We Who Are Alive and Remain (6 page)

I hunted a little as a kid, but not much—mostly squirrels, snakes, small stuff. When I was about nine or ten the cattle people paid ten dollars apiece for a cougar. My friends and I went out with Winchesters and didn’t come back in until we got at least two cougars each. Then each fall we went over to the swamps in Louisiana and picked moss to sell for mattresses. I think we got ten cents a load. We thought we were rich.

About that time, I was maybe nine, my father taught me how to swim. The Sabine River in Texas divides Texas and Louisiana. Swimming in that nasty-ass river are water moccasins, copperheads, little crocodiles. Dad threw me right in. I doggied out of that place like you never saw. But I always knew if I had a problem, he’d jump in after me. Years later he was on a merchant marine ship and got torpedoed while crossing the Atlantic. I was joking with him about the experience:

“Good thing you can swim,” I said.

“Swim?” he said. “Hell, I can’t swim.”

Was Dad hard on me? Nah. He taught me that you can do anything if you put your mind to it and don’t be afraid of it. I carried this all through my time in the war—I still carry it today: what’s going to happen is going to happen. Forget about yesterday, don’t think about tomorrow, get through today—that’s how we worked.

I laugh about it now—Dad had this old bagpipe brought over from Scotland. He couldn’t really play it but he liked to make a lot of noise. Whenever he came home he sat on the back porch with it. All the animals would take off.

In 1939, when I was thirteen, we moved up to Pennsylvania, where my father started working for an oil company. We were able to see him more there, about once every fourteen days. That’s where I gave myself the nickname Clancy. Life went better for me after that.

I’m probably the baby of the Band of Brothers. I was born January 29, 1926, didn’t join Easy Company until Hagenau, and I had my nineteenth birthday on the boat ride over to Europe. One guy my age was Johnny Martin, although he was a three-mission man. Johnny went in the service when he was fifteen, or something like that. His folks let him fib about his age to get in. By the time I got in he was already a sergeant. Some of the guys like Leo Boyle—I think he was fourteen years older than Martin and me.

After I was born we lived in Baker City, over in eastern Oregon. Mom and Dad had come out there when they were little kids in the 1890s. My grandmother taught school in a mining town called Granite, Oregon. It’s a ghost town now, but back then it was bigger than LeGrand is today.

When I was six months old, Dad went to work in timber, so we moved over to Bend, then we moved back to Nampa, Idaho. I went to all of grade school and my first two years of high school in Boise. In many ways Boise feels like home to me, even though we live in Oregon today.

My family, we were working people, but during the 1930s I don’t think there was anybody very rich. Fortunately, my dad had a pretty good job during the Depression. He made a hundred dollars a month driving a truck for a wholesale grocery company. Every other night he was home. We didn’t hurt for anything. We had plenty of clothes and a decent house, five milk cows, and a well. Every morning I pumped water for the cows and milked five cows every morning and night.

I left high school at the end of my sophomore year and was going to go into the navy. But I’m color-blind, so they wouldn’t take me. So I worked for a roofing company making paper and shingles in Portland. It burned down one night in a huge fire. Then I worked for a sand and gravel outfit driving a truck for just a little bit. I had a girlfriend from high school and her dad was the superintendent of the company out on Ross Island there in Portland. I had to go to work on a tugboat to get out there.

The next January I turned eighteen and they drafted me a few months later, in May. The draft didn’t surprise me at all. I wanted to go and had tried to get in. When I came home from the service I was going to finish high school, but they did some tests and gave me a GED instead. They did that with a lot of GIs who didn’t finish high school.

I was born in July 1922. My dad was an auto mechanic and a truck driver. He worked for P. F. Johnson and Son in Richmond, California. During the Depression, P. F. Johnson kept busy, so we never had down times, like so many people had. We never went hungry. Dad hauled a lot of produce. When it was watermelon season, we ate watermelon preserves till they were coming out of our ears. When it was apple time, we ate apple pies. The hardest thing was that Dad drove that truck such long hours. He used to haul bathtubs from Richmond to Los Angeles—five days on the road at forty-five miles per hour in those old trucks. We saw him on weekends; that was it. There were no such thing as forklifts, either—whatever Dad carried, it was all by muscle. That was Dad—muscle from top to bottom.

After five days on the road, Dad came home tired. He wanted to get some rest. Mom always complained to him about whatever me or my brothers did when he was gone. I had a half brother and three other brothers. So whenever Dad came through the front door, he just lined up the five of us boys and started at the top with a heater hose. He figured we needed a licking for one thing or another. But then it was over.

I had a good childhood, but when I got into junior high I became a little unruly. I never did anything really bad. It’s hard to know exactly what the hell turned old Principal Schellenberger against me. I didn’t hate him. I sure didn’t like him, though. I got thrown out of school and went to the California Junior Republic, a vocational high school for boys. I ended up doing pretty well at my new school. When I graduated I got the state bankers’ award and the FFA award. I studied farming and animal husbandry. In my junior year, old Pop Forester, one of the teachers, thought I was about the best thing that come down the road as far as a farmhand was concerned. I guess I’m bragging. But that’s not all—the last few years I’ve participated in county fairs. I got to drive the Budweiser Clydesdale team, twice. These are heavy draft horses. It’s not everybody who gets to do that. But I did.

My father was a cook when he enlisted into the U.S. Army in order to fight the Germans in World War I. He and his brothers and sister had immigrated to the United States from northern Scotland around 1900 and settled in Portland, Oregon. My dad decided to volunteer into an infantry company, as he felt he wasn’t really doing much to end the war as a cook. No sooner had he joined the infantry when he was seriously wounded during a German shelling. He was hospitalized in the States for a long period of time while healing.

My mother’s family also emigrated from northern Scotland around 1900. It wasn’t long before the two met and were married. My dad owned and operated restaurants in the Portland area for quite some time. Disaster struck my family as the Depression overcame the economy, and at this time my mother died, leaving my sister and I motherless.

It didn’t take long for my dad to find another mate. She had two children and was having a hard time of it, as she was divorced and living hand to mouth. Once again we were a family, this time with two boys and two girls.

We moved from Portland and bought a large house in Long Beach, Washington, a summer resort area that drew many visitors. Most people burned wood for heat and cooking, and my father, seeing an opportunity, bought a truck and began hauling scrap lumber pieces from a lumber yard some thirty miles away. It was profitable, and we four kids finished high school at Ilwaco High School in Washington.

My stepbrother was killed while taking flight training in Texas. I received the news while stationed in Aldbourne, just before the invasion of Normandy.

The Day Everything Changed

I remember it so well. I had graduated high school and was working as a tool and dye maker for GE. I had saved enough money to buy a brand-new car, a 1941 Oldsmobile. There were four buddies of mine from the neighborhood. We got together one day and started talking about taking a trip to Canada. So we decided to go to Buffalo and then cross into Canada. We crossed the border and went to a souvenir place. As we walked in, this guy was standing there with a weird stare in his eyes. He said, “You guys got your guns?”

And we’re like, “What’s he talking about?”

Then he said, “You got your uniforms?”

We said no.

“Well,” he said, “the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Everybody got so still. Right when we heard that, we turned around, got in our car, and went back to Erie. From the time we left Canada until we got back to Erie, nobody spoke a word. We knew what was happening. This meant war. Then, when we found out how bad it was—how many people had got killed and how many of our ships had got sunk—we were really mad.

Years later I met a guy who was on one of the battleships moored at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese planes came in one after another. They dropped eight torpedoes on the ship he was on. He was on one side of the boat by himself. There were about eighty or ninety guys on the other side of the boat. When the first torpedo hit, he got blown into the air about a hundred feet and went into the water. He was one of the few who survived. Those guys on those boats that were sunk—I would not have wanted to be there when that happened for anything.

I was here at home in Joliet. It was on a Sunday, and we heard it on the radio. What was my reaction? Well, a war with another country, my God. We were all surprised.

The draft was on, and we were about to be drafted. So we enlisted instead. That way we knew when we were going. I was twenty-six when I joined. We went to a theater and saw a show about paratroopers. When they said they were paying paratroopers extra money, well, that was that. Why else would we jump out of a perfectly good airplane?

I was at home. We had an old Selco radio and used to listen to the soaps. It was Sunday when the news broke. Within about two months most everybody was lying about their age to get into the service.

Did I lie? Sure. Mom let me go. She knew I was going to enlist anyway. I didn’t have a birth certificate because a midwife delivered me, so there was no way to prove how old I was. At 16 I was big for my age, 5 foot 11, about 160 pounds. So me and another couple fellows reported to the draft board and told them we were 18.

“Hell,” the man said, “you want to go in now or in two weeks?”

“We’re ready now,” we answered. They didn’t care how old we were.

What was our motivation for signing up? Everybody was real patriotic back then. Everybody helped everybody else. I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was, but our navy was there, and the enemy had killed our people. So that was enough for me.

You’ve got to think that enlisting was an adventure, too. We had all grown up watching cowboy and Indian movies. They never shot back. So we were going to go over there and the enemy was going to run away—just like in the movies.

Well, they sure didn’t do that in real life.

I was downtown in a park. There was a kid selling papers saying, “Extra! Extra!” I was with a couple other kids. We didn’t know what he was talking about. We hollered, “What’s going on?”

He said, “There’s a war. They bombed Pearl Harbor.”

We weren’t impressed. One guy said, “Aw, we’ll send a couple ships down and they’ll snake ’em. That war will take a week and they’ll be over with it.”

I enlisted that same month. I was kinda young when I went in—not yet 18. It was getting so everybody was going in the service. A lot of them were being drafted and had no choice. I saw that going on, so figured I might as well join up when I could decide what I wanted to do. All the guys I knew were enlisting. None of them were staying home.

I had just finished high school when I enlisted. They let me finish early. Usually you had to be eighteen to join the service, but somehow they passed me right through, they were probably hurting for people. I think they just turned their heads. I didn’t lie about my age, no one ever asked.

I was at an all-night party in Crockett, California, with a girl named Virginia Russell. Her dad had been a truck driver at the same place as my dad. Then her dad had taken a job at a brickyard where they lived. That’s where the party was. I stayed overnight. When we got up next morning, someone turned on the radio. Every time the music stopped, someone flipped it to another station, so it wasn’t until noon, December 7, 1941, before any of us learned about Pearl Harbor. I got right in the car and went home. The next day early in the morning I drove to San Francisco and joined up. The feeling was a little different then—I think every one of us had it. The country needed us. We needed to do what needed to be done—I like to say that the country needed it, my family needed it, and I needed it—it was that simple.

You can understand, there was an awful lot of confusion in the system all at once. So they signed me up in the army and sent me home, saying as soon as we’ve got some place to send you, we’ll be in touch. That was December 8.

Well, on December 9, I got into an automobile wreck. I went to the big army hospital in Frisco—Letterman General. The car had rolled over on me. I had been driving with my mother and another fellow. (Dad had gone back into the army when they called up the National Guard, and my mother divorced him then.) I had a broken collarbone, broken pelvis, broken arm, and was smashed on the side of the head. I was all screwed up. I was in the hospital until May 1, 1942. When I got out, the army said they couldn’t use me anymore because of the accident. So I was no longer a soldier.

I went back to my job as an apprentice carpenter. I worked for a guy with one arm, digging ditches for foundations, doing the crapwork, really low. I hated the job. I had always lived around a lot of construction—that’s how I got the job. You follow the flow, that’s how it goes.