A Company of Heroes

by Marcus Brotherton

  This past year has been a fine one for me. During the holidays I will be with all my children, and the prospects for the year ahead are bright and full of promise. What more could a man ask? Or what more might a person wish for friends, such as you?

  Good luck, and sleep warm.

  Myron N. (Mike) Ranney

  14

  LAVON REESE

  Interview with Marcia Reese Rood, daughter With additional information from Joe Watson, family friend

  Daddy’s been gone since 1975. He talked a lot about the war when I was growing up, but I didn’t pay attention very closely to his stories. He talked only when he had been drinking, and mostly I was trying to avoid him then.

  I’m not saying this quite right. Today, I understand so much more of what Daddy went through in the war. I just wish I understood it back then. I would have listened much more closely if I did.

  He Didn’t Have Anything

  My father, LaVon P. Reese, was born in Kempton, Indiana, on February 10, 1921. He had two brothers and one sister. His mom worked in a hospital as a nurse’s aide, but I don’t know what his dad did because he died when I was way young. I was born in 1947.

  People called my father Von or Reese. His middle name was Paul, after his dad, so I don’t know how his parents came up with LaVon.

  I know Daddy’s upbringing was rough. The family didn’t have much money and needed to work hard. I called his sister to get some pictures and she said, “Honey we didn’t have a camera back then; we just didn’t have anything.”

  I think that’s why a lot of these guys went into the paratroopers—it was a chance at a good job. It’s also why they could handle the war—because they were raised so tough.

  Dad graduated from Kempton High School. He worked odd jobs after graduation until he went into the service.

  That’s about all I know about his earlier years. He didn’t talk about them much, and I never asked him any questions.

  Parachuting into Bastogne

  General George S. Patton—now that’s who Daddy talked about all the time. I don’t remember anything specific about what he said, but it was always General Patton this or that. The war was hard on Daddy. I know he had to shoot some young guys, and that always bothered him.

  Dad was one of the original Toccoa men. He mentioned that. I always knew he was in Easy Company, and that’s been verified a number of ways. Stephen Ambrose mentioned him a few times in Band of Brothers, although we didn’t know about the book until the movie came out. After Normandy, Dad was promoted from private to corporal.17 He was with the men toward the end of the war in Germany where his main interest was chasing women.18 In Austria, he boarded a girlfriend for a while in a private house.19 Dick Winters wrote that Dad joined the ranks of the NCOs just before the Holland campaign.20 Daddy’s picture is on the front cover of Don Malarkey’s book: it’s a group of Easy Company guys, and he’s in the back row, the third from the right.

  In 2001, Floyd Talbert’s brother phoned and filled us in, and we went over to Normandy with HBO. Several of the men remembered my dad. They said he was always a good athlete.

  In addition to his other duties, Daddy was also a pathfinder. I’ve got some information about that. The 506th actually had three guys in their ranks who were trained as pathfinders—Red Wright, Carl Fenstermaker, and my dad.

  You think of the guys parachuting into Normandy or Holland, but Dad was one of the few men who actually parachuted into Bastogne. It happened on December 22, 1944, just days after the Germans broke through the Allied lines in the Ardennes. Two sticks of pathfinders from the 101st Airborne Division jumped into Bastogne. Their mission was to set up signal beacons to guide in planes to get new supplies to the men. The resupply mission succeeded, thanks to the efforts of my dad and the pathfinders.

  Joe Watson is a cousin of my mother’s. He and Daddy bailed hay during summers after the war. It would get hot up in the haymow, and they’d get to talking. Daddy told Joe he was pretty scared when they parachuted into Bastogne. He said the Germans threw everything they had at them, and their plane was just coming apart. He wanted to jump out before he was allowed.

  Daddy told Joe about a situation up there at Hitler’s lair. I guess the boys were celebrating and all, and they just lined up and all pissed in Hitler’s bathtub. They just lined up and let ’er go. That’s what Joe said anyway.

  History and Sports

  After the war Daddy went to college at Ball State, here in Muncie, Indiana. He married my mother, Bernice, right after the war in ’46. My mother was a bookkeeper and worked in an office. They had an apartment in Muncie while Daddy was getting his degree. She helped support him when he was getting that.

  My husband Lester says to remember that Floyd Talbert stood up for Mom and Dad when they got married. I never met Floyd, but I guess that when they got back from the war he and Daddy remained friends for a lot of years. Daddy never went back to many of the reunions. I don’t know why. I wish he was here now so I could ask him about these things.

  Daddy became a high school history teacher and got a job in Kokomo, where he also taught health and physical education. He was a great athlete and coached high school basketball and baseball. History was always his favorite: anything to do with World War II, that’s all he talked about. I’m proud he was able to get his college education. Oh Lord, he just loved history and sports. There’s a couple guys around here that knew him, in fact he coached them, and they always talked about how good of a coach he was.

  Daddy and Mom liked to have a good time. They fished, camped, and did a lot of swimming, boating, and skiing. Anything outdoors, that’s what they loved. Daddy was very muscular and loved to show off his physique, especially when he was drinking. He played a lot of cards here at the Legion in Sharpsville. We talked to Dick Winters, and he remembered my dad. Winters said the men nicknamed him “Blackjack,” because Daddy loved to play cards so much.

  We lived on a farm near Kokomo. My parents didn’t work the farm for their living. It was my grandfather’s farm, and there were four houses on it. Grandpa had given Mom and Dad one of the houses to live in when they got married and Daddy got the job teaching school. This was my mom’s folks—they had 220 acres, corn, beans, wheat, milk cows, and Daddy helped out from time to time when they needed work done. Their son ran the farm later on. A lot of my growing-up years were spent trying to avoid my parents. So when I got old enough, I came to town a lot with my girlfriends.

  Whenever Daddy Drank

  As far back as I recall, I remember Daddy drinking. He didn’t let it get ahold of him at first. The drinking got bad about when I went into junior high, then it got better for a while, then it got worse again until he died. There were about fifteen really rough years where the drinking took hold of him completely. He had trouble keeping a job then. As a teacher you need to watch that.

  Mother probably could have done more to encourage him to stop. She got on him, but she liked to drink, too, and they liked to go out dancing at places where a lot of drinking was going on. Whenever Daddy drank, he sat up at night and started talking—I don’t know when he ever slept—then Mother got on him, and he got mad at her, and they argued.

  Daddy could get so mad, so mean, when he was drinking. Whenever he drank he reminisced about the war. He went and sat on the back porch with his rifle, mumbling and yelling and shooting into the woods behind our house. When I started dating Lester in high school, Daddy got to drinking one night really bad and searched for his rifle. Mother gave Lester the gun and said, “You get this out of the house.” Lester did. Daddy never threatened us with his gun. I wouldn’t want it to come across that way. But when somebody’s drinking and holding a rifle, you never know what kind of damage he might do.

  Daddy liked to pick fights and found it hard to keep friends because he argued so much. Once, we had friends over playing cards, and Daddy picked a fight with the guy. It got so bad we called the police. Do I remember what the fight was about? Oh grief, no. Undoubtedly it was
n’t anything worth fighting over. Daddy was probably bragging about the war, and the guy probably made some negative comment because he wasn’t there. That might have set Daddy off. I really don’t remember. I was young and probably in the other room trying not to hear.

  As a kid growing up in that kind of environment, mostly I was just worried about being embarrassed. When a person’s drunk, he can act pretty silly. I was always worried to be out in public with Daddy when he had been drinking.

  I think I’m coming across that he was bad to me, and it was never that way. When he was sober, he could be a great guy. It’s just that I don’t have a lot of memories of when he wasn’t drunk. Daddy had his fun moments. I remember him playing ball in the yard with me.

  I got a phone call here about two months ago from my nephew. He said, “You know, I remember your dad every year on New Year’s Eve. He called right at midnight, at 12:01. I’d look at my dad and he’d say, ‘Well I bet that’s Von calling to tell us GERONIMO!’ That’s what he always said when he called up on New Year’s Eve.”

  He Was Only Fifty-four

  It’s funny, when I graduated from high school in 1966, I wanted to become a hairdresser. But Daddy wanted me to become a teacher, like him. My dad’s sister was a hairdresser, and she lived about an hour and a half away. From time to time I went there by bus and spent a week with her. Now I wish I’d become a teacher—that’s the joke—I’d have made a little more money than I’m making now.

  Lester and I got married right after we graduated. I was an only child, and there were nine kids in Lester’s family, so that’s what I married into. Mother couldn’t have asked to have a better son-in-law. Lester and I have two children.

  Right about when Lester and I got married, Daddy lost his job in Kokomo because of the drinking. So my parents moved to Indianapolis, about an hour from us, and Daddy got a job in another school system. Mother quit her job in Kokomo and moved with him.

  Mom and Dad often came up from Indy on the weekends and took the children back home with them. That was always one good thing about Daddy. He sure loved his grandkids. He got out there and taught them how to ride bikes, or got down on the floor with them and rassled. He showed them how to do pushups and stand on their heads.

  How did Daddy die? Well, he fell off the porch while drinking and needed to go to the hospital. Then he passed away the second day in the hospital, just real suddenly. The autopsy showed cirrhosis and artery blockage. Six or seven things were listed. Basically, they felt that the alcohol had taken his life too early. He was only fifty-four. My parents went to church some, but not a lot. I hope he went to Heaven. That’s all I can say.

  There was a funeral. I have to brag on my husband a bit here. Lester wanted Daddy to have a military funeral. But it was July 3 when he passed, just before the July 4 weekend, and we couldn’t find any veterans around. Lester called everywhere. I told Lester not to worry about it, but he said, “Absolutely not, Marcia, your dad lived and breathed that war, and he is going to have a military service.” So he got it all worked out, and I was so thankful that Lester pushed to get that done. He’s a wonderful man.

  After Daddy died, Mother remarried a fellow who came over from Czechoslovakia after World War II, another military guy. She found some happiness in that marriage. He was a drinker, not quite as bad as my dad was, but he died of cirrhosis, too. His death took longer and was harder. Mother got lung cancer and died in 1993. She and Daddy both smoked and drank and partied a lot. It took its toll.

  A Purpose to It

  I’ve been reading up on this some. As hard as it is to talk about bad memories, there’s a purpose to it. These young guys coming back from the war today, they need to be encouraged to talk to someone if they’re having problems. There are places that can help soldiers nowadays, but back then you weren’t supposed to talk about anything.

  When we were in Paris, I met Bill Guarnere. We got to talking and I said, “All the stories I hear about my daddy, it seemed like he really liked the women”—of course he wasn’t married then—“and he liked to drink.”

  And Bill said, “Well, honey, that was the way we all were back then. We never knew if we were going to be alive the next day. We liked the women and we liked the booze.”

  It just seemed that Daddy let the drinking get such a hold of him. The war created the bad situation, but after the war, if guys didn’t rein it in, it took over their lives.

  From talking to the other veterans, it gave me so much more respect for what my dad went through and helped me understand it so much more. I feel really bad that I didn’t understand more of it when he was alive. I was so upset with him most of the time.

  I still respect my daddy. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t help him somehow. Why didn’t we do more? Why didn’t we handle this better? But it doesn’t matter. It probably wouldn’t have happened anyway.

  What’s the one thing I would want people to know about my father? Basically, that he was a good man. He fought and lived that war his whole life, and it tormented him to the end. That’s a hard thing to fight against all those years. At least he came home and got an education. He worked with kids. And he loved history. He wanted to teach history to teach kids to tell them what our country is all about. He just let the alcohol get the best of him.

  15

  EUGENE “DOC” ROE

  Interviews with Eugene Roe Jr., son, Marlene Langlois, daughter, and Chris Langlois, Derek Tircuit, and Kyle Tircuit, grandsons

  Eugene “Doc” Roe Sr. was featured prominently in the HBO miniseries as the soft-spoken Cajun medic who cared for the men during the worst of times. Episode 6 was almost completely devoted to Doc Roe’s struggles to treat the wounded in the snow and cold of Bastogne. The men were running desperately low of medical equipment, and Doc Roe moved from foxhole to foxhole, scrounging bandages and morphine syrettes. He also befriended a Belgian nurse in Bastogne, who was later killed during a German bombing raid.

  Despite a lot of airtime in the miniseries, Stephen Ambrose mentioned Doc Roe only three times in the book. The most prominent mention is as follows:Medics were the most popular, respected and appreciated men in the company. Their weapons were first aid kits; their place on the line was whenever a man called out when he was wounded. Lieutenant Jack Foley, who recommended Private Eugene Roe for the Silver Star after a devastating firefight in Bastogne, had special praise for him. “He was there when he was needed, and how he got ‘there’ you often wondered. If any man [who] struggled in the snow and the cold, in the many attacks through the open and through the woods, ever deserved such a medal, it was our medic, Gene Roe.21

  Doc Roe seldom talked about the war to his family, but he was a colorful man in other ways. His grandson, Chris Langlois, remembers him simply by the affectionate nickname Paw-Paw. In contrast to Chris’s other grandparents, who were more straitlaced and reserved, Chris’s Paw-Paw was rougher and tougher. Doc Roe always wore cowboy boots, always smoked, and was always deeply tanned and weathered by the sun. He owned acreage and ran a heavy-duty construction business from it. The grandchildren were always welcome to come over and play in the dirt pits and on the backhoes, bulldozers, and tractors that lay scattered around his yard.

  This is the story of the real Doc Roe.

  Growing Up on the Bayou

  Doc Roe’s son, Eugene Roe Jr., shares the same name as his dad. What’s that been like for him?

  “Well, nobody said a thing about it until the series came out,” Eugene Jr. said. “Then I started getting a lot of letters and calls from fans of the series. Mostly, it’s been good.”

  Eugene Jr. noted that even though the series portrayed his father as a Louisiana gentleman, the portrayal wasn’t as accurate as it might have been. “He was much rougher and poorer than that. He didn’t have nearly as strong a Cajun accent as the movie portrayed, and although everybody in the movie called him Doc Roe, he wasn’t a doctor by any means. He only had a sixth-grade education.”

  Why only sixth grade? “We
ll, that’s just the way things were, growing up on the bayou back then,” said Eugene Jr. “Dad contracted polio as a child, which slowed down his schooling a bit. But he got past that, and it didn’t have any lasting effects on him. Basically, he quit school because there wasn’t that much emphasis on education where and how he grew up. His family expected him to go to work—which is what he did. Funny enough, he was pretty adamant about me going to school though.”

  Doc Roe grew up in Bayou Chene, a town that doesn’t exist anymore. If you study the history of that town, noted Eugene Jr., it was a backwater community of about five hundred swampers, lumberjacks, trappers, farmers, fisherman, and moss pickers.

  “That’s the climate in which Dad grew up,” Eugene Jr. said. “His daddy worked on boats. There were five children in his family—three boys and two girls. Even though they were poor, he had a fairly happy childhood and didn’t speak of any bad memories from back then. When he went to school, he took a boat, a type of waterbus. That’s how they all lived, close to the river like that.”

  After Doc Roe quit school, he worked on shrimp boats and miscellaneous jobs to help support the family. In the 1920s, oil drilling began in the area, and water from the Mississippi was rerouted to build a spillway that flooded the town. The government told the people they’d have to leave. When the levees came through, the Roe family moved to Morgan City, Louisiana, which is where Doc Roe grew up as a teenager. After he came back from the war, he moved to Baton Rouge.

  In the series it says that Doc Roe’s grandmother was a traiteur, a traditional Cajun faith healer, but that was contrived by Hollywood, noted the family.