by Don Malarkey
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
—Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
I fondly ask:—But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts, who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:—
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Returning to Mourmelon, after three weeks in Haguenau, I kept putting it off. There were, after all, other things to consider, like who in the hell had looted our barracks while we were gone. We had stored all our belongings in the center of our barracks living room. When the door opened, all we saw was a huge pile of clothing nearly reaching to the ceiling. We’d been professionally looted, we suspected by some air force rear-echelon folks who’d arrived after we left for Bastogne. Gone were all our souvenirs, guns, cameras, medals, patches, wings, jump boots, knives, daggers. Anything with value. Jeez, you go off to fight one enemy and come back to another. And the guys were supposedly on our side.
I got settled in the winterized tent that would be my home and was going to do it then. But I received a three-day pass to Paris and left immediately, on February 28. When I returned, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I wrote her.
March 3, 1945
France
Dear Faye,
Received your swell “V-mail a couple of days ago and finally have found the time to answer. I had wanted to write you long ago but the government won’t allow it until they are certain that enough time has elapsed.
I hardly know how to write this letter, Faye. Your loss has been so great that there is very little I can say that would in any way console you. He was my best friend and the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was go on fighting after “the Skipper” was gone. I’ve seen a lot of them go, and I’d never seen men cry ’til that day when Skip joined the angels. Countless tears from a lot of his friends fell into the snow that day. He was without doubt the best liked person in the company—respected as a soldier—loved as the happy-go-lucky Skipper.
I’ve never missed Mass, Faye, and Sunday morning was always certain that I got out of the sack. That last Sunday [before Skip’s death] we went to services in a snow-covered field in Belgium so we can be thankful in knowing that he was in the State of Grace.
I do hope and pray that someday I will be able to meet you. I’ve always felt as if I really did know you. If ever I do get back to New York I shall promise to come to Kenmore. I’d always planned to do that with Skip. I wanted to tell you how lucky I thought you were. Now I can only shudder at the anguish you must be enduring. Gosh! Faye, I wish I could spend several hours with you so I could tell you everything that I can’t seem to put into words.
I hope you will write. I know he would have wanted it that way. “Chuck” [Grant] sends his regards. Joe [Toye] is in pretty tough shape. “Smitty” [Burr Smith] is in the hospital, too, but will be back soon.
Love, Don
When Lieutenant Speirs offered me a ten-day furlough in England, I grabbed it with gusto. Not only would it be fun, but it would take my mind off other things, such as Skip and the increasingly less enthusiastic letters from Bernice. “Never again say ‘It’s hard to keep our love alive when we’re so far apart,’” I wrote her in March. “It might be that way for you but not for me. The only thing I find hard about it is trying to quell the intensity of it enough to act normal.”
In England, I played lots of craps, sold a German Schmeisser for $275 to some sailor while crossing the English Channel, and ate frequently at a basement café on Charing Cross Road that specialized in roast duck and browned potatoes. Marvelous. Somewhere along the line, I read that the entire 101st Division had been awarded the Presidential Citation, the second time for the 506th, for its stance near Bastogne. Wearing that uniform with the screaming eagle on it, people knew two things about you: You were a damn good soldier—and half crazy.
One afternoon, in the basement bar of the Regent Palace Hotel, I noticed two red-beret sergeants from the British 1st Airborne Division sitting down the way. In London, these guys were honored above all; nobody in a red beret was to be arrested for drunkenness. Eventually they noticed my 101st Airborne patch, the screaming eagle.
“We owe a tip of the hat to the 101st,” said one. “Got us across the Rhine one black night after we’d been trapped behind enemy lines.”
I jiggled the ice cubes in my Scotch.
“I know,” I said. “That was my company. E Company 506th.”
They scoffed a bit and looked around at each other, obviously thinking I was trying to take some credit that wasn’t due me.
“Oh, really?” one said with a touch of doubt.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was on the rescue team.”
“Well, of course you were, old chap—so was my dead aunt Lucille,” said one, and they both laughed.
My Scotch was settling in. I paused, then took another sip.
“Say, how’s that tank sergeant, the commander from the Seventh Armored Division who headed up that outfit known as the Rats of Tobruk? Guy was in my boat.”
Their eyes widened.
“After we got him safely across the Rhine, he told me his wife had already been a widow five times and he was gettin’ out of this ‘bloody war.’”
They froze in silence, then one of them cleared his throat. “To E Company,” he said, holding up his drink. I clinked my glass with the others and nodded, then held mine high. “To E Company.”
When I returned to Mourmelon, there was another letter from Faye. Among other things, she wondered why Skip’s family hadn’t gotten an official letter from the company, beyond the telegram. It probably got lost in the transition from Dike to Speirs, I figured. At any rate, Skip’s mother was still holding out hope that her son was alive. I wrote back.
March 31, 1945
France
Dear Faye,
Just returned from a grand furlough in London and your swell letter was a real treat.
I’m sorry to hear you had been sick, Faye, but I’m sure that by this time you must be back to normal and enjoying yourself as much as possible in these days of war. Though I’ll have to admit the way it’s going now anything could happen. It’s hard to believe that the Rhine is so far behind the line these days.
This damn war has been going so long that when it finally does end I won’t be able to believe it.
I know how hard it is for you to realize Skip is gone. And how hard it must be to forget. I don’t think things always happen for the best—they just happen and we have to try to adjust ourselves accordingly.
Perhaps we can console ourselves in that he is in a happier place where there is always peace and not the misery and horror of a crazy world at war.
I’m afraid that the telegram is official. The chaplain does write the family but it does take time. It’s hell to think Skip’s mother is still hoping. His personal things are also to be sent home by the chaplain. I’m sure that in time they will arrive.
Well, Faye, I’ll close for now. I’m getting along great in spite of this G.D. life. You needn’t worry about haunting me. I’ll come to Kenmore. If anyone or anything ever does.
Love, Don
Allied forces were pushing deeper into Germany. On April 2, we were trucked to the west side of the Rhine River to act as blocking backs for any major escape attempts out of the Ruhr region. We were positioned in various villages, watching with interest as German citizens worked on their war-damaged properties rather than flee.
In a village named Dormagen, Lt. Harry Welsh was looking for someone to chec
k on a factory on the Rhine where it was rumored German soldiers might be holed up. I said I’d go. I went out with a rifleman, Ralph Orth, about noon. We worked our way through the large building, finding nobody. On the way out, we were walking through the yard area. At times like this, you couldn’t help thinking, after surviving all the tough stuff, if your number would come up on something simple like this. As I’d written Bernice, “I’m a fugitive from the law of averages, which isn’t good.”
“Hey, Orth,” I asked. “How long’s it been since you fired that rifle?”
“I dunno, Sarge. A long time, I guess.”
I pointed to a stack of railroad rails about fifty yards away.
“Why don’t you fire into that stack?”
He aimed and fired, then immediately yelled, “I’m hit!” and crumbled to the ground. What the hell? At first I thought he was joking, then we realized he’d been hit by a fragment of his own bullet that had hit a steel rail and ricocheted. It had penetrated his kneecap.
“Thanks, Sarge,” he said, his look of fear suddenly replaced by a smile. “You just earned me a ticket home.”
Our life now was not day-to-day combat, but mop-up duty. Patrols here and there to check for enemy soldiers holed up in various places. “Remember this,” Speirs once told us. “No prisoners. Shoot ’em all.”
One night, we crossed the Rhine to check for krauts in some building and, finding none, were returning when machine-gun fire hailed down on us. We were still about fifty feet from the shore. It was a mad rush for the bank but none of us got hit.
In some ways, as the strength of the real enemy diminished, another enemy rose up: ourselves. Sometimes it was serious, some guy getting drunk and killing another guy, other times just some alcohol-fueled high jinks, like the night I showed up at the company headquarters soaking wet from having jumped into the Rhine in the middle of the night, fueled by the strangest booze I’ve ever had.
They told me it was schnapps. It turned out to be wood alcohol, probably 200 proof, and it locked up my respiratory system like a frozen block on a pickup. I couldn’t breathe. I started flailing my arms in anguish, which only heightened the laughter from the guys around me. But Floyd Talbert realized I was in trouble. He threw me down on a cot and jumped on my chest. My breathing started again. Once recovered, I picked up a bottle of the stuff, poured it in an ashtray, and dropped a match in it. The flames leapt into the air like a homecoming bonfire.
Several nights later, I was lying in my bunk and broke out into a deep sweat, followed by chills. Back and forth. Finally, our medic, Eugene Roe, came and took my temperature.
“We’re gettin’ you the hell out of here, Malark.”
“No, no, no. I’ll be OK.”
Nobody in Easy had spent more consecutive days in combat than me. I didn’t want the streak to end because I had a piddly case of the flu.
“I’m getting Speirs,” said Roe.
“Roe, I’m—”
“Shut up, Malark. You’re sick.”
He got Captain Speirs, who did a quick assessment and ordered me to a hospital. “We’re pulling out in the morning, Malark. You’re not fit to come. Get well and rejoin us for the victory celebration in Hitler’s place in the mountains.”
An ambulance took me to a field hospital, where I hazily recall several doctors standing over me, bright lights in my face, and hearing talk about some strain of Rhine River malaria.
The next day, I was sent to an army hospital at the University of Liège in Belgium. It was there, in Liège, that the German drive to Antwerp had stalled. I was assigned a bed abutting a windowed outside wall, directly across from a platoon sergeant from the 28th Division. The guy had been here since the Bulge, when he’d frozen his feet off in the Ardennes Forest, and was in serious pain. Fourteen beds lined each side of the room.
In the days to come, I made the weirdest discovery: Except for the sarge across from me, nobody there was really sick. And the doctors and nurses seemed to be playing right along with the script. The patients would kid around like guys on some fraternity porch, then someone would whistle, and everyone would hop back in his bed. As the door opened, they’d paste these poor-me looks on their faces. In would walk some major from the medical staff, going from bed to bed, listening to the wildest stories of woe imaginable. And with apparent sympathy. What kind of Mickey Mouse outfit was this?
Finally, the doctor reached my bed, looked at my chart, and asked how I felt.
“Fine,” I said. “Whatever I had must have broken in the time I was being shuttled here from the Rhine.”
“According to this chart, Sergeant Malarkey, what you have is more serious than you might think.”
I shrugged. “All I can tell you is I feel fine. I’d like to get back to my company.” He looked at me with furrowed brow and moved on. This went on for days—the well people acting sick and me telling the major that I was well and ready to get out of this place.
“Sergeant, why do you want out of here?”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Because someone’s gotta fight the friggin’ war!” I said.
Just when I didn’t think his brow could furrow any further, it did. “Are you—are you serious}”
“Damn right I’m serious.”
Guy thought I was nuts. “You want back out there?”
This went on for ten days. It was as if I were trapped in some freakish theater comedy. But it would have been funnier had it not been sickening; these were a bunch of yellow-bellied cowards turning their backs on the country they’d promised to serve.
Next day, I was told the doctor wanted me on an upper-floor lab. He wanted to give me something called sodium pentothal, as part of an examination.
“What the hell is that stuff?” I asked.
“It’s a drug that’ll relax you and help you describe your feelings.”
I wanted to tell him that I was quite capable of describing my feelings without his shooting me full of that crap. Like this: I feel like I’d like to punch you in your furrowed-brow face and leave this loony bin forever.
He offered me an afternoon pass into Liège. “Walk around, get some fresh air, Sergeant Malarkey, and let’s see how you get along,” he said.
I thought about just bolting, but figured going AWOL this late in the game wasn’t a good idea. I got along just fine and returned, ready to pack and leave.
“Wait, wouldn’t you want to donate some blood for us?” the doctor said. “We could use a pint.”
“You can get all the blood you need from these crybabies around me,” I said.
And I left, knowing that the guys in Easy would never believe this one. When I walked out of that hospital, I felt freer than I had felt since the night I’d sat around that campfire on the Nehalem River before leaving for the army.
When the war in Europe ended, I was in a pub in Venders, Belgium. All by myself. Trying to figure out how in the hell I was going to find my division. I had come to Verviers because I knew that an army transient facility there helped soldiers get reconnected to their units.
After Bastogne, the Belgians would see that eagle on my shoulder and buy me drinks on the spot, so I was enjoying some of that hospitality in a sidewalk pub on the town’s main street when it happened: Out of nowhere, the church bells started ringing. Then I heard some shouts.
“It’s over!” people started yelling in all sorts of languages, including some in broken English. “The war is over! The Germans have surrendered!”
I hoisted my mug in the air. Others did the same. This was a country the Germans had goose-stepped into in 1940 and basically said, You are now under our rule. Except for a few months after the original Allied sweep toward Germany, they hadn’t known freedom for nearly twice the time I’d been in the service. They’d lost sons in battle. Lost civilians who got caught in the cross fire of war. People were hugging each other. Kissing each other. Dancing.
Belgians. Americans. Brits. Canadians. All wrapped together in a sort of frenzied celebration b
orn of pain and loss and a million memories we all wanted to forget but knew we never would.
Only one thing was missing: Easy Company. My band of brothers. As much fun as I was having with the locals, it wasn’t quite the same without a connection to those guys whom I’d been with since Toccoa. You could look in those guys’ eyes and, without saying a word, feel a connection I’d never felt before or would ever feel again. As if our strength hadn’t come from being Don, Skip, Joe, Bill, Frank, Burr, Gordon, and the rest, but from being one single unit. Not perfect; hell, far from it. But absolutely committed to one another amid our imperfection. And to doing whatever it took to win this war.
Shortly after, as if I’d had a prayer answered, I looked through the window and saw him: Frank Perconte, a 1st Platooner in Easy Company, a good-looking Italian from Chicago. I’d last seen him in the snow of Bastogne, bleeding badly from the neck, not thinking he was going to make it.
“Malark!”
“Perconte, you old son of a—”
“Let me buy you a drink, or a dozen!”
“I wasn’t sure you’d even made it,” I said. “You OK?”
“Just a scratch.”
Turns out he was headed back to rejoin the company after recovering in England. Somehow, just having one Easy Company guy there made all the difference. And the day only got better when a trolley rolled up out front and there, perched on top, was someone familiar to us both: Burr Smith. He, too, was returning after a wound at Bastogne.
The three of us locked arms around each other.
“This is it, boys,” said Smith. “We’re going home!”
15
DREAMING OF WILD BLACKBERRIES
Germany, Austria
May 9, 1945-Mid-June 1945
Home was never quite as close as we’d think. After we’d caught up with Easy Company in Saalfelden, Austria, in mid-May, all of us were packing our bags and heading for the nearest ship back to the States—at least in our minds. But then you’d start hearing the name of a place that none of us had given much thought to.