Band of Brothers (41 page)

“Dick this can go on and on. I have never discussed these things with anyone on this earth. The things we had are damn near sacred to me.” He signed off, “Your Devoted Soldier forever.”

Talbert had enclosed a recent photograph. He looked like a mountain man. In his reply, Winters told him to shave off the beard and get his hair cut if he intended to come to San Diego. He did, but he still showed up wearing tattered hunting clothes. The first morning, Gordon and Don Moone took him to a men’s store and bought him new clothes. Before the year was out, he died.

Gordon wrote his epitaph. “Almost all of the men of Company E suffered wounds of various severity. Some of us limp, some have impaired vision or hearing, but almost without exception we have modified our lives to accommodate the injury. Tab continued in daily conflict with a demon within his breast. He paid a dear price for his service to his country. He could not have given more without laying down his life.”

Dick Winters paid him an ultimate tribute: “If I had to pick out just
one
man to be with me on a mission in combat, it would be Talbert.”

·    ·    ·

Capt. Herbert Sobel had no physical wounds, but deep mental ones. He also disappeared from sight. He married, had two sons, got a divorce, and was estranged from his children. He worked as an accountant for an appliance company in Chicago. Maj. Clarence Hester was in Chicago on business one day in the early 1960s. He arranged for a lunch together. He found Sobel to be bitter toward E Company and life generally. Twenty years later Guarnere tried to locate Sobel. He finally found his sister, who told him Sobel was in bad mental condition and that he directed his rage at the men of E Company. Guarnere nevertheless paid Sobel’s dues to the 101st Association, hoping to get him involved in that organization, but nothing happened. Shortly thereafter Captain Sobel shot himself. He botched it. Eventually he died in September 1988. His funeral was a sad affair. His ex-wife did not come to it, nor did his sons, nor did any member of E Company.

·    ·    ·

Sgt. Skinny Sisk also had a hard time shaking his war memories. In July 1991, he wrote Winters to explain. “My career after the war was trying to drink away the truckload of Krauts that I stopped in Holland and the die-hard Nazi that I went up into the Bavarian Alps and killed. Old Moe Alley made a statement that all the killings that I did was going to jump into the bed with me one of these days and they surely did. I had a lot of flash backs after the war and I started drinking. Ha! Ha!

“Then my sister’s little daughter, four-years-old, came into my bedroom (I was too unbearable to the rest of the family, either hung over or drunk) and she told me that Jesus loved me and she loved me and if I would repent God would forgive me for all the men I kept trying to kill all over again.

“That little girl got to me. I put her out of my room, told her to go to her Mommy. There and then I bowed my head on my Mother’s old feather bed and repented and God forgave me for the war and all the other bad things I had done down through the years. I was ordained in the latter part of 1949 into the ministry and believe me, Dick, I haven’t whipped but one man since and he needed it. I have four children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

“The Lord willing and Jesus tarrys I hope to see you all at the next reunion. If not I’ll see you at the last jump. I know you won’t freeze in the door.”

·    ·    ·

Easy Company’s contributions to the nation’s defense did not end with the company’s demise. A number stayed in the Army. Lt. S. H. Matheson, an original company officer who had quickly moved up to regimental staff, became a two-star general and commander of the 101st. Bob Brewer made colonel, spending much of his time working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Far East. Ed Shames made colonel in the Reserves.

Sgt. Clarence Lyall made a career out of the paratroopers. He made two combat jumps in Korea and in 1954 was assigned to the 29th French Parachute Regiment as an adviser. The 29th was at Dien Bien Phu. Lyall got out two weeks before the garrison surrendered. He is one of a small number who have made four combat jumps; surely he is unique in having been a participant in both the Battle of the Bulge and the Siege of Dien Bien Phu.

Sgt. Robert “Burr” Smith also stayed in the paratroopers, where he got a commission and eventually became a lieutenant colonel. He commanded a Special Forces Reserve unit in San Francisco. In December 1979, he wrote to Winters: “Eventually my reserve assignment led me to a new career with a government agency, which in turn led to eight years in Laos as a civilian advisor to a large irregular force. I continued to jump regularly until 1974, when lack of interest drove me to hang gliding, and that has been my consuming passion ever since.… For the present I am assigned as a special assistant to the Commander of Delta Force, the counter-terror force at Fort Bragg. My specialties are (surprise! surprise!): airborne operations, light weapons, and small unit operations.

“My office is on Buckner Road, right across the street from where we were just before leaving for England. The old buildings are exactly as you last saw them and are still in daily use.…

“Funny thing about ‘The Modern Army,’ Dick. I am assigned to what is reputed to be the best unit in the U.S. Army, the Delta Force, and I believe that it is. Still, on a man-for-man basis, I’d choose my wartime paratroop company
any time!
We had something there for three years that will never be equalled.”

He was scheduled to go on the mission to Iran to rescue the hostages in 1980, but when the CIA learned this, it forbade him to go because he knew so many secrets. “So, I missed what certainly would have been the last adventure in my life,” he wrote Winters. “I had lived, worked and trained with Delta every day for nearly two years, Dick, and I
Hated
to be left behind.”

That got Smith going on leadership. He wrote of Winters, “You were blessed (some would say rewarded) with the uniform respect and admiration of 120 soldiers, essentially civilians in uniform, who would have followed you to certain death. I’ve been a soldier most of my adult life. In that time I’ve met only a handful of great soldiers, and of that handful only half or less come from my WWII experience, and two of them came from ol’ Easy — you and Bill Guarnere. The rest of us were O.K.… good soldiers by-and-large, and a few were better than average, but I know as much about ‘Grace Under Pressure’ as most men, and a lot more about it than some. You had it.”

In 1980, riding an experimental hang-glider, Smith crashed and suffered severe injuries. In operating on his lungs, the doctors discovered a cancer. Rader, who had pulled Smith out of a flooded field on June 6, 1944, visited him in the hospital. They played a name game — one would call out the name of a Toccoa man, the other would supply a brief word portrait. Shortly thereafter, Smith died.

Sgt. Amos “Buck” Taylor spent a quarter-century with the CIA, working in the Far East Division of the Covert Operation Directorate, sometimes in Washington, often overseas. He won’t say much about what he did, except that “the big threat to our country in that part of the world was Communist China and of course the USSR. That will give you some idea of the focus of my work. So much for that.”

·    ·    ·

When Captain Speirs got back to England in the summer of 1945, he discovered that the English “widow” he had married, and who had borne his son, wasn’t a widow at all. Her husband reappeared from a P.O.W. camp. She chose him over Speirs, and the couple kept all the loot Speirs had shipped back from Europe. He decided to stay in the Army. He made a combat jump in Korea and commanded a rifle company on the line in that war. In 1956 he attended a Russian language course in Monterey, California, and then was assigned to Potsdam, East Germany, as liaison officer with the Soviet Army. In 1958 he became the American governor of Spandau Prison, Berlin, where Rudolf Hess was serving his life term. In 1962 he went to Laos with the U.S. mission to the Royal Lao Army.

When old E Company men call him today and open the conversation by saying, “You won’t remember me, but we were together during the war,” Speirs replies, “Which war?” His son Robert, born in England during the war, is an infantry major in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the “Green Jackets,” and Speirs’s “pride and joy.”

·    ·    ·

David Webster could not understand how anyone could stay in the Army. He wanted to be a writer. He moved to California and paid his bills with a variety of odd jobs as he wrote and submitted articles and a book on his wartime experiences. He placed many of the articles, the top being in
The Saturday Evening Post,
but he could not find a publisher for his book. He became a reporter, first with the Los Angeles
Daily News,
then with the
Wall Street Journal.
In 1951 he married Barbara Stoessel, an artist and sister of Walter J. Stoessel, Jr., who became U.S. ambassador to Poland, the Soviet Union, and West Germany.

Webster had always been fascinated by sharks. Barbara writes, “The shark, for him, became a symbol of everything that is mysterious and fierce about the sea. He began gathering material for a book of his own. His research went on for years. He studied sharks first-hand, underwater, swimming among them; and caught many, fishing with a handline from his 11-foot sailing dinghy which he had named
Tusitala,
which means ‘Teller of Tales.’
 
” He wrote the book and submitted it twenty-nine times, but could not convince a publisher that anyone wanted to read about sharks.

On September 9, 1961, Webster set sail from Santa Monica with squid bait, a heavy line, and hook for shark fishing. He never came back. A search the next day discovered the
Tusitala
awash 5 miles offshore. One oar and the tiller were missing. His body was never found.

Barbara was able to get his book on sharks published (
Myth and Maneater,
W. W. Norton & Co., 1963). There was a British edition and a paperback edition in Australia. When
Jaws
was released in 1975, Dell issued a mass-market paperback.

·    ·    ·

Three of the sergeants became rich men. John Martin attended Ohio State University on his G.I. Bill money, then returned to his railroad job. He became a supervisor, had a car, secretary, and pension building and was making money on the side by building houses on speculation. In 1961 he gave it all up and, over the intense protest of his wife and children, then in high school, moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and started building homes. He had $8,000 in total capital, and everyone thought he was crazy. At the end of the first year, he paid more in taxes than he had ever made working for the railroad. Soon he was building apartment complexes and nursing homes. He expanded his activities into Texas and Montana. In 1970 he bought a cattle ranch in the mountains of western Montana. Today he is a multimillionaire. He still likes to take risks, although he no longer jumps out of airplanes. He has resisted tempting offers to sell his business; the president of Martin Construction today is John Martin, while his wife Patricia is the vice president and treasurer. They are also the directors and sole stockholders.

Don Moone used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend Grinnell College, then went into advertising. He rose rapidly. In 1973 he became the president of Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, Inc., a major New York City advertising firm. Four years later, at age fifty-one, he retired, built a home in Florida, and has lived there since in some splendor.

Carwood Lipton majored in engineering at Marshall College (now University), while his wife Jo Anne was bearing three sons. Lipton went to work for Owens-Illinois, Inc. He rose steadily in the firm; in 1971 he moved to London as director of manufacturing for eight glass factories in England and Scotland. In 1974 he went to Geneva, Switzerland, in charge of operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In 1975 Jo Anne died of a heart attack. The next year, Lipton married a widow, Marie Hope Mahoney, whose husband had been a close friend of Lipton’s, just as Marie was a close friend of Jo Anne’s. At the request of the CEO of United Glass, Ltd., he wrote a pamphlet,
Leading People.
It was a subject he knew well.

Lipton retired in 1983. He writes, “Currently living in comfortable retirement in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where I had decided when we were training in Camp Mackall that I would someday live. My hobbies are much travel throughout the world, golf, model engineering, woodworking, and reading.”

Lewis Nixon had always been rich. He took over his father’s far-flung industrial and agricultural empire and ran it while traveling around the world. His chief hobby today is reading.

·    ·    ·

Lt. Buck Compton stayed in public service jobs, so he became more famous than rich. He was a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department from 1947 to 1951, then spent twenty years as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office, eventually becoming chief deputy district attorney. In 1968 he directed the investigation of Sirhan Sirhan, then conducted the prosecution. In 1970 Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed him to the California Court of Appeals as an associate justice. He and his wife Donna have two daughters, one granddaughter. His reputation is that he remains the best athlete in the company; he is said to play a mean game of golf.