One of the problems is they fight wars differently today. They tell the enemy what their plans are. The media gets hold of it. How can you fight a war like that? It’s on the news, on the Internet. They’re letting these kids use cell phones from a goddamn foxhole. The time Ronald Reagan jumped into Panama with the troops, and he went to the microphone and announced the troops captured the president of Panama, and everything was secured, it was a success, one of the guys from the media said, “You never told us the troops were going in to invade Panama.” Reagan said, “If I would have told you, I would have told the enemy. They’re my troops, they’re my men.” He was right. We all loved him when he said that, and we weren’t even in the Army then.
When the book came out, people started calling us heroes. We’re not heroes. It burns me up how people use the word “hero” today. The heroes are the kids who gave 100 percent; they gave their lives. The heroes are the mothers who gave up a son, who carried him for nine months, and raised him to do right, and he does right, and at eighteen, he goes to fight for his country, and he dies doing right. That’s a hero. When they call a baseball or a football player a hero, that player is playing a game they love, and getting well paid for it. How is that a hero? You can call him the star of the game, but he’s not a hero. The word is misused. Bill and I get furious when we hear it used in the wrong context. We know we’re not heroes. The kid who went to war and never walked back through his mother’s front door, he’s the hero.
The book got more veterans to talk about the war, not just us, but all veterans, from the Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force. And if telling the stories makes people think about it, then we’re doing something good.
I get on the bus sometimes with a woman who was in Auschwitz. She started talking to me one day. She knew me because she saw Band of Brothers. She showed me her tattoo, and she said, “Thank you, you did so much for my people.” Her husband tended bar in the city, and he showed me his tattoo. It amazes me how they lived through these things, and went on to move forward, try and forgive the past, and to make productive lives for themselves.
Recently there was a Holocaust Memorial Dinner to honor survivors, and me and Bill were invited as guests, because they knew Easy Company liberated the Landsberg concentration camp. We were told there were going to be survivors from Landsberg there, and I wanted to talk to them. I know it’s far-fetched, but one thing I wanted to ask them was about the Hungarian girl with the reddish hair. Did they know her? I imagine they did. They were from the same camp. I never got to talk to them, they left too quickly. But over the years, I’ve thought about her, and I hope she did well.
I hear about these idiots like a well-known movie star’s father who said there was no such things as the Holocaust. He don’t even believe a man went to the moon. I’m disappointed in him. That’s why I call up newspapers to set things straight. You need to speak up about people like that. They weren’t there, but they think they can tell you the way it was.
The people who saw the things we saw, it affects you for life. You remember things, and they affect you emotionally and physically. Nothing that makes you take a turn for the worst or anything, it just affects you for a few minutes. That’s why I couldn’t tell my stories for a long time. I never told my wife or my daughter anything about the war. I started telling them to my son-in-law Ed in the last twenty years. He wanted to know everything. It was very hard. The Greeks have a saying: If you keep a hero’s name in the public’s eye, the person never dies. That’s why I started telling certain stories. Like about Jim Campbell and John Julian. I couldn’t get myself to express them before. I didn’t even tell Stephen Ambrose when he interviewed me for Band of Brothers.
One funny thing happened after the book came out: My brother Shad called me and said, “I want to apologize. I just read the book. You did have a German general surrender to you!” He said, “We thought you were full of shit!”
I feel good to be able to say things worked out exactly as they have in my life. That I didn’t wait to get drafted, that I didn’t tell anyone of my hand condition—because if I waited to get drafted I might have—and that I didn’t go into any other outfit. As bad as it was—and you paid a heavy price for being a paratrooper, believe me, always put on the front lines under bad conditions—and even with the emotional scars you live with, I’m glad I did it. All goodness came out of it. I would never have had the opportunity to meet guys like Winters, Guarnere, Toye, Ed Joint and Joe Lesniewksi, Malarkey, J. D. Henderson, Shifty Powers, Chuck Grant, One Lung McClung, Compton, Mike McMann, and most important, Muck, Penkala, Campbell, and Julian, who never came back. Guarnere, I don’t have to mention, he’s nuts, he always let’s me know he’s around! It makes you feel good that you were with these guys all over Europe in some tough spots, guys you shared a hole with, and guys who saved your life, like Sheehy. He saved my life in Holland. When someone mentions that a guy named Dick Winters wrote a book, I get proud as hell. I’m too happy to say he was my company commander. To call these men my friends is a privilege.
BILL
Right after the war, the 101st Airborne had a reunion in 1946 in Indianapolis. I couldn’t go, I was in the hospital, but I went to the next one in New York. For the first couple years, the towns we went to were up in arms that we were coming, they were scared. We were just fresh from war. They figured we were killers, we were savages, we were going to turn the town upside down. They must have heard what we did to London after Normandy! But when the men got there, we were like pussycats. After combat, you don’t even want to kill a bug.
About ten or so Easy Company men came to the first couple reunions, and I started calling the men every year trying to get them to go. When enough of us were going, I suggested we have our own yearly reunion. Just Easy Company. So that’s what we did. Frannie helped me organize and run the reunions for fifty years. About forty or fifty men came to the first one, and it grew to eighty-three one year—when we went to San Diego. We had a core group that always came—Babe, George Luz, Walter Gordon, Gordon Carson, Joe Toye, Bill Wingett, Burt Christenson, Lewis Nixon, Buck Compton, Don Malarkey, Rod Bain, Johnny Martin, Gene Roe, Ralph Spina, Herb Suerth, Popeye Wynn, Carwood Lipton, Buck Taylor—that’s just a few. Dick Winters came to two or three reunions, too.
The first reunion Rod Bain came to, I saw him coming in, so I stood behind a column, and jumped out and hollered, “Bain!” Figured I’d do it one last time for posterity. He said, “What do you want, Sarge?” I said, “Get me a Seven and Seven.” So he brought me seven Seven and Sevens, and said, “There you go, don’t bother me anymore!” He’s a great guy, God bless him. We were together a lot during the war.
Like Babe said, we mostly have fun, drink, dance, laugh. But when we see each other it’s emotional, too, just nobody talks about it. The first year I convinced Malarkey to come—now Malarkey’s sentimental anyway, cries like a baby when he sees us—he got so overwhelmed, he started drinking and went for a walk, and come nighttime, he went missing. We all got in cabs and went looking for him, even the police went looking. The next morning, someone found him sleeping at the back entrance of a store. He was drunk, got lost, and fell asleep. We gave him holy hell. He’s come every year since.
I tried to get Captain Sobel to come to the reunions. He lived in Chicago. I paid his Airborne dues for him and I sent him a card. I said, “Come, the men want to see you.” The war was over. He was another man in E Company. You don’t carry grudges. We disliked him, but never hated him. What he put us through was almost as bad as being in combat. We didn’t know he was doing something good for us. He got us ready for the worst of the worst. We have to give him credit for what he did. But he never came to any reunions. His sister contacted me in 1988 to tell me he died. He tried to commit suicide before that. That was sad news. It didn’t matter what we’d been through, or how we felt. After Band of Brothers came out, she came to our reunion in Valley Forge. She was furious about what the book said about her brother, but it was all true. She want
ed to kill me and Malarkey. She was crying. She gave me a letter she wrote to us. It was scathing. I said to her, “Sit down and talk to us. Any question you have, we’ll tell you the truth as it was, but I can’t change it.” She got the full story, she understood a little more, and apologized to everyone. She died right after that.
People can’t believe we’ve been together every year. Some others do it but it’s very, very rare. It was important to me to keep in touch with the men. Beside the reunions, I stayed active in the 506th, I was on the board of governors for thirty years. When I think about the war—I think about it every day of my life—I think about the men, not the war. Thoughts of the men from the beginning of the war, from Toccoa, to the end. Easy Company lost sixty to seventy men in the war. I can tell you what happened to each one, from Alley to Zimmerman. No one else could do that. It’s not something I’m bragging about, it’s just that I made it my business, that’s all. I cared about each and every one. When I go on the tours with Babe or go back to Europe, I think of what happened there and who was killed. I never had nightmares. That post-traumatic stress disorder, quite a few people got it, but I didn’t. I just have good, fond memories of the men. Whenever I think of someone, I pick up the phone and call him, or his family, because a lot of the men are gone today. This goes way back, from the time the war was over until today, and my phone bills were sometimes two hundred dollars a month. I just gave up doing the reunions two years ago, now my phone bill is twenty-one dollars a month. I’m saving money!
When the men get together, nobody talks much about the war. We talk about our families, what we’ve been doing. If something comes up that has to do with the war, we look at each other and we don’t have to say a word. You give a guy a hug or squeeze. It’s understood. You were both there, and you both know. If you’re a combat veteran, war never leaves you. Every Christmas you spend, you spend at Bastogne. Whether you know it or not, you spend it there. It’s in your mind, body, and soul. In September you think of Holland, too, but it’s not got the same charge as Bastogne, that was the most haunting part of the war. What happened there remains inside every one of us.
Strange things from the war still happen today. In 1989, they found the C-47 that went down on D-day with Captain Meehan and headquarters. They found some of the men with crickets still in their pockets, they found dog tags, knives, a static line hook, English money. All still there from forty-five years before. Real strange and eerie!
There’s nothing that’s changed my life so dramatically as the Army. Being associated with these guys from Easy Company has been the most important part of my life after my own family. It’s a love and brotherhood you can’t explain. I’ve kept them together. I always give them hell. Always have. It’s because you love them, but you don’t tell them you love them. You just give them hell. And they say, “Oh, there he goes again. Gonorrhea giving everyone hell.” I just keep after them, that’s all.
People ask if the war changes you. The war changes you in lots of ways. Damn right. You get home and say, “I’m lucky to be alive.” Everything is incidental. There are no big problems in life. Everything is incidental when nobody is trying to kill you. Nothing bothers me. I couldn’t care less if we have forty feet of snow, nineteen inches of rain. Thunder, hurricanes. Nothing can compare to being in the war. No matter what you say or do today, nothing can compare to the experiences in the war. Everything is minor. You got a headache? Foot bothering you? Get the hell out of here! Minor detail. During the war, you never know if tomorrow will come. Every day, you lived like it was your last day. I still live that way. War gives you a different perspective on life. It’s true. You can’t understand it unless you been there.
Life is more treasured, too. You appreciate every day and live every day to the fullest. You think, “I might not be here tomorrow.” You appreciate everything you have. I always did, because we didn’t have nothing growing up, but war magnifies it, makes you appreciate it even more.
Another thing is, I was always good at figuring people out. I think it’s something you’re born with. But during the war, leading forty-eight men, you become an expert at it. I knew inside out the personalities of my men. I knew who was capable of what, I knew how to push buttons. Some people didn’t do what you asked. I kept that in mind, too. I knew who goofed off, who was goldbricking. For those people it was fist city, bing-bang-boom! They knew you meant business. When it’s war, it’s not a game. Since the war, I’ve met thousands and thousands of people, I talk to someone for a few minutes, I get a feel for them right away. I can tell their nature right away. Most of the time I’m correct. I can tell who to put my time into and who not to bother with.
The world’s changed a lot, too, since the war. Today, TV is fighting the war for you. And the politicians fight the war. When I hear the computers and the cell phones and the e-mails and the answering machines, it depresses me more than the war. It’s a different generation, kid. Back then, people interacted with each other, they were patriotic, they cared about their community, shared what little they had. Today everybody’s separate. Families don’t help each other. Everybody wants more and more, nobody’s satisfied with what they got. The more people have the more they want. Back then life was simple, families were closer, people were happier. I wouldn’t trade those days for all the money in the world. It’s funny, how your memory goes way, way back. Do you remember the song “Seven-Twenty in the Book”? When I was a little kid, we had a man in Philly, before the big bands of the early twenties, and his name was Jan Savit, and he had a band like Glenn Miller. I liked his records, and the most famous song was “Seven-Twenty in the Book.” Every time I hear it on the radio, I can still sing it now. That’s how things carry on all through your life. Today’s music is all noise. You can get away with anything. You can burn the flag, too, if you want. That’s America.
I still feel like I did when I was twenty years old. Me and Babe still feel like kids. We can still stay out partying all night! Still chasing the broads, just can’t catch them. Age is just a number, kid. If you start thinking of the numbers, you think you’re going to die. I say, “Get the hell out of here!” Just run! I just keep running.
When the phone rings, I say nineteen prayers. I am afraid for bad news. Because I know everyone in the company, they call me. They don’t call Winters, they don’t call Babe, just me and me alone, because I have been the one trying to keep everyone together. I do it to keep Easy Company alive and the memories of the men alive.
Stephen Ambrose came to our reunion in New Orleans around 1989. He was interviewing veterans, he wasn’t planning on writing a book about Easy Company. When he saw he had forty to fifty men from one company, he was very interested in how we stayed together for almost fifty years. He knew he had gold. I feel like if me and Frannie didn’t put in all that work, it wouldn’t have happened. We put our lives into it. Try doing it once. I don’t know how we did it, but it got done.
When Ambrose decided to write the book, he got most of his information from Walter Gordon, Winters, and Lipton. Winters especially, because he had a diary, and then he got Ambrose in touch with the key men in the company, and Ambrose contacted me. I met him at Winters’s farm in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and I stayed there for a few days for interviews. Then I spent two days with Ambrose at Lipton’s house in Southern Pines, North Carolina. For most of us, that was the first time we talked about the war since we came home. At the time, I thought Ambrose was nuts. I couldn’t imagine who would want to hear about it. I thought, We’re no heroes. It took everyone to win that war. It took the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Merchant Marine, and the people on the home front—the moms, the pops, the kids, everyone. It was a concerted effort by everyone in America. No matter what they done, we needed everybody. Easy Company was different from other companies in a way. The bond the men had. No other company had this. No other regiment trained together and went into combat together. So we were bonded different right from the beginning. Then we had Sobel. He beat the crap out of
us, and it made us closer. Made us better fighters, too. We were a hell of a company. We had street smarts. Made us natural killers on the battlefield. We were pussycats off the battlefield! But it was the bond that was special. How else can you explain staying together every year from 1942 until today? I talk to veterans all over the world and I ask them, “Do you guys see each other?” They forgot the names of the men they fought with. So when I say we’ve been together since 1942 until today, that speaks for what we are.
10
BACK TO THE PLACES WE FOUGHT
(Bill’s Stories in Italics)
When you go back to these places where you barely survived, and you lost buddies, and you saw terrible things, you have no feeling. It makes me feel worn out and old. It all comes back to you, and physically and mentally, we just don’t believe we went through it. I look around and hide tears sometimes. You can’t believe you survived it, you can’t believe what you seen, and you can’t believe what you did. And then you remember the faces of the people you liberated, and then you know why you were there.
Bill and I have our private moments when we go there, but the people really welcome us, especially in Holland, and we have a lot of fun with them.
The first time, we went back to Eindhoven, Holland, in 1954 for the tenth anniversary of the drop. The Dutch government was celebrating the liberation and invited the 101st Airborne. We marched through there September 17, 1944, as paratroopers and liberators, and went ten years later as civilians. Oh, the Dutch love the American soldiers. They couldn’t do enough for us. For twenty-one days we lived in Dutch homes. They had parades. The children put wreaths on the graves of the soldiers. So you see it was a foreign government that celebrated the Allied forces first, and they still do it every year. A man named Mathew van Luyt created a group called the Dutch Airborne Friends. They invite the 101st back to Europe every year. They call it Remember September. They have a big parade. Later, they started doing it in France and Belgium, too. They have schoolchildren put flowers on the graves there, too. It’s carried on until today.
Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends Page 24