Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  England became a double-edged sword for Easy Company. One edge was the privilege of weekend passes to London or wherever you wanted to roam in the countryside. Easy Company did nothing to disprove the reputation of paratroopers as first-class hell-raisers. We were all in our early twenties and had never had such freedom, such opportunities. For some, that meant god-awful hangovers, cases of the clap from the always available women of the night, and a month’s wages lost on the poker table. I confess, I let some of my youthful energy carry me away on occasion; after a particularly lively pub experience, Rod Bain told me the next morning that I’d recited every line of Kipling’s “Gunga Din”—while standing atop the bar. No wonder my jump boots smelled like stale beer.

  The other edge of the sword was more worrisome. Under Captain Sobel, company morale was sinking like a torpedoed sub. We were adding some new officers; given the potential for losing men, the goal was two lieutenants per platoon. Among the newcomers was a guy named Lynn “Buck” Compton, a star catcher on the UCLA baseball team and a football player as well. In fact, as a guard, he’d blocked for Jackie Robinson on UCLA’s 1942-43 Rose Bowl team. He was warm. Friendly. And he would become a good friend of mine. He knew of a number of players from the University of Oregon’s football and basketball teams, guys I’d gone to college with. In fact, he would become a good friend of lots of guys, which would cause some friction with Winters, who thought officers shouldn’t be playing poker with the enlisted men. Compton was forever sneaking out and playing cards with the guys, though he’ll swear he only did it once or twice. Frankly, like Buck, I thought the line between officers and enlisted men was drawn far too deep in the ground; hell, we were all going off to fight the same war. But that would be small-time friction compared to the cold war of Captain Sobel and Lieutenant Winters that came to a head in the fall of 1943.

  Sobel was bearing down on us—and on the officers and noncoms—like never before. Frankly, I think the guy was scared stiff. One night, he totally screwed up on a simple maneuver. His own men played a trick on him when he encountered a barbed-wire fence: From behind some bushes, Pvt. George Luz—a Portuguese jokester and master of imitation—yelled at Sobel to cut through a barbed-wire fence while the rest of us tried to muffle our laughter. When Sobel questioned the command, Luz identified himself as “Major Oliver Horton,” the battalion executive officer. Damned if Sobel didn’t cut the fence—and later caught hell for it when the farmers found their cows wandering all over the place. Sobel knew he was in over his head as a military leader. Knew he didn’t have the men’s respect. And, worse, knew he wasn’t Lt. Dick Winters.

  Winters was that rare leader who could be tough as nails but who respected us deeply. The result? We respected him. About the only rap on Winters, guys would tell you, is that he didn’t drink on Friday nights with the rest of the officers; some took that as a goody-two-shoes deal, a cold shoulder turned to his fellow officers. But he was everything that Sobel wanted to be but couldn’t. Sobel’s pride got in the way. And when that happened, the only tool in his chest seemed to be the hammer. Beat harder on ’em. I will make you respect me!

  By late October, Sobel—and, to a lesser degree, 1st Sgt. William Evans—had become the elephant in every Quonset hut on the post. The noncommissioned officers, in particular, were grumbling about Sobel, not because they didn’t like his style but because they honestly believed his lack of leadership would be a liability to the men in time of combat. The guy hid behind his rank. Beneath the uniform, he had little confidence in his abilities to lead but too much pride to admit it. Instead, when he felt threatened, he’d use the power of those bars instead of his brains or, God forbid, his heart.

  In England, out of the blue, Sobel demanded that Winters inspect the latrines. Winters did so. But later that day, Sobel, saying he had moved up the latrine-duty deadline and Winters had missed the inspection, wrote him up. Winters quietly bristled; nobody, he said, had told him about the time change. Sobel insisted he’d phoned and sent a runner.

  That was the you’ve-pushed-me-too-far-moment for Dick Winters. In writing, he requested a trial by court-martial. Sobel responded the next day with two options for Winters: denial of a forty-eight-hour pass or being court-martialed. He assumed Winters, fearing the harsher consequence, would gobble up the revocation of the pass. Sobel was a gambler who thought he had a hot hand and could trump Winters easily. Sobel was wrong. He’d underestimated the man’s integrity. Winters, his pride finally pushed to the brink, chose a court-martial trial so he could defend himself.

  All hell broke loose. Fired up by Sgt. Mike Ranney and Sgt. Terrence “Salty” Harris, the noncommissioned officers basically mutinied. The noncoms called a meeting at which each man agreed to write his own resignation. In essence, they said, We’re turning in our stripes. We refuse to serve under this man.

  Tense times followed. There was talk that the entire company could be busted for mutiny charges. In the days to come, Lt. Patrick Sweeney was on-site, reciting the Articles of War that covered mutiny and sedition. Discussions went on for several days, one night until midnight. We were sitting in our barracks when Don Moone, an officer’s mess orderly, came in and whispered the news:

  “Sobel’s gone.”

  We were soon introduced to 1st Lt. Thomas B. Meehan, our new company commander. Sobel had been reassigned to a new parachute-jumping school at the nearby village of Chilton Foliat.

  So what had happened? I believe, with all the best of intentions, Dick Winters quietly orchestrated the deal to force Sobel out. Not for his selfish gain, mind you; that wasn’t Winters’s style. He was among the most selfless men I’ve ever had the privilege of serving with. No, he did it for the good of the men. He did it to save their lives. Like many others, Dick thought Sobel would lead his men into a massacre and so probably got someone like Carwood Lipton, a brilliant and trustworthy guy, to do his bidding. Lipton may have gone to noncoms such as Ranney—eager as hell for a commission and perhaps ripe to prove his loyalty to those above—and Harris, whose Irish blood may have inspired a touch of rebellion, to force the issue. That way, the intended goal might be reached without Winters’s fingerprints being on the deed.

  Dick denied it then, he’ll deny it now, and he’ll deny it till the day he dies. That’s fine. But I will go to my grave believing that out of compassion for his men, he believed he had no other choice. And it was the absolute right thing to do. Ranney and Harris were both busted for their parts; Harris left the company and, as a pathfinder who jumped before the rest of us on D-day to mark our drop zones, died that day. Ranney went to Normandy as a private, became a squad leader in Holland, and, though he’d temporarily been set back, couldn’t wait for a commission to be an officer.

  By New Year’s 1944, we’d been together for nearly sixteen months—and overseas nearly four. We’d been racked by a leadership crisis. Eaten way too much bad English food. And trained in nearly daily drizzle. Coughing and sneezing were now as much a part of the barracks as snoring and farting; the place now not only smelled rotten, but sounded rotten. Our spirits were low.

  One day, Tom Burgess, a fellow Northwesterner, came to me.

  “So, Malark, d’ya see the order about submarine service?”

  I had not, so went to check out the new notice pinned on the bulletin board. There was a critical need for enlisted men to transfer. Burgess, a clotheshorse, thought it would be nice to wear neatly pressed slacks instead of the fatigues we were always in. I just wanted a change of scenery, someplace else to play out whatever “adventure” was in me. But I wasn’t interested in going if Skip was staying.

  “Whataya think?” I said after explaining the idea to Skip. He was all for it, too, so the three of us went to company headquarters to fill out application forms.

  “Get the hell out of here,” some noncom told us.

  We weren’t going anywhere else, except into the sky in planes, then down on the ground to fight Germans. And sooner rather than later, which, at this point, seemed li
ke a blessing.

  If Meehan was a welcome change for Easy Company, his arrival didn’t mean we weren’t without leadership problems—perhaps not at the top, but at the sergeant level. In the late spring, when Winters asked me to be a squad leader, I said yes, not that I had any design on climbing the ranks, but for the same reason some people run for political office. Not because they’re passionate about politics, but because they’re tired of being jerked around by the nitwits who get elected. By guys like 1st Sgt. William Evans.

  In April, I contracted a severe head cold in the rainy, cold English weather. I went on sick call several times, was given some aspirin, and returned to field duty. But when the cold persisted, I got frustrated. I took a weekend pass to London in search of help.

  I had plenty of money from dice games so I talked Burgess, who was broke, into coming along. On the train ride to London, my ears started aching terribly, worse than any of the ear problems I’d had as a kid or as a freshman at the University of Oregon when I’d had to miss the ROTC test. When we arrived, I told the cabdriver, “Get me to the nearest army medical facility. Fast!”

  A doctor—a woman, which was rare in those days—discovered I had a temperature of over 105 degrees. She looked Burgess’s way. “Get that soldier out of here,” she said.

  “But he doesn’t have any money,” I said. I started reaching for my money belt.

  “He’ll need to come back tomorrow,” she said, and all but shoved him out. Apparently this was serious and the docs didn’t want any intrusions.

  I was given oral medicine and massive shots of penicillin. In the middle of the night, I awoke feeling a dampness on my face and pillow. Blood, I realized, was draining from my ears and nose. They gave me more shots.

  At 9:00 A.M., they told me I was going to be moved to the U.S. Army 1st General Hospital in St. Albans, about twenty miles west of London. I explained that I had a friend who had come with me; he could get a message to my company about what had happened to me. But he didn’t have any money. They agreed to wait. Tom arrived. I gave him my money belt with over a hundred pounds in it and told him to notify the Easy Company officers about my situation. He said he would. At St. Albans, a full colonel was put in charge of me.

  “You’re lucky you got to a hospital when you did, Private Malarkey,” said the doctor. “A day longer and the infection would have gone into your brain. And that’d have meant big trouble. Your battalion docs didn’t do you any favors by missing this.”

  I was there for two weeks. They were shooting 250,000 units of penicillin in me every two hours. I hardly had any place on my body they hadn’t stuck that damn needle. Finally, the infection let up.

  “Given your problem now and your history with ear problems, you’ve got no business jumping out of an airplane,” the doctor said. “I can have you removed from the paratroopers. In fact, I should have you removed.”

  The words hit like a punch to the gut. “Doc, no, you can’t do that.”

  “But you’re endangering yourself, Private. And you might be endangering the men around you as well.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t like the way events were headed. “I’ve come this far,” I said, “and I’m not quitting now. I’m a paratrooper, Doc. And I wanna stay a paratrooper.”

  “Even if it might cause permanent damage?”

  “Look, it’s like I was meant to jump out of those planes with these guys. Like this is what I was born for. Please, Doc.”

  He looked at me. “I’m going to let you loose for a few days in St. Albans as a test to see how you hold up. You pass, you’re out of here, with no recommendation from me to give up the jumping, but if you black out up there in the sky, don’t come crying to me.”

  I passed the test. But my return to Easy Company wasn’t as glorious.

  “Hey, Malark, thought you were AWOL,” said a soldier as I headed for company headquarters.

  “Been in the hospital,” I said. “Didn’t Burgess notify Evans?”

  I walked in. First Sgt. William Evans looked at me as if I’d just made a pass at his girl.

  “Where the hell have you been, soldier?”

  I handed him my discharge papers from the hospital. He threw them aside, not even glancing at them. His eyes bored into mine.

  “You, Malarkey, have been AWOL!”

  Evans drove me crazy; he was worse than Sobel, a guy who was nothing but thought he was something. Another of these noncoms who was in it just for the extra fifty bucks a month. A guy who might even have put Sobel up to some of the tricks he played on us. What he had against me, I’m not sure. But whatever it was, it was becoming mutual.

  “I’ve been in the hospital,” I said. “Private Burgess was with me and I instructed him to notify you about my situation.” (He had, I would later learn, though Evans kept insisting that Burgess was lying to cover my butt.)

  “I got half a mind to court-martial you, soldier. You—”

  Just then the half-ajar door flung wide-open from the office of 1st Lt. Thomas Meehan, Sobel’s replacement. “Sergeant Evans, in my office. Now!”

  Evans returned, trying hard to downplay the sheepish look on his face. Meehan watched from behind. “Report to your quarters, Malarkey,” said Evans, the wind clearly out of his sails.

  Meehan returned to his office. But my Irish temper had been triggered—and I sensed a rare window of opportunity. I looked around and saw a box of condoms, available to soldiers on leave who wanted to avoid the clap. I grabbed one of the rubbers and tossed it at Evans.

  “Here,” I said. “Slip that over your head, Sarge. It should fit every part of your body.” And walked out.

  As summer neared, such touches of humor were fewer and farther between in Easy Company. We knew we were going to be invading France; when, where, was anybody’s guess. Meanwhile, with England now sprinkled with soldiers who’d fought in North Africa, Sicily, or Italy—and sharing stories with those of us who hadn’t—war suddenly started having context. It was no longer like looking through a drizzly English pub window. It was crystal-clear stories of American soldiers fighting, dying, being wounded, and being taken POW. Sometime, while we were in Aldbourne—not just before we headed for Normandy as in the HBO miniseries—Bill Guarnere got word that his brother had been killed in Italy.

  On my last weekend pass, I went with Skip Muck, Joe Toye, and Chuck Grant for a drink with a guy named Fritz Niland. A paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Niland was a good friend of Skip’s because they’d both grown up near each other in upstate New York. Fritz’s brother Bob, with the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, joined us at a large pub in London’s industrial district.

  Like any time guys got together, there was lots of laughing, such as when Fritz told about getting blown off course following a practice jump in England, and crashing through the thatched roof of a house, landing on the table of a couple just getting ready to eat. Not missing a beat, they stood up, introduced themselves, and asked if Fritz would like to join them for dinner.

  But what seared deeper into my memory was Bob’s stories about war. For what seemed like hours, he gripped us with tales of his combat experiences. His punch lines at the end of every description were haunting: “If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you—dead.” In part because he repeated the phrase and in part because it reminded me that, after years of training, there truly was an enemy out there waiting for us, those words tumbled over in my mind for weeks to come.

  When I hurt a leg on a practice jump in Salisbury Plain, a Red Cross worker brought me a book in the hospital. The title intrigued me: Out of the Night by Jan Valtin. Immediately, William Ernest Henley’s poem—the one I’d memorized at the University of Oregon—came to mind (Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from pole to pole). The book described the capture, by the Gestapo, of a spy who had done undercover work in various parts of the world, including the United States. When he was returned to Germany, he was t
ortured for 101 days and nights, but did not reveal the information sought by the Gestapo. It was a chilling thought: captured by the Germans. I hadn’t thought much about that.

  We had talked about the possibility in our training sessions, how we would only give them name, rank, and serial number, and how, as paratroopers, we were likely to be tortured. But, until now, I hadn’t thought that it could actually happen. Despite such fears, we were getting so antsy we just wanted to go.

  “Let’s jump,” said Skip Muck one night as we lay in our bunks. “I’m so damn anxious to get this thing started.”

  We all were. In a letter to my uncle Hugh in Portland on April 18, 1944, I wrote, “[I’m] feeling like a million and am all set to carry the mail against the Germans when the invasion comes, if ever.” I said as much in letters to Bernice, too. By now, my on-again, off-again relationship with Bernice was back on; as at Toccoa, I’d gotten lonely in England and realized what a stupid idiot I’d been, and for reasons beyond me, she’d taken me back.

  In May, on our last practice jump before Normandy, I was told to “jump” the mortar complete—tube, base plate, and bipod—in a canvas bag. “If you’re not killed,” said Lieutenant Winters, “that’s how we’ll do it over Normandy.” I wasn’t and we did.

  Finally, our practice jumps were all behind us, nearly three dozen total, including a handful at night. We moved to a place called Upottery, about twenty miles west of Southampton on the English Channel, just north of Lyme Bay, though we weren’t supposed to know it at the time because we were in total-blackout conditions. Nobody was allowed in or out of our camp. You’d be out walking around and see our own guys dressed in German uniforms to familiarize ourselves with the enemy. We’d come to this place to make sure all the logistics to support the invasion were watertight and, at the same time, to throw off any enemy-agent surveillance of the 101st Airborne. We were placed in tents along the edge of protected fields; armed guards surrounded us at all times, making it all but impossible for someone to run off and, accidentally or on purpose, reveal our invasion plans.