A Company of Heroes (16 page)

Dad and Frank both graduated high school and went to work at Gary Steelworks. They carpooled together, although Dad only went one way with Frank. Dad went to Roosevelt University in Chicago during the evenings and took the train home. He studied journalism in college and got his degree after the war through the University of Missouri. Unfortunately we don’t have any of dad’s writings, journals, or letters anymore. Where they lived was right near the Des Plaines River. Not too long after the war ended, the river flooded, swamping their house and destroying all his writings.

Dad didn’t think he was going to get drafted, being older, but serving his country was still something he wanted to do. After the war started, Frank and Dad were at the movies one day at the Rialto Square Theater, and that’s where they saw one of those shorts that described the paratroopers. They decided to do that and enlisted together. Their serial numbers were consecutive, only one apart.

Dad craved adventure and thought that jumping out of an airplane would be a fun thing to try. He said he always enjoyed the actual experience of parachuting—not into combat, but simply the rush that came from jumping.

Dad and Frank were two of the first four privates in Easy Company along with Skinny Sisk and Carwood Lipton. When Frank and my dad enlisted, they both started out in 1st Platoon, but because they played so many pranks on the other guys, they ended up getting separated. My dad went to 2nd Platoon, and Frank stayed in the 1st.

Just before D-day, when Dad was in England, his father passed away. Dad talked about that with us—how hard it was to lose a parent and be so far away from family. He really wanted to go home but wasn’t able to, so he got away for a while by himself and tried to grieve in private and make sense of it all.

He jumped on D-Day and for Operation Market-Garden in Holland and for the “third jump”—off the truck in Bastogne, as the men say. He found it astonishing that the Dutch were so grateful to be liberated.

He was right there in a foxhole in Bastogne when Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere lost their legs in the shelling. The shelling was so bad, he said. Many of the men were so upset at what had occurred before their eyes. He and Carwood Lipton helped keep the men together and pulled guys back into their foxholes until the shelling was all over. He talked about that quite a bit.

Dad was shot twice. Both times, luckily, no major organs were hit, so he was able to be patched up and sent back in. He was present in every single battle and was one of the few guys who made it all the way through the war from the first day in Toccoa to the end. He had scars from his shrapnel wounds, and as a kid I was always intrigued with his scars. The skin was pulled together and folded over in a little flap. One scar was up in his chest area, the shoulder, close to his heart. The other was lower. The bullet went right through him, leaving both an entry and exit wound. The first time he was shot it happened at the tail end of Market-Garden. The second time he got injured was just as they were pulling out of Bastogne.

Dad talked about the concentration camps, about how he had a hard time reconciling that with his German nationality. He wondered how these things could be going on and be attributed to his people. He had a really hard time coming to grips with that.

Sergeant Chuck Grant was a really close friend of Dad’s. In Berchtesgaden, Chuck was shot in the brain by a drunken replacement from another company, and I know Dad had a really hard time with that. He (along with several of the other men) beat up on the drunken GI, and Dad even pulled a gun on him. I know that’s one of the incidents my family worried about. How was it going to be portrayed in the series?

In the book, it mentions that it was my dad who pulled the gun,
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but the series attributes it to Ron Speirs. I think the way that scene was ultimately portrayed was handled well. It showed the confusion and anger of the moment. Here, the men had made it all the way through the war, but one of their friends was gravely injured in an accident that could have been prevented. Dad said the drunken replacement was taken to a regi-mental guardhouse for discipline, and that’s the last they ever heard of him. Fortunately, Sergeant Grant slowly recovered, although he had some problems talking and he was partially paralyzed. After the war he attended some of the reunions and lived until the 1980s.

Almost every family vacation, we went to visit one of my dad’s war buddies. They were like extended family to us. When we were young we didn’t quite understand the connection all these people had to us. We visited Popeye Winn, Joe Toye, Walter Gordon—those are the ones I remember visiting. We went to the reunions as kids, and then even after my dad died, my mom insisted that we go. Easy Company is like family to us. We know quite a few of the kids as well as the men. My mom helped plan one of the national conventions for the 101st in Chicago. The main hotel was being renovated, so my mom booked all the Company E guys in a different hotel across the street. The guys had such a good time like that, just being together so much as a group. Everybody just hung out in the hospitality room morning to night, swapping stories. That was really when they started having the separate company E reunions, and not worrying about being part of the larger 101st ones.

Dad never saw himself as doing anything special in the war. He was just doing his job with the guys around him, he always said.

When Dad came back after the war, he finished college, then began to look for a job. He was a little older than most of the returning GIs and found that he was put at a disadvantage because of his age. Sears, Roebuck had an entry-level job open, but it had a maximum age limit, and dad was older than the limit, so on the application he fudged and said he was seven years younger. He got the job. He worked for Sears, Roebuck his whole career, in their catalog division, and ended up being one of their vice presidents.

Dad worked in downtown Chicago. He held the very first meeting in the Sears Tower while they were still doing the excavation. He took a bunch of people down to the basement with hardhats and a card table and set up the meeting. Only the hole was dug then. But he did it for fun, to say that they had the first meeting there.

Shortly after the war he met my mom, Jean Newman. She came from Fremont, Nebraska, and had moved to Chicago with a couple of her girlfriends after they graduated from college. They wanted to try life in the big city for a little while. The other girlfriends moved back to Nebraska, but my mom stayed in Chicago where she worked at a printing company. Years later, she worked as a kindergarten assistant and then as a travel agent.

My parents lived in Chicago when they were first married, then moved to Oak Park for a few years, then after my sister was born we moved to Lombard. There were six kids in my family altogether. We kept moving out to the suburbs like everybody else. By the time my youngest sister came along we had moved out to Lisle.

Mom and Dad had a good marriage and got along well. Mom adored Dad, and vice versa. Mom was a member of the DuPage Symphony Orchestra and played several different instruments. She was very smart and got A’s all through high school, except for gym. She was one of those people who are so smart that they almost lack a little common sense, and my dad could always play a good joke on her. Mom wasn’t quite as fun-loving as he, but they went out every Saturday night to dinner or to go dancing. Weekly, they had people over to the house for barbecues and to play cards. Mom and Dad were big bridge players. Cards were always a big part of family life and vacations—wherever we stopped, they always held bridge tournaments.

As kids, we just adored Dad. We couldn’t wait for him to get home. He was a lot of fun. My favorite memories of him all involve little things, like him taking us out for ice cream. He loved to sing and would good naturedly torture me with his songs. He sang “
Sugar, Sugar,”
and “
Knock Three Times.”
On Sunday mornings he cooked breakfast for us, big pancakes shaped like the initials of our names. He made up silly little nicknames for all of us. He called me Karrie, or Karriebrook, because one of the clothing lines in the Sears catalog was named that. My sister’s name is Amy, and Dad called her Amy Pamey Button Bright. My brother Mark was Marker Parker. My brother Kurt was Dirty Kurty, because he liked to play with his Hot Wheels cars in the dirt. The nicknames sort of petered out with the younger ones, but Dad always teased us kids. When my little sister was young and had to go to the bathroom, Dad said, “You know, when we were in the war we didn’t get much toilet paper—so you can only use one sheet.” He drove us around to our activities in the family station wagon. I was in Job’s Daughters, and Dad always took me and my friends to the meetings. Afterward he got us ice cream. I know all my girlfriends adored him. He was just that kind of person, very sociable, always the life of the party, although he could be firm when he needed to be. He expected much from himself, and he wanted all of us to do our best. We didn’t want to let him down. It meant a lot to us to have Dad proud of us.

Dad died far too young, on May 15, 1971. He was fifty-four.

It happened around four o’clock in the afternoon during the running of the Preakness Stakes. Dad always said that after watching so many of his buddies go so horribly, he wanted to go as quickly as he could when he died. He also joked that if he could choose any way to go, he’d want to go while on a golf course.

That’s exactly how he died. It was a Saturday and he was part of a golf league with Sears. He had just finished playing a round of golf. He won that day and went to post his scores. He was walking into the clubhouse to go have a drink with the guys, sat down, and was gone.

It was just one of those things—as quick as that. The hospital said it was an acute coronary occlusion, that he was very healthy, and that if he had been to see the doctor a few days before they wouldn’t have been able to find anything. My mother always thought it was a piece of shrapnel, still in his body, that moved into his heart, because he had so much of it still in him.

The golf course was just a few miles from our house. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon. We were all home. Plans were being made to go out that evening to a school function. My mom and my sister were upstairs in a room chatting. We heard sirens and didn’t think anything of it. A little bit later, the men whom Dad had been playing golf with came to the door to get my mom and take her to the hospital. We didn’t find out he was gone until she came back. We were devastated. I was only fifteen, a sophomore in high school. My youngest sister was just six.

Dad’s funeral went on for three days. He lay in wake for two days, one out by us in Lisle, and another in Joliet. He had so many people who loved him. The ceremony was packed. He ended up being cremated and the ashes went into an urn. Mom made a little display case on the mantle beside all his medals. She said he always wanted to be there looking after us.

Ironically my brother, Mark, was a lot like my dad and also passed away young, in his early forties, of esophageal cancer. He also went much too soon.

Mom passed away four years ago. She had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and died of a heart attack. She liked to have a good time all the way to the end. She had no regrets about her life.

So many of the men after the war seemed to struggle so much, but my dad seemed to survive so well—I’ve often wondered about that, about why. He loved to party. He loved his martinis just like all the rest of the guys. He came home each night and had a drink while Mom was cooking dinner. I guess the drinking just didn’t catch up with him.

My parents had a really strong social network. They could stay up all night with their bridge tournaments. They went out all the time, every weekend, whether business or just socializing. I know it helped Dad to have many friends.

Dad seemed to have a different outlook compared to many of the other returning veterans. Some of the men kept their experiences bottled up, but Dad certainly didn’t. He chose to talk. And he could talk about anything. It wasn’t just the war, he talked about a lot of things. He loved politics, and loved debating politics. He loved going out and meeting with people, and he never kept his feelings inside. You always knew what he was thinking.

And he had Frank Perconte around—one good, lifelong friend. They always had a good time when they were together.

What is one thing I would want people to know about my dad? That he was a very special, extraordinary person who cared deeply about other people. Everyone he came in contact with, he brought them into his circle of friendship and family. He wanted to enjoy each moment of life. He was a man of integrity, passion, and conviction who lived for his family, friends, and wife. I wish more people were like that.

 

 

 

He was a machine gunner at Brécourt Manor and awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. He cut a finger off a German he bayoneted near Carentan and took the man’s ring. He had a reputation of being very rough on prisoners, and perhaps the most widely recounted story of Private Joe Liebgott is when Captain Dick Winters ordered him to take eleven prisoners back to the battalion Command Post.
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Winters noticed how edgy Liebgott was and made him empty his rifle except for one bullet, saying, “If you drop a prisoner, the rest will jump you.”

But Winters liked Liebgott and considered him a good combat soldier and loyal friend. Liebgott dragged Ed Tipper to safety after Tipper was severely wounded in Carentan. In Bastogne, Winters made Liebgott his runner for a short while, giving him a chance to rest up from the extreme tension of the front line. Liebgott played a key role in the attack on Noville a short time later, and was one of just eleven men from the original forty from 1st Platoon still around after the Battle of the Bulge.