by Don Malarkey
We rained down everything we had on the Germans; they did the same to us. At some point, E Company was the only force holding the line; units on either side had fallen back under fire, leaving us out there like sitting ducks. We had a flooded area to our right flank, and nobody on our left.
“Malark, get over here!” It was Buck Compton, whom I’d one day count as one of my closest friends, but, for now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear from.
“We need machine-gun ammo,” he said. “You’re elected.”
My job, whether I chose to accept or not, was to scramble back to a farm building a few hundred yards away, across a pasture, near the intersection, where we’d deposited some ammo. I took off. Mortar fire rained down around me. I dove on my face and put my hands on my helmet. Blam! Shrapnel ripped into my right hand. The mortar fire stopped. I popped up and ran harder.
Go! Go! Go! I could see the building. Fifty yards. Twenty-five. Ten. I burst in the door, breathing hard. Our medic, Eugene Roe, was up to his elbows in blood, patching soldiers right and left. By now, he was already a seasoned veteran with the wounded, able to patch and diagnose in a quiet, methodical way.
“That’s a Purple Heart wound, Malark,” he calmly said, hardly looking up from wrapping a bandage around the chest of some soldier naked from the waist up. I looked around the room. The waiting line was long and full of soldiers far bloodier than me. I mentally gulped, never having seen the wounded congregated like this in one place.
“I don’t want any Purple Hearts,” I said. “But how about a bandage?”
He patched me up. I grabbed the ammo. And praying most of the way, I made it back to the hedgerows.
I refused a Purple Heart award because, in relation to what other guys were going through, it seemed like an incidental wound. As I later wrote to Bernice, “I refused it at the time for my wound was not bad enough that it was necessary that I be decorated. Death and mangled bodies are so prevalent I felt I didn’t deserve it.”
We had ten casualties in the June 12 attack on Carentan; nine the next day in the defense of Carentan. As that defense continued, we were giving up ground fast. The Germans were relentless. We were close to being overrun. Tired. Losing guys. And hope. But at midafternoon, the 2nd Armored Division—sixty tanks strong, plus fresh soldiers—arrived to relieve us. What a wonderful sight. Much better than when Sgt. Leo Boyle had earlier stood up and seen what he thought was a line of American tanks on the horizon. “Tanks! And they’re ours!” he yelled. He was wrong. They were Germans. And he paid the price when, shortly after his pronouncement, a bullet riddled his leg. He was hit bad. And wound up being shipped back to England. It wasn’t easy seeing your buddies go down around you. Beyond losing them, you wondered the inevitable: Am I next?
After the battle, Winters came across a German soldier who was terribly wounded and crying for help. He asked me to put the man out of his misery. I obeyed my order.
That night, over K rations in a gutted church, a story was told about Ronald Speirs, a first lieutenant in D Company, giving cigarettes to a bunch of German POWs a few days before and then mowing them down. That’s nothing, someone said, Speirs had also gunned down one of his own men for disobeying him. Seems he had ordered one of his sergeants to attack directly across an open meadow at a cluster of farm buildings occupied by German machine gunners and a few tanks. Instead, the sergeant suggested he work up along a hedgerow instead of crossing in the open. Lieutenant Speirs took that as refusing a direct order, pulled his gun, and killed the man. There was no shortage of calvados and cognac in Normandy, and rumor had it that the sergeant had been drinking. In any case, the incident was reviewed by regimental commanders and Speirs was cleared of any misconduct. Still, I made a mental note: Don’t wind up with this guy as your platoon leader.
The 506th moved to a defensive position southwest of Carentan. On the second day we were there, an American soldier was coming down the hedgerow asking for me or Skip Muck. I looked up from my foxhole. There stood Fritz Niland, the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment guy whom we’d last seen at the pub in England when he was with his brother, Bob.
“How the hell are you, Fritz?”
He seemed distracted. “Seen Skip?” he asked.
“He’s in the First Platoon, just about a hundred yards down the line,” I said, remembering that the two were friends from back home in New York. Soon, Fritz came back and said good-bye to me, saying he was headed home, though he didn’t say why.
Later, Skip told me, his usual impish smile gone and his face almost in a daze, “Yesterday Fritz learned his brother Bob, who’s in the Eighty-second, had been killed on D-day.”
Bob’s platoon had been surrounded and he volunteered to man a machine gun for harassing fire while others broke through the encirclement. He used up several boxes of ammo and was cradling the gun to move to another spot when he was shot and killed with a single bullet. I remembered his prophetic words in London: “If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you—dead.”
But the rest of the story was even more chilling. “So anyway,” continued Skip, “Fritz hears this news and leaves the Eighty-second to tell another brother, Edward, a platoon leader in the Fourth Infantry Division, about Bob, only to find Edward has been killed.”
“My God,” I said.
“There’s more, Malark. By this time, Father Francis Sampson is looking for Fritz. Why? To tell him that another brother, Preston, a flier in the China-Burma-India theater, had been killed this week, too.”
“So, Fritz—”
“Is the only survivor of four Niland brothers serving their country. He’s being sent home ASAP.”
I instantly thought of Grandmother Malarkey, who’d lost two sons in one war and never gotten over it. “My God,” I said. “That poor mother.”
The Niland news numbed me. I had to get back from this war. Alive. If for nobody else, for Grandmother Malarkey, by then seventy years old and worried sick that she might lose a third boy to war.*
Dick Winters needed a volunteer to take out a high-noon patrol. Finding none, he came down the hedgerow to me.
“Malarkey, you’re nominated,” he said. “Report with Rod Bain, and six others, at battalion headquarters by eleven hundred.”
His statement was punctuated by the ka-boomb of some incoming shells; we were well protected in foxholes, but the incoming and outgoing “mail” kept the ground shaking frequently.
When we arrived at headquarters, we found that the patrol was a command performance by Lewis Nixon, Winters’s close pal and the resident lush. Nobody could quite figure out why those guys were such close friends; Nixon was a full-blown alcoholic and Winters didn’t drink at all. Anyway, Nixon had picked out a complex of farm buildings, about a mile in front of our positions. He wanted us to penetrate to the outbuildings or as close as we could get.
Joe Toye wouldn’t be on this team; he had been sent back to England because the medics were worried about gangrene setting in from the skin being ripped from his arm during the jump. Bain was an automatic pick because of his radio and skills with it. I also picked John Sheehy, Dick Davenport, Ed Joint, Allen Vest, and two others; eight altogether. Hedgerows would provide good concealment. We moved out and soon saw one that ran straight toward the objective. We followed it for a while.
“Sheehy,” I whispered loudly from a crouched position about six yards behind him. “Stop at the next hedgerow and the two of us will check out the lay of the land.” Staying low, moving carefully, I went to join him.
Snap. I’d stepped on a twig. In an instant, a German helmet popped up out of the hedgerow not ten feet from us, though the soldier inside was looking off to the side, not right at us. I pulled up my tommy gun, bumping Sheehy. The German soldier spun. It didn’t matter. John got him in the head with a full blast. The kraut dropped with an eerie gurgle.
In the distance, I saw other Germans, responding to the gunfire. We’re in deep trouble, I thought. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said
. And we did. We all darted back the way we’d come. Bain had it worse than the rest, having to haul that sixty-pound radio. Winters, after we’d reported back, realized the Jerries were thicker than he thought. “No more day patrols,” he said.
I was weary. After two weeks on the main line of resistance, those of us in Easy Company were a sorry sight for the eyes—and hard on the nose. Our hair was matted, faces unshaven, uniforms grimy and stinking from our sweat. We’d had little sleep, little quiet, little hot food. In a couple of days we moved north, up the Cherbourg Peninsula. It was primarily a time of rest, relaxation, and eating French beef, a delicacy that we enjoyed to the hilt. On at least one occasion we had an afternoon trip into Cherbourg, which had been liberated in bloody fighting.
In early July, we moved back to a location near Utah Beach for eventual departure back to England and whatever else this war had in store for Easy Company. This time, our resident scrounger, Alton More, was getting more tactful in his finds. He walked into camp one afternoon carrying two cardboard boxes, one of canned fruit cocktail and the other of pineapple. We feasted as he told us how he’d gotten it from the main supply depot. Others joined him on his runs in subsequent days and we ate like kings.
The day before we were to board an LST for our trip across the Channel, More outdid himself.
“Check it out, Malark,” he said, showing me a U.S. army motorcycle and sidecar he’d wrangled from the main motor pool and hidden in the sand dunes near Utah Beach. He’d asked Compton about taking it back to England. “If you can get it on that ship, I don’t care,” said Buck, who was in charge because Winters had been sent back to England with a leg wound.
The next day, July 11, More moved the cycle up to the fore dune. We had worked out a hand signal for him to ride over the dune. I had tipped off the navy personnel that we had a last-minute vehicle coming aboard, without mentioning it was an American motorcycle and sidecar. When Easy Company had boarded, Compton and I were standing on the ramp. I signaled More. He came roaring over the dune and up the ramp like some sort of barnstorming cycle king.
We were the first off the LST at Southampton. More and I rode the cycle back to Aldbourne. On the way, I asked him what we would do for gas, and he said we’d stop at army depots. He opened his saddlebag and pulled out a stack of phony fuel tickets he’d concocted, but darned if they didn’t work. We had no problems getting gas. And so with Alton driving and me in the sidecar, we zipped through the English countryside with smiles wide and fists pumping the air like a couple of carefree American boys who’d left the war behind.
* This incident, after being told by me to Stephen Ambrose in a 1991 interview, became the basis for the movie Saving Private Ryan. Lieutenant Winters has confirmed as much in a letter.
9
UNCLAIMED LAUNDRY
Aldbourne, England
July13-September16, 1944
We were wrong, Alton and I. Though we tried like hell, we couldn’t leave war behind, at least permanently. It came after us like a rogue wave, some three-story monster rolling toward shore, like the ones my old next-door neighbor, the bar pilot, used to tell me about. But soldiers, I was beginning to realize, got good at whistling in the dark. And so even though we knew that wave was coming, knew it was going to hunt us down, we sometimes threw caution to the wind and raced a motorcycle and sidecar around the English countryside all summer. We did this despite a message I’d gotten from Sobel informing me that he knew I had that motorcycle in my possession and would confiscate it when we left next for combat. In other words, he wasn’t about to go toe-to-toe with Winters again, a thought that made racing that cycle around sweeter still, but would happily take on a runt like me.
We had spent thirty-five days in Normandy. Now we were back in Aldbourne and soon to be headed for Holland. What I remember most about this transition stint was more clashing between our lives as highly trained men in combat and our lives as ordinary guys in our early twenties who wanted to fish the Nehalem River or go back to a girl or return to play on a college football team but couldn’t do any of that stuff so went to a pub instead. We’d tried so hard to outrun that wave, but there it was, building, building, building, and preparing to crash.
I’d only been back a few days when reminded of that. We had these two women in Aldbourne who did laundry for us for practically nothing. Great people. When I’d go to get our stuff, they’d sometimes say to me, in those beautiful British accents, “Cup of tea?” Once, one of them asked for a favor. “Might you take some back for some of the other men, save them a trip?” And started handing me stacks of clothes, some of which were for guys who wouldn’t be needing those clothes because they were six feet under at Utah Beach: Miller, the kid who was always reading his Bible, died on D-day. So did Lieutenant Meehan, whose plane went down in flames, leaving Winters the commanding officer of Easy Company. Salty Harris, the noncom who’d had the guts to stand up to Sobel and then been busted for it, had been killed on D-day. So had Evans, the sarge who I’d had my share of run-ins with. Others who didn’t come back were Sergio Moya, Robert Bloser, Everett Gray, Richard Owen, Herman Collins, George Elliott, and nearly a dozen more from Easy Company alone. Burgess, a guy from Washington State whom I’d met my first night in Toccoa, got shot through the back of the jaw. Some French farmer patched him up, held his hand, and he eventually went back to the States for recovery. But, you see, that’s what so many people don’t understand about war. When I told the laundry woman Burgess had been sent home to recover, she probably thought, “Oh, good,” as if the guy had just fallen off his bike and skinned his knee. Actually, Burgess would need thirty-two surgeries and years to recover. And he was one of the lucky ones. On June 6, Easy Company had jumped with 139 officers and soldiers. When we were pulled off the line, we had 74.
You can’t blame the laundry lady for not keeping a box score for Easy Company’s dead, wounded, and missing-inactions. And it’s not like the British weren’t paying for this war without some blood of their own. We all got furloughs when we returned to England, and a bunch of us checked into the Regent Palace Hotel in London and headed straight for the Palace Pub, owned by my friend Pat McGrath. Only he wasn’t there. Soon after we’d left for Normandy, he’d gotten pneumonia. Had to go to the hospital. One night when the Germans were shelling the city, a buzz bomb—one of those V-2s—found its way into a heating vent, went to the basement, and blew up that hospital, taking Pat with it. So a woman hands you this laundry and you thank her and think, as you’re walking away, What do you do with laundry for guys who aren’t ever going to need it?
That’s another thing they didn’t teach us in the army. You train to kill and avoid being killed, but not what to do when someone you know gets killed. When we lined up, later that summer, for a memorial service for guys in the 506th who’d died in Normandy, it was new to us all. Back home, we’d seen our peers be honored at assemblies, graduation ceremonies, and the like, but, unlike now, never honored when they weren’t around to soak it in.
We were bused to regimental headquarters on the estate of Lord Wills at Littlecote, outside Chilton Foliat, and lined up in fields of green, the entire 506th. Two thousand of us. A band played. A chaplain prayed.
Almighty God, we kneel to Thee and ask to be the instrument of Thy fury in smiting the evil forces that have visited death, misery, and debasement on the people of the earth. … Be with us, God, when we leap from our planes into the dark abyss and descend in parachutes into the midst of enemy fire. Give us iron will and stark courage as we spring from the harnesses of our parachutes to seize arms for battle. The legions of evil are many, Father; grace our arms to meet and defeat them in the name of freedom and dignity of man…. Let our enemies who have lived by the sword turn from their violence lest they perish by the sword. Help us to serve Thee gallantly and to be humble in victory.
General Taylor spoke but we couldn’t hear a word he said; a formation of C-47s passed over about that time. But we heard the names of the dead. All 414. I never
talked with any of my buddies about that day, but I wondered if we were all wondering the same two things: if the list would ever end. And if, down the road, our names would ever be on it.
While in England, I heard news from the States that Grandmother Malarkey wouldn’t be worrying anymore about whether my name was going to be on that list. She had already lost two sons to war and didn’t want to lose a grandson. But on D-day, said a letter, she had gone to church and prayed for the safety of the troops. Then had gone straight to bed—and never gotten up. My aunt Margarita later told me Grandmother Malarkey hadn’t died of a heart attack, as the doctor had said. “She died of a broken heart, worrying about that curly-haired grandson of hers at war.”
There were some crazy times down in England the last two months. Crazy good. Crazy bad.
I’d now been promoted to sergeant, and with it came a great perk: me and other noncoms, including Skip, had been given use of a private thatched-roof home on London Road, outside Aldbourne. Not that there weren’t still rules, one of which was, no dames. But one time I came back to the house and damned if Bill Guarnere and Gordie Carson didn’t have a couple of gals in leopard-skin tights holed up with them. And somehow, the higher-ups caught wind of it and were soon on their way over, in the form of 1st Lt. Thomas Peacock, a replacement officer and a big by-the-book guy.
Compton, who knew what was going on but wasn’t about to do anything, called us from company headquarters. “Peacock’s coming,” he said.
Bill and Gordie were in a panic, but they found a ceiling entry to a tiny attic and shoved the girls up there. In walked Peacock, who said he’d heard a rumor that some ladies might be on the premises. Guarnere and Carson, like a couple of teenagers hiding half-empty beer bottles, shook their heads. No, not here, sir. Peacock, of course, wasn’t giving up. Bill and Gordie stood firm. They thought they’d won this stalemate. Then it happened: A single spike of a high-heel shoe punctured the plaster ceiling. I’m not sure what Carson’s punishment was; Guarnere had to do close-order drills in front of imaginary troops. And, as an accomplice, for the first time in my life I got KP duty, along with all the other noncoms in that house.