A Company of Heroes (27 page)

Babe Heffron tells about how in one incident in Holland, my father went out behind enemy lines on reconnaissance with Corporal James Campbell, and the next thing you know here comes my father running through this mushroom cloud with his body riddled with shrapnel and his uniform smoking. Babe ran up and said, “Where’s Campbell?” My father said, “He’s gone.” Babe said, “What do you mean, he’s gone—let’s go get him.” My father said, “No, you don’t understand. He’s
gone
.” Campbell had taken a direct hit from an 88.

Dad was wounded four times: in Normandy, Holland, and twice at Bastogne. On January 2, 1945, Dad was hit by a piece of shrapnel from a bomb during a German air raid. He was sent to an aid station and came back to the line the same day, his arm in a sling. He didn’t want to let down his buddies.

In Bastogne he got pretty bad trench foot but didn’t want to get evacuated for it. He had already received three Purple Hearts, and he kind of shook it off. Years later when I joined the service, he gave me some advice, “Find out who the good NCOs are and listen to them. And make sure you always wear dry socks.”

Just to set the record straight: In Bastogne, when he lost his leg in the midst of all that intense shelling, he was outside his foxhole, yes, but there was a good reason he wasn’t in his foxhole yet. As a squad leader, he was directing his men to get in their foxholes first. In the movie, it showed him out there just walking around. But that’s not the way it was.

In the series, it shows Dad asking Malarkey for a cigarette after being hit. “Geez,” Dad says, “what’s a guy have to do to get killed around here?” Apparently, that line happened word for word. Neither Dad nor Bill Guarnere (who was also seriously wounded while pulling my dad back to a foxhole) were screaming or yelling even though they were both hurt badly. They remained conscious and calm.

After the shelling, they took Dad to an aid station in Bastogne. He had already lost a lot of his leg from the shelling, so they cut off the remainder below the knee. From there, they sent him to England. By the time he got there, gangrene had set in, so they amputated again, this time above the knee. He was a great athlete before he went into the army, a boxer. When he lost his leg, all that was over.

He was in pretty bad shape. My mother says he was 175-180 pounds when he went into the service, and when he came back to the States he was about 110. He almost died. It wasn’t just the leg. He had shrapnel in his body until the day he died. I remember seeing scars all over his back, his good leg, his hands. Because of his injuries he also had nerve damage and limited use of his right hand, which bothered him that he couldn’t grip anything properly. So it wasn’t just his leg. He was just messed up. At least he survived.

From England, they sent him to the hospitals in Atlantic City where he paired up with Guarnere for about a year, both recuperating. They flew around in their wheelchairs, raising hell all over the boardwalks and bars. That’s where he met my mother in fact—Atlantic City.

I expect that if he was alive today, things would be much different. Just like Guarnere and Buck Compton and all the ones who are alive to explain their stories, his autobiography would have made one hell of a book.

Mom and Dad were married in 1946. They moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, where my father had lived with his brother, a state policeman, just before Dad went into the army. After the army, they returned and settled a block down the street from my uncle.

In those days, it was harder for a guy with one leg to get around and to find work. Dad drew some disability because of his leg, but it wasn’t enough to take care of the family. He had always wanted to make a career out of the military, but that wasn’t possible anymore. Even so, he always worked full-time. When he first got out, he worked for a textile plant, then in the steel mills for Bethlehem Steel. He sharpened bits, so he was able to sit somewhere with a sharpening machine. He worked there for more than twenty years until he retired. He was in the union and retired when he was sixty, then worked part-time at miscellaneous things to keep busy.

My parents had four children. My sister, Anita, is the oldest, then Pete and me, then our youngest brother Jonathan, whose birth, I think, was the final straw for my father in many ways. He had been through so much hardship in his life.

My youngest brother was classified as mentally handicapped, but it was more than that. He couldn’t walk, talk, feed himself, go to the bathroom. I’m drawing a blank on the proper terminology, but it was basically a vegetative state. There was nothing to do for my little brother long-term, so he had to be put into a home about an hour away when he was three years old.

I know it hit both my parents really hard. I was only six when my parents divorced in 1963, so I don’t remember much. After the divorce, my mother and us kids moved from Reading to Philadelphia and lived with our grandparents for a while. Then my mother remarried and we lived in Philadelphia until we all grew up and went our separate ways.

Everybody knew Dad as this gruff, tough guy. He had a big heart but it was covered in this layer of ice so much of the time. If you lived with him long enough, you could get beyond that, but it was hard to see beyond his exterior. My stepmother said, “I never met a more Christian man than your father.” He was a pretty religious guy and went to church every Sunday. He was even in a choir when he was young. But it was much more than that. My stepmother was talking about the actions he took because of his faith. That’s what she meant.

Dad went to see my little brother every day. After Dad retired, he was up there all the time, feeding him, taking care of him, a couple hours a day, every day—that was Dad’s life. “Steven,” he used to say to me, “I just want to live long enough to bury Jonathan, and then I’ll be happy.”

Jonathan basically just expired. He didn’t have much of a stomach left by the end. There wasn’t anything anybody could do for him. He wasn’t supposed to live much longer than childhood, but he was tough. He died at age thirty-two, three times as long as anyone thought he would live. There must have been a lot of the Toye blood in him. My mother, Eleanor, was always very strong as well.

Sure as hell, a year and a half after my brother died, Dad died, too.

Dad was a hell of a patriot. One time while growing up, it would have been the Vietnam era, 1971 or 1972, I was a young punk, didn’t know what was going on, and said something that was negative about the war. Dad went off like a Roman candle. “You know,” he barked, “if the damn president called me today I’d go over and fight.” Honest to God, he would have. That’s the type of guy he was. It wasn’t just talk with Dad.

He never complained. Never about his treatment. Never about the VA. Never about the Army. Never about his life before or after the war. That’s not the type of guy he was. He was always grateful for what he had.

They portrayed him in the series as a quiet, almost morose kind of guy, but growing up, I saw another side of him. He wasn’t a backslapper, but he had a pretty good sense of humor. Babe and Malarkey both said that when the bullets started flying, my dad sang Irish songs.

After my parents divorced, Dad and I met about once a month, then for two weeks vacation each year. He always took us out fishing and hunting, those were some of my best times with him. He never hunted himself. He said, “I had enough of that to last a lifetime.” But he taught us how.

Some hilarious stories happened with him. It was my first time pheasant hunting, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. A pheasant ran across the ground. I had my shotgun on it. All of a sudden, right in my sights, is my father. He yelled and froze. I got my rifle off him in a hurry and he said, “Whoa, I tried to put my good leg in my pocket—I thought you were going to shoot it off.”

My brother did some crazy stuff. Another time while pheasant hunting, one flew up and my brother shot over our heads to get it. My dad dove in the ditch. “Goddamn it, Peter, what’s the matter with you,” he yelled.

One time while out fishing, we hit Dad in the head with an oar and put a big gash in him. It wasn’t on purpose. He just gave us this look, his glasses all mangled, and we all wanted to jump out of the boat and swim for home.

Once at the shooting range, my brother handed my dad his rifle, and he said, as he always did: “No, no, I don’t want to shoot anymore. I had enough of that during the goddamn war.” My brother kept bugging him, so finally dad took the rifle and shot it. It had a scope on it, and it had been a while since dad had fired anything. He put the scope right to his face and came up with a bloody circle around his eye. He just swore a lot.

There was a bit of the “Irish virus” in the family, I guess, and Dad liked to tip back a few. When he wasn’t drinking, he was really a great guy, but, yes, the drinking was always there. Unfortunately, that generation didn’t go look for help. That was their life out there in the coal regions. They’d work their arses off all week long for a dollar a day, then go down to the bar to drink, and all the women would need to come to the bar and get their men out of there before they peed it all away drinking. That was the upbringing where Dad came from. The damn war didn’t help, of course. I can remember as a kid watching TV with my dad and he’s asleep in the chair, moaning with nightmares. He never would admit the nightmares with his hardcore demeanor, but that’s what it had to be. To us, Dad was always a pillar of strength. But you never know what’s in somebody’s heart and mind deep down. I know Dad carried a lot of the horrors of war with him.

It’s not like he ever talked about his feelings. One time he talked to Malarkey about how bad he felt about dropping out of school in the seventh grade, about how he wished he had made it all the way through high school. That’s the only time we ever heard about how he felt deep down.

For years I was my dad’s drinking buddy, but then I quit drinking in 1986. Before that, Pete was out west and I was here with my family and so I stayed around and drank with Dad, but it was getting to me, too. I would have lost my wife and family over it, so I stopped.

When I quit, I guess Dad started thinking about it. The alcohol had caused him a number of problems over the years, the divorce, basically losing his family, the anger. His first reaction when I told him was, “Baaah, what! Are you weak?” But as time went along, he told my wife (he never told me directly), “You know, I’m really proud of Steve.” He said he was too old to quit drinking. But I’m sure he thought about it.

As you get older, you reflect. Once, in his later years, Dad said he didn’t feel like he had done much with his life. I said, “Dad—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—what you did over there in a year, ninety-nine percent of the population can’t say they did anything close to it, before, during, or after. He looked at me like, “Really?”

I mean, you think of it: take just any one of those stories about Dad. Those men helped save the world. I mean, I served in the military, too, but luckily it wasn’t in a time of war. What I went through is miniscule compared to what Dad and those vets went through.

Dad remarried in the late 1960s. His new wife had four children from a previous marriage, the two older ones were moved out by then, but there was a younger boy and girl. Dad was good to them and used to umpire the boy’s games.

In his later years, Dad did all kinds of things. He took classes up at community college—painting, cooking. Nobody would know that, but he was a great cook. He used to cook up in the coal regions, that was part of his job then, and it stuck with him. As adults, he cooked up steak and lobster for me, my wife Bonnie, and our kids. I tell you, that was the best I ever had.

For hobbies, Dad loved working out with weights. And he loved to walk—if you can believe it. There was a track in Reading close to the house, and Dad went down there a lot. Even toward the end, he walked a mile a day. He watched a lot of sports. Any game we had, he’d come out and watch. He fished and took us hunting in the mountains. In his later years, he drove from state to state to see his grandkids play sports.

Near the end of Dad’s life I was living out in Michigan. He wasn’t himself at all, edgy, saying his stomach hurt. He actually cut out drinking caffeinated coffee, which wasn’t like him, as he always had a stomach of iron. He went in for a hernia operation and found that he was just riddled with cancer—pancreatic, which is one of the worst ones, basically a death sentence.

Unfortunately I was in a horrible job at the time—it’s all kind of a blur—and Dad’s passing happened so quickly. My stepfather had just died, and we were back staying in New Jersey, getting ready to go to his funeral. Next thing we knew we got a call from my sister saying Dad had passed. So we went to my stepfather’s funeral and the next day we went to my father’s. It was a really bad time of life. And his death happened so damn quick. That’s one of the things that’s always bothered me. I never had the chance to say good-bye. My brother said I was probably better off that way. He had seen him in the last few weeks, and Dad wasn’t in the right frame of mind then. He was about ninety-five pounds. You could tell it was his last days.

Major Winters came to Dad’s funeral and did the eulogy, which was very classy of him. Winters lived in Hershey, Pennsylvania, about an hour away from Dad, and they did a variety of things together over the years. Dad was grand marshal in a parade once, which he really didn’t like doing, although it was good for him. The accolades he received, although he couldn’t stand them, they made him feel like his life was worth it. I’m glad the book came out when he was still alive. That was a good tribute to the men. I just wish he was alive for the miniseries.

What’s the one thing I’d want people to remember about Joe Toye?

He was a loyal, tough, patriotic, Christian man. He was old-school and grew up the hard way. He was flawed as a father and flawed as a husband, yes, but he did the best he could considering the cards he was dealt. He lost much in his life but never gave up. I have a lot of respect for him, and I think that anybody who knew him does, too.