Easy Company Soldier (27 page)

I landed a job at the Spudnut Doughnut Shop on Eleventh Street, across from the frat. I'd be at work at 5:30 a.m., do my job, head off for school, do my homework in the evening, and hit the sleeping porch at midnight. The nightmares started to fade. Not go away altogether. Just fade.

At the same time, doubts about whether I was worthy of Irene Moor started to tease me. I'd gone to Portland to meet her parents. She lived in a pretty classy neighborhood. Her father was an optician. Country-club types. And I was Don Malarkey, a guy who'd worked the salmon nets, spent a few years in foxholes, and now worked at a Spudnut Doughnut. I'm not sure her parents found me inspiring.

But one thing I knew and they knew: I loved their daughter. And one of the biggest reasons was because she was different from anybody else when it came to my war stuff. She listened. She understood. When all the sudden I'd be in tears over some stupid thing, she wouldn't think I was some sort of wimp. I told her stuff about the war, stuff that I'd
never told anyone in the fraternity. During the war, she'd been to a lot of bases, being part of social events to keep up morale. She understood soldiers. And though she didn't understand war, she always gave me the benefit of the doubt, figuring that I'd seen stuff that was hard letting go of, even if I wanted to.

In the late spring, at midnight, following sorority closing hours, a choral group from the Chi Psi fraternity was serenading the Gamma Phis. When members appeared at the second-floor balcony, the group requested to see Miss Irene Moor. She was informed that she had been chosen “Moonlight Girl of Chi Psi Fraternity.” But their voices wouldn't do much to win her over. She was mine. That was my Sigma Nu pin on her, shining in the moonlight, and when they realized it, their notes took a decided shift to the flat side.

I spent Easter weekend with her and her parents in Portland. I had brought her an Easter basket and positioned in a large decorative egg was an engagement ring.

“One thing you should know,” I said. “You marry me, you marry me forever. No divorcing. I'm Catholic.”

She had been raised Methodist. “But what if you don't love me any longer?” she asked.

“You won't have to worry about me never loving you any longer,” I said.

We walked on. “One other thing,” I said.

“Yes?”

“We should have a son and call him Michael.”

“Why Michael?”

“I just like the sound of it:
Michael Malarkey.
Like the way it rolls off the tongue. Good Irish name.”

“Michael Malarkey,” she said. “You're right. Fine by me.”

We were married June 19, 1948, the same day the rest of
my class was going through the graduation ceremony at the University of Oregon. I had earned my degree and could have been there, too, but I had a more important ceremony to attend.

We did have a son named Michael, who wound up serving with the 3rd Armored Division in Germany during the early seventies. And three wonderful daughters. I ran for county commissioner of Clatsop County, my old home county, and won. I sold cars at Lovell Auto in Astoria for years; once had a guy come up to me and shake my hand. It was Ben Gronnell.

“Son, I've been waiting fifteen years to say thank you to you,” he said. “When you were just a little kid, you helped save my farm in the Tillamook Burn.” I was, to say the least, surprised. He had tears in his eyes.

You start looking back over your life and realize that, for better or worse, the past never really goes away. It's with us always. Sometimes, like in the case of Ben Gronnell, it comes back to remind us maybe we're not so bad after all. And sometimes it comes back to haunt us; once, I went to my folks to get those German stamp books that I'd sent home. They didn't have them. Along with all the letters I'd sent home, they'd thrown them out when they moved from the place on Cow Creek. Just like that.

Politics, I decided, wasn't for me. Neither was selling cars. We moved to Portland. I got into commercial real estate. Our little tykes became teenagers. Irene was a great mom. What an Irish slob I was; four children and I never changed a diaper. Sometimes, we'd head back over the Coast Range for vacations at the beach. Or camped along the Nehalem
River, where my kids picked blackberries from the same bushes I'd once picked from as a kid. Life was good. But just when I thought I had put everything behind me and thought I was home free, I'd turn and see the wave building over my shoulder.

I don't know how Irene took it, my waking up in the middle of the night with the nightmares. Going into my midwinter funks, thinking of guys who'd be missing yet another Christmas with their families. December. January. Hate those months. Cold and dark. I still shiver because of the Bulge. One more day there and I honestly think I would have gotten hypothermia. Like a lot of other guys in Easy Company, I tried to drink away the memories.

Years passed. One December, in the 1970s, I'd been drinking at the Legion Club. I wasn't roaring drunk, but feeling good, so I thought I'd call Joe Toye in Pennsylvania. I called information and said I wanted the number for “Joseph J. Toye, Pittston, Pennsylvania.” She said no such person was listed. So I said, “Is there anyone named Toye in Pennsylvania who owes your telephone company money?” She did some checking, then said, yes, he lives in West Reading, not Pittston. I said, “Would you ring him? That's him.” It was. When I called, he'd just stumbled in from the bar. He was juiced and I was half-juiced. It was funny. But as time rolled on, it got so it wasn't funny anymore.

A few years later, living in Portland, I'd swing by some bar after work for a drink. There wasn't a glass of Scotch I brought to my lips that I wasn't back in Bastogne, where we were surrounded for eight straight days. Every time. One night, I was about sixty years old, I don't know what came over me. It was December. My job felt like a dead end. I was depressed. Before I knew it, I'd left a bar out on the east side
and was headed east on Highway 26, toward Mount Hood. I knew of a curve flanked by a thousand-foot canyon. That was my target.

The car was swerving. It was snowing. Though not totally juiced, I had no business driving. As I climbed higher into the mountains, snow started lining the road, piled up by the plows. In my fogged-up mind, like the time I was standing around the campfire in Jack's Woods with that pistol in my hand, I'd somehow concocted this plan to end it all, just fly off a cliff and say to hell with it. Bury myself in that snowy canyon just like Skip had been buried in that snowy foxhole.

But when I reached the top of the pass, the image of Irene came into my mind. I pulled over to the side of the road and said to myself,
No. Not back in Bastogne. Not now. Not ever. This Malarkey doesn't quit.

At twenty-one, jumping out of airplanes and running Mount Currahee, you never stop to think you'll someday be eighty-six. But now I am. Unlike the time at Bastogne, where every minute seemed to take an hour, life now passes fast. One day you're taking on Hitler's army, the next day calling to cancel the newspaper because the kid can't get the blasted thing on the porch. One day you're jumping out of an airplane at more than one hundred miles per hour, the next day shuffling into the Cue Ball for three-cushion billiards every Thursday. Our battles change. But such is life. And despite the disappointments and pain, I wouldn't trade mine for anything.

My father died in 1955 of leukemia, my mother ten years
later of internal hemorrhaging. By then, I'd long gotten over their throwing out my stamp albums from Germany and the letters I'd sent home, and most of the other hurt as well.

Bernice Franetovich went on to become the singer she hoped to be. At age twenty-nine, she married a big-band musician and they had a great life together. Travel, skiing, bicycling across the country, the works. I got a letter from her a few years ago; her husband had passed away. She told me she was proud of how I'd served our country.

I did finally meet Faye Tanner, though, I'm ashamed to say, it wasn't me coming to see her like it should have been, but she coming to see me. She fell in love with a good man, a man who never insisted that she forget about Skip Muck. They were married in 1950. She kept Skip's wings, his eagle patch, the letters I sent her. When Stephen Ambrose's
Band of Brothers
and the HBO television series came out, she wound up being interviewed. A friend of mine saw her name in the paper and encouraged me to get in touch with her. It was hard—I'd let her down by not going to see her—but she was warm, gracious, and forgiving, just like the sweet woman I'd always imagined she would be. She sent me two letters that I'd sent her after Skip had died; she'd saved them all this time. In the nineties, she showed up at an Easy Company reunion at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. I put my arm around her and we both broke down and cried, meaning I'd cried with, or for, nearly everybody connected to the Easy Company story except for one person.

Our house on Kensington where I'd jumped off the roof with the beach umbrella is still there. The cabins on the Nehalem are long gone, and the Sigma Nu house at the
University of Oregon is where they filmed some fraternity scenes for that crazy movie
Animal House
back in the seventies.

Things change. I've changed. For the better I hope, though with me, it's always been one of those two-steps-foward-one-step-backward deals. After that night near Mount Hood, I cut back my drinking—and quit smoking. What got me on track was a handful of people: the love of my wife, Irene, and my family. And the guys of Easy Company. In 1978, I—a self-proclaimed Oregon hermit—met with two of our guys. The next year, I wrote to Dick Winters:

In 1980, I went to Nashville for my first-ever Easy Company reunion; it was the first time my wife, Irene, and I had ever flown in a jet. (Ironically, a few decades after the war, I discovered why I froze up while in that orchard tree back in Normandy; I have acrophobia, a fear of heights, not common among paratroopers. The only way I could fly in my later years was to order a Scotch whiskey when
I got aboard and tell the flight attendant to keep 'em coming.)

At the Nashville reunion, I started realizing all the stuff I'd bottled up in me over the decades. On the first night of the reunion, a bunch of us—Joe Toye, Don Moone, Chuck Grant, Walter Gordon, and our wives—went to a club. My emotions from being back with these guys went nuts; I hadn't seen them in thirty-five years. I walked out of the club without Irene and headed back to the hotel. I got lost. Scared. Disoriented. The works. By the time I found myself back at the hotel, the lobby was full of Easy Company men who'd gotten so worried they'd sent the police after me. I guess I'd been in some pretty dangerous neighborhoods and hadn't known it. I felt like I'd let everyone down. Back home, I wrote most of the men with deep apologies. I also started realizing that maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to face some of this stuff inside that was making me crazy at times. Another letter to Winters:

It was freeing, I realized, to face the long-buried stuff. As I told Winters:

That, I've come to believe, is the hardest thing about war: to be faced with so many emotional situations involving people who've come to mean the world to you. Losing those people, sometimes right in front of you. And yet not being able to grieve for them. Even after the war, when you were expected to just get on with your life as if nothing more had happened to you than, say, a reshuffling of your living room furniture. I had a fraternity brother who contacted me when all the
Band of Brothers
stuff started coming out in the press. He said, “How in the hell could I have lived with you for four years and never known this stuff?” Because we keep it inside. In my whole life, I've never been to a counselor, even
though I probably should have. As I wrote to Winters in 1980: