to die on his own terms. Three days later he returned from his trip, and I was relieved. “I’m so weak,” he told me, “I’m just so weak.” He was crying.

Right around then he called many of his closest friends and said, “I just wanted to say good-bye.” He just needed to hear their voices one last time. Many of them didn’t really believe he was so near the end. I think my father’s life was blessed with deep, lifelong friendships. People either worshipped him or didn’t care for his personality. He was opinionated and had a temper, but predominately he was very beloved and made a lasting impact on people’s lives.

My father died an ugly, painful death, just horrible and slow, terrified as he coughed up blood and pieces of lung tissue for days at the end. He was coherent and talking until the night before he died. I feel so fortunate that I was able to tell him that I loved him and that he was my best friend. He died January 7, 1983, at age fifty-eight. I was with him until just moments before he took his last breath.

He was cremated and interred at the military cemetery at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. The cemetery sits on a beautiful bluff looking over San Diego Harbor on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. I think he would like it there. I live in Wisconsin now but try to visit my mother once a year and always stop by to put flowers on Dad’s grave. Alex Penkala, who died in Bastogne, has a nephew, Tim Penkala, who lives in San Diego. Every year on Memorial Day, Tim and his daughters place flowers on my father’s grave site as a tribute to my father and the men of Easy Company.

I have a copy of a letter written from Easy Company veteran Mike Ranney to Dick Winters eighteen days after my father died. It is perhaps the memory I hold closest. It sums up his life and the men he served with so well. Mike wrote: