Shifty's War

by Marcus Brotherton

  After I’d worked maybe twenty-three years at the mine, I decided to retire. I piddled around in my garden for a while, then helped build my house. It wasn’t a big house. Just comfortable, with a good wide porch out in front for sitting. We built our house in 1986. The McClure River ran right next to that house, and a railway ran right next to the road. We got an opportunity to name the little road in the neighborhood, too, and Dorothy told me to call it Shifty Lane, so that’s what the sign says. The coal trains came regular out of Kentucky and went to Kingsport and beyond, but the noise didn’t bother us none. Trains had been around these parts as long as I could remember, and I liked the way they sounded. One of the best things about our new house was that hummingbirds came around. I put up a feeder on our front porch, and I bet there were twenty of them before long. Sometimes the ants crawled up and messed with the feeder, and that was an aggravation to me, but I found if I put a little cooking oil where the feeder was hanging up there, then the ants couldn’t cause a fuss. That’s what occupied my mind much of the time. Things like that, you know.

  Well, I ran for the county supervisor seat somewhere in there, because I figured there were lots of things that a man could do to get things done right, but I lost the nomination. Somebody joked that it was a good thing, too, because I was too honest for politics. So, losing that seat was okay by me. Let somebody else run things. Fine.

  I’d always done the grocery shopping for Dorothy and me, for as long back as I could remember. Each week I’d read the newspaper ads and get the best prices. I’d always go to the same place—Food City, it was called, and I got to be good friends with the managers. Oh, sometimes they’d aggravate me, sure. One day they advertised a special sale on chicken. I went and they were all out. I told the manager, “If you’re gonna advertise it, make sure you got enough to sell.” But they were fine folks there, they really were.

  Now, I never told anybody this, maybe only my son Wayne when he grew older, but the real reason I liked grocery shopping was that I’d meet my brothers there each week and we’d slip some brandy drinking into our shopping. We’d each take a nip or two, walk around the store a bit, then go stand outside Food City and talk and have another drink or two, you know. That was our secret, and that’s how it went for a long while.

  Sad to say, my brothers all died a while back, one by one. None of them were as old as they needed to be before they passed, and it was real sad for me for some time. My mother died, too, around that time, but she’d lived long and healthy and was full of years and joy. Somehow it wasn’t as sad when she passed, though I missed her dearly. My sister Gaynelle’s still living and going strong. She married young and lives over in Roanoke, about four hours away. I love her richly, I surely do.

  Well, most other things went well for me in this latter season of life, but one day I was out trout fishing, see, and my eyes starting blurring to bait the hook. I’d been noticing things go wrong like that for some time, but hadn’t said anything. Fortunately, my grandson Clay was with me and he helped bait my hook, but I was worried just the same.

  I went to the doctor, and he said my eyesight was about to get real bad. I couldn’t say I liked the sound of that one bit. Sure enough, what the doctor said started coming true. The doctor called it macular degeneration, MD for short. It meant I was losing all my eyesight except for my peripheral vision. I kept driving, mind you. I guess I knew the roads around here as good as anyone. But I’d go to Food City, and they’d move things around on me, I guessed, because I couldn’t find things like I used to. Or I’d go to watch basketball games, same as always, but things would get real blurry out on the court. I’d talk to Shanghai Nickles, he was usually announcing the game, and say, “Now, Shanghai, you call the game real clear, you hear. You got to be my eyes for me, you know.” And he would. But it wasn’t the same, you know. It wasn’t the same.

  Well. Shit. I started having some powerful chest pains one day, and they took me in and said my heart was choked up. They opened my heart right up, they did, and I had bypass surgery. Then I got over that, but then along came prostate cancer, and that sure causes a fella a heap of aggravation. But I took radiation treatments and beat the cancer. So that took care of that.

  After my treatments, my eyes started getting real bad. I always loved to read, you know, but it got so I couldn’t even see the words on a page anymore, not even out of the corners of my eyes. I loved Westerns—anything by Louis L’Amour. My favorite book of his was called Last of the Breed. I used to read it over and over again. I also liked anything by Ian Fleming, the guy who wrote James Bond. And Last of the Mohicans was one of the best books ever written, as far as I was concerned. But then I couldn’t read anymore, so I got the idea of getting books on tape through the visually handicapped organization. I’d sit in my chair and listen to tapes, but it wasn’t the same.

  A fella starts feeling real down about himself when his health turns. I’d have good days and bad days, but I started having more bad days than not. The life I was living wasn’t the life I wanted to live anymore. I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do. I didn’t look forward to anything anymore. The devil starts whispering powerful lies in a fella’s ear when he’s not feeling healthy, and if a fella’s not careful, he starts to believe those lies. A man like me had lived his life as well as could be lived, I figured, and there’s something to be said for climbing off a horse while it’s still kicking, you know. So I wondered, you know. I’d be sitting in my chair day after day feeling bad about things, smoking my cigarettes, wondering if my time was up. I felt so low. Most days. So low. That’s how I felt. My kids were worried I was depressed, but I never liked that word much. Still, I wondered if anything could ever make me feel better. And I doubted anything could.

  Well, then, wouldn’t you know it, one day I got a phone call.

  And everything got set to change.

  16

  THE BAND OF BROTHERS

  Back in 1992, a book had been written about Easy Company by this historian named Stephen Ambrose. He’d called me on the phone a few times and we’d talked. That was the input I had in the book. Seemed like a friendly enough fella, and after that book came out he mailed me a copy. Well, I read it, scowled, and mailed it right back. I never fussed to anybody in particular about it, but Mister Ambrose had gotten things dead wrong. Not everything in the book, mind you, just one important section. Important to me, anyway. I don’t know exactly who had given him wrong information, but in his book it said that when it was real cold and miserable out there in Bastogne, Lieutenant Shames had given me an order to go out on a patrol, and I’d plumb refused to go.

  To an old military man like me, that was a slap in the face. I’d never disobeyed an order. Not even in the worst conditions. I might have grumbled a bit, but I always did my duty. Well, I called up Lieutenant Shames and asked him if he’d seen the book, and he told me he didn’t like it either and he’d never said anything like that fool story about me to Mister Ambrose. So somewhere lines had gotten crossed, and I understand how that can happen in a book when an author is talking with a lot of fellas. But still, I wasn’t happy.

  Time passed, and I pretty much forgot about things. The book wasn’t a best seller—not at first. I think one guy from work read it. He said, “Really? You were in all that stuff over in the war? How come you never talked to me about it?”

  “I never talked to anyone about it,” I said.

  My daughter, Margo, wrote to Mister Ambrose and asked him to change things. I think Herb Suerth, the president of the Men of Easy Company Association, did that, too. I heard he told Ambrose I was the best noncom in Easy Company. Well, I don’t know about all that, but I guess Mister Ambrose checked things out more and agreed to take that wrong section out of the book. He called me up and explained things, and we had a good talk. He said the section would be removed in a later edition. And it was.

  Well, some years passed, and that phone call came, the one that made me much more happy. It came one day out of the blue
and was from Playtone Studios, a movie company out in Hollywood. Seemed that two famous fellas by the names of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg had read Mister Ambrose’s book, and they’d liked it a lot. They figured that enough time had passed since World War II that a lot of folks who maybe hadn’t been around then might want to know what had gone on during those years, and they liked the idea that the book traced the story of only one company of soldiers. Plenty of other books about the war had been written, see, but those other books were more about the generals, the higher-ups, the strategy at the upper-brass level. Mister Ambrose’s book talked about war from the common man’s point of view. That was us.

  The fella from the studios wanted to know if they could fly out to Clinchco and interview me. They wanted to hear my words and record some of them for a documentary part of the movie. The idea tickled me. Imagine, someone making a movie with me in it. So I said yes, and they flew out with a camera crew and an interviewer, and we had ourselves a good time. They were real nice folks from Playtone, and I showed them my garden and my rifles, and I let them shoot my M1 off my front porch, like I often did. They asked me all sorts of questions about the war. I knew they wouldn’t use all the material, and that didn’t matter. I just tried to answer the questions as best as I knew.

  I wasn’t a complete stranger to moviemaking ways, mind you. A few years earlier a movie had been made, which they called Saving Private Ryan. It was a fictional story, but based on true events that happened around Normandy. Mister Ambrose had also written a few paragraphs about the true events in his book Band of Brothers. The real “Private Ryan” was a fella named Fritz Niland. He grew up in Tonawanda, New York, about five doors down from Skip Muck. Fritz was in the 101st, but in a different outfit, so he came around every so often to visit Skip when we were in Europe. Don Malarkey and Joe Toye became friends of his, and they met up for beers a few times. Anyway, the interesting thing about that movie was that they’d based one of the characters in it on me—the sniper in the group who looks for Private Ryan. At least that’s what was said, but I don’t know how close the connection was. I saw the movie and liked it fine, although it showed the sniper fella using a scope on his rifle. I never used a scope. None of us did. I wouldn’t say we even had a real sniper in our outfit. McClung, Sergeant Taylor, and me were about the three best shots in the company, but we always just aimed our rifles at whatever we needed to, then hit whatever we needed to hit. Still, I wouldn’t fault the movie none for showing a scope on a rifle. It was a really well made picture show. It was.

  Well, a while after the folks from Playtone visited, a nice young actor named Peter Youngblood Hills phoned me up and asked if he could also come by for a spell. He was going to play me in the Band of Brothers miniseries. From him, I learned this wasn’t going to be just one movie, but a lot of different episodes they were going to show on a cable channel called HBO. I said sure, I’d like to meet Peter. It also tickled me to think that some fine-looking young fella was going to play my character on TV.

  Peter flew over from London, where they were working on the series. He spent a day and a night with us in our home, and asked me all sorts of questions about my life, about how I did things, how I said things. I showed him how I carried my rifle and what kind it was. Lot of guys used the carbine, you know, and some guys used Thompsons, but I always liked the M1 Garand best. Even though I couldn’t see very well, I still knew my way around Dickenson County, so I drove Peter up to Cumberland Gap where you can see several states from this one point. All the while he asked about little mannerisms I had. How I said certain words. He was practicing the way I talked, you know. I told him I talked like everybody else, you know, but he was studying hard to get my accent down, I reckoned that’s what they call it. I didn’t believe I have an accent, and I told Peter exactly that. He just grinned. Well, Peter was a fine boy, and we were all getting along real swell. I joked to Peter that Dorothy and me might want to adopt him as one of our own. But then we went to town one night and took him to eat. My, that boy could attack a plate of food, and afterward I said, “You know, Peter, you better forget about that adopting business—I can’t afford to feed you.”

  In 2001, the Band of Brothers miniseries was all set to come out. HBO flew all of us in Easy Company who were able over to Normandy for the premiere. That was real nice of them, and I hadn’t been back to Europe since the war. We were driving to the premiere at Utah Beach, and one of the producers turned around in the van and said, “You know, in about ten minutes your life is going to change forever.” None of us old-timers had any idea what he meant. Some of the men were rattled when they saw the showing, but that wasn’t what the producer was getting at. We’d still need to find that out for ourselves. Now, I liked the show real fine. It was only a movie after all, close to the real thing, but only close. You could never truly show how scared a man was, how hungry and cold he truly was. You could never explain it. You just had to live through it to understand.

  After the miniseries, we all went back home, and life did indeed start to get different. Folks would stop you on the street and say, “Hey, Shifty, I saw you on TV last night.” That was the beginning of what the producer was talking about. Those comments felt okay to me, you know, I was the same as I’d always been. In fact, I was happy at what the series was doing. After the war, I just came back to the States and lived my life without talking to anybody, you know. But Band of Brothers was serving a greater purpose. It was the first time that things about World War II had been publicized in a big way. For years and years, the war and all the veterans who’d fought in it had gone unrecognized. After the miniseries came out, there was a new sense of gratefulness—for veterans everywhere, not just those who served in World War II.

  Now, some folks wondered why all this fuss was being made over Easy Company, and I thought they had a point. We knew our outfit had been well trained. We were one of the best companies the American Army had at the time, and we were proud of that. Sure. But we also knew that we weren’t the only company to do good things or suffer losses. Easy Company became sort of a symbol for all other elite outfits, I guessed. But I wished somehow that all the outfits could have had all the recognition that Easy Company started to get.

  About a year went by, and I guess that Band of Brothers mini-series did real well on HBO, for soon we got news that it had been nominated for a bunch of Emmy Awards. In 2002, HBO flew us out to Hollywood to take part in the awards show. I had to slap my knee when I saw a bunch of old soldiers all decked out in tuxedos, riding in limousines. There was One Lung McClung, Moe Alley, Hayseed Rogers—all the guys who’d once shared foxholes together were now strolling down the red carpet.

  I shook hands with David Schwimmer, the fella who played Captain Sobel in the series. He was a real nice fella and we talked for a while. I thought he did an excellent job of portraying Captain Sobel and I told him so, although the first thing I said to him was, “I think I want to knock the shit out of you.” He got the joke and laughed. I wasn’t really aggravated. Not after all those years. Captain Sobel wasn’t all that bad. I knew all his hard training helped get us through the war.

  For the actual awards show, Major Winters stayed in the auditorium for the telecast, but they took the rest of us over to the St. Regis Hotel nearby, so they’d have enough seats for us all. That was fine. The plan was that when the nominations and winners were announced, they were going to combine shots of us with Major Winters and what was happening on stage, split-screen style. I started studying that and thought, You know, I’d like all my hillbilly friends back in Clinchco to see that I’m really here in Hollywood on TV. So I asked the boy in charge if I could move my chair up a few rows. He said okay. But then I got seated up in the front row, and that boy behind the camera was swinging the camera over only so far, and it didn’t look to me like he was gonna get me on camera after all. So I pulled him aside, and he recognized my name and that I was known as the sharpshooter in the series, so I said, “I’m noticing that you’re not brin
ging the camera down to where I’m sitting. If you don’t move that camera, I’ll shoot you right between the eyes.” He had a good chuckle, and then, during the ceremony, the cameraman looked over at me. The camera still wasn’t on me, so I gave him a stone-faced glare and tapped my finger right between my eyes. I guess that boy got the message, for he brought the camera on over and it showed me on screen.

  After the Emmys were over and Band of Brothers won five or six awards, we all went to this fancy restaurant in Hollywood called Spago to celebrate. Tom Hanks was milling about over there, and Mister Hanks and I had a real fine talk. We were passing around the Emmy statue he’d won, and he asked me what I might do with it. I said I might take it home and fix it to the hood of my jeep. He had a good laugh.

  Well, we all went home from Hollywood after that, but what that producer said to us in the back of the van about our lives never being the same started coming true rapid-fire. I started getting mail. Lots of mail. Fan mail. Folks wanting books signed, pictures, hats. I tried to answer all the mail, sign whatever I could, but it was hard because I wasn’t able to see so well. Fortunately, I got to be good friends with a fella named Johnny Sykes, the postmaster at the Clinchco post office. I developed a routine where I’d come to the post office every day at the same time and say, “Hello post office,” and Johnny Sykes would take a break and talk with me. He’d read all my mail out loud to me, and help me sign where things needed to be signed. We talked all the while, about politics, taxes, fishing, whatever. Johnny Sykes became a real good friend over time. My fishing days were pretty much over by then, but he’d often catch a mess of fish and bring me some.

  I’d get phone calls, too. And I didn’t mind speaking to people on the phone. Sometimes folks wanted to come meet me. A fella came with a camera one day and walked up on the porch where I was sitting having a cigarette. I stood to shake his hand and the first thing he said was, “Well, holy cow. You’re really real.”