by Don Malarkey
I don’t know how Irene took it, my waking up in the middle of the night with the nightmares. Going into my midwinter funks, thinking of guys who’d be missing yet another Christmas with their families. December. January. Hate those months. Cold and dark. I still shiver because of the Bulge. One more day there and I honestly think I would have gotten hypothermia. Like a lot of other guys in Easy Company, I tried to drink away the memories.
Years passed. One December, in the 1970s, I’d been drinking at the Legion Club. I wasn’t roaring drunk, but feeling good, so I thought I’d call Joe Toye in Pennsylvania. I called information and said I wanted the number for “Joseph J. Toye, Pittston, Pennsylvania.” She said no such person was listed. So I said, “Is there anyone named Toye in Pennsylvania who owes your telephone company money?” She did some checking, then said, yes, he lives in West Reading, not Pittston. I said, “Would you ring him? That’s him.” It was. When I called, he’d just stumbled in from the bar. He was juiced and I was half-juiced. It was funny. But as time rolled on, it got so it wasn’t funny anymore.
A few years later, living in Portland, I’d swing by some bar after work for a drink. There wasn’t a glass of Scotch I brought to my lips that I wasn’t back in Bastogne, where we were surrounded for eight straight days. Every time. One night, I was about sixty years old, I don’t know what came over me. It was December. My job felt like a dead end. I was depressed. Before I knew it, I’d left a bar out on the east side and was headed east on Highway 26, toward Mount Hood. I knew of a curve flanked by a thousand-foot canyon. That was my target.
The car was swerving. It was snowing. Though not totally juiced, I had no business driving. As I climbed higher into the mountains, snow started lining the road, piled up by the plows. In my fogged-up mind, like the time I was standing around the campfire in Jack’s Woods with that pistol in my hand, I’d somehow concocted this plan to end it all, just fly off a cliff and say to hell with it. Bury myself in that snowy canyon just like Skip had been buried in that snowy foxhole.
But when I reached the top of the pass, the image of Irene came into my mind. I pulled over to the side of the road and said to myself, No. Not back in Bastogne. Not now. Not ever. This Malarkey doesn’t quit.
EPILOGUE
REMEMBERING THE BAND OF BROTHERS
At twenty-one, jumping out of airplanes and running Mount Currahee, you never stop to think you’ll someday be eighty-six. But now I am. Unlike the time at Bastogne, where every minute seemed to take an hour, life now passes fast. One day you’re taking on Hitler’s army, the next day calling to cancel the newspaper because the kid can’t get the blasted thing on the porch. One day you’re jumping out of an airplane at more than one hundred miles per hour, the next day shuffling into the Cue Ball for three-cushion billiards every Thursday. Our battles change. But such is life. And despite the disappointments and pain, I wouldn’t trade mine for anything.
My father died in 1955 of leukemia, my mother ten years later of internal hemorrhaging. By then, I’d long gotten over their throwing out my stamp albums from Germany and the letters I’d sent home, and most of the other hurt as well.
Bernice Franetovich went on to become the singer she hoped to be. At age twenty-nine, she married a big-band musician and they had a great life together. Travel, skiing, bicycling across the country, the works. I got a letter from her a few years ago; her husband had passed away. She told me she was proud of how I’d served our country.
I did finally meet Faye Tanner, though, I’m ashamed to say, it wasn’t me coming to see her like it should have been, but she coming to see me. She fell in love with a good man, a man who never insisted that she forget about Skip Muck. They were married in 1950. She kept Skip’s wings, his eagle patch, the letters I sent her. When Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and the HBO television series came out, she wound up being interviewed. A friend of mine saw her name in the paper and encouraged me to get in touch with her. It was hard—I’d let her down by not going to see her—but she was warm, gracious, and forgiving, just like the sweet woman I’d always imagined she would be. She sent me two letters that I’d sent her after Skip had died; she’d saved them all this time. In the nineties, she showed up at an Easy Company reunion at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. I put my arm around her and we both broke down and cried, meaning I’d cried with, or for, nearly everybody connected to the Easy Company story except for one person.
Our house on Kensington where I’d jumped off the roof with the beach umbrella is still there. The cabins on the Nehalem are long gone, and the Sigma Nu house at the University of Oregon is where they filmed some fraternity scenes for that crazy movie Animal House back in the seventies.
Things change. I’ve changed. For the better I hope, though with me, it’s always been one of those two-steps-foward-one-step-backward deals. After that night near Mount Hood, I cut back my drinking—and quit smoking. What got me on track was a handful of people: the love of my wife, Irene, and my family. And the guys of Easy Company. In 1978, I—a self-proclaimed Oregon hermit—met with two of our guys. The next year, I wrote to Dick Winters:
I don’t think a day has passed in my life that I haven’t thought about you and all the fine persons we were fortunate to serve with. Until a year and a half ago, I had very little contact with anyone from the company. I let Guarnere talk me into driving back to Missoula to meet with him and John Martin. Although Martin lives in Phoenix, he has a luxury summer home in Missoula. I am an Oregon hermit so that was quite a concession for me. There are not too many of us out this way. Tom Burgess lives in Vancouver, Washington and Rod Bain in Alaska. We have seen each other quite a bit. Jim Alley lives in Seattle. I have heard from Bob Rader, Joe Hogan, Welsh, Ranney, and Buck.
In 1980, I went to Nashville for my first-ever Easy Company reunion; it was the first time my wife, Irene, and I had ever flown in a jet. (Ironically, a few decades after the war, I discovered why I froze up while in that orchard tree back in Normandy; I have acrophobia, a fear of heights, not common among paratroopers. The only way I could fly in my later years was to order a Scotch whiskey when I got aboard and tell the flight attendant to keep ’em coming.)
At the Nashville reunion, I started realizing all the stuff I’d bottled up in me over the decades. On the first night of the reunion, a bunch of us—Joe Toye, Don Moone, Chuck Grant, Walter Gordon, and our wives—went to a club. My emotions from being back with these guys went nuts; I hadn’t seen them in thirty-five years. I walked out of the club without Irene and headed back to the hotel. I got lost. Scared. Disoriented. The works. By the time I found myself back at the hotel, the lobby was full of Easy Company men who’d gotten so worried they’d sent the police after me. I guess I’d been in some pretty dangerous neighborhoods and hadn’t known it. I felt like I’d let everyone down. Back home, I wrote most of the men with deep apologies. I also started realizing that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to face some of this stuff inside that was making me crazy at times. Another letter to Winters:
The reunion, in some respects, was overwhelming to me and an emotional experience that makes it difficult to collect one’s thoughts in an orderly manner. Nevertheless, I shall remember with special significance my first reunion, even though it incorporated a traumatic event on my part. Irene was very reluctant about going to Nashville but after four days exposure to the men and traditions of the 101st Airborne she now considers it to be one of the most important happenings of our life.
It was freeing, I realized, to face the long-buried stuff. As I told Winters:
Back in 1944-45, a person had to discipline his emotions to such an extent, in order to keep your head screwed on, that you may not have properly demonstrated proper appreciation, compassion, sorrow, and the whole gamut of feelings that were rampant within you. I wanted you to know how grateful I was for your consideration of me throughout our entire time overseas. There was more than one instance when you very well may have saved my life—D-Day is one; ordering me in from the outpost in Holland
, at Hell’s Corner, when I was caught in a heavy mortar attack; and pulling me off a combat patrol in Haguenau are a few. I am sure there are more…. There has hardly been an hour pass since I left France in November 1945 that I have not thought of you and the tremendous officers and men of our company and the 101st Airborne…. It was without question the proudest and most cherished period of my life, even though there are times when I succumb to depths of sadness that I am not strong enough to withstand, when I dwell too much on memories of the men we left behind. I am not ashamed of it—the Irish are known to have emotional weaknesses and I am no exception—except I did stay in control in combat.
That, I’ve come to believe, is the hardest thing about war: to be faced with so many emotional situations involving people who’ve come to mean the world to you. Losing those people, sometimes right in front of you. And yet not being able to grieve for them. Even after the war, when you were expected to just get on with your life as if nothing more had happened to you than, say, a reshuffling of your living room furniture. I had a fraternity brother who contacted me when all the Band of Brothers stuff started coming out in the press. He said, “How in the hell could I have lived with you for four years and never known this stuff?” Because we keep it inside. In my whole life, I’ve never been to a counselor, even though I probably should have. As I wrote to Winters in 1980:
Perhaps the event that remains most vivid in my mind was when Skip Muck was killed. Medic Roe came to my foxhole to tell me about it and to ask me if I wanted to see Skip before he removed his body. I refused. Later, he returned and said that you suggested that I come back with you for a couple of days. I also refused to do that, knowing we were going back to Foy soon. The thoughtfulness you extended to me was appreciated far more than I tolerated myself to express back in those days.
When Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers came out in 1992, followed by the HBO miniseries almost a decade later, it was good for me. Not because of the attention; I didn’t need that, though I’ve enjoyed speaking from time to time to various organizations around the world about my experiences and about leadership. But because it somehow reminded me that what we did was a good thing—and over the years I’d forgotten that. I remember getting a letter from Winters in 2003. “Who would have thought our stories would have been shared with the whole world?” he wrote. “We are indeed fortunate and have been blessed.”
Still, that movie was an emotional roller coaster for me. I was called in as a consultant on some scenes, and it was tough. It brought everything back, especially later on when we all got to go to France for the premiere. Skip’s family was there. What’s so interesting is that the actor who I became closest with was Richard Speight Jr., the guy who played Skip in the miniseries. The first time he called me, he was politely asking me questions about Skip so he could better portray him, and damned if I didn’t hang up on him. Not because he’d done or said anything wrong. Because I just couldn’t take it.
But as the filming began and we got to know each other, Richard became a great support to me, this kid half a century younger than me. Never made me feel like some sentimental old fool. Told me he understood my emotions. Said it was OK, that I was emotional because Skip and I had meant so much to each other and that was a good thing, not a bad thing. That meant the world to me. You have to understand that it took me nearly forty years before I could look at our 1942 company picture and not break into tears, particularly if it was December or January.
I didn’t like everything about the book or the movie. I wish Ambrose had included a handful of guys he ignored, instead of dwelling so much on a bit player like David Kenyon Webster. And the movie had a bit too much “Hollywood” in it for my taste. Nobody I’ve talked to from Easy Company remembers being at that Jewish concentration camp at Landsberg. The Carentan and Eindhoven fights—they made those out to be a helluva lot more than they were. That said, both the book and miniseries did what they set out to do—tell the story of this “band of brothers,” most of it as it happened. And allowed me to talk about stuff that I hadn’t talked about. And spend more time with the guys of Easy Company, though they’re dwindling fast. At Toccoa, we’d had about 150 men. In 1984, we had forty-three men at the annual reunion; in 2002, the last one I attended, in Phoenix, we had thirty—and four actors from HBO’s Band of Brothers, which meant the world to us. It’s interesting, looking back at one of the photographs taken that weekend: There’s Richard Speight Jr. (Skip), Scott Grimes (me), Michael Cudlitz (Denver “Bull” Randleman), and Matthew Settle (Ronald Speirs). And who does Grimes, who played me, have his arm around? Richard Speight Jr., of course. The guy who played Skip.
In many ways, the Band of Brothers became like this large, extended family; we had trained together, suffered together, fought together, died together. Not that we always got along, before or after the war. I remember once, at a reunion in Dallas, Lewis Nixon and Harry Welsh and Mike Ranney sitting around, and Nixon tees off on Buck Compton. Says he was a coward. I said, “Is that right? And how many Silver Stars do you have?” They didn’t know Buck Compton. They hadn’t served with him as I had. Hadn’t seen him rush those 105s at Brécourt Manor. Compton had been wounded in Holland, and was a damn good officer, a tough soldier, a guy who gave until he couldn’t give anymore. Not a cowardly bone in his body.
Usually, we got along much better. The Muck and Penkala families—Skip and Alex died together in Bastogne—became extremely close friends and remain so today. In the mid eighties, Winters got no less than forty-one Christmas cards from Easy Company guys—forty years after the war was over. I remember getting a letter from Harry Welsh, back in 1979, thanking me for volunteering to take that patrol by myself into that factory along the Rhine River, where the kid named Orth took a ricocheted bullet in the knee. For many, the reunions were among the highlights of our older years. But like all families, the Band of Brothers have experienced their pain.
It’s sad looking back at some of the letters I sent Winters over the years: “I do not see how Burr Smith can make it much longer. … I have had dozens of my friends and relatives from WWII who drank themselves to death. … I was sorry to hear about Mike Ranney.” Ranney, one of the guys who’d triggered the ouster of Sobel, wound up living in a boarding house in Reno and was found all by himself, dying. Years before, he’d brought a written apology to the guys at a reunion for being out of position and getting shot at Brécourt Manor in Normandy.
At one reunion, I got on an elevator and there was a guy wearing these dirty old clothes and smelling of booze. A severe alcoholic. Not until later did I realize it was a Toccoa guy. Don Moone and Walter Gordon took him to a room, stripped his clothes off, and got him everything new with more to take with him. It was sad.
Joe Toye, unable to work in the mines, spent his whole life sharpening giant drill bits for a coal-mining operation. One year, a few of us cooked up a deal to get Joe and his wife, Betty, some free airline tickets so they could come to a reunion. He died in 1995. I called the night before he died and thanked him for all he’d done for me. Later, I got a letter from his son, Pete. He was then working in the athletic department at the University of Wyoming. Joe had had a tough life. He and this kid’s mother had divorced; Joe and his boy had a tough go of it.
So I wrote Pete a letter and told him about the Joe Toye I’d known in Bastogne and the hell his father had been through and how he’d saved my life when Dewitt Lowery had threatened to stick that knife in my gut. He framed that letter, stuck it on his wall, and wrote back:
This has been a very emotional day for me ever since I received your letter. I’m half Irish and that half can get me blubbering easily even without a few beers. My father was a hard man. As hard as the Anthracite he shoveled in his youth and the drill bits he sharpened later in life at Grace Mines. He was not a touchy-feely guy and I think he harbored a lot of emotional pain and frustration from the war. That pain and frustration was most obvious when he drank but, as I get older, I understand him more and more. W
ith reading the books of Company E exploits and seeing Saving Private Ryan I am now getting a much clearer picture of what being trained as elite warriors entailed and how death and dismemberment and the associated psychological trauma you all dealt with must have affected your postwar lives. For my dad, I believe he fought those ghosts the best he could in a time when real men dealt with their own baggage and never whined or cried or appeared weak. He was my rock against which I have measured my responses to my own life struggles.
In hindsight, I suppose, my father had some ghosts of his own. No, he hadn’t fought in a war. But he’d lost two brothers to war. And lost a business. A house. His pride. In a way, his family. Strange, isn’t it? As with Pete Toye, we don’t start figuring out the old man until after he’s gone.
Lots of good things spun off from all the Band of Brothers attention. The movie Saving Private Ryan came out of Ambrose’s book after Tom Hanks read about the Niland brothers. I’d told Ambrose the story about Skip and me having drinks with the Niland brothers in London. They’d known Skip because they’d grown up in upstate New York where he had. I told Ambrose how, after D-day, Fritz Niland showed up near Carentan, looking for Skip. One of his brothers had been killed, he said. Turned out three of them had been killed. So he was immediately tracked down, though not by an army platoon as in Saving Private Ryan, but by a Catholic chaplain, and shipped home. “Don Malarkey’s story in Band of Brothers about going to London … and visiting the Niland brothers … is the story behind the story of the movie, Saving Private Ryan,” Dick Winters has asserted in writing.