A Company of Heroes (6 page)

In a radio interview right around when the book
Band of Brothers
came out, Dad described his first jump. “I was scared at first, but once the chute opened, I remember saying what a grand and glorious feeling, a spectacular way of getting to the ground.”

Years after the war he wrote friends of his, describing his first jump. It says as much about his character as it does about the jump.

After his first jump, Dad said he always prayed the
Magnificat
anytime before he jumped or headed out on duty. Some of the text of the prayer is taken from Luke 1:46-55.

Being Irish was extremely important to Dad, and he talked about his heritage all the time. He never actually visited Ireland. On the boat ride over the Atlantic, he passed by Ireland but fell asleep for that part of the voyage. That was as close as he ever got to Ireland. He always kicked himself for that.

Dad described joining Easy Company in France. From a replacement depot, he came to camp about eight o’clock at night. It was cold and blustery. The replacements came off their truck, were told simply to find a cot, and were sent to a tent. When Dad went inside the tent he saw a group of the men playing cards. Although most were around twenty-one or twenty-two, to Dad they looked “tough, old, and grizzled,” and he said to himself, “I think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, O’Keefe.” He was assigned to 1st platoon, under Lieutenant Jack Foley and Sergeant Pat Christenson.

The book talks about how on his third night in Mourmelon, Dad went out on a night problem at midnight. As the men walked in the dark in single file, Dad lost sight of the man in front of him. He tensed, looking around. A quiet voice from behind him said, “You’re okay son. Just kneel down and look up and you can catch sight of them against the sky.” Dad did and caught sight of the troops.
⁹
Only later he learned that the voice had been from Major Dick Winters, then battalion staff, who had come back and was leading an all-night exercise for an outfit now full of replacements, which speaks highly of Winters.

Once in France the men were all hungry and went looking for something to eat. Dad reached into his pocket and pulled out all he had—thirty-five cents. It wouldn’t have bought much. Then he saw a church and decided to put his last money in the collection box for the poor. He believed that God would provide for him and the men. There was no immediate miraculous provision of food, but the men kept going and eventually found some food somewhere. Dad said he wasn’t seeking a miracle; what mattered was that he was trusting God and giving all he had.

Dad rode into Germany with the outfit where they saw little fighting. Mostly they were involved in occupation duties. In his interview with HBO, Dad mentioned that at the end of the war he saw a dead German soldier on the ground still holding a Catholic missal (prayer book). It struck him how alike they all were, young men just doing their jobs.

On May 8, the last day of the war in Europe, he and Harry Lager went to a storage space to look for eggs. When they kicked in the door, two Italian deserters were inside. They jumped up, and Dad and Lager pointed their rifles. There was a bottle of champagne on the table and one of the Italians said, “Pax,” and they drank a toast to peace.

On the way back to camp, Dad and Lager met a German officer with a bum leg who had been in the North Africa campaign. He invited them in for wine and they toasted the end of the war. “It was the best thing they could do,” Dad said, “to all say yes, that darn war was finally over.”

Dad returned home and went to college at the University of Ottawa in Canada for two years, then switched to Maryknoll Seminary in New York, still thinking about entering the priesthood. That’s when his younger brother, Mike, died. There are various family theories as to why Pat decided against the priesthood. Most likely it was because after Mike’s death Dad was the only remaining son in the family. Dad earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the State University of New York.

After university, he returned to his hometown of Northampton and did odd jobs, but felt stifled there, so he moved to California in the late 1950s where he worked as a civilian for Edwards Air Force Base, a type of work that became his life’s career. He was a position classification specialist, a type of personnel manager. In 1968, our family moved from California to Washington, DC, where Dad continued similar work spending most of his career at the Pentagon. Dad lived in Rockville, Maryland, from 1968 until his death.

He had many more interests besides his career and job. Mostly he just loved his family. Although working for the government, whenever people asked him who he worked for, he said, “I work for my wife and kids.”

Dad married our mom, Gloria Lopez, in 1961. He was thirty-five when he got married. She was twenty-seven. My mom is Mexican-American, and came from a family with eleven children. She grew up in La Junta, Colorado. Her oldest brother, Edward Lopez, had been killed in WWII when she was in elementary school.

When Dad met Mom, she was a junior high school English teacher at Edwards Air Force Base. They met at church. They were married quickly, less than a year after first meeting. They had two children, a boy, Kevin, and a daughter, me, Kris. Kevin grew up to be an Army military intelligence officer in Panama in the 1980s during the Noriega years. He was commissioned by Colin Powell. Later, Kevin worked as an ATF field agent in Miami, and later at the ATF headquarters in Washington, DC. I have a master’s degree in special education and work in mental health.

Dad was a wonderful father. As a very little girl I remember not wanting to go to sleep. He held me and walked around singing this old Irish lullaby, “
Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra
.” He could be a lot of fun, too. Sometimes my brother and I watched scary movies, and Dad hid behind the couch to scare us.

He always told these stupid jokes. His favorite was:

My dad cracked up whenever he said it, like we had never heard it before.

He was always doodling, a bit of a dreamer. He worked complex math problems just for fun. He played a banjo, mostly in our backyard. He collected oddly shaped rocks.

Dad attended all of our school events, athletic games, piano recitals, and swim meets. He coached basketball and soccer, his son’s best sport. Dad was a voracious reader and a regular at the Aspen Hill Library. He read several books each week, everything from historical fiction, to detective novels, to books about ancient languages, cave drawings, and early civilizations. He kept a bookcase at home in the bathroom downstairs—that’s how much he loved reading.

Dad’s faith involved more than going to church. He saw his spirituality as a guiding force throughout his life. It affected how he saw things and treated people. Several times I remember asking him for advice, and Dad instructed me to discern what God wanted me to do. I remember feeling a sense of purpose, that God had an overarching control of all things, of hope, that I would see God in Heaven after death, and of security, that God accepted and loved me. All of Dad’s children and his three grandchildren, Brian, Alexandra, and Ella, are very involved with church today.

Dad loved to meet people everywhere he went and learn little bits of different languages. He wasn’t a super-social type of person, but he could talk very easily to strangers. He credited that to his war experiences, how the travel overseas had expanded his world view. He was always trying to learn about other countries, people, groups, and customs. Before the subway was built in DC, he took buses to work, and met all kinds of people on his commute. He always tried to meet and befriend as many people as he could. He learned to say, “
Hello, how are you
,” in more than one hundred different languages.

He retired in 1986, just after he turned sixty, the same year I graduated from college. They were getting computerized at work, and he decided he didn’t want to go through the hassles of learning the new system. Dad made a great retiree. He was still young and active. Many days he met with other retired friends and veterans at a McDonald’s in town to swap war stories, politics, and current events. Dad always wore his Airborne cap and smoked a pipe.

After Ambrose’s book came out, and then the miniseries, he exploded as a local celebrity. There were news stories about him. He spoke to schools and community groups about his war experiences. Young fathers brought their kids to McDonald’s to get his autograph. I think it almost made some of the other guys jealous that he got all this attention.

Dad seldom talked about his war years with us, but whenever he watched the evening news and a story came on about another war, Dad shook his head sadly and said, “You know, WWII was supposed to be the war to end all wars.”

Dad absolutely loved going to the Easy Company reunions. He was closest with Clancy Lyall, Chris Christensen, Tony Garcia, Shifty Powers, Bill Guarnere, Babe Heffron, and Don Malarkey. I remember him talking about those men quite a bit. Dick Winters and Dad corresponded. Winters still sends bits of news to my mom.

In Dad’s later years, he got arthritis in his feet and that slowed him down a lot. But he still loved to walk down by Rock Creek, and found it very peaceful there. He always mentioned different animals he saw down by the creek.

In the spring of 2002, Dad got very sick and they had a hard time diagnosing him. He had a lot of tests done, including one at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, to figure out if he had picked up some sort of strange infection during the war. But he hadn’t. Finally they diagnosed him with two types of cancer, bladder cancer and a type of lymphoma. Dad had been a cigarette smoker his whole life. He had switched from cigarettes to pipes a few years before the diagnosis.

In spite of the diagnosis, doctors didn’t know how to treat him. In August 2002, I was visiting, and Dad was really down. His weight had dropped considerably and he was barely moving off the couch. All he ate was vanilla ice cream, because he said nothing else tasted good. Doctors were suggesting various plans for treatment, but Dad wasn’t being cooperative at all. “It’s my time to go,” he kept saying. “I survived the war, but this is my time to die.”

During that visit, he received an invitation in the mail to go to the Emmys in California with all his Easy Company friends. He perked up when he saw that. “You know,” he said, “I really want to go to that.”

It sounded great, but I wanted to make sure. “You think you’re well enough to fly cross-country?” I asked.

“I’m going to tell the doctors that they need to get started on me, and that I need to be well enough to go,” he said.

Dad met with his oncologist immediately. “Do whatever you need to do,” he said. “Start the chemo.”

About six weeks later, in September, we went to the Emmys. My mom had her fiftieth high school reunion in Colorado the same weekend, so she asked me if I could go with Dad. He was so excited. He didn’t seem as sick as he really was. He was trying to eat regular food again, and he could often eat a little bit.

HBO treated us royally. We flew first class and were put up in a great hotel. After the Emmys, everyone went to the restauant Spago for a celebration. Dad was in a wheelchair then, and Tom Hanks was at the restaurant, too. Dad couldn’t get in the line where everybody was talking to Tom, but Tom came over to Dad and bent down to his level. They had a good talk.

When we came home, Dad finished his course of chemo and radiation, but grew sicker. He was in and out of the hospital during the next few months. We spent a very enjoyable Christmas together where all the family was together one last time. By the first week of February 2003 his body grew very weak.

We got the call on a Wednesday that Dad had grown very sick. We travelled to be with him, and my brother flew in from Florida. My mother and brother and I spent the day with him in the hospital. It was snowing heavily, and we went home that night. I’ve heard this from several wives of paratroopers before, that sometimes their husbands will jump out of bed in the middle of the night, like they’re dreaming of parachuting again. Dad was extremely weak, but the next morning when we went back to the hospital, a nurse told us that Dad had jumped out of bed during the night. I like to think he was dreaming of one last jump.

On his last day alive, he was in and out, not talking, just resting. As I sat by his bed, I held his hand and prayed. I had this strange spiritual experience; I can’t quite explain it. I saw somebody come into the room—I could just barely see movement in the air—and it was like some sort of spirit moved Dad’s body up to a standing position. I think it was an angel coming to get Dad. I couldn’t actually see anybody, but I could see motion in the room—I don’t know how else to describe it other than that.

When Dad died, we were all in the room with him holding his hands. Again I felt this strange presence, it’s hard to describe, but it was like I touched Heaven when I was holding his hands. I was feeling Heaven through him.

Dad didn’t fear dying. He felt like he had lived a long life and done what he wanted to do. He felt that death was simply going home to be with God.

He passed away on Saturday, February 8, 2003. At his funeral we had two photo displays of him, one with his family, the other with his war buddies. We played the
Band of Brothers
CD in the lobby for the wake. People told us how beautiful it all was.