A Company of Heroes (3 page)

In a letter to my mother dated December 18, 1967, from the Department of the Army, it describes how my dad died. He was on active duty with the 8th Supply and Transport Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, in West Germany. A week before his death he had attended a commemorative weekend in Bastogne, Belgium, and returned from the event feeling unwell. He was taken to the emergency room and diagnosed with a perforated ulcer. Emergency surgery was performed the next day. Complications set in, his kidneys failed, and he died December 17.

I don’t doubt that’s all true. But I will say that what’s in that letter is mostly polite talk. My dad drank himself to death. That’s how it really happened.

My dad drank every day. After work he went to the NCO club until it closed at two in the morning. He came back home bringing a couple bottles of Seagram’s 7 with him, which was his favorite. My mom and he were drinking buddies, and most times they drank until five in the morning. My dad would sleep an hour, shave, shower, get on his uniform, go to work, and perform duties like it was nothing. That’s how it went pretty much every weekday for my dad. He’d sleep more on the weekends, but even then, as soon as he got up and ate something, it was back to the drinking again. I’ve never seen a man drink as much as my father. He could drink enormous quantities of alcohol. At least he was a happy drunk: that was about the only good thing about his addiction.

There were other problems in the marriage. Mom and Dad split up a couple years before he died. Dad liked to gamble as well as drink. My mom put up with that for eleven years. Mom handled the money and gave him a lot of leeway in how much money he used for gambling. He used to gamble away the rent money until Mom put a stop to that.

We were stationed at Fort Lee for a time where he got a job as a parachute-rigger instructor. Then he had a ministroke, so they put him on temporary retirement. But dad loved the Army and worked to get his strength back. Finally he was strong enough, so they let him go back in. He had eighteen months to go before he retired. They stationed him in Germany in June, 1967. He was dead by December of that year. He was forty-four years old when he died.

My mom and dad always loved each other, I don’t doubt that. When my dad died, it just destroyed my mom. She started drinking more and eventually became a severe alcoholic herself. Toward the end she would sometimes drink twenty-three out of twenty-four hours in a day. She drank herself into dementia. She grew very sick at the end; she was in the hospital on full life support. I don’t think she ever got over the death of my dad. She died in 1996.

I went through a lot of the same problems as my dad. I got in trouble a lot as a kid. As a teenager I liked to drink. I figured the Army was the only way I could get straightened out, so I joined the service. I was mostly stationed at Fort Lewis. I put in my four years but didn’t want to enlist again. I liked the Seattle/Tacoma area in Washington State a lot and settled down there after the service. I got married and had a son, then got divorced. For a while I had custody of my son. He lives across the country now, but we’re still close. Washington State treated me good and is my home now. Good people. Good fishing. I’m happy here. Washington’s where I love to be.

I know my dad certainly had his share of problems, but nobody is perfect. I want people to remember my father this way: He was a true American paratrooper who put his life on the line for this country and thousands of other people in this world. He fought for people he didn’t even know. I’m proud of him, so proud. That’s how I want people to remember Albert Blithe.

 

 

 

When I was a kid and asked Dad about his combat experiences, I always asked in general terms—“Did you kill any Germans?”—that type of thing, and my dad’s answers were equally vague—“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.” After
Band of Brothers
came out, we learned to ask more specific questions, and in turn, Dad gave us more specific answers. But even then there was a lot that remained unsaid. I wish that thirty years ago we had known how to ask questions better. Maybe we all wish that with our parents.

You first see a glimpse of my dad, Tony Garcia (as portrayed by actor Douglas Spain), toward the end of episode 3 of the
Band of Brothers
, the one titled “
Carentan
.” Then in episode 4, titled “
Replacements
,” when the original men of Easy are back from Normandy, three very young-looking privates—Les Hashey, James Miller, and my dad—are sitting at a table in the Blue Boar Inn in England. The now battle-hardened Bill Guarnere sits down with them, tells them an off-color joke about getting inside a plane named Doris, then warns them to listen closely to whatever their squad leader, Bull Randleman, tells them. Later, while on the ground outside the plane just before the jump for Operation Market-Garden, my dad’s character is seen nervously trying to get his rifle and gear in order, and Bull gives him some last minute advice about jumping, which sets Dad’s mind at ease.

We learned a lot about our dad’s combat experiences only after the miniseries came out. Dad talked as we watched TV together. It was the most we had ever heard from him about it. As a rule, Dad kept the war to himself. I believe he didn’t want to burden anyone else with it. He had seen such awful things—the shellings, the concentration camp, his buddies getting killed and wounded. But even though he didn’t say much, you could tell that the war had affected him. Every so often Mom would say, “Your dad had a nightmare again.” His dreams would usually be about fighting in combat or jumping out of a plane. On several occasions the dreams must have been intense. When I came over to visit, he might have a new scratch or cut, or maybe a bruise on his forehead. He’d fallen out of bed and hit his head on the nightstand during a nightmare, thinking he was fighting or jumping from a plane.

I saw evidence of these dreams firsthand a few times. In 2000, Dad, my sister Kelly, and I went to an Easy Company reunion in New Orleans where we all shared a hotel room. (Mom didn’t travel by plane anymore because she was disabled with multiple sclerosis.) We could hear Dad in the night mumbling and thrashing around. I called out to him: “Relax. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine.” He went back to sleep, and we didn’t mention it the next morning. We also saw this while on the trip to France for the premier of
Band of Brothers.
The vivid memories surfaced in his dreams, making for troubled sleep. I can imagine that any kind of event relating to Easy Company or the war brought back the memories and dreams.

There were things that he readily shared, though, from his wartime experiences. Once after watching a war movie as a kid, I remember asking him how a bazooka destroyed a tank. He drew me a detailed diagram and explained how the bazooka shell worked. He was happy to share that kind of information.

What was my dad really like? Some details are lost forever, and we’ll never know, but this is what we do know:

Anthony Garcia was born in 1924, in Inez, Texas. The timing of his birth came as a surprise. His family lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but my grandmother was visiting relatives in Texas when she gave birth to him prematurely. When the baby was strong enough to travel, they rejoined the rest of the family in Wyoming.

Dad’s parents were full-blooded Mexicans who had moved to the United States in search of a better life. My grandmother, Isabel, was the daughter of a sharecropper, and came to the states first. My grandfather, José, came later. They met and married and moved about the country following work—everything from coal mining in Appalachia to handling freight for the Union Pacific Railroad, where José eventually gained permanent employment. My dad was the fourth child in the family. All of José and Isabel’s seven children were born in the United States. They spoke Spanish in the house and picked up English as time went on. Dad spoke it fluently by the time I knew him. He didn’t have any accent at all.

My dad’s family wasn’t wealthy by any means. My grandfather decided to build the family a house. By hand, he and the boys dug the basement. For a while they actually lived in the hole in the ground. The family joke is that dad was born in a foxhole. Then, gradually, they built the rest of the house, much of it with salvage wood that my grandfather brought home from work. That house still stands today.

My dad learned early how to be self-reliant. He and his brothers and sisters picked cotton, tended turkeys, and helped out with the calves, which he and his siblings sometimes saddled for fun and rode around the farm. His sister remembers him as a laid-back kid, an average student, someone who got along with all of his siblings and was especially considerate to the younger children. Dad had a large paper route. Come rain, shine, or Cheyenne snow, the papers always got delivered on time.

When the war began, Dad’s older brother Ben had already enlisted and survived the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. That clinched Dad’s decision to join up, so he dropped out of high school in 1943 to enlist.

My dad and a buddy first tried to enlist in the Marines. At the recruiter’s office, they were told, “Sorry, we’re all full up. Why don’t you try the Army?” So they did. His first assignment was with a searchlight battalion.

He saw posters advertising the Airborne and had his mind set on joining it, but he failed the physical twice because his heart rate was irregular. Someone gave him a couple of pills to help steady his heart rate. Not knowing any better, he took more pills than necessary, which made his heart race during the exam. The doctor commented, “I guess they worked you guys really hard in physical training today,” to which my dad, not missing a beat, said, “They sure did!” And with that, he passed the exam and got into the Airborne.

Even though the military was segregated at the time, I don’t recall Dad ever talking about incidents of prejudice because he was Mexican-American. I think he always fit in well with the rest of the guys.

Dad wasn’t one of the original Toccoa men. He trained stateside then was shipped to England and arrived just before the D-day invasion. They kept the newer replacements out of that jump, holding them back to replenish the ranks when the invasion forces returned. He remembered being on the bus coming into the camp area and seeing the other guys gearing up for the invasion. It was quite a way to join Easy Company, he said.

Market-Garden was his first combat jump. He jumped, battled all through Holland with the other men of Easy, and continued on with the company through the end of the war.

In the “Crossroads” episode, the miniseries shows a scene where Easy was about to attack a German machine-gun nest at night. My dad was shown firing a rifle but was actually on the mortar squad with Skip Muck and Alex Penkala. Muck and Penkala were setting up the mortar tube, and the mortar squad was so close to the enemy that it looked like the mortar tube was practically straight up and down. My dad remembered thinking, “If there’s any wind, that shell’s gonna come right back down on our heads.” Fortunately, there wasn’t, it didn’t, and the shell took out the German machine-gun nest.

The next morning they were off the top of the dike and had taken cover at the base of it. Dick Winters decided that they should attack the Germans and had the men fix bayonets. A close-up is shown of my dad as he’s putting the bayonet on the end of his rifle. When my dad saw the scene, he said he remembered the exact moment back in 1944, and recalled that at that moment in his past he had thought, “This kind of stuff only happens in the movies.” How ironic.

In a later episode, during the mission to cross a river and capture German prisoners, the miniseries shows him and some other men falling into the river near Haguenau. Dad told me he was actually in the first boat going across, and they got across okay. But after they got to the other side, one of the following boats capsized: the one with the group’s lieutenant. Times like these, my dad’s sense of humor tended to show up, although it wasn’t the best timing. You can picture it: a cold, dimly lit night, and my dad’s on the far bank of the river with the other guys from his boat. The lieutenant comes up the bank, soaking wet, and my dad, being a smart-ass, whispers, “Hey lieutenant, you fall in the water?” The comment probably didn’t get a very good reception. Another detail he remembered about that mission was that he helped clear out some buildings. He had three grenades with him but dropped one, losing it in the mud, gave one to another guy, and tossed the last one into a cellar. It was also on this mission to get prisoners that he managed to collect a couple of souvenirs. After the patrol brought the German prisoners back to their quarters, my dad took out his bayonet and approached one of the prisoners in order to cut off some German patches. My dad remembered how the German’s eyes “went wide when he saw me walking towards him with me holding that knife.”

My dad apparently could make situations a little lighter without intending to. Once, after the major fighting of the Battle of the Bulge had taken place and Easy was moving away from Bastogne, the men were in the woods getting shelled. His buddy Les Hashey got hit by a tree splinter while in his foxhole. Hashey yelled out, “Hey Tony, I’m hit. I need help.” Dad asked, “How do you know?” Hashey yelled back, “My shoulder’s bleeding.” My dad felt pretty silly for asking the question. He and Hashey were the closest of friends, but my dad didn’t take too much to Hashey’s constant volunteering for patrols. I remember him telling us about one time Hashey was trying to get my dad to go along with him on a patrol, and my dad jokingly telling him, “You’re crazy. Get away from me.”

In the wintery cold of Bastogne, Dad was jumping across a stream while carrying an ammo bag containing six rounds of mortar ammunition. He misjudged the distance, broke the ice, fell into the stream, and got soaked. By the time the men reached the next town, his clothing had frozen, causing a crackling sound as he walked. There were no clean or dry clothes to change into, and the incident kept him out of duty that night because the men didn’t want to risk the noise. That was the only good thing about walking around in ice-covered clothes all day, he said.