A Company of Heroes (21 page)

“Vinegar,” Uncle Herbert answered. “Want a taste?”

“Sure,” Dad said. He couldn’t remember ever tasting it before.

Uncle Herbert burst into laughter when Dad made a face and spit the liquid on the floor. “It wasn’t vinegar,” Uncle Herbert said. “It was piss.”

Dad was appalled and humiliated and “felt little remorse or sadness when [Uncle Herbert] died unexpectedly a few years later of a ruptured appendix.”

As a boy, Dad was gregarious and well liked, good in school, and a quick reader. He described school as “a daily adventure.” He looked up to his father, and they enjoyed a close relationship, although his home life wasn’t stable.

The family was poor. Not
poor
poor, but they certainly did not have much money in the family, or in the community. The Great Depression hit everyone hard. Dad described how the crops failed several years in a row, chickens died in the intense summer heat, and “great swirling clouds of grasshoppers ate everything in sight, even clothes hanging on the line.” The bank foreclosed on his grandparents’ farm. One summer his parents took him to a cousin’s house, said they were going away for the weekend, and left him for half a year while his father tried a new business venture. There’s a letter from the boy asking his mother to send him his baseball glove.

Dad went through junior high school in Jamestown. The family settled there for several years, then moved out west to Roseburg, Oregon, where his father had a new job in advertising. Dad started high school and became an athlete, proud and capable, playing football. He delivered newspapers every morning at five a.m. and made friends with one of the country’s most distinguished gunsmiths, who taught him how to shoot. The family ran out of money again and moved back to the Dakotas where they boarded with relatives. In high school and summers, Dad participated in the Citizens’ Military Training Corps, a predecessor program of ROTC. You didn’t get paid other than five cents per mile travel allowance to get to and from the camp. He hitched rides, got reimbursed for mileage, and pocketed the difference. Dad made twenty-five dollars over the summer, a huge amount then. He tried boxing as a sport and became the camp’s lightweight champion by a knockout.

Dad attended the University of North Dakota for one semester as a mining engineering major, then dropped out when his father became sick. He was needed at home to help run the family printing business. By the start of the next summer his father felt well enough to return to work, so Dad hitchhiked west and worked in a copper mine. He went back to university in the fall and continued scrambling along, doing odd jobs, playing football, and living in the football house for free, just trying to keep himself together financially.

Pearl Harbor was attacked and the world turned upside down. Dad wanted to join the Air Force and become a pilot, but his eyes weren’t good enough. His father objected to any enlistment, believing he would be deferred if he stayed in college. Dad caught a bus to Fargo where he enlisted anyway. He was sent to Fort Snelling for processing while waiting to be assigned elsewhere. He met a recruiter who told him the paratroopers were the best damn outfit in the Army, plus you made an extra fifty bucks. “I was offered the two most powerful appeals: glory and greed,” Dad wrote. “I signed on the dotted line right then and there.”

Four days after enlisting, Dad rode a train to Toccoa, Georgia, to the then-named Camp Toombs (later renamed Camp Toccoa), where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was being formed. He described the town and the camp:

Dad was soon assigned to Company E led by “Captain Herbert M. Sobel: big-nosed, swarthy, tall, lanky, and called simply, The Black Swan.” Dad was assigned his gear and quickly made a sergeant and squad leader because of his previous military training.

Just before Thanksgiving 1942, the men marched from Toccoa to Atlanta, about 118 miles. It took three days.

Fort Benning and parachute school proved easier for the men after the tough training they’d already received. They ran everywhere and did pushups all the time, but they proved fitter than their new drill instructors.

Five jumps were required to graduate and get their wings. The men learned how to pack their own chutes and practiced jumping from two hundred-foot towers. The first real jump came soon. Jumping was always optional, but a refusal to jump meant six months in the stockade. Dad described his first and following jumps:

Dad received his wings and a ten-day pass home. He returned to his parents’ house in Fargo, “swaggering through all the parties and nightlife in that part of the state.” Quickly, the leave ended and he returned to Benning, then was transferred to Camp McCall where more training occurred.

Dad became a first sergeant for the 3rd platoon, but found it too administrative and asked to be transferred to 1st Platoon as platoon sergeant. The company went on maneuvers in Tennessee during summer 1943, then was transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for more concentrated training.

In September 1943, the 506th was transferred to Camp Shanks, New York, then boarded the
Samaria
for the voyage across the Atlantic.

The men were sent to the little village Aldbourne, about 80 miles due west of London. Dad slept in a stable in Aldbourne that had its own stove, which he described as “singularly comfortable accommodations.”

He celebrated his twenty-first birthday nearby at the home of the Blakes, “a warm-hearted, gregarious family” who had known his father during WWI. A public swimming pool was nearby, and a seventeen-year-old neighbor girl offered to take him swimming. Dad dove in, thinking he would show this young English lass what a fine swimmer he was. She splashed past him with “a tremendous burst of speed” and handily beat him to the far end. Only then did she explain that she was the United Kingdom’s freestyle swimming champ.

The role Dad played in the mutiny against Captain Sobel has been widely discussed.
¹⁶
We have a letter he wrote home in November 1943 to his mother that reads simply:

In his new company, Dad was going to be trained as a pathfinder, but immediately before the Normandy invasion he contacted Dick Winters and said he really wanted to be back with E Company. About June 1, 1944, five days before the Normandy jump, Dad’s orders came through and he was transferred back to Easy Company.

Easy Company gathered its gear and was transported by trucks to an airbase under tight security. The men were shown maps and models of their invasion area and drop zones on the Cotentin Peninsula in Western France. A key objective was to take the city of Carentan, a major transportation center and link between the Omaha and Utah beach landing areas. Easy Company was scheduled to land a few miles north and west of the city.