Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  The uniform ‘e wore

  Was nothin’ much before,

  An’ rather less than ‘arfo’ that be’ind,

  For a twisty piece o ’rag

  An’ a goatskin water-bag

  Was all the field-equipment ‘e could find.

  When the sweatin’ troop-train lay

  In a sidin’ through the day,

  Where the ‘eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl,

  We shouted “Harry By!”

  Till our throats were bricky-dry,

  Then we wopped ‘im ’cause ’ e couldn’t serve us all.

  It was “Din! Din! Din!

  You ‘eathen, where the mischief ’ ave you been?

  You put some juldee in it,

  Or I’ll marrow you this minute,

  If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!”

  With too many helmets filled, we snaked our way through the Ardennes Forest, on a high plateau, near the city of Bastogne. We were about eight miles west of the Belgium-Luxembourg border. It was raining lightly, the day so dank that the countryside, sprinkled with groves of fir trees, looked like some black-and-white photo. We bailed out of the trucks a couple miles west of Bastogne, the only part of the circle around the town the Germans hadn’t quite closed. We moved into the village in a route march formation, hearing artillery fire far to the north and east. Unlike in Holland, nobody was outside waving orange flags and giving us cigars and free drinks and blowing us kisses. Except for soldiers, there was no life anywhere in Bastogne.

  The 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment was preceding us so there was no need for scouts or other security. But as we marched along, oh, how I wanted a little of that Georgia heat we’d had while training.

  “Malark, whataya got in terms of ammo?” Buck Compton asked. I did a quick inventory of my nearly empty pouches and pockets.

  “One clip and a couple of grenades. No carbine ammo at all. In other words, squat.”

  He reached into his pocket and handed me a clip, then asked the same question of the guys behind me. It was like asking beggars for money.

  The 501st had moved straight through the city, heading east, and immediately met German troops. They fought till dark. We of the 506th headed northeast on the Bastogne-Foy highway. That’s where I saw the sorriest sight I’ve seen in my life: soldiers—American soldiers—walking the other way, alongside the road, against us. Heads down. Some bloodied. Boots covered with mud. Retreating.

  “What the hell is this?” I said to nobody in particular. “Where they going?”

  “It’s not where they’re going,” said Toye. “It’s what they’re runnin‘ from.’”

  We watched in near disbelief as hundreds and hundreds of beat-up soldiers passed us. Two of their three infantry regiments had been encircled and captured. Most of those retreating were quiet, not even looking up. A few mumbled this or that. One supposedly told Babe Heffron, “They’ll kill you all.” I’ll never forget the look in their eyes: fear, a sort of winter version of the stories I’d heard of loggers trying to outrun the Tillamook Burn.

  Like me, Heffron was a cocky Irishman. “Don’t worry, fellas,” he said to the quitters. “We’ll take care of ’em for ya.”

  Maybe so, though the retreat didn’t exactly instill confidence in us. But what could you do? We started mooching anything we could off the bastards: ammo, food, the works. Hell, if they couldn’t do the job, they could at least give us stuff so we could.

  I saw a Sherman tank on the west side of the highway; probably out of fuel. On its far side, sure enough, I found an engineer’s shovel. It seemed like a small thing at the time—a theft by a desperate soldier—but would save some lives in the weeks to come, which would absolve me from any lingering guilt.

  We came over a rise in the road and could see the villages of Foy and Noville below in the distance. A massive wave of German armor was sweeping through Noville, about two miles northeast. We stood and watched. The scene caught us off guard and made our hearts beat just a little faster. Nobody said a word. We just stared. We’d never seen the enemy in such numbers before.

  Once we reached Foy, we were ordered to high, wooded ground southeast of the town; in war, it’s always an advantage to be above your enemy. In Normandy, we’d burrowed into hedgerows. In Holland, we’d used dikes for cover. Here, we were hunkering down in a forest thick with midsized pine and firs that gave way to a grazing field sloping down to Foy and, beyond that, Noville. Thick not only with trees, but bodies. Our guys and theirs. There had already been fighting in these woods. Intense fighting.

  “Hell of an idea—that shovel,” said Rod Bain, my pal from across the Columbia River, as we feverishly dug foxholes for Easy Company. “You’d think the army might have thought we could use those.”

  “Just pretend we’re after long necks,” I said, “really big ones, deep in the sand.”

  “God, Malark, what I’d give to taste a clam again.”

  The ground was wet and cold, though not yet frozen. Taking turns with just a few shovels, we started digging our foxholes, making what would become our homes for however long we were here. We outposted a man as our watch about fifty yards out in an open field, then, clothes and all, slid into our mummy bags, two guys to a foxhole, and tried to catch whatever sleep we could. It wasn’t easy. Like the others, I hadn’t slept for nearly two full days and was dead tired, but I couldn’t help thinking about the mass of German soldiers I’d seen just down the hill, in Noville.

  12

  “WHAT’S A GUY GOTTA DO TO DIE?”

  Bastogne

  December 19, 1944-January 3, 1945

  In some ways, my war ended in Bastogne. In some ways it began there. The first day was surprisingly quiet. Eerily quiet, the forest wrapped in fog, the trees like thick masts in Warrenton’s harbor on some November morning. It was the kind of quiet you sensed would not last, even if it lulled you into thinking otherwise.

  We heard bursts of machine-gun fire and an occasional whump of an 88 in the distance, but clearly the Germans were, at least for now, doing business with our buddies and not us. We couldn’t see much. And the Germans apparently couldn’t see much more, given that a kraut wandered within shouting distance and crouched to take a crap. We took him prisoner.

  We were hunkered down in a dense forest that ran west to east between Foy and Bizory called the Bois Jacques. We just came to call it Jack’s Woods. The 506th was spread out along about a five-hundred-yard front, meaning, with 150 or so men, we were already stretched thin. Easy Company was on the left as we faced Foy.

  To bide our time in the first few days, we’d expand our foxholes, which was getting harder to do as the temperatures dropped and the ground froze. But we chipped away, a little at a time. When we’d finish an L-shaped hole, it’d be about six feet in length by two feet wide, the long stretch for sleeping, the short for shooting. Three or four feet deep.

  The resemblance to coffins wasn’t lost on Easy Company, though the amount of joking dropped with the temperature. We were exhausted. And it was getting colder.

  “Give me the forty-five degrees and rain of an Astoria winter any day,” I muttered to Bain, my “roommate.”

  “Hell, Malark, compared to Ilwaco, Astoria has winter drought. We get more than eighty inches a year.”

  I blew on my hands for the umpteenth time. Nearby, Walter Gordon Jr., a quick-witted machine-gunner from Louisiana, was sitting next to his machine gun as if a mannequin, his head wrapped in a big towel with his helmet on top.

  “Jeez, Smoky,” I said, “why not just put a big arrow pointing to your head that says, ‘Krauts, shoot here.’” He just looked at me, rolled his eyes, and shivered.

  Bastogne was miserable and cold, but, for now, dry. No mud. Ice formed on mud puddles. And because of the cold and light casualties, none of the “death smell” of Normandy. An occasional whiff of coffee, cigarette smoke, and a navy-bean fart—that was Bastogne.

  The snow started on the second day, December 2
0. Growing up, snow was rare in Astoria, though I’d sometimes run into it crossing over the Coast Range while heading to or from the Willamette Valley. In Bastogne, it fell softly at first, then with great gusto. Just like our exchanges with the Germans. A few small skirmishes occurred here and there, but not much else.

  Father Maloney quietly gathered Easy’s Catholics and others who felt the need for some spiritual encouragement. It was Skip’s idea. Alex Penkala, another close friend of Skip’s, was there; like Muck, he was a pretty serious Catholic. Perconte would make fun of him for still being a virgin. Me? I prayed a lot during the war that I could somehow just make it back to the banks of the Nehalem River with a blackberry tin in my hand. I was no Father Maloney. What a trouper he was, having jumped with us into Normandy and Holland, and being with us now in Bastogne. In the stillness of the woods, his words were soft assurance on the jagged edge of war: “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  As the group broke up, Skip and I made our ways to each other, having not seen one another since Mourmelon. Our eyes—tired eyes—met. He was holding the rosary he carried with him everywhere.

  “Stay safe, Skipper,” I said.

  “You, too, Malark. See you when we get outa this friggin’ icebox.”

  We shook hands. He left to rejoin the 1st Platoon. I returned to my foxhole a few hundred yards away. By then, the Jerries had moved machine gunners along the Foy-Bizory road. But all we could do was wait, knowing either they would attack or we would. Some will tell you that fear is a soldier’s worst enemy. I disagree. Too much and you’re paralyzed. But too little and you’re dead. Fear helps you take care of yourself so something bad won’t happen to you. If you don’t have at least some fear, you’re going to be a damn poor soldier and get yourself wounded or killed. Yeah, too much can kill you. But a little of it can save your life.

  Sometimes, I worried as much about having rookies to the left and right of me as I did about the enemy. You’d always get a bit more nervous if you had some replacement beside you. And for whatever reason, they were the guys who seemed to get killed or wounded faster. Maybe it was because they just weren’t as gritty. Or maybe because they weren’t as well trained. In either case, they seemed to disappear quicker than the Toccoa guys.

  Suddenly, on the second or third day, the stillness of the woods was shattered by the pop of guns and the sound of bullets ripping into trees. And then the awful sound of someone getting hit: a muffled cry. “I’m hit!” And the panicked cry of “Medic! Medic!” And a machine-gunning of swear words that spoke not only of pain but of the frustration of knowing the victim could no longer do battle with the bastard who’d shot him. And—God, I hated this one—a soft, desperate call for a mother.

  The German machine gunners kept spraying the woods like a lawn sprinkler till we finally got some guys in position and started hammering back. Before long, the field beyond the woods was littered with dead Germans. Dozens of them, part of one small attempt to push the lines west, toward their ultimate goal of Antwerp. Not that every time we quelled such a push it didn’t cost us something. Gordon took a shot in the neck that should have killed him but didn’t. Same with another machine gunner. They survived, but not by much. Same with that new machine-gun crew, the Polish guys. Our medic, Eugene Roe, was busy that day, and the nearest aid station was in Bastogne, a few dangerous miles away.

  Wounded men were Roe’s stock-in-trade. And he’d seen more death than anyone else in the unit. To the rest of us, death was some rogue wave that would crash down on us from time to time. Hell, Roe was standing out in the surf every day, taking one shot after another. Since we’d got to Bastogne—bloodier than any other place we’d been—Roe was getting a bit of that thousand-yard stare himself. Quieter. You could tell it was getting to him. And who could blame him?

  We continued hide-and-seek games with the krauts for the next few days, not that there was much daylight in which to fight. It didn’t get light until around 8:00 a.m. and returned to dark around 4:00 p.m. We’d pick a fight, they’d pick a fight. They’d send a patrol; we’d send a patrol. We did a lot of frontline firing and mortaring. Perhaps too much. If this stalemate didn’t break in our favor soon, we were bound to lose because we were already running out of ammo. And snow and heavy fog meant our flyboys weren’t, at least for now, going to be saving our butts with a supply drop. We were down to six rounds per mortar, one bandolier per rifleman, and one box of machine-gun ammo per gun.

  “No firing at anything, except to repel a major attack,” said Compton.

  Before long, the Germans seemed to sense this. When the fog would lift, we’d see them down there in Foy, frolicking around in their white snowsuits, almost as if daring us to come after them but knowing we couldn’t. Already, the 506th’s 1st Battalion had been beat up pretty badly trying to take the town and had fallen back.

  Ammo wasn’t the only thing we were low on. Roe was going from man to man like some sort of desperate trick-or-treater, scrounging whatever he could in the way of supplies. Food was becoming a problem. Not enough K rations had got distributed in the rush to leave Mourmelon. Our company cooks tried to get us hot, boiled chunks of beef in a souplike recipe—or white beans in broth—brought in from Bastogne by jeep before daylight or after dark, but it was impossible to keep it even lukewarm. Our best culinary trick was mixing a lemonade packet from our K rations to make an iced dessert. But, God, what I’d give for a hamburger steak and mashed potatoes from the Liberty Grill.

  Meanwhile, the cold and snow started taking their toll. Joe Toye’s soft singing of Irish ballads or “I’ll Be Seeing You” might have eased his soul, but it wasn’t doing much for his toes. Roe suggested he go back to regiment for a break. “I ain’t comin’ off the line,” Toye said.

  We were told to inspect our feet on occasion. Blue was a warning. Black the danger zone. On December 21, up to a foot of dry powder fell. And yet we were still wearing summer uniforms. All we had for cold weather were long, wool overcoats, which helped in the trenches but obviously weren’t smart for combat, and thin woolen caps we wore under our helmets. Sometimes, if a guy got hit, Roe was having to tuck the plasma bottle in his armpit to keep the stuff from freezing.

  “Krauts don’t know how good they got it,” said Bill Guarnere, who’d become a close friend. “Wearing them snowsuits and sleeping in houses down there in Foy—they got the life.”

  When you’d be up checking an outpost and look down on that village, you’d think you were looking at a Currier & Ives Christmas card. Then you’d stumble over some frozen corpse, bled out in the snow, and you’d think otherwise. The body of one dead German, not far from our foxholes, finally got to a few guys; despite the nearly frozen soil, they gave him a proper burial.

  By now, I’d become a unit sergeant. Along with other noncoms, we needed to keep an eye on who needed a break, some Joe who needed a couple of days back at the command post, where Winters was, or being a runner between us.

  “Malark, I need you to witness this for me,” said Roe one day. One of our replacements—a guy named Hughes whose grandfather had been a U.S. Supreme Court justice—huddled in his foxhole, complaining of not being able to feel his feet. Roe unlaced one of the man’s boots. His foot was half-black, early signs of gangrene. His war was over. Later, I heard he lost part of one foot and the entire other foot, though, as a newcomer to us at Mourmelon, he may never even have fired a shot in the war.

  Once, I made the mistake of checking my own feet; took me two days to get them warm again. While picking up supplies in Bastogne, I picked up some burlap bags and started wrapping my boots in them. I found that if you poured some water on them and had it freeze, it actually worked as insulation and kept your feet warmer. I go
t a lot of heckling for my system, but by now I preferred warmth to pride and, while some believed otherwise, remained convinced this was the way to go. Speirs thought my getup was the funniest thing since Abbott and Costello; he had Forrest Guth, a guy with a camera, take a picture of me. Winters just thought I was nuts. Later, he said, “Can you imagine a guy wrapping his feet so he could stay in combat rather than get out?”

  Every now and then you’d hear about some guy who’d taken off his boots just to freeze his feet so he could get out of here. Occasionally, some guy would go so far as to put a bullet in his foot for the same reason. War could twist your mind in lots of ways; when you get cold and exhausted, you lose your mental edge. And if you lose your mental edge, you lose hope. You lose hope and you’re doomed. For some guys, a day or two helping out back at the command post could charge their batteries a bit. Winters was big on that. He’d notice a guy who was having a tough time and call him for a little break. “Hang tough,” he was always telling us. Other times, the only way out for a soldier seemed to be the one thing I vowed I’d never do: quit.

  Bastogne was challenging us in ways no other place had. We had no artillery power and no airpower. We were low on ammo and food. The men were cold, fearful, exhausted. I’ve heard a soldier loses his effectiveness in combat after about 90 days; we’d been in action for 107 since Normandy. This wasn’t exactly how any of us had expected to spend Christmas 1944. As if our situation wasn’t already ominous enough, word filtered through Easy’s ranks from a medic back in Bastogne: The Germans had closed the circle. The 101st Airborne was now completely surrounded, but as Winters would remind us, “We’re used to that. We’re paratroopers.”