Easy Company Soldier (10 page)

Like any time guys got together, there was lots of laughing, such as when Fritz told about getting blown off course following a practice jump in England, and crashing through the thatched roof of a house, landing on the table of a couple just getting ready to eat. Not missing a beat, they stood up, introduced themselves, and asked if Fritz would like to join them for dinner.

But what seared deeper into my memory was Bob's stories about war. For what seemed like hours, he gripped us with tales of his combat experiences. His punch lines at the end of every description were haunting: “If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you—dead.” In part because he repeated the phrase and in part because it reminded me that, after years of training, there truly
was
an enemy out there waiting for us, those words tumbled over in my mind for weeks to come.

When I hurt a leg on a practice jump in Salisbury Plain, a Red Cross worker brought me a book in the hospital. The title intrigued me:
Out of the Night
by Jan Valtin. Immediately, William Ernest Henley's poem—the one I'd memorized at the University of Oregon—came to mind
(Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from pole to pole).
The book
described the capture, by the Gestapo, of a spy who had done undercover work in various parts of the world, including the United States. When he was returned to Germany, he was tortured for 101 days and nights, but did not reveal the information sought by the Gestapo. It was a chilling thought: captured by the Germans. I hadn't thought much about that.

We had talked about the possibility in our training sessions, how we would only give them name, rank, and serial number, and how, as paratroopers, we were likely to be tortured. But, until now, I hadn't thought that it could actually happen. Despite such fears, we were getting so antsy we just wanted to go.

“Let's jump,” said Skip Muck one night as we lay in our bunks. “I'm so damn anxious to get this thing started.”

We all were. In a letter to my uncle Hugh in Portland on April 18, 1944, I wrote, “[I'm] feeling like a million and am all set to carry the mail against the Germans when the invasion comes, if ever.” I said as much in letters to Bernice, too. By now, my on-again, off-again relationship with Bernice was back on; as at Toccoa, I'd gotten lonely in England and realized what a stupid idiot I'd been, and for reasons beyond me, she'd taken me back.

In May, on our last practice jump before Normandy, I was told to “jump” the mortar complete—tube, base plate, and bipod—in a canvas bag. “If you're not killed,” said Lieutenant Winters, “that's how we'll do it over Normandy.” I wasn't and we did.

Finally, our practice jumps were all behind us, nearly three dozen total, including a handful at night. We moved to a place called Upottery, about twenty miles west of Southampton on the English Channel, just north of Lyme Bay, though
we weren't supposed to know it at the time because we were in total-blackout conditions. Nobody was allowed in or out of our camp. You'd be out walking around and see our own guys dressed in German uniforms to familiarize ourselves with the enemy. We'd come to this place to make sure all the logistics to support the invasion were watertight and, at the same time, to throw off any enemy-agent surveillance of the 101st Airborne. We were placed in tents along the edge of protected fields; armed guards surrounded us at all times, making it all but impossible for someone to run off and, accidentally or on purpose, reveal our invasion plans.

It had been twenty-one months since I'd arrived at Toccoa. We'd discussed how to attack gun positions, bridges, and causeways. We'd gone over equipment, from gas masks to knives, from guns to Mae West life jackets should we, God forbid, land in water. We'd sharpened our bayonets. We knew how to dig a foxhole, take out enemy artillery. We knew the “flash-thunder” passwords to make sure, when we hit the ground in the night, that guys were ours and how, as a backup, to squeeze our metal dime-store “crickets” to identify ourselves as friend, not foe. We knew that if a German police dog was suddenly sniffing the barrel of our tommy gun, we were to shoot the dog pronto.

We'd examined and reexamined three-dimensional sand tables and maps showing exactly what the invasion of France was to look like. We were to fly over the English Channel and across the Cherbourg Peninsula. Specially trained teams of parachutists, pathfinders, would jump about an hour ahead of us. Their job was to set up special lights and radar sets to guide the rest of us in. Then, in early-morning darkness, we would drop about five miles inland from the Normandy beaches and make our way west toward Utah Beach. Our
rally point was a little hamlet called Le Grand Chemin; we were to get there by 7:00
A.M.

We'd learned that the Germans had flooded the low-lying ground just inland from the beach, forcing troops from the Channel to use only four causeways. Our job was to seize these causeways and get control of those exits so the Germans' supplies couldn't get to their troops near the beach and so our boys on the beach could get inland quickly. That might mean destroying the big guns we knew the Germans would have hammering the beach.

We'd been issued ammo and $10 worth of French francs. We'd even taken out our $10,000 life insurance policies, laughing about it to each other but not to ourselves.

The anticipation built to a sweaty-palmed pitch, then, as the wind started whipping around, crashed with a single announcement from General Taylor. Eisenhower had scrubbed the jump for June 5 because of a bad-weather forecast. Cheers pierced the air; even if we'd been anxious to go, somehow the thought of a nice hot meal and a movie instead of jumping into the unknown had a certain appeal. The movie was Cary Grant and Laraine Day in
Mr. Lucky.
Later, as we slept, the winds calmed. The next night, word came down: The jump is on.

In the hangars, we got our packed chutes, which, I'll never forget, had this shiny stuff on them, something new called fluorescent tape so we could see them in the dark. In those hangars we were each handed Eisenhower's written message of encouragement. “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these
many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. … Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

Father Maloney, our chaplain, offered absolution to those of us who were Catholic. Skip had stuffed a rosary in his pocket that he'd keep with him until the end. It felt good to have a clean bill of health with God. Johnny Miller—he was from the South—was reading his Bible; he read that thing everywhere he went. Gen. Maxwell Taylor walked among the men, shaking hands and offering encouragement. There was talk of three days of hard fighting and coming home while the ground troops pressed on. Sounded good. Frankly, it sounded
too
good. But in the nervous quiet, I think a lot of us wanted to believe it could be true—even though I was thinking more like
a year.

We synchronized our watches. Trucks brought our gear to the airfield. Some guys had blackened their faces with charcoal or paint; our 2nd Platoon wasn't among them. I grabbed my gear. I would be “jumping” all three parts of the mortar unit—base plate, tube, and bipod—all of it crammed in canvas bags and secured to me. Sixty-five pounds' worth. Made you feel like the tuba player in a band. On top of that, you had to get in a plane with it on, then parachute out. No sweat.

That and my regular gear, including entrenching tools, ammo, weapons, and food, meant I had nearly two hundred pounds on me as climbed into that C-47. It took four guys—two pushing and two pulling—just to get me in the plane. Years later, I met a guy back in Oregon who'd been there that evening, a ground soldier who was watching us get ready. He told me, “I watched all you guys loaded down with parachutes and stuff, willing to jump out of an airplane into
the night and go fight, and I remember thinking,
Where else do you find men like this?
”

The guys in our stick took their seats, backs to the fuselage, nearly knocking knees with the ten guys on the other side: Buck Compton, Bill Guarnere, Salvatore Bellino, Joseph Lesniewski, Dewitt Lowery, Johnny Plesha, John Sheehy, Cleveland Petty, Frank Zastavniak, Edward Bernat, Earl Hale, Rod Bain, Bradford Freeman, J. B. Stokes, Joachim Melo, Thomas Burgess, Robert Leonard, Richard Davenport, and Joe Toye. Skip was on a different plane. The pilot was Donald LePard. We were “chalk,” or plane, No. 70.

You couldn't help looking in each other's eyes. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking something different. We were a pretty serious bunch at that moment. Those weren't football helmets on our head this time, but army helmets, each stenciled with a white spade to identify us part of the 506th Regiment. But as I looked at each man, I figured if I had to go to war, I couldn't be going with a better bunch of guys.

If you want to be a hero, the Germans will quickly make you one
—
dead.
Bob Niland's words paid me a few last visits, interrupted by Lt. Buck Compton going guy-to-guy to hand out pills.

“What the hell are these for?” I said.

“Airsickness.”

“Don't need 'em.”

“Take them, Malarkey.”

“Buck, remember me? I'm from Astoria. I've bobbed like a cork over the Columbia Bar plenty of times and never gotten sick.”

“Take the pills, Malark. That's an order.”

I think that was the only direct order Buck gave me the entire war. So I took the pills, though, looking back, I think
they were more for our nerves than our stomachs. As the engines cranked up, I was already drowsy. At the moment, I wasn't feeling anything profound, as if I was about to plunge into history or anything like that. All I was thinking was
Let's go. Let's do this thing we've been training for seemingly forever.

It was about an hour before midnight. Because of the British “double-savings time,” though, it was still light enough so you could see out. Not that it mattered. By the time the C-47 lifted off, I was fast asleep.

For what Easy Company would later remember as such an eventful time in our lives, it was an uneventful flight. At first. We spent a couple of hours in the air, and somewhere over the English Channel, I awoke. In the distance, you could see the wakes of hundreds of ships as our fleet headed toward Normandy. The boys on those ships would get their baptisms to war come sunup; ours would come a tad sooner. When we were over Guernsey Island, we first noticed some light enemy fire. Nothing serious.

Compton stood in the doorway and looked at me. He winked and said loudly over the rattle of the engines, “We're gonna throw a scare into those krauts tonight, Malark.”

We headed east across France's Cherbourg Peninsula and
straight for Ste.-Mère-Église. That's when all hell broke loose. Big guns thumped below. Searchlights rolled around the clouds, searching for the likes of us. Tracer bullets from antiaircraft and machine guns zinged through what was now darkness. Fires burned on the ground from planes that had already been shot down. For a split second, I was back watching those giant Douglas firs bursting into flames and heading toward our cabin on the Nehalem.

Our plane—one of eighty-one that had taken off in England—was dropping, dropping, dropping some more. Ack-ack fire from the ground intensified. The plan was to fly in at fifteen hundred feet and go to six hundred when we were above the drop zone. But we were already below three hundred feet. And sitting ducks for the Germans.

We didn't know it at the time, but our pathfinders—guys who were supposed to jump earlier from a different plane and give us a signal to show us our drop zone—had gone down in the English Channel because of engine failure. We also didn't know that, though the plane was to slow to about 100 mph for the jump, we were screaming along at more like 200.

We stood and hooked up our chutes to the static line. Guts tightened. I don't recall there even being a sound-off; everything was happening so quick. I was second or third in the stick. All I was thinking was
Get the hell out of this plane, Malarkey.
The ground, at this point, was our friend. The quicker we could get down, the better off we were.

I was anxious, not fearful. With the noise of the engines, the darkness, and the flashes of light giving an eerie look to the clouds, too much was going on for you to concentrate on any fear that might have lodged in your gut. The light turned green and stayed green.

“Go! Go! Go!” yelled the jumpmaster, screaming just to be heard above the din of the engines, the guns, and the wind outside. Compton jumped first. Then Toye. I was next, a thousand do-this-and-do-that thoughts interrupted by a fleeting thought of “Invictus”:

Only later would I realize the amazing scope of the 101st's contribution on this night: Nearly seven thousand soldiers were falling into the darkness. It had been suggested, long ago, that we shout the name of Maj. Gen. Bill Lee, commander of the 101st, when we jumped. I didn't. “Currahee!” I yelled instead. And jumped into the Normandy night.
One thousand one … one thousand two.
I felt the jolt of the prop wash. The chute burst open. With a splash of moonlight on the ground, I could see a triangular piece of property to my left, between roads. I'd been floating for nearly thirty seconds. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a farm road. Not much else. Certainly not the elm tree I suddenly felt myself crashing into.

Some paratroopers, I'd later learn, would die in such trees, target practice for the Germans come daybreak. Some didn't even make it that far. In either shot-down planes or hanging limp from parachutes, with bullets in them, they were dead on arrival. But somehow I swung down on my risers, almost as if I were in a giant sling, like at Camp Mackall, and felt my feet touch the ground.