Easy Company Soldier

by Don Malarkey

  Dike was permanently relieved of his duties. Speirs was put in command of Easy Company. For now, Easy Company was as exhausted as we’d ever been. Though we slept inside actual structures that night for the first time since Mourmelon, about a month ago, the cold seemed more intense. The next morning, we moved out, heading for Noville, a larger village just down the road that had been our objective since we’d first dug in, in those Bastogne woods. A light snow fell.

  Noville required another risky approach in an open field. It was January 14. We moved out through the snow. Meanwhile, the 1st Battalion advanced far to our left, being pummeled by German 88s. We soon had problems of our own: Machine guns from Noville had opened on us. Speirs set up a couple of machine guns in response. With each burst of fire, we’d advance a little more across a small stream and into position for a morning assault. A horse, its legs shattered by a shell fragment, stood in a nearby field. One of our noncoms put it out of its misery.

  Meanwhile, our misery continued. That night, January 14, with no enemy fire, we tucked up under a deep shoulder of land and waited to attack in the morning. It was, some would remember, the coldest night of the war. We shivered through the night, having got plenty sweaty moving to this point. At one point, Winters considered just attacking in the darkness rather than freeze in it, but decided against it for fear we’d shoot our own men.

  Early in the morning, Carwood Lipton and a radioman crept forward to assess the situation. He found knocked-out Sherman tanks and lots of bodies of Allied soldiers, frozen like plastic army men, the dead of a battle from nearly a month earlier.

  We started the assault at dawn. The village was ours by noon; resistance had been lighter than expected. Now it was on to Rachamps, a tiny village about three kilometers beyond, the last of three objectives we’d had when we arrived here. The 11th Armored Division joined us on our flank, one of the few times we’d have the luxury of such bulk. We moved north on high ground and found ourselves looking down into a treeless basin with the village nestled amid white fields at the bottom. The snow on the village’s front door dipped into a giant bowl, and it was decided we could find good cover if we could just get to the far end of that bowl. But that meant, of course, an approach in a wide-open field.

  We started moving forward in snow nearly two feet deep. A soldier’s best friend is cover and we had none. It was a strange feeling of vulnerability. But the German garrison must have been apprehensive about our approach. They lobbed some 88s our way, not exploding shells but armor-piercing, and all were too long or too short. Other resistance was light, almost as if they were giving in to the inevitable. We started running to find cover behind fences and buildings. I looked up from behind a wall. A Belgian farmer was standing in the window of a farmhouse, frantically waving and pointing to the cellar of the house. He held up two fingers and pointed down. A pair of Germans were downstairs.

  A handful of us moved forward. I opened the back door and could see the stairs to the basement.

  “Comeinzeout!” I yelled.

  No response. I threw a grenade down. Boom. A dog scurried upstairs. I yelled again. Again, no response. I opened fire with a tommy gun as I started down the stairs and finally heard some German words. Finally, two officers slunk up the stairs, one waving a white handkerchief.

  I don’t remember who interrogated them, but they said they were told they were supposed to fight to the last man or a German 88 unit was going to level the town, including them. We took sixty-five prisoners that day and didn’t lose a man. Late in the day, the two officers were being held in a village barn. Sgt. Earl Hale and a rifleman, Joe Liebgott, were guarding them. One of the prisoners sprang on Hale, slitting his throat. Liebgott killed both. Somehow, Hale survived.

  As did Easy Company after nearly a month in this frozen hell. Later that evening, word came down that the 17th Airborne would be relieving us, or whatever was left of us. We had arrived at Bastogne on December 19 with about 120 men; between death, wounds, trench foot, and guys who just couldn’t take it anymore, we now had about 60. Among my friends: Muck and Hoobler, dead. Toye, Guarnere, Gordon, Smith, and Perconte, wounded. Compton, gone.

  In a letter from Bernice, she’d asked what it was like for me in war. I wrote back, saying, among other things, this:

  When we were surrounded I sometimes felt we would never pull out of it. Generally, I was confident—in spite of the suffering. Can you imagine, honey, living in a foxhole with ice on the side and hanging from an improvised roof? Outside the snow was up to your knees. We had to wrap our feet in burlap bags to keep them from freezing—even then, many of (the men) had toes that wouldn’t function. I can remember how my hands would freeze to my tommy gun.

  The fact that you’re still alive is the only important thing. I know you don’t know what it is to face death. It’s the most punishing experience you can imagine. And when you’re fighting you’re going through it 24 hours a day. It’s hard, darling, to walk into those Kraut tanks, machine guns, artillery, etc when you know you’ve got so much to live for. It takes a lot of that stuff called ’guts ’that too damn few men have. Having been as lucky as I am, I begin to feel that I’m a fugitive from the law of averages, which isn’t good. This war is hell all right.

  Then, in the same letter, I obviously remembered the low point of that hell. Skip’s death.

  How would you feel if you were walking down the street with a friend and suddenly she was blown into a thousand pieces’? My best friend was killed at my side, the greatest little guy I’ve ever known. I was more broken up than I’ve ever been in my life but there’s no turnin’ back—keep drivin’—and for five days after we kept attackin ’.

  Each day more of my friends would leave for a better world. That’s a sample of what I’ve been doing. I could never describe the terror that strikes you when you ’re under those terrific artillery barrages when the exploding steel seemingly pounds you into the ground and makes your head reel, your ears pop, and your heart stop beating I would tell you a lot more about legs and arms, faces, eyes, etc. that are no longer usable. That’s the kind of a life I know—not an existence of a human being [but] the life of a madman.

  In Bastogne, though, the end had finally come. Once Rachamps was secured and we had the POWs together, I was invited to one of the farmhouses whose family had not fled. It was the first time I’d been indoors, in a warm building, in a month. A warm fire was burning in a huge rock fireplace, and I stood in front of those flames and soaked them up like a hungry man who hadn’t eaten in weeks, as if I’d forgotten how good a fire could feel. The smell of a fire always takes me back to those summer evenings, as a kid, cooking crawdads or fish over the flames on the Nehalem River.

  When Skip came to visit, we were going to do that. We were going to catch sea-run cutthroat and bake them over the flames and drink beer. And I was going to see his old haunts in upstate New York. Meet Faye, the girl whom I felt I almost knew because Skip had talked so much about her. Maybe be in the wedding.

  But that knock on the door in Mourmelon had changed everything.

  14

  LETTERS FROM TWO WOMEN

  France, Belgium, Germany

  January 20, 1945-May 8, 1945

  Combat pushes so much adrenaline through your veins that once you stop fighting, once that rush is over, you come down harder than the morning after an all-night binge. Doubly hard when, arriving by truck at a place in France called Haguenau, you see the 1st Platoon boys arrive and remember he’s not with the outfit anymore. Of Skip’s 1st Platoon, only eleven of the forty men were still with the unit.

  For Easy Company, Haguenau, about 160 miles southeast of Bastogne, was a place of transition. We were joined by a bunch of replacement soldiers, wet-behind-the-ears types who knew the war was winding down but wanted to get in a few licks before the last shot was fired. Some were the real deal. Others just wanted to send a picture back home to convince everybody that they were a war hero. Still others were a bit of both, like a kid named Hank Jone
s, a second lieutenant fresh out of West Point who was both cocky and totally green; looked like the kid on your block back home who sold Grit magazines door-to-door.

  “Sir,” he said when I first met him. “I’m here to be your assistant and you will leave for a while and come back as my assistant.” I liked his pluck, but he’d confused me with Carwood Lipton, who he assumed was going to be up for a battlefield commission.

  The idea of being replaced did, frankly, have some appeal to it; by now, I was so tired my mind seemed in a fog. But I wasn’t quitting.

  “Thanks, Jones,” I said. “But I’m sticking right here with the Second Platoon.”

  Beyond the fresh faces, we had a few guys rejoin us who’d been wounded in Normandy or Holland and were now recovered. Among them was Webster, the Harvard man so busy polishing his Bobcat badge that he didn’t realize that damn near everybody else was now an Eagle Scout. Or dead. Or, like Toye and Guarnere, lying in some hospital back in England trying to figure out how in the hell to walk on one leg for the rest of their lives.

  Webster, who’d taken a single bullet cleanly through the leg in Holland, showed up in Haguenau with the pep of a kid being dropped off at a birthday party—and not smart enough to figure out the rest of us weren’t much in a partying mood. He kept asking where so-and-so was. And guys kept telling him: “dead … lost a leg … took a shot in the neck … froze his friggin’ feet off….”

  I looked at Webster in his fresh uniform, then headed off to find the portable showers that I’d heard had been trucked in for us. A shower felt good, even if the water wasn’t exactly stateside hot. But as I stood there, ignoring the “Hurry it up, pal” impatience of guys in line, I let that water wash over my face, wishing I could wash Bastogne off me like it was nothing more than salmon blood on my hands from a day hauling the seines on the Columbia.

  I closed my eyes and there I was, sitting on the edge of that foxhole, Roe’s words almost in slow motion: Malark, I’m sorry, but it’s Skip…. Over and over.

  Since Bastogne, I’d learned that Muck would never have been in such a vulnerable position had another unit—some non-101st unit—done its job that day and occupied some settlements west of Foy. But they failed, which meant scrubbing the very mission that had moved the 1st Platoon to the front. In other words, Skip shouldn’t have been sitting in that foxhole at that moment.

  I toweled off my face. Yeah, Haguenau was a place of transition. You sensed the war in Europe was winding down, as if the Germans were just lobbing a few shells here and there to remind us that they weren’t scampering home with their tail between their legs. But, suddenly, with time to think, you started wondering if it would ever really be over.

  Haguenau sat on the Moder River. I’m sure it was beautiful in the spring and summer; for now, in mid-February and in midwar, it was battered buildings connected by muddy streets. The Germans had launched a diversionary operation in this region to draw American troops out of the Bastogne area. A few of their soldiers, probably not more than a squad, were milling about across the river, not more than a hundred yards from us.

  With the 2nd Platoon still without an officer, I was, as a staff sergeant, in charge. Our headquarters was a large house owned by a dentist who, like lots of dentists in Europe, had his practice as part of his home. He was also the mayor of Haguenau. And reportedly a Nazi who’d fled pretty fast when he heard Americans were coming to town. Without much to do one day, we blew open a safe in his house, but all we found was some coins, loose jewelry, and two stamp albums. I gave the coins and jewelry to guys in the company; later, I sent the stamp albums home to my parents.

  At Haguenau, I got some mail: a letter from Bernice. We were talking marriage by now, though I kept getting the idea I was more excited about it than she was. “Life without you,” I had written in January from Bastogne, “wouldn’t be worth living.” Later, I wrote about having no chance to grieve for those you’ve lost.

  I am sorry, darling, that you allowed yourself to be so assured that I was soon to strike the shores of the good old U.S.A. I know how hard it is on you, emotionally. With me, it isn’t so bad for the army doesn’t allow you to display or harbor emotions. It’s the constant suppressing of them that brings about the psychological changes in men that people notice in returning veterans. Personally, that doesn’t worry me for I’ll probably be overly emotional in my return to you.

  I also got a letter from Joe Toye. Pretty much one-syllable words, which always bothered Joe but not me. Hell, it wasn’t how you said something, it was that you took the time to say it. Anyway, they’d cut his leg off within a couple of days of his getting it ripped to shreds at Bastogne. Then again in England. Then, back in the States, he got gangrene and had to have it cut again. “Tonight,” he said, “they’re cuttin’ it for the fourth time, and if it’s not successful, I’ve already been told that’s it. I die.” Guarnere, we heard, was recovering but had lost his leg.

  By now, Easy Company had lost its enthusiasm for war; it didn’t help hearing that dozens of our boys had been massacred by the krauts someplace north of Bastogne called Malmédy. I was slipping into a bit more cynicism than usual. When General Maxwell Taylor, back in the war zone after conveniently missing a tiny skirmish called the Battle of the Bulge, came through for an inspection, I mentally rolled my eyes.

  “Sergeant, were you wearing your helmet when it was hit?” he asked, looking at a helmet with a chunk missing after I’d taken a bullet from that P-47 that the krauts had apparently stolen and used to dive-bomb us.

  I wanted to shake my head and say, “What do you think?” Instead I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, in that case you can continue wearing it.”

  The incident showed how little the pencil-pushing brass knew about frontline duty. Anyone with a helmet with that kind of damage wouldn’t have had a friggin’ head if the helmet hadn’t been on his head when he was hit. I continued to wear it. And would have even if he’d told me I couldn’t.

  When word came down that we were going to send a patrol across the Moder River and bring back a few Germans who could cough up some info, nobody leapt to their feet. Nobody, that is, except Jones. I was going, but later word came down from Lt. Dick Winters that he wanted Jones, the West Point rookie, to replace me.

  That was fine by me. I wasn’t hurt, I was relieved, and so tired that I wouldn’t have been a good choice to go anyway. My assignment was, along with Speirs, to provide covering fire from the second floor of a house. The mission was like a deadly game of checkers. We got two of their guys as prisoners and lost two guys; Sgt. Bill Kiehn was killed outright and Eugene Jackson got hammered by the wooden handle of a potato masher.

  Poor Jackson. He’s the guy who’d taken a large fragment from a mortar in the side of his head in Normandy, then shown up before the Holland jump as if nothing had happened. Now, he was fighting for what little life was left in him. They’d dragged him back across the river, into our headquarters house, but everybody in the room knew he wasn’t going to make it. And he didn’t. He kept calling over and over for his “mama” to help him. He died as they tried to get him to a military hospital. Of shock—that’s what I heard. He was only nineteen, among those soldiers so anxious to get in that he’d lied about his age back when he was sixteen.

  The patrol had, in relation to other stuff we’d faced since the jump into Normandy, been pretty small potatoes. But afterward, Jones seemed sufficiently impressed that war was a big boys’ ball game. Watching Jackson die, Jones’s face was white as a ghost. He remained with the company for a short time, then was transferred to a higher echelon. Rumor had it that the war would soon end, and the West Pointers were being protected to staff peacetime armies.

  A few days later, command sent word that they wanted another patrol, needed a few more German soldiers. By then, it had turned colder; a thin layer of ice coated the Moder. Could we have sent that patrol and got those prisoners? Sure. But Winters didn’t want to risk it. He sent in a report that wasn’t rea
lly true but wasn’t really false; it said something like “Unable to secure prisoners. All our men safe.” You never talk about these things at the time, but I think, like us all, he was still a little numb from Bastogne and yet finally hopeful that, if we were careful, we might actually get out of this alive. The first patrol, in my mind, was a waste of two good men. I’m glad Dick made it our last patrol.

  Our moods rose. Winters was promoted to major. Some late Christmas presents started arriving, candy and cookies and stuff. My aunt Claudia in Portland was good about sending food, occasionally some Norwegian sardines. That smell would permeate any place we’d open them, though they’d get wolfed down in minutes. Ed Stein, who was Jewish, kept telling me, “Sarge, wait until you taste the strawberries my mother is sending.” Some Jewish delicacy, and a dish that I’m sure is good. When fresh. But it includes sour cream, and after weeks—hell, maybe months—en route I took one whiff and headed for open air. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Stein was savoring each bite.

  In the last few days in Haguenau, I started looking forward to a train, not a truck, ride to Mourmelon. I thought a lot about Faye Tanner back in New York, who had, by now, heard there was no need to wait for Skip to come home. With time to think again about something beyond combat—about being patient and getting home and those who wait—I tumbled Milton’s “On His Blindness” around in my head: