Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

by William Guarnere

  That first year, they were putting us up in Dutch homes, and we had to wait in line to go up on stage and get a family to stay with. There was a pretty young Dutch girl there—and Bill was married, but I was single—and she and I are both next in line to get paired up, and I’m all excited to end up staying with this girl. Next thing I know, Bill’s telling the director, “I would like my buddy, Babe, to stay with the Dutch people I’m staying with.” He was staying with an old couple in their late seventies! I wanted to kill him that day, but they ended up being like family to us. We called them Mom and Pop Vermuelen. They had a fourteen-year-old granddaughter; we called her Honey because we couldn’t pronounce her name. They lived at 402 Hoogstraat, which means High Street in Dutch. There were bars every six feet, and I had a hell of a job getting Bill home. He had to stop in every bar. Mom, the old lady, walked into the pub, grabbed Bill by the ear and pulled him out saying, “You had plenty beer, plenty beer!” We were thirty-one years old, old enough to know better!

  They gave us a bed that was maybe three feet by three feet. Bill fell out of bed. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The bathroom was outside, and we were drinking a lot of beer. The first night, we were in our bedroom with the door shut, discussing, “How are we gonna keep going outside? We drank all this beer?!” Mom and Pop must have heard us anguishing over it, because she came knocking on the door and handed me a bucket. She said, “You go here, you had plenty beer today.” My God, I am still embarrassed today. So in the morning, Bill says to me, “Babe, my leg is starting to bother me, I wonder if it could be from the beer.” I said, “You never complain about your leg! Are you too goddamn embarrassed to carry the goddamn bucket down? I’ll take the bucket down!” We’re arguing about who’s going to take the bucket down and in walks the old lady, and she looks at the bucket and she says, “Oh my! Plenty beer!” It had a head on it! I looked at Bill. We were so worried about being embarrassed, and she didn’t care at all! Right, Bill?

  Why, certainly! To her, it was just a bucket of beer! Are you telling this story for everyone?

  It shows how broadminded the Dutch are. We really enjoyed ourselves with them. They just loved being with the guys that dropped there. We used to take them out, we’d buy food for them in the market. We bought Honey a bicycle. We loved doing things for them.

  We loved our time there. It was beautiful, nobody thought of the war. They were just happy and free.

  We went back five years later, and visited a few times after that, and around 1970, Mom and Pop passed away. But we got to know a lot of people by then. Before Band of Brothers, if Bill and I were sitting in Eindhoven, they would come right over and know our names. They knew we were from the 101st and that we liberated them. Their newspaper, the Dagblad, always had us in there. In Son, they had an article on us. They’ve recognized us every year. Since Band of Brothers came out, now everyone knows us. When we go to Holland, my job the first morning is to get postcards and stamps while Bill waits in the room. One morning, two guys started hollering out to me, they must have seen the eagle on my jacket, and next thing I know, they picked me up bodily and took me into a pub. Everyone in the bar started clapping and hitting their glasses on the bar. They wanted me to drink. It was ten in the morning! I may have had one. And then another. And then another.

  I never got my postcards! When he came back I said, “You’re a fine-looking specimen.” He was drunk as a skunk.

  We also became friends with a Dutch man who saw us come down from the sky. He loves us like brothers. Today, he’s the head of the Van Gogh Museum.

  That first trip back, I met a Dutchman who said, “Let me show you something.” He pulled out a photo of himself on a motorcycle with a trooper behind him. I thought, Jesus, I hope this ain’t the guy whose motorcycle I stole! He’s caught up to me after all these years and now he wants me to pay for it! But it wasn’t him—thank Christ for that. He just wanted me to sign the back of the photo. I was nervous there for a minute.

  We went back to Holland again in 1959. Everything looked newer and cleaner, and well taken care of like they were proud to be a free country. During the war it was downtrodden. It didn’t look like the beauty that you knew Holland could be.

  It was all farms. Now there are roads and houses. No more open farmland that it was when we were there. Most of the places we knew disappeared.

  Everything changed so much, where we fought, the center of the city is all changed. When we go today we don’t recognize it—skyscrapers, airports. Time marches on. Every year we go back, it changes more and more. New buildings and homes and condominiums, same as any city. It’s always in your mind what it once looked like. Secondary roads, dirt roads, grass and plants not being cared for. Nothing was like it was when I got there ten years later. The look on the people’s faces there was different, too. They’re free. The Dutch are fun. They like to talk and they like to sing, and they love their beer.

  We wanted to go to a certain few places, and they told us these things weren’t there. We know there was a church in Uden and they say it wasn’t there. I know it was there. It was the one where J. B. Stokes and I went up the belfry to look for our platoon.

  The field where we dropped in Holland, there was a man who had a farmhouse in the field. I guess he owned the field. The farmhouse is still there and we went back to visit. Everybody visits. He has a plaque on his property commemorating us. I think Easy Company gave him a plaque, too.

  Today, a lot of the people we liberated are gone, but their children, who were ten or twelve years old at the time remember us. They passed on to their children the stories of the sacrifices made for their freedom, so even the little children are so grateful. They still thank us. It’s sixty-some years later, and when we walk down the street, people run out of their houses to thank us. They know the eagle on our jackets.

  When we dropped into Holland in 1944, there was a woman shoving an autograph book in our faces while we were trying to fight the war. Well, about twenty-five years ago, the woman found us. Yes, she did. Babe and I, and other Easy Company men went to Eindhoven and this woman came up and introduced herself. Her name was Sylvia. I said, “Bring the book tomorrow and we’ll sign our real names,” and she did. We’re friends with her now, and with her son, who was born twenty years after the war.

  We have fifty or so people who call us regularly. We meet more and more people we liberated, and then they introduce us to people. One man, Theo Staal, he lives north of Eindhoven, his sister was a young girl of fifteen, sixteen, when we liberated Eindhoven, and we met Theo and his family when we went back. He sent us a plaque, which is hanging up in my house. It says:

  You fought and bought us freedom in Eindhoven on September 18,

  1944.

  Thanks For Ever [sic]

  Your Dutch friends

  Family Theo Staal,

  Roosendaal—the Netherlands

  When the book Band of Brothers came out, we got lots of letters; some of the Dutch were trying to retrace our steps, figure out where everything happened. I got a photo in the mail of a green pasture and a ditch filled with water, looked so peaceful, and on the back it said, “Is this the dike where Dukeman was killed (Chapter 6)?” It’s their history, too. They research. They know more than we do.

  The Dutch people started coming to the States to visit us, too. They come to Philly, or E Company reunions, or meet us in Vegas. They’re fun people.

  John van Kooijk from the Dutch resistance came and spent a couple weeks here. John became an American citizen after the war and died soon after. His son Eddie van Kooijk joined the 101st Airborne and fought in 2nd Battalion just like us, under our Colonel Strayer. He lives with his wife, Maggie, in Tennessee. Eddie said to me: “I’ll tell you why the Dutch love the American soldiers. When I was eight years old, I rode on a bike with my mother down the street in Neunen. We stopped at a corner and a German soldier grabbed my mother by her neck and threw her on the ground. He got on the bike and took off. That’s not living. Not when a Ger
man soldier can do that to my mother.”

  On our trip back in 1959, a guy named Eddie Posnick, who was in the 501st, was on a tour with us. He got wounded in Veghel, but before he got wounded, he was in a Catholic school where there had been some heavy fighting, and on the ground, he found a statue of the blessed mother with the head blown off. He was Catholic, so he picked it up, said a few prayers, and put the head in his musette bag. He kept it all through the war. So the tour stopped at the Catholic school, and Eddie laid his musette bag on a desk. The mother superior came down to see us, and when Eddie took the head of the blessed mother out of his bag, the mother superior got all excited and started to scream, “I knew it would come back, I knew it would come back!” She ran up some steps and came down with the rest of the statue, and the head fit right on. She said they had kept it all these years and prayed that the head was going to return. She said people thought they were nuts. All forty of us were in disbelief. We couldn’t believe what we saw, the pieces were back together all those years later.

  In Aldbourne, everything and everybody we saw during the war is all gone. There are a few pubs that are still there. No horse stables. No barracks. The horse stables were taken apart and relocated to Camp Toccoa, Georgia. Today they don’t know who we are. Me and Babe went over there and they threw us out of the pub. They close it from two to four p.m. What kind of joints are these? I think it was the Blue Boar. They’re young kids. They have no idea who we are. They’re still limeys. They’re nice people. but they’re still limeys.

  We always stop at a pub in London called the Coal Hole. They used to run barges from the Thames River up to the cafe, and they took coal off the barges there. It was a very ritzy place until we got in there! We were on a tour one year, and we were supposed to give a talk, and I don’t remember giving a talk, and Bill don’t remember giving a talk, but they said we made a nice speech! Even the bobbies come over. They had me outside directing traffic. Bill yelled outside, “Get in here before you get hit in the ass with a bus, no one can see you!” I said, “They can see me!”

  Bill and I went to a Mass one Sunday morning in London at a church named Corpus Christi, on Maiden Lane across from the Strand Palace Hotel. The Strand Palace had the Cove and the Gardens, where a lot of us hung out during the war for dances and beer. After the Mass was over, Bill and I were walking out and he said, “Babe, guess who I just got done talking to.” He said, “Joe Toye and Chuck Grant.” They had since passed away. I looked at him and I said, “Bill, you’ve got to be kidding me. I just got done talking to both of them, too.” We just looked at each other. It was eerie.

  I told the story about going back to Aldbourne, to where we ate, slept, and trained, and how I could hear the Easy Company men counting cadence, double-timing, rifle bolts being pulled back, the guys shouting and kidding each other. Bill heard it, too. Is it all in the mind? These kinds of things, they sound strange, but they happen a lot.

  We went all the way up into France and they were not as friendly as the Dutch. They wanted no parts of us. What we encountered, someone else may have encountered something different. You see, you can’t compare the Dutch with anybody else in Europe. The American troops loved them. They stand out in their minds better than any.

  Some of the men go back to Normandy and they remember where they been. Nothing looks the same to me. Nothing’s familiar. We’ve been back to Brecourt Manor a few times, and everything’s changed. They try to keep it the same, the trees are there, but they’re a lot bigger—it’s been sixty years! When I go there, I think about what we did there, the men I was with, how I felt when I was there. Most of the GIs don’t like the French, they weren’t friendly during the war.

  About a year ago, I was contacted by a teacher in France, Christelle Zuccolotto. She lives near Normandy. She was collecting all kinds of documents and photos from the Normandy invasion, she has a big collection. She started the Band of Brothers Project to teach children about the war and the liberation of France. A few of the Easy Company men volunteer time to answer questions from the students—me, Malarkey, Perconte, and one or two others do it. They send us letters and we answer. I never mind helping the kids. They should know their history’s no fairy tale.

  The first time we went back to Bastogne, thank God it wasn’t winter. The foxholes are still there. There’s some debris lying in the holes. The outline from the baseplate of the mortar is still there, where Malarkey had it set up. Occasionally they find cartridges or pieces of webbing from soldiers’ belts or pieces of weapons. During the war the shelling took all the bark off the trees. The trees grew back. You always get that creepy feeling in Bastogne. There’s something about those woods. You always get that feeling a shell’s going to come in. You feel very unsettled, very uncomfortable. Being there brings back a lot of memories, none of them good. You don’t know how the hell you lived through it.

  We think of all kinds of things when we’re there. Each soldier has his own personal thoughts about what he experienced there. You think of what happened there, who was where, who was hit, who died where, you look for foxholes. Some of them are graves of our buddies. You barely survived there. No place has the same charge as Bastogne. It looks like it did in 1944. The woods are there, the foxholes are there. The place is eerie.

  We were in Bastogne in 1994 and a little Belgian boy about six years old was with his father, and he was pointing at Bill’s leg and saying something to his father in French. I imagine he must have been saying, “What is that, Papa, the man has only one leg?” His father answered him and must have been trying to explain. I said to Bill, “The boy is looking at your leg,” and Bill said, “Yeah, I know, he’s been looking at my leg since we’ve been here.” So Bill walked over and said to the man, “Tell your son I lost my leg here in these woods, and if he can find it, I’ll give him some francs.” And the little boy got a big smile on his face, and he took off and came back crying. He told his papa he couldn’t find the leg. We gave them both a lot of francs, and the little boy was happy again. It was eerie that it happened in the very place Bill lost his leg.

  People often look at Bill’s leg and Bill tries to have some humor about it and make people feel better. It shows you mentally how he’s carried on with his leg, how he can make light of it himself. Other guys don’t fare as well, but Bill accepts life as it is and tries to make the best of everything and enjoy himself at all times. His jokes aren’t funny, but he tries.

  In Bastogne, there’s a monument to Easy Company. It’s to all the men that were killed in Bastogne. Everyone goes there to see it. So many that the area’s become a tourist attraction, and they hit you up for everything.

  We were with a tour group going through the museum, and a bunch of us had to take a pee. So we’re in a line, and the line is moving through, Babe is in the back of the line, and a big broad came and told us, “You can’t go in there unless you pay.” We were all looking through our pockets and bags and nobody had the money we needed to take a pee. So Babe yells from the back of the line, “Go ahead, the piss is on me!” and he paid for everybody. I still laugh at Babe hollering, “The piss is on me!”

  It was twenty francs each, one hundred forty francs for everyone. I said to her, “You see those woods over there?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “I took about five thousand pisses over there in those woods during the war and you didn’t charge me a damn dime!”

  The main reason we go to Europe is to visit the graves of our buddies, all the men we fought with and left behind. We’ve been back about fifteen times now. We go to the cemetery in Normandy, Margraten in Holland, Chapelle in Belgium, and Hamm, Luxembourg, where all the kids killed in the Bulge are buried. The cemeteries are beautiful, lush green grass with white crosses about four feet high, as far as the eye can see. Some Stars of David, too. It’s sad, but beautiful. It takes your breath away. Especially with snow on the ground and snow in the trees, against the white crosses, what a beautiful picture. It’s a very somber place. It affects you. I don’t care how hard
-boiled you are. It’s a very hard thing to do, but it’s something we have to do. We lost a lot of kids in Belgium. I’d say Belgium is the hardest. Every time I go there, I visit John Julian’s grave, and say a prayer and leave flowers. And I visit Muck and Penkala, and the rest of the guys. They were all just kids.

  General Patton is buried there, too. He died right after the war was over; he was killed in an automobile accident and they buried him in Luxembourg.

  Once you go to one cemetery, you start thinking of all the guys that were killed, not just the ones that are there. I think of all the guys I fought with from Alley to Zimmerman, alive or dead, I think about all of them. You’re there, but you’re not there. Anytime you take a veteran that’s been in combat to a cemetery, his mind goes back. Now or later he is going to cry. He might cry to himself, but he’s going to cry. If they start playing taps, forget about it. It happened to us recently in Normandy. We were with all of the Easy Company men, and they started playing taps. You can’t compose. And there was a broad after me, too, that day!

  One day we were paying our respects to our buddies buried at Margraten, when the man who drives the tour said, “Hey, Babe, come over here.” He was looking at one of the white crosses. There was a kid, Private Lucky, he was killed May the 7th, the day before the war was over. I have a picture of his grave. He wasn’t a jumper. He wasn’t in the 101st. But the fact that his name was Lucky, and he got it a day before it was over, that was very hard to take. I said to the driver, “How lucky was he.” He said, “In name only, Babe.”