Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  Bernice’s father, Louie—he’d come from Croatia—ran the Liberty Grill on Commercial Street and I got a job there as a busboy. Her dad seemed to think I was OK and I thought he was, too. In 1922, the Astoria Fire had leveled most of downtown, but in a time when a lot of people gave up, he rebuilt. I always admired that, along with the Grill’s hamburger steak and mashed potatoes. The Grill also made wonderful clam chowder, heavy on the clams. Once, when President Franklin Roosevelt went salmon fishing on the Columbia, his aides would motor ashore and bring him back Liberty Grill chowder, on his request. Bernice was proud of her dad for that, and who could blame her?

  One day at the Liberty Grill, this bar pilot looked up from his newspaper and asked me what I thought Germany was going to do with France. He was surprised that I actually had an answer.

  “Germany,” I said, “is like the Notre Dame of Europe. Powerful. France and all of Europe is in big trouble.”

  The next day, Louie, the owner, told me a guy had overheard me talking about Germany at the counter yesterday. He was with the FBI, and sure enough this guy wanted to know how I knew so much about the war in Europe, which seemed odd because I’d just been reading the papers. It was a time of great suspicion, those late thirties. The world seemed on the brink of something bad, but we just weren’t sure what that something was.

  I graduated from Astoria High in the spring of 1939, and with my father and mother not working, I had no money to attend the University of Oregon, my school of choice. So I decided I’d put myself through school on my own. I got a job loading ships and blending flour at the Pillsbury Flour Mill in Astoria, at the time one of the country’s largest-volume export mills to the Far East. I stowed some money away for college and bought a ’36 Chevrolet.

  I left grandma’s house and lived in an apartment that Bernice’s father owned on Franklin Avenue. Bernice was still my girl; when she was selected as a princess in the Queen’s Court of the Astoria Regatta, she naturally chose me as her escort. I worked at the mill during the day and bused dishes at the Liberty Grill at night. One foggy September evening—on the northern-Oregon coast, no month is safe from the stuff—I was cleaning up a table when I saw a copy of The Evening Astoria-Budget, its front page ringed with the circles of a few coffee cups and its main headline tinged with dread:

  FIGHTING UNDERWAY

  I had the same feeling I had had when the farmer had burst into the doors of that camp mess hall to tell us a forest fire was headed our way.

  3

  “MOM, DON’T WORRY, I’LL BE BACK”

  Eugene and Astoria, Oregon

  September 1939 to September 1942

  I entered the University of Oregon in the fall of 1941, having worked two years and sold my car to afford it. I’d almost been predestined to go to UO, given the pipeline between Eugene and my older Astoria friends, and my dad and uncle Bob having gone there. The college was about 150 miles southeast of Astoria, at the lower end of the Willamette Valley.

  Eugene was lush, rainy, but not nearly as wet as what I’d been used to, and sprinkled liberally with Douglas fir trees and coeds with beautiful legs. Elsewhere in the world, Germany, after the Czechoslovakia takeover and the conquest of Poland, was taking over countries with a sort of devil-may-care arrogance: Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and others—and bombing the hell out of Great Britain. America instituted a peacetime draft because President Franklin Roosevelt supported Great Britain, which had declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland. America was sending the British money, weapons, and machinery. The common thinking was that America’s involvement in this war wasn’t a matter of if, but when. Meanwhile, I tried to ignore the possibilities.

  In some ways, college was like a grown-up version of life on the Nehalem. An escape of sorts. I joined the Sigma Nu fraternity on Eleventh Street, where my father and uncle Bob had been members back in the teens. I still worked—this time, washing dishes at the fraternity and at a sorority, which, for obvious reasons, was more fun than working at my own house. Both jobs were far easier than tossing around thirty-pound salmon or loading cargo ships. I partied, sang with the fraternity choir, and watched football games at Hay-ward Field and basketball games at McArthur Court. I even went to classes regularly, deciding to get a degree in business administration.

  Bernice, who’d gone a year to Marylhurst College in Portland, transferred to Oregon when I began there. We dated for a while, but she hadn’t pledged a sorority and I took so much ribbing from my fraternity brothers that I broke up with her. That was a stupid reason to part, but when you’re young, sometimes you do stupid things.

  What I remember most about that first year, other than a mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) class all male students were required to take because of the war in Europe, were a couple of poems I memorized. On my entrance exam for the University of Oregon, I remember being told I was among the few newcomers who wouldn’t need to take bonehead English because Star of the Sea had prepared me so well. One poem I learned at Oregon was Milton’s “On His Blindness.” Another was “Gunga Din,” by Rudyard Kipling, about this water boy during war who earns the praise of his military master. It reminded me of a certain twelve-year-old boy carrying buckets of water out of Lost Lake Creek to help save a man’s farm. I didn’t think it was all that emotional a poem, but when I recited it in a freshman English class, two students in the front row were in tears.

  The other poem I loved, by William Ernest Henley, was called “Invictus”:

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  It’s strange how when you’re young and learning stuff, you never stop to think that someday you might use whatever it is you’re learning. But even though, in the thirties, I thought “Invictus” was little more than an inspiring poem about not giving up, I would—in war—find a strength in those words that sometimes got me through another day.

  “You don’t seem like the poetry type,” one of my fraternity brothers once told me.

  “I know, you think of me more like the Frank Sinatra type,” I said, laughing.

  One Sunday morning in early December, I was washing pots and pans left over from a Saturday-night dinner at the house when a fraternity brother rushed in.

  “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!” he said.

  “Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?” I asked, a naive question for a guy who’d been acing geography all through school.

  The big question in the fraternity that week was what branch of the service we were each headed for. Fall term wound to a close. I took my finals, though I missed an ROTC test because I was in the student infirmary with yet another ear infection. Then I packed for my trip home, knowing, down the road, I’d be off to war in some way, shape, or form. I was a Malarkey. That’s just what we did. Never thought twice about finding some way out, even though I would soon be offered one.

  Everywhere you went, talk was of the war. I had a good friend from Astoria who was also going to school at the University of Oregon, a Japanese kid named Tom Hayashi. He was an excellent swimmer and basketball player. His folks ran some kind of store. Shortly after the bombing, I saw him leaning against the wall of the library, near a bunch of phones. He was crying.

  “What’s the matter, Tommy?” I asked.

  He pa
used a moment and shook his head a bit. “Just talked to my folks back in Astoria. People are throwing rocks through the windows at their store.” The idea sickened me. I never saw him again; like most Japanese during those times, he was probably soon shipped off to one of those internment camps.

  On December 15, I hitchhiked north to Portland and was in the bus depot when I noticed a Marine Corps recruiting sign across the street. What the heck; I had a little time to kill, so I sauntered over and took a physical exam. The doctor said I was 100 percent fit—except for one thing. After checking my mouth, he said my teeth weren’t up to snuff. No explanation. (Many years later, I learned the marines had a regulation about having so many of your back molars—something to do with a medical device they would put in your mouth to knock you out for surgery—and I was a few short of regulation.)

  I hopped on a bus headed for Astoria and was reading the November 1941 edition of Reader’s Digest. Among the articles was one about something called paratroopers, soldiers the United States was training in Georgia to jump out of airplanes, land, and fight. Said the article:

  Soldiers chosen must be unmarried, under 30, physically tops and emotionally well balanced. When one of these picked men reaches Fort Benning he starts through the toughest school ever devised for American soldiers. For six weeks he is hardened into a physical superman, driven through exercises which make football practice look soft. … They are probably the hardest, toughest and best-dressed soldiers in the Army. … When he gets his jump training he gets silver wings to wear on his blouse and he is cocky.

  Thank God I’d flunked the Marine Corps physical. I knew, at that moment, that being a paratrooper was for me. I wanted to be one of the hardest, toughest, and best-dressed soldiers in the army. I wanted to be “hardened into a physical superman.” Wear those wings. Hell, I wanted to jump out of an airplane with a parachute on my back and be “cocky.” It seemed challenging, yet simple: go on a mission for few days, fight like hell, get picked up, and return to your post.

  I arrived home for the holidays to the Cow Creek cabin. With nothing but the Pacific Ocean between Oregon and Japan, a touch of tenseness was in the air that hadn’t been there before. The Japanese had attacked Hawaii; what would prevent them from bombing the mainland United States? And Astoria was a major shipping port at the mouth of the largest West Coast river to empty into the Pacific. The army had already commandeered one of Astoria’s two ferries to use as a mine layer at the mouth of the Columbia.

  I mentioned my plan to become a paratrooper to my mother. She broke down on the spot. Three weeks of being at war had a lot of folks jittery about their sons. Hearing that I wasn’t interested in a desk job but wanted to jump out of airplanes caught her off guard.

  My grandmother took it even harder. She was a Gold Star Mother who had already lost two sons, my uncles, to war. Now the worries of war she’d experienced two decades ago were suddenly back, thanks to me. For the rest of my time at home, the proverbial elephant was in the room. I didn’t want to talk about it. Neither did my mom or grandmother. So we didn’t. I can’t remember seeing my father; as I said, he was usually just somewhere else.

  When I returned to Eugene for winter term, I got a kick below the belt: My ROTC instructor, Colonel Swanson, had given me an F. Flunked me for missing that fall-term final.

  “You need to repeat the course, young man,” he said.

  Repeat? “But I missed the test because I was in bed in the infirmary, sir,” I said. “I couldn’t be there.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had A’s all fall. Can’t I just take the test? I can prove that—”

  “You’ll need to repeat the course, Mr. Malarkey,” he said with a this-discussion-is-over tone to his voice.

  “But—”

  “Look, young man, we’re at war and I’m tired of fooling with college students who don’t seem to appreciate that fact.”

  Something welled up deep within. I was a Malarkey. I was from Astoria, home of tough, proud, independent cusses who believed, at their core, in a square deal—and this didn’t seem too square. I turned my back, marched to the Sigma Nu house, got my olive drab army uniform, and returned to his office.

  His receptionist tried to stop me. I blew right past her, dropped that uniform on his desk, and walked away. Swan-son didn’t say a word. Neither did I. Heading down Thirteenth Street back to the house, I suddenly realized what I’d done, even if I tried to tell myself that it was the right thing. Even if my pride was clouding what I didn’t want to face.

  I’d done exactly what I said I wouldn’t do.

  I’d quit.

  Winter and spring terms had a heaviness to them, like the battleship-gray clouds that seemed to roll across the Coast Range, and into Eugene, about November and overstay their welcome until May. It wasn’t so much because of the past—my dropping out of ROTC—but because of the future. The world was at war, and now America was in the thick of it. An Allied invasion of France was a distinct possibility.

  In April, home for a break, I again mentioned the idea of my becoming a paratrooper. And again my mother turned icy. “You know what happened to your uncles,” she said. Yeah, I knew, and, in some ways, I was thinking, That’s exactly why I need to join. The Malarkeys have some unfinished business with the Germans. Of course, I didn’t say that to her.

  “Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

  Then I wavered a bit on my paratrooper decision. Maybe to appease her and Grandmother Malarkey—maybe to appease myself since I’d been smitten with being a pilot since another of my uncles, Cecil Eckert, had taken me flying as a kid in Portland—I later took an exam for pilot training with the Army Air Corps at the University of Oregon. But the math was beyond me; nothing at Star of the Sea had prepared me for this. I walked out in midtest.

  I registered for the draft, finished my freshman year at Oregon—my transcript showed three straight flunks for ROTC—and moved to Portland to work in a machinery shop, Monarch Forge and Machine Works. The plant did extensive work for Liberty ships, the vessels that would ferry our troops to battle. As a machinist, I helped make propeller shafts. A few years before, amid the thousands of men and women working in similar plants in Portland, one young man about my age worked across the street at Schmitz Steel Company. I never met him, but I would meet him in a couple of years, in Normandy, on what would come to be known as D-day. I would be wearing the uniform of an American paratrooper. He would be wearing the uniform of the enemy.

  In July, as I turned twenty-one, my draft notice arrived, but there were still some outs. My boss at Monarch offered me a deferment. I could, he told me, fulfill my military obligation by continuing to work in the plant. I thanked him, but refused. Weeks later, papers came instructing me to report to Fort Lewis, a few hours north, near Tacoma. I quit my job and went home to spend a few days with my mother and grandmother. Bernice was off at some special music school.

  While there, I ran into an old buddy who was home on leave from Fort Lewis. He told me the first thing they asked for was volunteers to be in the paratroopers.

  “Whatever you do, don’t say yes, Malarkey,” he said. “It’s a death sentence. You’re jumpin’ out of a friggin’ airplane going a couple hundred miles an hour—and right into enemy territory. The odds stink.”

  But I’d made up my mind: That’s what I was going to do. He shook his head sideways. “You’re nuts,” he said.

  I drove to Warrenton and said good-bye to my grandmother. She knew none of the nuances of the military, the difference between a paratrooper and a guy slinging hash in some back-of-the-lines mess hall. All she knew was that she had already buried two sons because of the supposed “war to end all wars.” And now her grandson was going to fight in another war. She hugged me and cried.

  “If anything happens to you, Donnie Malarkey,” she said, her eyes fixed on mine, “it’ll be the end of me.”

  I headed back to our cabin in Cow Creek Valley. I wa
lked along the Nehalem River and stared at the water and thought of all the old times: Bomba the Jungle Boy, fishing, camping.

  It was nearly mid-September and the water was low; the heavy rains wouldn’t begin for another couple of months. Fingerling salmon—sea-run cutthroat—darted here and there, soon off on their round-trip journeys to the Pacific Ocean thirty-five miles away. On the river bottom, the crawdads were thick. I netted a few for later. A breeze roused the smell of blackberries, whose flavor had peaked weeks ago, but they still tasted sweet. At nightfall, I built a fire, steamed those crawdads, and had what you might call my own personal “last supper,” washing my dinner down with a few bottles of Olympia beer.

  Afterward, I stared at the embers deep into the night, trying, I suppose, to feel that sense of tranquillity I’d often felt out here as a kid, but I was never quite able to get there. It was as if I were being pulled toward something, some place—almost like these fingerling salmon that would instinctively swim to the sea each spring. Somehow, they just knew where they needed to be; just as, later on, they knew they needed to return to the river, the place where they’d started. Even if it meant swimming thirty-five miles upstream.

  I slept back at the cabin. I left in the morning, before either my mother or father had awakened. I hadn’t told them about my decision to become a paratrooper. But, like those salmon, I knew where I needed to be.

  4

  TOCCOA, SOBEL, AND SURVIVAL

  Toccoa, Georgia

  September-November 1942

  I reported for duty in Portland and was sent, by train, to Fort Lewis with a group of about a hundred other inductees. It was September 12, 1942. We arrived at 4:00 A.M. and were told to report to an “indoctrination center.” My buddy in Astoria had been right: As we sat in the room, among the first questions we were asked was whether any of us wanted to become paratroopers. Some of the guys didn’t even know what the officer was talking about. What the hell was a paratrooper? Then he explained the concept, about jumping out of an airplane behind enemy lines, then fighting. About how it took a special man to volunteer. About how it took five jumps to earn your wings; and if you refused to jump, you could be court-martialed.