Easy Company Soldier (28 page)

When Stephen Ambrose's book
Band of Brothers
came out in 1992, followed by the HBO miniseries almost a decade later, it was good for me. Not because of the attention; I didn't need that, though I've enjoyed speaking from time to time to various organizations around the world about my experiences and about leadership. But because it somehow reminded me that what we did was a good thing—and over the years I'd forgotten that. I remember getting a letter from Winters in 2003. “Who would have thought our stories would have been shared with the whole world?” he wrote. “We are indeed fortunate and have been blessed.”

Still, that movie was an emotional roller coaster for me. I was called in as a consultant on some scenes, and it was tough. It brought everything back, especially later on when we all got to go to France for the premiere. Skip's family was there. What's so interesting is that the actor who I became closest with was Richard Speight Jr., the guy who played Skip in the miniseries. The first time he called me, he was politely asking me questions about Skip so he could better portray him, and damned if I didn't hang up on him. Not because
he'd done or said anything wrong. Because I just couldn't take it.

But as the filming began and we got to know each other, Richard became a great support to me, this kid half a century younger than me. Never made me feel like some sentimental old fool. Told me he understood my emotions. Said it was OK, that I was emotional because Skip and I had meant so much to each other and that was a good thing, not a bad thing. That meant the world to me. You have to understand that it took me nearly forty years before I could look at our 1942 company picture and not break into tears, particularly if it was December or January.

I didn't like everything about the book or the movie. I wish Ambrose had included a handful of guys he ignored, instead of dwelling so much on a bit player like David Kenyon Webster. And the movie had a bit too much “Hollywood” in it for my taste. Nobody I've talked to from Easy Company remembers being at that Jewish concentration camp at Landsberg. The Carentan and Eindhoven fights—they made those out to be a helluva lot more than they were. That said, both the book and miniseries did what they set out to do—tell the story of this “band of brothers,” most of it as it happened. And allowed me to talk about stuff that I hadn't talked about. And spend more time with the guys of Easy Company, though they're dwindling fast. At Toccoa, we'd had about 150 men. In 1984, we had forty-three men at the annual reunion; in 2002, the last one I attended, in Phoenix, we had thirty—and four actors from HBO's
Band of Brothers,
which meant the world to us. It's interesting, looking back at one of the photographs taken that weekend: There's Richard Speight Jr. (Skip), Scott Grimes (me), Michael Cudlitz (Denver “Bull” Randleman), and Matthew
Settle (Ronald Speirs). And who does Grimes, who played me, have his arm around? Richard Speight Jr., of course. The guy who played Skip.

In many ways, the Band of Brothers became like this large, extended family; we had trained together, suffered together, fought together, died together. Not that we always got along, before or after the war. I remember once, at a reunion in Dallas, Lewis Nixon and Harry Welsh and Mike Ranney sitting around, and Nixon tees off on Buck Compton. Says he was a coward. I said, “Is that right? And how many Silver Stars do
you
have?” They didn't know Buck Compton. They hadn't served with him as I had. Hadn't seen him rush those 105s at Brécourt Manor. Compton had been wounded in Holland, and was a damn good officer, a tough soldier, a guy who gave until he couldn't give anymore. Not a cowardly bone in his body.

Usually, we got along much better. The Muck and Penkala families—Skip and Alex died together in Bastogne—became extremely close friends and remain so today. In the mid eighties, Winters got no less than forty-one Christmas cards from Easy Company guys—forty years after the war was over. I remember getting a letter from Harry Welsh, back in 1979, thanking me for volunteering to take that patrol by myself into that factory along the Rhine River, where the kid named Orth took a ricocheted bullet in the knee. For many, the reunions were among the highlights of our older years. But like all families, the Band of Brothers have experienced their pain.

It's sad looking back at some of the letters I sent Winters over the years: “I do not see how Burr Smith can make it
much longer. … I have had dozens of my friends and relatives from WWII who drank themselves to death. … I was sorry to hear about Mike Ranney.” Ranney, one of the guys who'd triggered the ouster of Sobel, wound up living in a boarding house in Reno and was found all by himself, dying. Years before, he'd brought a written apology to the guys at a reunion for being out of position and getting shot at Brécourt Manor in Normandy.

At one reunion, I got on an elevator and there was a guy wearing these dirty old clothes and smelling of booze. A severe alcoholic. Not until later did I realize it was a Toccoa guy. Don Moone and Walter Gordon took him to a room, stripped his clothes off, and got him everything new with more to take with him. It was sad.

Joe Toye, unable to work in the mines, spent his whole life sharpening giant drill bits for a coal-mining operation. One year, a few of us cooked up a deal to get Joe and his wife, Betty, some free airline tickets so they could come to a reunion. He died in 1995. I called the night before he died and thanked him for all he'd done for me. Later, I got a letter from his son, Pete. He was then working in the athletic department at the University of Wyoming. Joe had had a tough life. He and this kid's mother had divorced; Joe and his boy had a tough go of it.

So I wrote Pete a letter and told him about the Joe Toye I'd known in Bastogne and the hell his father had been through and how he'd saved my life when Dewitt Lowery had threatened to stick that knife in my gut. He framed that letter, stuck it on his wall, and wrote back:

In hindsight, I suppose, my father had some ghosts of his own. No, he hadn't fought in a war. But he'd lost two brothers to war. And lost a business. A house. His pride. In a way, his family. Strange, isn't it? As with Pete Toye, we don't start figuring out the old man until after he's gone.

Lots of good things spun off from all the
Band of Brothers
attention. The movie
Saving Private Ryan
came out of Ambrose's book after Tom Hanks read about the Niland brothers. I'd told Ambrose the story about Skip and me having drinks with the Niland brothers in London. They'd known Skip because they'd grown up in upstate New York where he had. I told Ambrose how, after D-day, Fritz Niland showed up near Carentan, looking for Skip. One of
his brothers had been killed, he said. Turned out three of them had been killed. So he was immediately tracked down, though not by an army platoon as in
Saving Private Ryan,
but by a Catholic chaplain, and shipped home. “Don Malarkey's story in
Band of Brothers
about going to London … and visiting the Niland brothers … is the story behind the story of the movie,
Saving Private Ryan,”
Dick Winters has asserted in writing.

Because of the
Band of Brothers
attention, I've taken trips everywhere. Lots of fun. Lots of memories. The other day I was at Wal-Mart and had on an Easy Company jacket, and this kid comes up to me as we're getting our shopping carts and says, “You're … you're …”

“Don Malarkey,” I said. “Now you'd better take care of your shopping cart, son.”

The attention has been nice. It's nice to know you haven't been forgotten and to think somehow you left a mark on the world. Some people live their whole lives and can never really say they did anything for humanity. We did and can. But for all the attention, the darker side of war follows you. The wave is always there, building behind you, never going away. Ever since the march to Atlanta, I've had trouble walking at a quick pace or running. I get cold in December, even though Oregon rarely gets below thirty-five degrees. And I remember the guys we left behind. Every day, I remember.

But once, while walking the beach near Astoria, I saw these birds—puffins, I think—floating amid these giant waves that were about to break on them. And they did the damnedest thing: Knowing they couldn't ignore those waves or outswim them, they turned and faced the swells
head-on, dove right into them, realizing they'd be safer that way.

It was a good lesson for me.

Irene died in the spring of 2006 after a bout with breast cancer. We'd been married nearly sixty years, which is a long time, longer if you're married to me. What a woman. People admired me for what I'd done, but they admired her for who she was. I think of a line from that crazy Engelbert Humperdinck song: “Thanks for taking me on a one-way trip to the sun.” I didn't deserve someone so refined and dignified. Now, when I give my homemade jam to friends, every label says the same thing: “Oregon's Wild Blackberries: Picked & Processed by Don Malarkey in Loving Memory of His Wife Irene.”

The year after she died was hell, especially Christmastime. But we'd had some great times. In the last twenty-five years, we'd gone to a lot of Easy Company reunions. She never begrudged me that stuff. Our house was—still is—filled with books and photos and posters about Easy Company; it's just a helluva lot dirtier now that she's not around. And lonelier. There's a certain nobility, as the poem “Invictus” suggests, in being the “captain of your soul.” But when you're alone, that me-against-the-world stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be.

We had gone to Europe a handful of times, Irene and I, to see many of the places where Easy Company had been decades ago. Enough to fill eighty albums with photos. We spent an afternoon with Michel de Vallavielle, who had been twenty-four when we'd fought the Germans on his family's farm, Brécourt Manor, in Normandy, and had accidentally
been shot by one of our guys. He showed us the stains on the floor where two German officers had died four decades before—at the hands of Easy Company. And bites out of a rock wall, courtesy of my mortar firing. In 1984, we went to Charing Cross Road where the Palace Pub had once stood, where I'd spent so many afternoons shooting the bull with Pat McGrath. It was now some sort of fast-food restaurant.

We walked along the dikes of Hell's Corner in Holland. In Eindhoven, in 2006, we were being honored—Dick Winters was being named an honorary citizen—and they had the British singer Vera Lynn singing the song she'd debuted in 1939, “We'll Meet Again.”

She hadn't sung more than three words when I collapsed into an emotional heap. Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron had to hold me up. Supposedly it was the last time she ever sang that song.

The first time I saw Skip Muck's grave at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial, I just stood there and felt numb. I was with Dick Winters and Carwood Lipton, on a trip led by Stephen Ambrose. It was 1991. No tears. In fact, there's a photo of three of us old vets standing at his grave and we're all looking resolute. Soldiers, you know, posing for a picture taken by a historian who admired the hell out of us.

I returned there in 2004 and remembered how when Roe asked if I wanted to see Skip, I'd said no. And when Winters
asked if I wanted a break, I'd said no. I realized that since those moments, I'd grieved for everybody I'd lost except for one man, the man whose death I'd tried for decades to run away from, the man whose loss had hit me harder than all the rest.

How many times had I looked at that 1942 photo of all of us at Toccoa, the one I'd written all the KIAs and SWAs on for those killed and seriously wounded, and thought, Why not me? Why no initials on
my
chest? Why not at Brécourt Manor, when I'd stupidly gone after what I thought was a Luger on that dead soldier? Or at Hell's Corner, when German soldiers had our patrol outnumbered eight to three but wrongly assumed we had more firepower and surrendered to us? Or at Bastogne? If Winters hadn't split Skip and me up, that would probably have been me, not Penkala, in that foxhole with Skip on January 9, 1944.

But even if I've played the what-if game often, I know, deep down, that you can never win at it. Better to remember that, for whatever reason—God or fate or reading a
Reader's Digest
article about paratroopers on a Greyhound bus heading for Astoria—I was privileged to serve with a company of men who would make me far more than I would have been without them. And that losing one of those men had hurt so badly that I'd buried the thought of him, thinking that somehow that would help me avoid the pain.