Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  Both of us liked a good laugh. Both of us were nuts for music: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James, The Mills Brothers singing “Paper Doll,” and Frank Sinatra’s “Moonlight Serenade.” At the end of a day, we’d go to the PX—it wasn’t much bigger than a boxcar—and were usually so tired that we’d sit on the floor, our backs to the wall, and with a beer or Coke in our hands listen to that jukebox until I thought we were going to wear out the grooves in those 78rpm records. It wasn’t just the sound of the music, it was what it could do to you inside: take you away from endless days of sweating, grunting, and cussing beneath your breath at Sobel.

  Skip and I both had girlfriends back home. OK, Skip had a girlfriend and I sort of had a girlfriend. I’d broken things off with Bernice back in college, but away from home, I missed her terribly and we began exchanging letters again. She’d gone to summer music school at Mills College, then to New York City to be a professional singer. Skip’s girlfriend was Faye Tanner, a cheerleader he’d met from another high school in the place he grew up. The more we talked about our girls, the more we realized that even they were similar. Pretty. Catholic. Loyal—Bernice even when I didn’t deserve it. Their letters picked us up on many a Toccoa day.

  The Depression had been hard on both our families. In some ways, we both were forced to become the “man of the house.” My dad essentially bailed out in 1938; his dad abandoned his family in about 1930, deciding he’d rather play in a jazz band and travel the country than be a father. Beyond that, we both were happy-go-lucky, witty, a little nutty, prickly when provoked, and, here and there, prone to laugh in the face of the odds if we thought, after doing so, we’d survive to live another day. How else do you explain our trying to become paratroopers? How else do you explain a guy swimming the Niagara? Or me defying an ROTC colonel?

  Skip was the real deal; didn’t have a phony bone in his body. Unassuming and yet had a personality that drew people to him like cold hands to a fire. He was the barracks peacekeeper on occasion. Not the guy who demanded to be in the spotlight but probably the best-liked man in the company. A guy who could make each of us feel as if he were his best friend. Deep down, I felt honored that he even had time for a maverick like me.

  Others soon realized we were best buddies. Burr Smith, an Easy Company soldier who’d been to a private military school in southern California, would write this about Muck and me when the war was over:

  Warren “Skippy” Muck [was] an upstate New Yorker of great charm and wit who drew people to him like a magnet. Quiet, unassuming, totally “real,” his strength was revealed in combat, where his 2d Platoon mortar section earned a fearsome reputation as Easy Company’s most effective heavy weapons element. Skippy was a happy guy, and those who knew him basked in the warmth of that happiness and were happy, too. His closest friend, and, inevitably one of mine, was Don Malarkey, another warm, friendly and happy-go-lucky individual who likewise rose to the top of my list of personal heroes like cream to the top of the old-fashioned glass milk bottle.

  In some ways, Skip had replaced my family and my pals at the Sigma Nu house as the person I was closest to on earth. Once, on our way back to the barracks from the PX, Skip and I were having a smoke when he asked me why I chose airborne. I told him about growing up with the stories about my uncles both giving their lives for their country.

  “I dunno, Skip, I think I was just born to do this,” I said.

  His response didn’t surprise me in the least: “Me, too, Malark.”

  But we never talked about not making it home. We only talked about what it would be like when we did, how we’d visit each other and he’d show me where he’d swum the Niagara and I’d take him fishing on the Nehalem, maybe out in the ocean for salmon.

  “Going out over the Columbia River bar makes swimming the Niagara look like kiddy stuff,” I huffed.

  “We’ll do it,” he said. “But, remember, I swam the Niagara at night.”

  5

  SKIP MUCK AND THE MARCH TO ATLANTA

  Toccoa, Benning, Mackall, and Bragg

  November 1942 to September 1943

  By November 1942, Easy Company was becoming a finely tuned company—even if, for the second time, I’d run into Eugene Brown, my old University of Oregon classmate, and called him Eugene instead of showing him the proper respect as an officer. We’d done a fifty-mile Friday-night march through the Chattahoochee National Forest where you couldn’t eat, drink, talk, or smoke; you just put your head down and went. It may have been the most difficult thing we did. But those were the things that drew us together, like we were one unit instead of a hundred-plus guys.

  We hadn’t jumped yet, our practice limited to jumping from thirty-foot towers in parachute harnesses suspended by steel cables, but we were prepared to take on anything on the ground. So our West Point colonel, William Sink, decided to try just that. Someone had shown him a Reader’s Digest article that said a Japanese army battalion had set a world record by marching a hundred miles in seventy-two hours. Sink decided we’d do the Japanese one better. He ordered his best battalion, the 2nd, to do a forced march from Toccoa southwest to Atlanta. More than one hundred men marching 118 miles. Under Sobel’s orders, we were not to cross roads when we stopped for breaks. And the real killer: We were to do all this with full field equipment.

  That was bad enough for regular guys carrying guns, especially the guys like Walter Gordon who had machine guns. But for mortarmen, like Skip and me, it was like being asked to climb Mount Everest with a pack full of bricks on our backs. The parts of a mortar unit weighed sixty-five pounds. Still, the challenge was intriguing, as if our team were finally getting in a game to see what we were made of.

  It was late November. We marched about forty-five miles the first day in wind, rain, and cold. I felt good. The second day, hail and sleet joined the mix. My legs started giving me trouble from the constant pounding on concrete; the sixty-five-pound mortar seemed to double in weight. I was dying of thirst.

  About noon, we were taking a break when a woman in front of a farmhouse, across a road, asked if we could use some water. I looked around. Lieutenant Winters was up at the head of the formation. I couldn’t see Sobel, so I told my squad leader, Bill Guarnere, that I was going for it. I ran across the road and filled two canteens for me and the guys. Suddenly, I saw him down the road, heading my way like a Labrador to a downed bird—Sobel.

  “I want that man’s name!” he shouted, a finger pointing my way.

  Just then, though, the column started moving forward and Sobel’s path to me was blocked by marching soldiers. I scampered back across the road and into the mass of olive drab, having dodged a dangerous bullet. Skip was proud. But over the last day and a half my legs had gotten progressively worse and I barely made that evening’s destination, Oglethorpe University, on Atlanta’s outskirts.

  Skip put up our pup tents and I lay down to rest. In the distance, I could hear Joe Toye singing some Irish song that had been passed down from his folks. At chow call, I couldn’t even stand up. I started to literally crawl on my hands and knees through the woods to the chow line. Skip stopped me, grabbed my mess kit, and said, “No friend of mine crawls anywhere.” He filled both our plates and came back to eat with me. After dinner, I just sat there, my mind numb, my legs on fire.

  “My shins are killin’ me, Skip. I don’t know if I can make it.”

  “Almost there, buddy. Only thirty-eight miles.”

  “Only thirty-eight?”

  “Eighty down. You can do this, Malark. We can do this.”

  “I dunno, Skip.”

  “I’ll get you to Atlanta if I have to drag you.”

  Later, Lieutenant Winters came to see me in the tent. He figured I had severe shin splints.

  “Why don’t you plan on going the rest of the way in a rig, Malarkey.”

  “Sir, give me a night’s rest,” I said, glancing at Skip. “I think I can make it.”

  Winters paused, then shook his head sideways. “Whatever you think.”


  I made Atlanta. We all made Atlanta—seventy-five hours from the time we started. As we marched down Peachtree Street to Five Corners in Atlanta, a few national radio networks announced to the world what we had done—beat the Japanese record, and beat it good. Afterward, my legs were terribly swollen. I spent three days in bed. But I’d made it. That’s partly because when we got close to Atlanta, we were joined by either a military or university band that led us; that music inspired me. And partly because to quit was to be like someone back home whom I didn’t want to be like. And partly because Skip Muck was in my ear the whole time, telling me I was going to make it if he had to throw me over his shoulder.

  Fort Benning, about a hundred miles southwest of Atlanta, was the next stop in our journey to become paratroopers. We hadn’t been there long when the sizing-up began. We were coming out of the mess hall when some 82nd Airborne paratroopers spotted us. They looked us up and down with their arms crossed and a few head-nodding smirks.

  “So, here come the long-walking, loud-talking, non-jumping ‘sonobitches’ 506ers,” said one.

  I’ll bet everyone in Easy Company wanted to lunge at those guys with fists flying, but by now, thanks to Sobel, we’d actually learned a touch of discipline. And in some ways, who could blame them for having their shorts in a bunch? Though these guys hadn’t seen action, they’d at least jumped out of planes. And some in the 82nd had already fought in North Africa and Sicily. Here at Benning, these guys had heard about our fitness records. Read all the headlines about the world-record march. Heard the stories of our forced marches, the nighttime assaults on Currahee. But we were newbies at Benning and, to this point, hadn’t done anything more than jump out of a parachute tower, harnessed to a cable, and land in a pile of straw. In their eyes, we were over-hyped rookies who hadn’t proven a damn thing.

  Benning was our chance to change that. Earning your wings as a paratrooper required four steps: The A stage was physical fitness; B involved practice work on the parachute towers and learning landing techniques, some of which we got at Toccoa; C was learning to pack your own chutes (and unpack … and repack, etc.); D was the final week at Benning, when you made your five required jumps.

  A and D were the trapdoors for the guys who weren’t going to cut it. Though we’d gained a few newcomers, we’d lost dozens of guys who just couldn’t manage the physical part of the training. We knew who had lungs and legs. Now, aboard C-47s heading into the skies over Georgia, we were going to find out who had balls. To refuse to jump, even once, was to be bounced from the Airborne. If a guy froze in practice, how the hell could you trust that he was going to jump when the enemy was waiting below?

  My worst thought was having to send a letter home saying I’d washed out. I’d be betraying the memory of my two uncles by failing. So, no, I couldn’t fail, I thought as we sat, nine to either side of the lumbering two-engine aircraft. We were wearing some team’s old football helmets, a scene that probably wouldn’t have scared the hell out of the krauts. Nerves were taut. This was it: time for our first jump, though I can honestly say I wasn’t scared. Just anxious.

  “Stand up and hook up!” the jumpmaster yelled over the thrum of the engines.

  You could barely hear him.

  “Check equipment!”

  I checked mine. I checked the man in front of me.

  “Sound off!” The last man in the “stick”—the name given to a group of parachutists—yelled, “Eighteen, OK!” and slapped the guy ahead of him on the back. “Seventeen, OK!” “Sixteen, OK.” “Fifteen, OK!” “Fourteen—”

  Suddenly, a guy in front of me panicked and grabbed a parallel support bar on the fuselage of the plane. Those of us who were behind him had to unhook our chutes and re-hook on the other side of him. Later, I learned that it had taken four people from the parachute school to pull him from the plane after it had landed. He was immediately whisked off to the guardhouse. We saw him a few days later at a special battalion ceremony that’s still seared into my mind.

  It was a “drumming out” ceremony in honor—make that dishonor—of those who couldn’t cut it. As hundreds of us watched—were forced to watch—they were stripped of patches from their caps and the 506th patch from their arms. A jeep drove up and dumped each guy’s barracks bag, and, with tommy guns at their backs, they were marched away, no longer paratroopers but infantrymen. Frankly, it was sickening, not the proudest day in American military history. Had word got back to Washington, D.C., about this, some heads would have rolled. But the mournful drums kept beating as the men were marched onto the reviewing area, publicly humiliated.

  Back in the plane, the jumpmaster was yelling, “Go! Go!”

  The line got shorter, my stomach churned harder, part of me scared, but most of me knowing that this was what all the hard work came down to: to step into the unknown with a bunch of other guys who were just as scared as I was but were still willing to leap.

  Remember what you’ve learned, Malarkey: Keep your fingers outside the door. Don’t look down. Watch the horizon—and the other guys’ chutes, to make sure you’re heading down at the same rate.

  The jumpmaster looked at me. The light on the inside of the aircraft turned from red to green. “Go!”

  I jumped. With the cover of my chute attached to the static line, the chute itself would open on its own. I remembered to count to four out loud: One thousand one. I heard the crackling of the canopy over my head as the prop blast caught it. One thousand two. The connector links whistled past. I clung to the reserve chute on my chest. One thousand three. I felt like a rag doll, falling at more than a hundred miles per hour. I held my breath. One thousand four. The wind rippled my face, far worse than any gale-force storm I’d experienced on Oregon’s windy north coast.

  Then, boom, I felt a tug. The canopy had opened. Breathe. The ground in front of me stopped swaying quite as much as it initially had. I opened the risers to help the chute fully open, then looked up. Whew. No blown panels. Looking around, I realized I was floating down at the same rate as the others, a comforting sign that nothing was out of whack.

  The field below was coming at me fast. I pulled on my risers for positioning. Noticed an ambulance to my left. Gulp. Then, closer, closer, closer. I turn back into the wind. And then, boots on the ground, a quick jolt of pain, and swirling around like the parachute I was trying to gather in, the fleeting thought that that was a helluva lot farther to fall than from the roof of our house back home.

  Later that week, I completed my second and third jumps. Two more and I was home free. “Sound off!” yelled the jumpmaster on our fourth attempt. There was only one problem: I’d contracted a bad cold and had laryngitis. Could barely get a word out, so I’d quickly asked the guy in front of me to shout my number. He did so, but the jump master knew something was amiss and came back to see me. I had described the problem on a piece of cardboard, which I flashed at him. Convinced I was willing and able, he didn’t pull me from the stick.

  I successfully completed that jump, then came the all-important fifth. “Go!” I flew into the air. When my boots hit the ground, it was sweet relief. I’d earned my wings. I was a U.S. army paratrooper. After the ceremony, at a party in our honor, we threw back more than a few beers. It had been four months since I’d arrived at Toccoa, wondering if that “W” would stand for “welcome” or “washout.” Now I knew. And Skip had made it, too.

  Wings Day was one of proudest days of my life. Not only was I proud of myself, but of every man in Easy Company, period. A few weeks later, the unit publication of the 504th Parachute Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division—called Static Line—encouraged its personnel to show a bit more respect to the 506th. At Benning, the 82nd’s 505th and 507th regiments had gone through school with a 21.06 percent washout rate. Ours was 1.53.

  Beyond the pride, the wings meant $50 more pay per month. Each month, I would send my mother my $50 jump pay and $15 of my regular pay, with instructions that it was not to be saved for me but to be used for her and
dad and my sister. It seemed a meager amount, but out in the cabin, their expenses weren’t huge. My mother cooked over a woodstove that also heated the cabin.

  I hoped those checks I sent home were somehow reassuring to my mother, and deep down I hoped they might ease the guilt I felt from pressing on to be a paratrooper against her will. I’m not sure what they meant to my father, if anything.

  It was a routine jump. Spring 1943, and we were at our next training stop, Camp Mackall in North Carolina, not far from Fort Bragg. My stick went out over a small lake, the wind blowing enough to nudge jumpers clear of the water. When my chute opened, I followed the split-second protocol of looking at the other guys’ chutes to make sure I was descending at the same rate. For the first time ever, that wasn’t the case. The other chutes seemed to be going up, which obviously meant I was going down way too fast. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  I looked up at my canopy. Oh my God! I had about five blown panels—of the twenty-four total—and five dangling suspension lines. Without much air in the canopy, I was falling like a rock, near the edge of a lake. I reached for my reserve chute but made a major blunder. Always throw it out in the opposite direction that you’re oscillating. Instead, I pulled the bonehead stunt of throwing it out the same way I was turning. It slowed me, but in a split second, I was engulfed in my reserve chute and couldn’t see anything.

  In seconds, I was crashing through the leaves and limbs of an oak tree. My suspension lines went taut just before I was going to hit the ground, and I just hung there, bouncing a bit as if on a swing. My chute was draped over the tree. Later, I figured out I’d done a Mickey Mouse job of packing my chute. I’d accidentally packed a “shot bag” with my chute—a tube of BBs about eighteen inches long that we’d use to smooth out each panel. The BBs must have broken free and punctured the panels. Fortunately, it was the last time I’d be required to pack my own chute; after ten jumps, that became someone else’s responsibility.