Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  Our Christmas miracle came early. On December 23, we awoke to clear skies.

  “God, look at that,” said Compton. “UCLA blue!”

  “Listen,” said Toye. “Planes. I hear planes.”

  We weren’t dreaming. We looked above us; in the gaps between the trees and there against an almost-too-true-to-be-real blue sky were C-47 transport planes, dropping supplies: food, blankets, medicine, ammunition, the works. The amount would prove less than we’d expected—the K rations would last for only a few days—but they were something, and triggered a much needed boost in morale. After a week cut off from everybody else, hidden back in the woods, we’d lost any sense of context, that we were part of something bigger than just staying alive. The planes reconnected us somehow. Soon, a few P-47s were also in the sky, apparently to rouse the Germans below in Foy and Noville.

  Some guys, including me, ran partway into the open field so they could see us. We whooped, hollered, and cheered, then suddenly froze in panic. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. The P-47s were opening fire with mounted machine guns. On us.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  We scattered beneath trees and into foxholes, wondering if those had been our own guys accidentally firing at us or Germans who’d captured our planes. They returned for a second go. I dove behind a tree. Ping. A bullet glanced off my helmet, sending my metal cap flying, but leaving me unscathed. I’d had tons of close calls since Normandy; this was another. But, somehow, I’d yet to be seriously wounded. At Bastogne, though, you didn’t find yourself thinking too much about long-range possibilities—say, getting back home. You were more concerned about just making it until tomorrow.

  On December 24, a jeep from Bastogne brought copies of a one-page newspaper. The Germans had, two days earlier, demanded the surrender of the 101st. Beneath a “Merry Christmas” greeting, General A. C. McAuliffe had written:

  24 December 1944

  What’s Merry about all this, you ask? We’re fighting—it’s cold. We aren ’t home. All true but what has the proud Eagle Division accomplished with its worthy comrades the 10th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and all the rest? Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We have identifications from four German Panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division. These units, spearheading the last desperate lunge, were headed straight west for key points when the Eagle Division was hurriedly ordered to stem the advance. How effectively this was done will be written in history; not alone in our Division’s glorious history but in World history. The Germans actually did surround us, their radios blaring our doom. Their Commander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance:

  December 22nd 1944

  To the U.S.A. Commander for the encircled town of Bastogne.

  The Fortune of war is changing. This time the U.S.A. forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units. More German armored units have crossed the river Ourthe near Ortheuville, have taken Marche and reached St. Hubert by passing through Homores-Sibrat-Tillet. Librament is in German hands.

  There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think it over a term of two hours will be granted beginning with the presentation of this note.

  If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A.A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne. The order for firing will be given immediately after this two hour’s term.

  All the serious civilian losses caused by the Artillery fire would not correspond with the well known American humanity.

  —The German Commander.

  The German Commander received the following reply:

  22 December 1944

  To the German Commander: NUTS!

  —The American Commander.

  “‘Nuts,‘” said Toye. “Gotta love that guy, McAuliffe.” Around us, soldiers hooted and hollered. McAuliffe’s refusal to give up encouraged us all; how fortunate that a gutsy guy like him was on watch while General Taylor was back in the States. Like the planes, his defiance reminded me that what we were doing here was about something bigger than just us. That we weren’t folding no matter what. We were beating back everything thrown at us.

  Not that his “Merry Christmas” got us in any sort of holiday spirit, thinking of Christmases back home. By dark, the wind had picked up and the windchill factor plummeted. We had navy-bean broth that night, as usual. For the first time, Winters OK’d a warming fire but the Germans must have picked up on it because an incoming mortar round pounded down, some shrapnel catching Harry Welsh below the belt. He was evacuated, went back to England, though went AWOL to later return to Easy Company.

  I passed out some Lucky Strike Christmas presents, then, making sure our outpost was manned, headed for some shut-eye. All was quiet except for guys coughing, which had become as common as breathing. Some guys will tell you they heard the Germans singing “Silent Night.” Maybe. I heard that song only in my head, though sound traveled so well over the snow that it’s possible it was really coming from the Germans in Foy. Once in a foxhole, Bain and I would pull our “lids” of limbs and fir bows over us. A guy named Ed Thomas had concocted a more gruesome roofing system: the frozen-stiff bodies of German soldiers atop the branches. His thinking was, when shrapnel started flying, better them than us. And, hell, the krauts were already feeling no pain.

  A few days later, word filtered from Bastogne that Glenn Miller’s plane had gone down over the Channel in mid-December and he was missing; it was hard to imagine not hearing more fresh songs from that guy, one of the greats of big-band music. But better news came on its heels: The siege of Bastogne was finally broken. A tank battalion from Patton’s 3rd Army had penetrated the German lines and rolled into town. That was wonderful. The circle was broken. We could get supplies in and wounded out. But, later, we heard that the 3rd rescued us. That cockeyed idea is phonier than a three-dollar bill. Easy Company didn’t need rescuing.

  One night, Joe Toye took shrapnel in the wrist when a German plane swooped low and dropped an antipersonnel bomb. It was the third time he’d been wounded since our jump into Normandy.

  “Damn it,” he growled. He hated getting wounded; he was like some football team’s star fullback, never wanting to stop. Never wanting to miss a single play.

  “You lucky SOB,” I said to him before he was taken back to an aid station in Bastogne.

  “I’ll be back, Malark.”

  Occasionally, in war, there’d be the guy who was happy to get hit; the Harvard man David Kenyon Webster, when having a bullet go cleanly through his leg in Holland, somehow had the presence of mind—and the Hollywood flare—to yell, “They got me!” He later said so himself. Said he’d gotten his wish: a million-dollar wound that would force him out of action. Funny, though, while Webster was back getting pampered by some sweetie-pie nurse in England, Eugene Jackson was dug in with us here at Bastogne—and had been with us in Holland—after nearly having had his ear ripped off by a mortar in Normandy. Different soldiers, you quickly learned, had different pain thresholds.

  Take Toye, his arm looking like a skinned deer after that Normandy jump. Shrapnel in Holland. Now wounded here in Bastogne. You couldn’t keep the guy down. And it wasn’t as if he had anything to prove; every man in Easy Company respected Joe Toye for his toughness. But, remembering back to that night at the Regent Palace when I found Joe on the roof of that atrium, maybe what drove him so hard physically was the need to make up for not being, in his own mind, as “eloquent” as some of the other guys, not that I ever thought eloquence was an Easy Company trait. And not that it was his fault. Hell, your dad sends you to the coal mines when you’re fifteen and you’re not going to be Shakespeare; it’s that simple.

  It’s ironic that Webster, the Harvard grad, could spin a sentence l
ike nobody’s business; he was forever writing home, regaling relatives with story after story. But you ask me whom I’d want in a foxhole with me—or, for that matter, back home, sharing a beer and a burger with me at the Liberty Grill—and I’ll pick Joe Toye every damn time over a guy like Webster. You know why? Because he was always thinking beyond himself, that’s why.

  On New Year’s Eve, I thought back to a year ago, Skip and I celebrating with the guys in England. Warm. Wild. All the food you could eat. Now, we sat in our foxholes and talked quietly. Then, with permission from Compton, just because we had ammo, we fired off six rounds of mortars to let the Germans know the worst was yet to come. A few days later, we were hunkered down when a jeep pulled up down the way, snow kicking up from its tires. It was Father Maloney. And who in the hell’s with him but Joe Toye. Arm in a sling. Hadn’t shaved since Adam was born. But there he was, walking across the field toward the front line. Winters saw him.

  “Where you going?” he asked. “You don’t have to go back to the lines.”

  Toye looked at him. “Gotta get back with the fellas,” he said. And walked back to join the boys in Easy Company. Like the others, I just stood and watched in awe.

  Lieutenant Peacock, the guy who’d busted us back in Aldbourne for smuggling in the girls in leopard-skin tights, won a thirty-day furlough back to the States. OK, Lewis Nixon won it but had the guts to stay, and Peacock was the lucky runner-up. Most of the guys were happy for him, not because he got to go home, but because they got rid of him. Nice guy, but in over his head. Meanwhile, a few guys with trench foot were sent back to England. Joe Liebgott turned quiet, morose; he’d temporarily lost his edge. In Bastogne, Toye had seen that lieutenant who’d frozen during the tank attack in Holland, the one who’d buried his head in the sand while that Tiger was ripping us; he was in an aid station, leaning against a wall, crying. Our numbers were dwindling. The only thing that kept me going was knowing I had good buddies in the foxholes down the line: Muck, Penkala, Guarnere, Toye, Hoobler—the Toccoa boys—and, of course, Buck Compton, who came to us late but was a good egg, and a sort of honorary Toccoa boy. After his being wounded in Holland, I wasn’t sure we’d see him again, and I was glad he was back, though a lot of guys worried about Buck. Thought he was getting too serious. Maybe losing his edge.

  We’d heard that General Taylor was now back in Bastogne. Everybody was ordered to shave within twenty-four hours and to remove their boots once a day and massage their feet. I refused the foot order, having tried and found it only made things worse. Come to think of it, I refused the shaving order, too, as did most of us.

  We’d heard from guys in Bastogne that the 101st was making headlines back home. We’d broken the German siege. Beaten the odds. All at a time when newspapers were looking for good hero stories and citizens looking for hope. But, believe me, we soldiers in those Bastogne foxholes weren’t feeling particularly heroic. What we mainly felt was cold. Our beards grew longer, our patience shorter. The snow resumed, now halfway to our knees. It would snow again every day for a week. Somehow it didn’t seem to bother the German planes, which were harassing us day and night. We had been on the front lines for fifteen days in Belgium, on top of seventy in Holland and twenty-three in Normandy. A total of 108 days, not that anybody was counting. In war, you count days the way prisoners mark walls. Will this ever end? Will we ever make it out alive? Will I get home to be with Bernice and pick blackberries? Will Skip marry Faye Tanner and live happily ever after? Such questions rattled around in your mind here and there, between the short spurts of combat and the much longer nights.

  On January 2, we headed out into Jack’s Woods to flush out any German soldiers before our inevitable attack on Foy. Before leaving, standing around a warming fire, we got to know a seven-man bazooka team from the 10th Armored Division that had joined us. We worked our way through the woods to the east, where the forest came to the edge of the Foy-Bizory road. We scooted across, knowing we couldn’t probably be seen from German outposts in Foy. We worked our way north with hardly any opposition. The worst problem was heavy snow piling up in the brush.

  Suddenly, an ear-piercing sound split the air: “screaming meemies,” like huge mortars and projectiles tumbling through the air, end over end, making an eerie whirling noise. They overshot us, their bark worse than their bite.

  Darkness was setting in. Defensive positions were set for the night. I didn’t see it, but later a German soldier came roaring through the woods on horseback, apparently like something out of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Scared the hell out of everybody there. He saw our men, probably wet his pants, pulled a one-eighty-degree turn, and headed back. Don Hoobler, a likable kid from Ohio, coolly pumped three rounds into the soldier’s back. The German fell off, and the horse ran off. Hoobler, a good friend of mine, was quite proud of himself.

  We dug in as best we could, not easy in the snow. Buck Compton moved from foxhole to foxhole to check on us. “Guys doin’ OK?” he’d say. Or, “Keep moving those toes.”

  The frontline machine-gun positions were in such heavy thicket that Burr Smith was actually exchanging banter with the krauts. Suddenly, crack. A gun went off nearby and a soldier screamed. One of ours. Hoobler. A guy I’d known since our runs up Currahee. He had been fiddling with a Browning 45 mm pistol—not a Luger as some thought—in his right-hand pocket and apparently accidentally shot himself in the leg. He was squirming in the snow, the blood gushing dangerously fast from his right leg. He’d severed a main artery.

  “Help me, help me, oh, God, help me,” he cried.

  A 1st Platoon medic bent over and tried to stop the bleeding. “Need help. Gotta get this man to an aid station.” Two guys hauled him off, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. Later, we heard he died shortly after arriving at the aid station. Bled to death.

  In the quiet of the woods that followed, you couldn’t help thinking fatalistic thoughts. You figured the law of averages was going to stay with you only so long in combat. And that you were living and fighting on borrowed time.

  Late the next afternoon, Winters pulled us out of our advanced position; he wanted us back in our old spots, perched in the woods overlooking Foy. At least part of the concern was that we had no reserves to fill the flanks; if Jerries got past us, we’d be fighting on three sides. Not good.

  The light started fading. We were trudging back to our old position—eighteen Easy guys and half a dozen guys from the bazooka team that had joined us—when we had to cross a narrow country lane. Looking back, I think the Germans might have seen us heading back to our positions in the woods because just as we arrived, so did a shelling like we’d never seen before or would see after. The Jerries started pounding us with big ones, probably 170s and 88s, as if they’d known exactly where we were heading. The shells rained down with the thunder of freight trains. Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom! One after another.

  “Incoming!” Compton yelled. “G’down! Take cover!” I found a hole in a hurry and tucked my head as if praying, which I did, too. Rod Bain piled in next to me. Around us, people were yelling, diving into foxholes and shell holes. Or, if desperate, cowering behind trees.

  The shells were set to explode on contact, creating “tree bursts” that flung shrapnel and knifelike shards of wood in all directions. Pines snapped in half and slammed to the snow with thumps, limbs flying crazily. I’d seen logging crews in action back home, but nothing like this chaos of falling trees. The ground exploded, dirt shooting up like geysers. Guys were running around, desperately looking for cover. For a moment, I was a twelve-year-old kid back in Oregon. “Bob, Donnie, get up, get up! Fire’s comin’.”

  “Get down! Find some cover!” Compton kept yelling. The bazooka team from the 10th Armored scurried for foxholes but none were to be had. Too late. Ka-boom! Their bodies were flung into the air, twisting and turning before landing contorted in the snow.

  Bain and I winced as the shells kept coming like oversized machine-gun fire. I’d been through a lot since Norma
ndy, but nothing as intense, as loud, as constantly dooming as this. When the shells hit, they literally bounced you up.

  Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom! The shelling continued. Bain was curled up in the fetal position, hands over his head. Outside, barely audible above the noise from the attack, I heard voices of soldiers: Someone yelling to take cover. Someone moaning. Someone yelling, “I’m hit.”

  Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom!

  Then, suddenly, quiet. As quickly as the attack began, it ended, the sound of shells replaced by the sound of the shelled: Bain and I barely heard it far in the distance. “Gotta get up … gotta get up.”

  It sounded like Joe Toye. I popped my head out of the foxhole and looked around for Buck Compton, for orders. That’s when we heard what sounded like Toye again. “Gotta get up … gotta get up …”

  Hearing that, Guarnere, Toye’s best friend, scrambled out of his foxhole like a madman, heading for his pal. He was playing right into the krauts’ hands: hit ‘em with a barrage, allow them a little time to go after their wounded, then hit ‘em again. But there was no stopping Guarnere. Bill got to Joe and was dragging him, by his two arms, back to a foxhole, leaving a streak of blood in the snow. Joe was missing a leg.

  “Ge’ back, Bill,” people were yelling. “Take cover!” But he wouldn’t leave Toye by himself. “Bill, find cover!” He glanced over his shoulder, spotting a foxhole. He was almost—

  Ka-boom, ka-boom!

  Guarnere and Toye disappeared in a hail of dirt, snow, shrapnel, and tree shards. The earth shook.

  Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom!

  Another soldier screamed. Finally, the barrage stopped again. It was eerily silent, broken by the panicked voice of Buck Compton.