A Company of Heroes (20 page)

From there, the men went to Hitler’s Nest, and then to Austria by war’s end. Robert was discharged in November 1945, and offered a Purple Heart, but he turned it down. “How could I receive it when so many others were wounded so badly?” he told his family. Robert had numerous scars, the elbow wound, various shrapnel wounds, the bullet in his hip, and various nicks and cuts from ordnances that went off near him. He was awarded other medals, including two Bronze Stars for bravery.

As mentioned, Robert was one of the few who gained weight during the war. When he came home it was at night, and, not wanting to wake his family, he slipped into the home unannounced and hit the sheets up in his room. The next morning, his mother didn’t recognize him. A lot of soldiers were coming and going in those days, and she had been boarding many of them. When she learned it was her son, it was a grand celebration.

All during the war, Robert had saved his money and sent it home to his mother for the family to use. But she hadn’t spent a dime of it, so when he returned home all his money was waiting for him.

He opted to use the GI Bill and matriculated at Morehead State College on a sports scholarship, but his legs were shot, still numb from Bastogne days. So he transferred to Cedarville College in Ohio and received his bachelor’s in education. He played some baseball and basketball for Cedarville.

Cedarville is a Baptist school, but Robert wasn’t religious at all. A group of his buddies went there, which is the only reason he went. By rule, the school was “dry,” but Robert helped to rig up a pulley system to lift kegs of beer up to his third floor dorm room. During winter he put his beer on the room’s window ledge to keep it cold. He and his buddies ate a lot of pickled eggs, and Robert regaled his family with stories of going to chapel and expelling the smelly results of beer and eggs. Evidently the college put up with his high jinks, for Robert graduated.

He became a teacher and later a coach. Following the lead of friends, he moved from Ohio to California around 1950 where he met Lucille, a California girl and nurse. She and Robert met on a blind date and were married on Valentine’s Day, 1953. Friends helped Robert land a job at the California School for Boys, which led to a teaching job in San Miguel, then another job in the Paso Robles School District, where Robert taught for the last twenty-five years until he retired.

Two children were born to the family, a boy and a girl, Donald and Robin. For fun, the family took trips to Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore, Canada, and Easy Company reunions. They were a frugal family, and every day when they were travelling they stopped at little roadside shops and bought Vienna sausages, Ritz crackers, and red delicious apples, Robert’s favorite lunch.

They often visited Easy Company men. Bull Randleman’s family was part of regular life. Mike Ranney came down from San Francisco to visit several times. Salve Matheson kept in touch. George Luz Sr. and Robert wrote letters back and forth. Bill Guarnere came to visit. Leo Matz, who vowed that if he made it out of the war alive would become a priest, was in Robert’s squad and remained a good friend after the war. After he became a priest, he visited Robert several times, including right after Robert’s second heart surgery.

In 1965, when Donald was seven years old, the family attended an Easy Company reunion at Fort Campbell. Young Donald got the chance to shoot an M-60, a machine gun so large he had to lay on the ground to shoot it. Robin was five years older, but, despite her pleas, wasn’t allowed to shoot the gun.

Robert coached freshman and JV basketball, and was very proud of the cross country teams he coached. During the ten years he coached cross country, seven of his teams went to the California Interscholastic Federation Finals. He had two All-Americans run for him, brothers Eric and Ivan Huff. He was very proud of them.

People described Robert as a strict but fair teacher. He didn’t stand for any nonsense. He developed a strong reputation among other teachers, and soon all the rowdy kids—the ones the other teachers couldn’t control—were sent to him. He was known to get a kid’s attention by throwing the eraser against a chalkboard. Some of his classroom management techniques would never fly these days. In one instance he actually picked up a rowdy boy and threw him out the door. To this day, his former students say a firm hand was exactly what they needed. When Robert started teaching educationally handicapped students, he softened considerably, and didn’t do any eraser throwing then.

In the early days of his teaching career, he actually worked two jobs. He taught school during the week. On weekends he was the assistant manager at the Paso Robles Airport. He fueled planes when they came in and kept an eye on things. He didn’t earn Social Security with the school district in those days, but he did with the airport job, and he wanted that for his family.

Robert was also on the town’s volunteer fire department for about a decade. One night in 1963 a large hotel caught fire in town. Robert fought the fire all night, came home in the morning, took a shower, ate breakfast, and went to work at school for the day.

Lucille worked as a nurse, then when the kids came along she stayed home, (which is when Robert worked two jobs). When the kids grew older, Lucille went back to work. Robert picked up more coaching then, which he considered a second job. For a hobby, he occasionally played softball in town or went fishing, but mostly he worked and coached.

Robert seemed to adjust well to life after the war. Why? “His family helped keep him grounded, for sure,” Donald said. “I think the contact with his buddies was also very helpful—writing letters, going to reunions. He enjoyed quality activities where he could disconnect from the stress of life and his memories and get refreshed.”

Robin remembered him struggling with memories of the war. “During Christmas he could get strangely quiet for days at a time,” Robin said. “I asked him about it and finally he told me that Christmastime always brought back memories of Don Hoobler’s death. In spite of the memories, he chose to continue on. The war did affect him, yes, but he was always conscious to not withdraw from his responsibilities.”

Robert retired in 1981. Despite his robust career, he suffered from poor health through most of his life, mostly due to the war. Over the years he had two heart surgeries with nine bypasses. He lost a kidney, and had an aortic aneurism and gallbladder problems. He had stomach ulcers, and doctors eventually cut away half his stomach. But Robert remained determined. Once, immediately after a surgery, he went golfing and hit a hole in one on the first hole.

When he retired, he enjoyed playing golf with his wife. They also walked a lot together, and travelled to Paris and Holland. He liked to fish. He wrote a lot of letters to his fellow Easy Company men, and he enjoyed keeping in touch with them. He always signed his letters to his war buddies: “
Robert J. Rader, here. Be good. Be careful. Sleep warm.
” He loved watching sports on TV and even bought two TVs for the living room so he could watch two sporting events at the same time.

Toward the end, when he couldn’t physically keep up with things, life became more daunting. Robert needed to be on dialysis, and when that happened he moved from sitting in his recliner to lying on the couch. It was a different lifestyle toward the end. But even then, he didn’t retreat. He kept up with his letter writing and calling his friends, keeping his focus on staying in touch with people and staying as active as he could.

Robert was on dialysis one day a week for nearly two years. His one kidney was still working, but his heart was failing. Lucille and Robert could still travel then, as long as Robert watched his diet. Then his other kidney failed, and the dialysis was upped to three times a week. That was the beginning of the end. Robert started to lose weight and grew very thin, 123 pounds on his six-foot-two-inch frame. The last six months he had no body fat and was extremely frail. The heater in the house ran all the time. He kept watching sports and writing letters whenever he could. He had some better days than others. Somewhere during that time there was a frank discussion with family members, and Robert decided he didn’t want anything to be prolonged. “No more,” he said simply.

In the final weeks, Robert had no appetite at all. Lucille came up with innovative milkshakes, just trying to get some nutrition in him. Whatever he wanted to eat, if it sounded good to him, they let him eat it, even if the food had forbidden salt in it.

The last week, Lucille called the children, now grown, and said, “Your father didn’t get out of his pajamas today.” This was very unlike Robert, who always got dressed and got ready for each day. Within a few days he became septic and his blood pressure went down. The family admitted him to the hospital for comfort care.

On his final day, Lucille went home from the hospital early because she was so tired. Donald drove her home, so it was just daughter and father in the hospital room. Robin turned on a John Wayne movie,
Rio Bravo
, and Robert and she talked about movie trivia. He was concerned about his wife. “Is she okay?” he asked. It was very quiet. He remained alert and oriented until the very end. Then he closed his eyes and just went to sleep.

“The death was a relief in many senses,” Lucille said. “You hated to see him in the condition he was in at the end. He had fought the fight.”

Robert passed away on April 7, 1997. He’s buried in a cemetery close to the family on the top of a hill under shade trees with good drainage and a good view. His VA marker reads, “Beloved husband and father.” Every Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day a ceremony is held at the cemetery with flags and speeches. His flag is flown along the cemetery’s driveway.

A couple years ago, after Robert passed away, the citizens of Paso Robles, spearheaded by Frank Mecham, a former student of Dad’s and then mayor, had a bridge redone and renamed the
Robert J. Rader Memorial Bridge.
The family still chokes up about that. A dedication ceremony was held in his honor. “It was such a great honor,” Donald said. “It was a great weekend. I know Dad would have loved it. He would have had a blast.”

At the bridge dedication, there were former colleagues from the fire department in attendance, former students, civic dignitaries, and lots of friends and family. Nine of the E Company men came down: Buck Compton, Shifty Powers, Bill Maynard, Rod Bain, Ed Joint, Bill Wingett, Don Malarkey, Jack McGrath, and Earl McClung. Local merchants donated hotel rooms for the veterans, and they were treated royally.

How would the family want Robert Rader to be remembered?

Donald puts it simply: “We all loved my dad and miss him very much. He was an honorable man to the end.”

 

 

 

My father, Mike Ranney, first penned the words that led to the title of this book. He was a prolific letter writer and often wrote to his former company commander, Dick Winters, who saved everything he received. After Dad died in 1988 at age sixty-six from a heart attack, Dick sent us a bound folder of all the letters Dad had ever sent him. Dad wrote about visiting Easy Company men, including Burr Smith, just before Burr passed away in January 1983. That’s the letter where Dad wrote the now famous quote about not being a hero personally, but serving in a company of heroes.

Dad had a degree in journalism and was a strong writer. He wrote poems, stories, jokes, and even his own obituary before he passed. You’ll find portions of Dad’s letters elsewhere in this book, for instance in the essay about Salty Harris, a good friend of his. Dad also penned the Easy Company newsletter for years. He described the newsletters as “very sporadic, cranked out to keep the old flames of comradeship and friendship burning.” Then, five years before Dad died, he wrote a lengthy memoir called,
The First 61 Years: The Recollections of Myron N. (Mike) Ranney
. It was never published other than him photocopying it and distributing it to family members, but it contains much information about his life and years spent with Easy Company, whose members he greatly loved and admired. In another letter to Dick Winters in 1980, Dad wrote, “I really have two families—my own, linked by blood, and Easy Company, tied together by a great and uncommon experience.”

What follows is the story of my father’s life as I remember him, and, mostly, as revealed through his own writings.

Myron “Mike” Ranney was born at home in a blizzard in 1922 in a little town called Kensal, North Dakota, the only child of Lucy and Russell Ranney. The snowstorm made it impossible to travel to the nearest hospital, which was in another town. His dad was an itinerant newspaper editor and printer who moved around to various towns seeking work to feed his family during the 1920s and the Depression. His mom was a schoolteacher and summer waitress in the local hotel’s restaurant. You get a sense of Dad’s surroundings from his description:

In his earliest days, Dad lived in town but spent every moment he could at his grandparents’ farm. “There was an abundance of love for me there,” he wrote. “Grandpa was a stern old bastard to his children, but pretty much a softy as far as his grandchildren were concerned. Grandma was an absolute jewel of a woman—tall, regal, happy.”

His Uncle Herbert’s place up the road was appealing at first, but Uncle Herbert pulled a trick on him which scarred the young boy and for which Dad never forgave him. Dad asked what was in a gallon jug filled with amber liquid. It stood on stairs leading to the basement.