by Don Malarkey
“If interested, please stand up,” the officer said. Of the hundred men, exactly two of us stood. Just down from me, still sitting, was a guy I’d known at the University of Oregon, Joe Montag.
“Well, so long, Malarkey,” he said. “I’ll never see you again.”
Judging by the majority’s choice, I figured I’d either gotten in with a group of really smart young men—or a bunch of namby-pamby chickens.
I was given a physical: five foot seven, 160 pounds. Good health. The other guy flunked his physical so it was just me heading to St. Louis, where I joined half a dozen other volunteers, including three who ultimately joined E Company, like me: Robert Rader, Don Hoobler, and William Howell. We were all on our way to a place called Toccoa, Georgia, where they’d separate the wheat from the chaff. The camp was located in the Chattahoochee National Forest, not far from a town called Toccoa, from which the camp got its name. It had been built specifically to form an experimental regiment that would feed into the Parachute School at Fort Benning, also in Georgia. About six thousand men were there. More than two out of three would either quit or be forced to quit. The rest would become paratroopers.
By the time I arrived, the regiment was pretty well formed and I was feeling a bit uneasy about fitting in. Newcomers were placed in W Company, a tented facility on the grassy slope of a hill just below the regimental medical-processing facility. We were a company in name only. The “W,” I learned, stood for either “welcome” or “washout” because as we were coming, a group of guys were going. “This serves as the regiment’s in-and-out processing machine,” Burr Smith, a guy from southern California who’d been there a while, pointed out to me, “and it’s a fast train in both directions.”
For all my bravado back in Astoria, nobody here knew me from Adam. From the get-go I feared my “W” might mean washout. Once assigned to E Company, I was having trouble just getting my cot put together; what made me think I could qualify for this elite group of soldiers? I’d already shown my inexperience by running into an officer I’d known back at the University of Oregon, Eugene Brown, and calling him Eugene instead of saluting him.
What’s more, I’d heard that the group of guys leaving had been booted because of their inability to run up and and down something called Currahee.
“What’s Currahee?” I asked one of them in my usual low, almost gravelly voice.
“Screw you, pal,” said one them as he flung a duffel bag over his shoulder and headed out the door. Whatever it was, I guess he and it hadn’t exactly hit it off.
That night, I would find out why. Currahee was a mountain, introduced to me by the first guy in E Company I became friends with. I was putting my shaving kit away on a shelf that had a photo of a young woman on it. I looked closer. Not only was she beautiful, but the name of the photo studio in the corner was familiar: wilson studio, astoria, Oregon.
“Who’s the photo of?” I asked a guy nearby.
“My sister.”
“No kidding?” I said. “It was taken by Wilson Studio, in Astoria—where I’m from.”
His eyes widened. “I’m from right across the Columbia in Ilwaco, Washington. Rod Bain’s the name.”
I was dumbfounded as we shook hands. Two thousand miles away and the guy bunking next to me was a ferry ride away from where I lived.
“Don Malarkey,” I said.
“Welcome, and we’re not the only Northwesterners: The guy on the other side of my bunk is Tom Burgess. He’s from Centralia, Washington. And John Plesha’s from Seattle. Rainier Valley. So, Malarkey, after dinner, how ’bout a run up Currahee so you can understand what you’ll be up against at Camp Toccoa?”
That night, after dinner, we walked to the foot of the mountain. Burgess joined us. “Currahee,” said Bain, “is the measuring stick for us all. Quitting is a no-no. You quit and you qualify for ‘moonlight patrol.’”
“Moonlight patrol?”
“Yeah, you quit Currahee and the next night you’re sleeping away, dreaming of Lana Turner or your girl back home, and you get a tap on your shoulder. It’s time for a command performance up the mountain. You and a bunch of other quitters—under the watchful eye of some noncom who’s already cranky because he’s having to babysit a bunch of wimps in the middle of the night.”
If it was Bain’s intention to scare me, it worked. It didn’t help when, after a half mile up the three-mile-long logging road twisting through the pines, he and Burgess were gliding along and I was sucking eggs. Near the top, I thought I was going to lose my dinner. On the way down I thought I was going to lose everything I’d eaten since high school. It took about two hours, but, wheezing like an aging outboard motor, I made it.
At the bottom of the hill, Bain slapped me on the back in congratulation. As we bent over to catch our breath, he explained that “Currahee” was an Indian word that meant “standing alone.”
“The battle cry of the 506th,” he said, “is ‘We stand alone together.’” He lowered his voice a notch for dramatic effect. “Currahee!” he yelled.
“Currahee!” followed Burgess.
Sweat had matted down my curly blond hair. I was bent over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, sweat dripping off my face. But hearing Burgess, I straightened up and, feeling like I’d somehow earned some tiny rite of passage, shouted my first battle cry.
“Currahee!”
That night, lying in my bunk, I wasn’t thinking about being far away from Oregon or about how tired I was or about how a single mosquito—and there were squadrons of them at Toccoa—could spoil a night’s sleep. Instead, I was thinking, what kind of a special group of guys was this that a couple of them—guys who didn’t even know me—would run up a mountain just for my benefit? To help prepare me for what was to come? To welcome me in instead of trying to trample me down? It might have seemed a simple thing, but I’ve never forgotten that gesture. It was the first bonding experience with a group of men who would one day become known as the “band of brothers.”
The “band of brothers,” as we’d become known as after Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book of the same name, comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V, 1598:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Specifically, that label was given those of us in E, or Easy Company—decades after the war was over. The 101st Airborne Division, otherwise known as the Screaming Eagles, began in 1942. The 82nd Airborne had been the first of its kind to train men in assault from the air. We were next. Maj. Gen. William C. Lee promised us that although the 101st had no history, we had a “rendezvous with destiny.” And a helluva rendezvous it would be.
Our 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was one of three such regiments in the 101st, the others being the 501st and the 502nd. Each regiment had three battalions: A, B, and C companies were assigned to the 1st Battalion; D, E—that was us, Easy Company—and F assigned to the 2nd; and G, H, and I assigned to the 3rd. Easy Company, about 150 men strong, was divided into four platoons of 40 to 50 men each. I was in Easy’s 2nd Platoon.
For Easy Company, virtually everything was at first some physical challenge: run Currahee three or four times a week; run a hillside obstacle course; over a stack of timber; under netting strewn with hog guts; through wooden chutes that left splinters in your hands; push-ups; sit-ups; windmills; somersaults; and do a forced march on Friday nights, starting out at five miles and adding five miles each week until the grand finale—a fifty-miler. No talking, no smoking—tough, since nearly all of us smoked like chimneys—no food, no water, and no stopping. Other companies didn’t require such strictness. Other companies didn’t have ambulances following them on their forced marches.
Then, I soon realized, E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, wasn’t like “other companies.” That’s mainly because we were led by Capt. Herbert Sobel, the man who demanded the fifty-milers, the hog-guts-in-your-face obstacle co
urses, and the no-blinking-on-a-run-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass rule on the Currahee runs.
“The men of Easy Company do not quit,” he’d yell on our way up that mountain. “Do you understand me?”
At times, he’d have officers sweep through the ranks—guys like Lt. Dick Winters, who always obeyed Sobel’s orders but wasn’t totally sold on the man—checking our musette bags and canteens for food and water. Sobel had it in for Winters—was tougher than nails on him, almost as if Winters were one of “us” instead of one of “them.”
After a week of sheer hell, Sobel would announce that we were being rewarded with a big dinner. You’d be halfway through your spaghetti when he’d walk in. We’d all snap to attention, and he’d say, “Gear on. We’re going up Currahee. Now! Heigh-ho, Silver!”
Even in our “down” time, Sobel would find ways to make us miserable.
“Sobel reminds me of that joke about the captain of the slave galley,” I told Skip Muck, a kid from New York I’d met, one afternoon as we were shining boots in the barracks. “First mate tells the guys who’re rowing, ‘Got good news and bad news for you, fellas. Good news is we’re taking a day off tomorrow. Bad news is the captain wants to go waterskiing.’”
“You got that right, Malark,” Skip said.
E Company inspections were legendary at Toccoa. Sobel would call them at any odd hour, bursting into the barracks with the surprise of some sneaker wave back home that’d sweep a fisherman right into the surf. Two weeks later, some crabber’d think he’d gotten the catch of a lifetime, pull up his ring, and find a body crawling with Dungeness crabs. At Toccoa, guys would disappear just like that, never to be heard of again. Couldn’t cut it. Couldn’t cut Sobel. Maybe both. One of them was a guy Skip and I knew, Bill Dickerson, from Tacoma, Washington. Nice guy. I remember mugging for a photo with Skip and me in a doorway, pretending we were going to jump out of a plane. That’s the closest Dickerson would get to jumping from a plane, though. Soon he, like dozens of others, was washed out to sea. Just like that.
Once, Sobel paid a surprise visit and confiscated all sorts of personal property from guys, everything from unauthorized ammo to a lifetime supply of rubbers to a can of peaches. Guys who’d disliked him before that incident hated him after it.
“Like to kill that SOB,” you’d hear some guy mutter, “and I ain’t kiddin’.”
Sobel would look you eye to eye—he was tall—and start sneering at you and raising his voice just enough so you wanted to start choking him. “Dirt on your rifle’s hinge spring, Malarkey. Weekend pass revoked.”
Lint on your chevrons. Revoked. A rusty bayonet. Revoked. Don’t like the sound of your name. Revoked. Sometimes, when one or two people had screwed up, he’d punish the whole bunch. There’d be some big dance we were all going to in town. Sorry. No passes. It was as if he were just trying to get our goat. Or maybe it was something deeper meant to make a bunch of misfits into a single unit.
He loved to humiliate us—or seemed to. Sometimes, as punishment, he’d make a guy sleep with a machine gun. Or go dig a six-foot-by-six-foot hole in the ground, then fill it back in. Jimmy Alley was always digging holes. When inspecting our 2nd Platoon, Sobel would come up to this kid named Frederick Belke. Seventeen years old. Never shaved in his life. Didn’t need to; all he had was peach fuzz. Sobel would announce to the whole platoon that Belke was restricted for being unshaven so we all were restricted. Finally, we practically tied the kid down and shaved him ourselves.
Some called Sobel the Black Swan because he was darkcomplected and ran like a duck, legs flapping here and there, but I admit, he did what we did. He’d get to the top of that mountain—frankly, not easy for him, but he’d never quit—with a stopwatch in his hand. “This might be good enough for the rest of the 506th, but it’s sure as hell not good enough for Easy Company!”
In a strange way, it kind of filled you with pride. You got the idea he was hardening us for tougher times to come. That he truly wanted us to be the best of the bunch—and believed we could be. We wrestled, boxed, did decathlon events—and ran, ran, ran. Soon we established the finest fitness record in the 506th, but when some colonel from elsewhere saw the results, he couldn’t believe it. So they sent this high muckety-muck from Washington, D.C., to retest us. We got an even higher score.
We were becoming exactly what Sobel wanted us to be: the best. But just when you were full of that pride—not that he ever told us he was proud of us—he’d find a way to suck it right out of you because you were so friggin’ mad at him. You also felt you’d let him, and everyone else, down. You could never tell whether he wanted us to succeed or fail. Was his job to make us great soldiers or drum us out of the army in shame?
“The guy’s the devil in jump boots,” Muck said to me once, blowing smoke from a Lucky Strike skyward.
I couldn’t disagree. By the time I left Toccoa, I wanted to tie Sobel to a loblolly pine and use him for slingshot practice. In the months to come, things would happen in training that would make a lot of us wonder if he were not only the devil in jump boots, but was going to get us killed in combat someday. When the war ended, I wondered something else about Herbert Sobel: I wondered if he wasn’t a big reason some of us were still alive.
We were a bunch of guys in our early twenties from all over the country: gritty city boys like Guarnere, Southern boys such as Jimmy Alley, a few West Coasters—and everything in between. We’d been born soon after our fathers and uncles had gotten back—or been buried in Europe—after World War I. Had been hardened by a Depression that left some of our families bruised and battered. And inspired, after Pearl Harbor, to roll up our sleeves and serve our country—or at least go find some adventure in some place other than our hometowns. Only a few were married: Frank Perconte, Carwood Lipton, and a guy who’d join us at Fort Bragg, Alton More, come to mind. Most of us were young, single, and, too often, stupid, but as the weeks wore on, we started to bond.
I found myself surrounded by all sorts of guys who came to be my friends. Bain, of course, was the first guy I’d met, and growing up on the Columbia, he knew the difference between a chinook and a sockeye salmon. As a native North-westerner, I appreciated that. Jimmy Alley, a kid from Arkansas, wanted me to believe that grits were actually food; guys like him had no idea how wonderful a crab cocktail or razor clams tasted. Alley was a bundle of energy, but it was sometimes like the energy of a firecracker—prone to blow up in his face. Sobel was always giving him extra duty for this or that.
Joe Toye, from Pittston, Pennsylvania, was Irish like me but far stronger; he was like sprung steel. Toughest guy in the unit, bar none, even if that brute strength seemed to hide some wounds deep inside. Bill Guarnere arrived with excellent combative credentials, being from South Philly—and with an accent to match. Don Moone, a private in the 3rd Platoon, had a brain that worked on the same wavelength as mine. Good man. Then there was Sal Bellino, a Brooklyn kid with a great singing voice; Ed “Step-and-a-Half” Stein, whose gait was about half again as much as mine; and Father John Maloney, the 506th chaplain, a guy who would somehow find a way to ground us to the deeper things, amid the grit of war. There were others—John Sheehy, Eugene Jackson, Herman Hansen, Earl “One Lung” McLung, Chuck Grant—whom I called my friends. Great guys all.
But of all the men I’d come to know at Toccoa, my closest pal quickly became Skip Muck. Every platoon—about forty-five guys—had four squads that consisted of three rifle squads and a six-man mortar squad. Along with Skip, I was assigned to a mortar squad as a gunner. We were a team, Skip and I. I’d sight. He’d drop the rounds down the tube. We bunked in the same barracks, and when we’d run Currahee, we usually wound up side by side.
“How ya feeling?” he’d ask.
“Like I’d rather be cleaning barnacles off the bottom of a trawler.”
Which is about as much as we’d get in before Sobel and his eagle eyes would catch our lips moving and bust us with fifty push-ups. “Catch up to the rest before we reach the top, dammit,
or you’ll be scrubbing toilets,” he’d say.
On the run that Sobel surprised us with in the middle of dinner, Skip, like a handful of others, started puking about two-thirds of the way up. He stopped and bent over.
“The men of Easy Company do not quit!” Sobel shouted, his eyes boring down on Skip. “Do you understand me?”
Instinctively, I grabbed Skip’s arm to keep him going. “Skip, com’n, pal, you can do this. We can do this. No quitting.” He wiped his face with his white paratrooper’s undershirt, nodded slightly, and continued on.
Warren H. Muck was about the millionth kid our age to be named after Warren Harding, a fairly popular president from 1921 to 1923, when a lot of us World War II kids were being born. No wonder he preferred “Skip.”
We were different in some ways. We couldn’t have grown up farther apart—Oregon and New York. He was from Tonawanda, just north of Buffalo and along the Niagara River. My roots were Irish, his German; he even spoke a fair amount of it. When it came to drinking and gambling, I was a major leaguer while Skip was happy to bounce around the minors, playing here and there, but the more we got to know each other, the more we realized we had lots in common.
We both had that adventurous spirit; while I was swinging across ravines on the branches of Douglas firs in Oregon’s woods, Skip was swimming across the Niagara River in New York. We were both about five-seven or five-eight, he a bit more wiry. We were both a little ornery, mischievous, and athletic; he played wide receiver in football and was on the swim team.