A Company of Heroes

by Marcus Brotherton

  Pat recounted two other stories to Gary, the first of his wounding. The men were sleep-deprived, walking dead men almost. Pat was lying in a foxhole with his arm outside the hole. He heard shrapnel coming in but was too exhausted even to move his arm. Sure enough, he was hit in the arm. He didn’t put in for a purple heart. “He figured that after Dukeman and Van Klinken got killed, what he received was nothing,” Gary said.

  Later, the men were at an intersection and a German officer came running out of the woods with a potato masher grenade, intent on throwing it. But the grenade went off in the German’s hand, blowing it off. Streaming blood as he was, the German kept his wits and sprinted back into the woods. The men never did get him. They were all still ducking down due to the grenade blast.

  A Life Lived in Liberty

  Pat continued on with Easy Company until the end of the war. He was with his unit for occupation duties in Germany and Austria.

  Then in fall 1945, Gary, now a ten-year-old boy, remembers hearing the good news. “We got a call from my grandmother. ‘Pat’s home,’ she said. I could hear her over the phone. Instantly I was out the door running down the street to their house. My mother yelled at me to come get my jacket, but I wasn’t turning back for anything.”

  Pat was a tech sergeant by war’s end. Gary remembers being very impressed with all the stripes and decorations he had, the spit-shined jump boots. “He was a sharp soldier,” Gary said. That first night home, Pat talked about the war, mostly just saying that he was glad it was over. Funny thing was, he looked up at the ceiling inside his parents’ house and said, “Wonder if a mortar could go through this.” Pat wanted to get on with life, same as the rest of the guys. A few evenings later the family held a big dinner celebration.

  Pat went back to his job at the telephone company, but he never seemed to be fully content there. He wanted to be a professional artist or horticulturalist, his other passion. He was also big into physical fitness and, as a side business, started one of the first public gymnasiums in Oakland, building it in a greenhouse. Famed bodybuilder Jack Lalanne, also an Oakland resident, was a friend and frequented the club. Pat did professional landscaping on the side from 1967 to 1987, building immaculate Japanese gardens.

  Pat married his wife, Mary Jo Bonham, in 1947. They had three sons, and bought a big home near Oakland with a huge yard where he created himself a sanctuary with a Japanese garden and wooden decking. He slept outside in summertime. Chris noted: “My father was probably like many of the fellows who came back. He was haunted by a lot of his war experiences. My room was adjacent to the back yard. I’d have the window open and remember hearing him in the night, many times. He had put stone pathways in the backyard, and I’d hear him walking on the pathways at two or three o’clock in morning. Afraid, I’d go to my mother. ‘Your father’s having funny feelings,’ she said. That was how she put it. It might have been insomnia or nightmares, but I believe it was post-traumatic stress. Later in life I worked as a police officer. I retired in 2007 after a fairly significant injury, and I grew to recognize what post-traumatic stress looked like. My dad and I grew closer later in life, but he never really did explain what was going on in his head. My mother explained more later on. She said, “Your dad’s reliving the war, having nightmares, he’s thinking about the loss of his buddies, the significant people in his life.”

  Mostly, Pat lived for his family. He did whatever he needed to do to care for them. If he took a vacation, it wasn’t for him, it was for the kids, Chris noted. He was an avid bow hunter and fisherman, but never at the family’s expense. He never had an extravagant vehicle. Mostly he drove older, used cars. He lived a simple life, but he lived it to the fullest.

  Pat spent lots of time creating his artwork, working on his or others’ gardens, sometimes for pay, usually for free. He built a cabin at Lake Tahoe with his sister’s husband. He loved the mountains and ocean. Chris described him as “a universal man. Some of us are good at some things, but Dad was good at many things.”

  Pat was a craftsman who built birdhouses and made elaborate wood carvings that were sold in gift shops in San Francisco and Sausalito. He picked up pieces of cedar and pine in the Sierras and carved everything from figurines of American Indians to Jesus.

  The family was Catholic, not necessarily devout, Chris said, but they attended church for many years. Pat had an aunt who was a nun. Pat was a highly ethical man and believed in following the Golden Rule. He was always known as a gentleman, even around his war buddies.

  Pat started out in the phone company climbing poles with those old straps and spikes. He could shimmy up like a bear. They called his section in the company “craft” because it took an artisan’s and technician’s mind to do it well. He worked his way up to management but hated his new role, so he quit and went back into the field, which floored his wife because it meant a cut in pay, Chris noted. But Pat was wired as a kinetic person. He had to be able to dig into his work with his hands. He wanted to get out there and get into the wires, not shuffle papers and people. On his seventieth birthday, just for fun, he went out and climbed a telephone pole with his old rig. He retired from the phone company in 1977 at age fifty-seven.

  Pat was big on ethics and doing the right thing. Later in life he told his son that he had always been true to his mother. “They were married a long time,” Chris said, “and I’m sure there were moments they felt less than thrilled with each other. But he never bailed. He never went astray on my mother.”

  After Mary Jo got sick in 1997, she passed away very quickly, dying of liver cancer within three months of diagnosis. “It was a shock to everyone,” Chris said, “but it really took my father for a loop. He was absolutely destroyed.” She was just sixty-nine when she died. “After she passed, my dad got good and drunk at the end of her funeral. He said, ‘I’ve lost my wife of fifty years, I just don’t care anymore.’ Dad retreated into grief. It was reflected in his diary and in other papers. Dad lost his passion for life, for his artwork, for writing. He just stopped doing those things.”

  Then Pat started to have health problems of his own. First, he had an aneurism, a ministroke. “The train just derailed from that point on,” Chris said. The stroke rewired his brain. He was slow and unresponsive, and was placed in a hospital in Salinas, near where his son, Pat, lived.

  “Dad was a tough old sonuvabitch,” Chris said. “The hospital called us from time to time, saying things like, ‘Your dad has been very feisty lately.’ A few times he even needed to be restrained because he’d start slugging if he didn’t like what he was getting. He was just confused. For a short time he ended up in an Alzheimer’s facility in Freemont. He didn’t know where he was, or who he was, or what time period he was in. He had lost track of his perception of time, and said things like, ‘Well, Malarkey’s sitting over there. I just told him he had outpost duty.’ I’d say, ‘That’s not Malarkey.’ He’d say emphatically, ‘Of course it is.’ He was just rewired.”

  Then, surprisingly, the unthinkable happened. One day Chris visited him in the Alzheimer’s facility and he said, clear as day, “Son, I’ve got to go home.”

  “Dad, what are you saying?” Chris said.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, “I’m fine.”

  And he was. Pat had defied the odds. His brain had healed. The family had him assessed, and he checked out fine.

  The family wasn’t eager to let him be on his own just yet. Two cousins who grew up with him in Oakland moved into his home with him, staying about ten months. Pat started exercising again. Most of his functioning returned, even to the point where he passed a DMV test and drove a car again. The physician didn’t bark a bit.

  Then, he got colon cancer, which they removed, and he was okay.

  Then Pat fell in his backyard, broke his arm, and jacked up his hip. “There was only so much the old war bird could take,” Chris said.

  Pat’s son, Tim, had the financial means by then to take care of his father very well. Tim arranged to hav
e a caregiver live with him in his home around the clock. She took good care of Pat, and they had a good friendship.

  Toward the end, Pat developed an ulceration on his back. Family members took him to the doctor and discovered he had lung cancer. It didn’t come as a surprise. “He had been a chronic cigarette smoker since the war,” Chris said. “That was just the mindset of that era. They received cigarettes in care packages back then.”

  The doctor said surgery was an option, but that Pat might end up on a ventilator.

  “I don’t want to go out like that,” Pat said. “Let the cards fall where they may.”

  They didn’t give him a timeline, but toward the end family members knew he was in massive pain. “You could tell by his mannerisms and expressions,” Chris said. “He never complained. He drank wine and self-medicated instead.”

  He went into a coma with a high fever with short respirations. Then he was gone. He died December 15, 1999, in his own home. His three sons were with him when he passed.

  Chris called Bill Guarnere to fill him in. In those days Bill kept track of everybody. Dick Winters wrote the family a letter, which says in part:I always took pride in having my best-looking man out front carrying the guidon [a small flag carried for marking, signaling or identification] for reviews by dignitaries. And that man, or course, was always Pat, who, with his clean-cut good looks and wide shoulders proudly carried the Company E guidon.

  When it came time for the big jump in Normandy, I wanted my best, most dependable man right behind me, that man was Pat again.

  All of Company E men share the loss of a true comrade.

  The last entry in Pat’s art journal shows a Christmas card he drew in 1944, which he sent to his fellow soldiers in Easy Company. It depicts a helmeted soldier. Underneath is one of his poems: So you think you’re getting old, Pal, and time is running short.

  Your hair is changing color and thinning, you report.

  You’ve had your good and bad times since 1945.

  So best count your blessings, that you are still alive.

  And look upon the bright side,

  remember all the young men we left beneath the ground.

  For one day we will see them where happiness abounds.

  You can worry all you’re worth.

  When it’s time to bite the bullet,

  there’s a better place, than here on Earth.

  Merry Christmas, —Chris

  8

  WALTER “SMOKEY” GORDON

  Interviews with Elizabeth “Bebe” Gordon, Linda Gordon, and Cleta Tracy Gordon, daughters With additional information from Walter Scott Gordon III, son, Gay Gordon, daughter, and Cleta “Junie” Ellington, niece

  Some people are consistent. Everything about them fits a mold, no surprises. Others, like our father, don’t fit any mold. It’s all guesswork when you try to figure them out, and half the time you’ll be proved wrong. In fact, just when you think you’ve understood them, they throw you a curve-ball and do or say something that doesn’t fit your understanding. This was our father. He lived through some extraordinary times and circumstances and was always a paradoxical figure, not only to us, but to all who knew him.

  This is the story of Walter Scott “Smokey” Gordon.

  Early Years

  We know little about Dad’s upbringing. He talked quite freely about his life but never dwelled on early years much. We know that his parents didn’t marry until they were both thirty, which was unusual for their day, and they both had unusual names. Dad’s father was named Walter but was referred to as BeeBoy or just Bee, nicknames from his childhood. Dad’s mother was named for the heroine of a dime novel (the equivalent of a modern trashy paperback). Her mother had read the book and was struck by the heroine’s style, but her father was dead against such a name from such a source. He wanted to call her Deborah instead, but his wife held out, so the baby who became our grandmother was called simply “the baby” until three years later when a new sibling’s arrival forced the issue. They had to give Grandmother a real name then, and Cleta she became.

  BeeBoy and Cleta grew up, met and married, and became a popular couple in Jackson, Mississippi, with many influential friends. BeeBoy became a spec builder and real estate developer and “got it when the gettin’ was good,” as they say down here. But his properties were leveraged on top of each other. When the Depression hit, the first of his properties fell and the rest came tumbling down. BeeBoy lost almost everything, and our grandparents went from being on top of the world to barely hanging on to their home.

  Through good times and bad, our Gordon grandparents were sustained by their regard for one another, their friends, their wit, and something else: a cook. No matter how hard times were, BeeBoy never let go of Grandmother’s cook. It may have been self-interest on BeeBoy’s part, because Grandmother’s entire culinary repertoire consisted of grits—not a difficult dish: just boil water, add grits, add salt, stir, and wait.

  Like her fictional namesake, our Grandmother Cleta was spunky in her own right. She had gone to college up north in Chicago, then later transferred down south and continued her studies at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee. She became a teacher in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and was fired from the school when she was spotted riding a horse astride. Everyone knew that all “ladies” had to ride sidesaddle. When students and parents learned of her dismissal, they threatened to fire the entire school board, and Grandmother was reinstated. She was an extraordinary teacher, and we know of at least three of her students who named their daughters Cleta in her honor.

  Whatever else they may have been, Cleta and BeeBoy were not prepared for parenthood, especially not for two babies at the same time. The birth of our daddy and his twin sister (named Walter and Cleta) stunned them. Our daddy told us that BeeBoy would drive up to the house at the end of the day, and, if he could hear the wailing of babies, would simply put the car in reverse and drive away. He’d return only after he was certain his offspring were safely asleep.

  Daddy was a bright young man, articulate, quick, and able to recall details of anything he had read. He had a wonderful vocabulary and studied Latin, yet, consistent with his paradoxical nature, did very poorly in school. Teachers always complained about his behavior. Knowing Daddy, we doubt his wit and joking manner were curtailed in the classroom.

  The family was not especially religious, but Daddy, on his own, became a faithful Episcopalian, a lay reader and an altar boy. He knew the Bible like the back of his hand. In spite of the normal childhood squabbles, Daddy always adored his twin sister. He was extremely close to her and later her husband, and their three small children. Tragically, Cleta died in her early thirties of breast cancer, which was the turning point of Daddy’s religious life. Following her death, anytime he was asked about his faith, he would reply, “Any God that could take away the most beautiful creation to walk this earth, I want nothing to do with.”

  He was always willing, however, to engage in discussions of religion. We have deeply religious relatives with whom Daddy could quote scripture chapter and verse. We wondered how a person who had lost his faith could know scripture so well and asked him. His reply was typical of this untypical man: “Don’t you know that the Bible is the greatest book ever written?”

  Enlistment

  Daddy enrolled at Millsaps College for a number of semesters, but his mind was on foolishness, and his transcripts reflected it. He was flailing about aimlessly, when an opportunity to make something of himself came in the most unlikely of situations: the call to arms. Here is another contradiction in this contradictory life: this lackluster student and lazy philanderer became absolutely on fire to become, of all things, a disciplined soldier.

  In those days, you didn’t need to explain why you wanted to go off to a foreign land to serve your country. If you were healthy, over eighteen, and walking around town, you needed to explain why you weren’t serving your country. But when Daddy first tried to enlist, he was rejected. He had flat feet and was color-bl
ind.

  When he told his father he wouldn’t give up, BeeBoy offered insight. “One thing the military tries to do,” he explained, “is displace you from your home turf so your homesickness won’t tempt you to rush home at the first challenge. If you enlist down south, you will train up north and vice versa.”

  Armed with this information and determined to try again, Daddy hopped a train heading north and ended up at a recruiting station in Philadelphia. He had heard about a special unit being formed called the paratroopers who would get more pay. It sounded fun, but it never occurred to him that they were paid more because most people don’t want to jump out of airplanes into enemy territory where other soldiers are on the ground, shooting at them.

  So there he was, in South Philly, waiting in a line to enlist. As the men in line with him read out the eye test, Daddy memorized the letters and faked his way through the eye test. We never asked him how he faked the flat foot test, but our guess is that the Army never thought he would live long enough for flat feet to become an issue. Daddy trained initially at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, then later at Camp Toccoa in Georgia.

  Geographically speaking, BeeBoy was right on the money!

  The War Years

  The “Smokey” nickname came from a tobacco-chewing habit Daddy had in his war years with Easy Company. When we were growing up, Daddy always smoked either a pipe or a cigar. He was never one to consume alcohol, claiming that whatever he drank, he would drink with voracity. Water was his drink of choice, way before it was fashionable. He couldn’t get enough of it. During training, he found he required more water than the average fellow and devised ways of gaining access to his comrades’ canteens. In the field, he began to carry extra Hershey’s bars, which proved to be just what a soldier considered a fair trade for a big swig of extra water.