Easy Company Soldier (19 page)

Suddenly, on the second or third day, the stillness of the woods was shattered by the pop of guns and the sound of bullets ripping into trees. And then the awful sound of someone getting hit: a muffled cry. “I'm hit!” And the panicked cry of “Medic! Medic!” And a machine-gunning of swear words that spoke not only of pain but of the frustration of knowing the victim could no longer do battle with the bastard who'd shot him. And—God, I hated this one—a soft, desperate call for a mother.

The German machine gunners kept spraying the woods like a lawn sprinkler till we finally got some guys in position and started hammering back. Before long, the field beyond the woods was littered with dead Germans. Dozens of them, part of one small attempt to push the lines west, toward their ultimate goal of Antwerp. Not that every time we quelled
such a push it didn't cost us something. Gordon took a shot in the neck that should have killed him but didn't. Same with another machine gunner. They survived, but not by much. Same with that new machine-gun crew, the Polish guys. Our medic, Eugene Roe, was busy that day, and the nearest aid station was in Bastogne, a few dangerous miles away.

Wounded men were Roe's stock-in-trade. And he'd seen more death than anyone else in the unit. To the rest of us, death was some rogue wave that would crash down on us from time to time. Hell, Roe was standing out in the surf every day, taking one shot after another. Since we'd got to Bastogne—bloodier than any other place we'd been—Roe was getting a bit of that thousand-yard stare himself. Quieter. You could tell it was getting to him. And who could blame him?

We continued hide-and-seek games with the krauts for the next few days, not that there was much daylight in which to fight. It didn't get light until around 8:00 a.m. and returned to dark around 4:00 p.m. We'd pick a fight, they'd pick a fight. They'd send a patrol; we'd send a patrol. We did a lot of frontline firing and mortaring. Perhaps too much. If this stalemate didn't break in our favor soon, we were bound to lose because we were already running out of ammo. And snow and heavy fog meant our flyboys weren't, at least for now, going to be saving our butts with a supply drop. We were down to six rounds per mortar, one bandolier per rifleman, and one box of machine-gun ammo per gun.

“No firing at anything, except to repel a major attack,” said Compton.

Before long, the Germans seemed to sense this. When the fog would lift, we'd see them down there in Foy, frolicking
around in their white snowsuits, almost as if daring us to come after them but knowing we couldn't. Already, the 506th's 1st Battalion had been beat up pretty badly trying to take the town and had fallen back.

Ammo wasn't the only thing we were low on. Roe was going from man to man like some sort of desperate trick-or-treater, scrounging whatever he could in the way of supplies. Food was becoming a problem. Not enough K rations had got distributed in the rush to leave Mourmelon. Our company cooks tried to get us hot, boiled chunks of beef in a souplike recipe—or white beans in broth—brought in from Bastogne by jeep before daylight or after dark, but it was impossible to keep it even lukewarm. Our best culinary trick was mixing a lemonade packet from our K rations to make an iced dessert. But, God, what I'd give for a hamburger steak and mashed potatoes from the Liberty Grill.

Meanwhile, the cold and snow started taking their toll. Joe Toye's soft singing of Irish ballads or “I'll Be Seeing You” might have eased his soul, but it wasn't doing much for his toes. Roe suggested he go back to regiment for a break. “I ain't comin' off the line,” Toye said.

We were told to inspect our feet on occasion. Blue was a warning. Black the danger zone. On December 21, up to a foot of dry powder fell. And yet we were still wearing summer uniforms. All we had for cold weather were long, wool overcoats, which helped in the trenches but obviously weren't smart for combat, and thin woolen caps we wore under our helmets. Sometimes, if a guy got hit, Roe was having to tuck the plasma bottle in his armpit to keep the stuff from freezing.

“Krauts don't know how good they got it,” said Bill Guarnere, who'd become a close friend. “Wearing them
snowsuits and sleeping in houses down there in Foy—they got the life.”

When you'd be up checking an outpost and look down on that village, you'd think you were looking at a Currier & Ives Christmas card. Then you'd stumble over some frozen corpse, bled out in the snow, and you'd think otherwise. The body of one dead German, not far from our foxholes, finally got to a few guys; despite the nearly frozen soil, they gave him a proper burial.

By now, I'd become a unit sergeant. Along with other noncoms, we needed to keep an eye on who needed a break, some Joe who needed a couple of days back at the command post, where Winters was, or being a runner between us.

“Malark, I need you to witness this for me,” said Roe one day. One of our replacements—a guy named Hughes whose grandfather had been a U.S. Supreme Court justice—huddled in his foxhole, complaining of not being able to feel his feet. Roe unlaced one of the man's boots. His foot was half-black, early signs of gangrene. His war was over. Later, I heard he lost part of one foot and the entire other foot, though, as a newcomer to us at Mourmelon, he may never even have fired a shot in the war.

Once, I made the mistake of checking my own feet; took me two days to get them warm again. While picking up supplies in Bastogne, I picked up some burlap bags and started wrapping my boots in them. I found that if you poured some water on them and had it freeze, it actually worked as insulation and kept your feet warmer. I got a lot of heckling for my system, but by now I preferred warmth to pride and, while some believed otherwise, remained convinced this was the way to go. Speirs thought my getup was the funniest thing since Abbott and Costello; he had Forrest Guth, a guy with a
camera, take a picture of me. Winters just thought I was nuts. Later, he said, “Can you imagine a guy wrapping his feet so he could
stay
in combat rather than get out?”

Every now and then you'd hear about some guy who'd taken off his boots just to freeze his feet so he could get out of here. Occasionally, some guy would go so far as to put a bullet in his foot for the same reason. War could twist your mind in lots of ways; when you get cold and exhausted, you lose your mental edge. And if you lose your mental edge, you lose hope. You lose hope and you're doomed. For some guys, a day or two helping out back at the command post could charge their batteries a bit. Winters was big on that. He'd notice a guy who was having a tough time and call him for a little break. “Hang tough,” he was always telling us. Other times, the only way out for a soldier seemed to be the one thing I vowed I'd never do: quit.

Bastogne was challenging us in ways no other place had. We had no artillery power and no airpower. We were low on ammo and food. The men were cold, fearful, exhausted. I've heard a soldier loses his effectiveness in combat after about 90 days; we'd been in action for 107 since Normandy. This wasn't exactly how any of us had expected to spend Christmas 1944. As if our situation wasn't already ominous enough, word filtered through Easy's ranks from a medic back in Bastogne: The Germans had closed the circle. The 101st Airborne was now completely surrounded, but as Winters would remind us, “We're used to that. We're paratroopers.”

Our Christmas miracle came early. On December 23, we awoke to clear skies.

“God, look at that,” said Compton. “UCLA blue!”

“
Listen,” said Toye. “Planes. I hear planes.”

We weren't dreaming. We looked above us; in the gaps between the trees and there against an almost-too-true-to-be-real blue sky were C-47 transport planes, dropping supplies: food, blankets, medicine, ammunition, the works. The amount would prove less than we'd expected—the K rations would last for only a few days—but they were
something,
and triggered a much needed boost in morale. After a week cut off from everybody else, hidden back in the woods, we'd lost any sense of context, that we were part of something bigger than just staying alive. The planes reconnected us somehow. Soon, a few P-47s were also in the sky, apparently to rouse the Germans below in Foy and Noville.

Some guys, including me, ran partway into the open field so they could see us. We whooped, hollered, and cheered, then suddenly froze in panic.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
The P-47s were opening fire with mounted machine guns. On us.

“What the hell?” I said.

We scattered beneath trees and into foxholes, wondering if those had been our own guys accidentally firing at us or Germans who'd captured our planes. They returned for a second go. I dove behind a tree.
Ping.
A bullet glanced off my helmet, sending my metal cap flying, but leaving me unscathed. I'd had tons of close calls since Normandy; this was another. But, somehow, I'd yet to be seriously wounded. At Bastogne, though, you didn't find yourself thinking too much about long-range possibilities—say, getting back home. You were more concerned about just making it until tomorrow.

On December 24, a jeep from Bastogne brought copies of a one-page newspaper. The Germans had, two days earlier, demanded the surrender of the 101st. Beneath a “Merry Christmas” greeting, General A. C. McAuliffe had written:

“‘Nuts,‘” said Toye. “Gotta love that guy, McAuliffe.” Around us, soldiers hooted and hollered. McAuliffe's refusal to give up encouraged us all; how fortunate that a gutsy guy like him was on watch while General Taylor was back in the States. Like the planes, his defiance reminded me that what we were doing here was about something bigger than just
us.
That we weren't folding no matter what. We were beating back everything thrown at us.

Not that his “Merry Christmas” got us in any sort of holiday spirit, thinking of Christmases back home. By dark, the wind had picked up and the windchill factor plummeted. We had navy-bean broth that night, as usual. For the first time, Winters OK'd a warming fire but the Germans must have picked up on it because an incoming mortar round pounded down, some shrapnel catching Harry Welsh below the belt. He was evacuated, went back to England, though went AWOL to later return to Easy Company.

I passed out some Lucky Strike Christmas presents, then, making sure our outpost was manned, headed for some shut-eye. All was quiet except for guys coughing, which had become as common as breathing. Some guys will tell you they heard the Germans singing “Silent Night.” Maybe. I heard that song only in my head, though sound traveled so well over the snow that it's possible it was really coming from the Germans in Foy. Once in a foxhole, Bain and I would pull our “lids” of limbs and fir bows over us. A guy named Ed Thomas had concocted a more gruesome roofing system: the frozen-stiff bodies of German soldiers atop the branches. His thinking was, when shrapnel started flying, better them than us. And, hell, the krauts were already feeling no pain.

A few days later, word filtered from Bastogne that Glenn Miller's plane had gone down over the Channel in mid-December and he was missing; it was hard to imagine not hearing more fresh songs from that guy, one of the greats of big-band music. But better news came on its heels: The siege of Bastogne was finally broken. A tank battalion from Patton's 3rd Army had penetrated the German lines and rolled into town. That was wonderful. The circle was broken. We could get supplies in and wounded out. But, later, we heard that the 3rd rescued us. That cockeyed idea is phonier than a three-dollar bill. Easy Company didn't need rescuing.

One night, Joe Toye took shrapnel in the wrist when a German plane swooped low and dropped an antipersonnel bomb. It was the third time he'd been wounded since our jump into Normandy.