We Who Are Alive and Remain (10 page)

I can’t believe some of the ridiculous things we did for fun. Down in the South they have these trees about six inches in diameter. We limbed the trees, then bent them back and tied them off with ropes. We put a pad on the top of a tree, a guy would sit on the pad, and we cut the rope. Instant catapult. We had to stop doing it after a while because guys were getting hurt.

Why did I decide to become a medic? Well, I wasn’t sure if I could actually shoot somebody. I knew I could defend myself; I knew that if I had to shoot somebody I would. They gave us all these tests, and through these tests they picked guys for different things. It was really an honor to be picked as a medic.

As medics we didn’t go from W Company straight to Easy. We were put into a medical detachment, one medic was assigned to each platoon plus regimental headquarters. During the war there were 142 medics with the 506th, counting replacements. As a medical attachment we trained by ourselves. We decided right from the start we were going to be the best unit in the regiment. Using one-inch tape, we put crosses on our helmets. We had some of the best shots in the regiment. We had the team record for running up Mount Currahee and the team record on the obstacle course. We were known for our close-order drill—people used to come and watch us drill. The other guys started making fun of us. They called us pill rollers and chancre mechanics [pronounced
shanker
, a chancre is an open sore you get from VD]. But that was only in camp. If anybody ever said anything bad about the medics outside of camp, he got decked.

After a while we were assigned companies. I was assigned Easy Company, 3rd Platoon, under Lieutenant Fred “Moose” Heyliger.

They shipped us to Toccoa, Georgia, on the train. This is different—I, and the guys I was with at first, were never in W Company. Almost everybody who arrived at Toccoa hung out in W Company for several days until taking a physical. But we got off the train and took the truck straight out to Toccoa to a medical dispensary to have our physicals. That same night we arrived we were in E Company. We were all in the 1st Platoon of E Company. Christenson and Dukeman were in the first squad. Gray and I were in the second squad. We may have been some of the very first men in E Company.

Gray and I ended up a machine gun team. We were that way until we got to England. Being a machine gunner wasn’t something I picked. I had picked being in the airborne, but I certainly didn’t get to choose what I was going to do or who was going to be my partner. If Gray and I had arrived a day apart we would have never been partners on the machine gun.

A machine gun squad was made up of four men: a gunner, an assistant gunner, and two ammo carriers. The two ammo carriers were just plain foot soldiers. The gunner and the assistant gunner were trained as gunners and traded off. When you had a list in the squad, somebody had to be first. On paper Gray was the gunner of the second squad. The gunner, in theory, carried the gun. The assistant carried the tripod and a rifle. But you all traded off, including the ammo carriers—everybody took turns carrying the gun.

When we went out on the machine gun range, ground squirrels stood out there on the fields. I was a great one for shooting those with a machine gun. That made my target scores pretty low sometimes. No credit for varmints.

Have you ever been to Toccoa? If you do, don’t pay a lot of attention to the road up Currahee road now—it’s sand and it’s graded all the time. In those days it wasn’t graded at all. Somebody had run a bulldozer up and down the thing a few times to get the brush and trees out of the way. A rain gulley ran right down the middle of it. The rest of it was rocks, and if you’re in formation, and your part of the formation runs over the rocks, you do, too. Some of those rocks were marbles and some were baseballs. It was damn hard not to fall. Your foot rolled on the rocks. You stubbed your toes. We wore boots when we ran. They were nothing like today’s running shoes. It was just a leather boot. I’m not certain when we got our taller jump boots. We must have had them when we went to Fort Benning. But I know we started out with what amounted to a nine-inch boot. Somewhere along the line they gave us a combat boot, which had leather on the lower part and straps that buckled. We couldn’t wear those jumping because the static lines got tangled in the straps too easily. I think we wore those at Camp Mackall.

Sure, I was a Toccoa guy, but one thing that gripes me about some of these Toccoa guys is that we feel we’re a breed alone. We trained under a tough guy, Captain Sobel, but that isn’t any credit to us, except that we happened to be there.

Here’s what I’ve got to say about Sobel: One day Sobel called me into his office and asked me why I was having some trouble in training. I told him about the car accident—there wasn’t much choice; they were going to find out anyway as soon as they took X-rays. Sobel had the opportunity to flush me right there. All he had to do was write a note, send me to the dispensary, and I’d have been down the road like the rest of those guys. But he didn’t do it. He simply said, “Well tough it out.” So I toughed it out. It’s pretty goddam hard for me not to respect the guy who did that. I’ll argue hands down with anybody who says Sobel was the SOB they often say he was. He was tough, yes, he was as tough as anybody you’ll ever know. But he was not a bastard. There are incidents that they talk about in the book and show in the movie, [
Band of Brothers
] like Dukeman and his loose collar getting chewed out by Sobel. I don’t remember that, and I stood in ranks right behind Bill Dukeman every damn formation we had at Toccoa. I don’t know why anybody made that up, but somebody sure as hell did. I think Sobel was as fair a guy as anybody who came down the road.

Another thing about Sobel—people gave him a hard time about his map-reading skills. I can’t think of anybody I know who doesn’t lack in some skill or another. Any damn fool who’s been in the army knows that if you’re company commander you depend on the sergeants for that bullshit. I wasn’t very good at map reading either, and I know a lot of other guys who weren’t.

I’ll tell you something else. You’ve heard of General Sal Mattheson. Long before he was a general he was our first platoon leader at Toccoa—the first one I remember, anyway. Well, when we were in Paris with HBO, for whatever reason, his wife, Colonel Robert Strayer’s wife, and my wife, Peg, simply hit it off. So that put me, Colonel Strayer, and General Mattheson palling around together. We went to a nursery or something where they grow fancy roses. The three of us were sitting out front on a bench while our wives went inside, and Strayer turns to me and says, “You know, what they did to Sobel was not right.” [Sobel was removed from command in Aldbourne.] I says, “Well, you must have been listening in to some of my disagreements with other people.” Mattheson broke in and said, “That was the wrong thing for them to do.” Strayer was battalion commander. If it was the right thing to do, he would have known it. Certainly Mattheson was a good officer. If he thought it was wrong, that justifies my thinking.

As soon as we got our wings, we were authorized to blouse our pants. It was an issue of pride for a paratrooper. I can remember [Sergeant Bill] Evans telling us that if we got to town and saw anybody who wasn’t a paratrooper with bloused boots to knock him on his ass and take his boots away.

Now, there was a guy I didn’t like: Evans. I hold him responsible for having me transferred out of Easy Company to Headquarters Company. He didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him. When I went in to Headquarters Company [2nd Battalion], we were just getting ready to jump into combat. It was three days before D-day. And all of a sudden I’m a replacement among a whole bunch of guys I don’t even know. All thanks to Evans. I went to see my friends from E Company and cussed like hell as I packed my barracks bag. I can’t remember the name of one person out of Headquarters Company, not even the commander. I went ahead and fought the war with Headquarters as a machine gunner. For a while when I was at Bastogne I was attached to I Company.

My friend Everett Gray (we were a machine gun team before I was transferred to Headquarters) was killed on D-day plus two. I believe that if he and I had been together, it might not have happened. We lost him awfully soon. No one knows quite how he died. He was all alone.

I think Evans thought I was a favorite of Sobel’s. Now, because I wasn’t afraid of Sobel, I never hesitated to walk up to Sobel and ask him questions, which some guys wouldn’t do. If fact, I’m sure sometimes I went up to him and asked him questions in order to keep Sobel from asking me questions. So I don’t know why Evans transferred me. Of course, he was no favorite of mine, either.

I remember only three guys who ever voluntarily transferred out of Easy Company. One was Dick Garrod, the guy I met the day I enlisted back in Frisco. Another was a guy named Cowboy Grant. We used to kid him about having a stump ranch because he was from Oregon and everything there is trees. Cowboy Grant was six foot, two inches tall, raw-boned as hell. If he hit you just playfully it was like a goddam mule kicking you, his knuckles were so hard. The third guy who transferred was named Cox; I’ll tell you about him in a minute.

When we were at Fort Benning, the army decided we should all learn to ride a horse. So they assigned some horses to the 506th. They put Cowboy Grant in charge of the horses. I had some horse experience, so Grant asked me to help him. We went over to the horses at night and went for rides—he and I and Garrod and Robert Van Klinken and somebody else, can’t think of who.

So we saddled up the horses and grabbed a handful of cherry bombs. (We used cherry bombs in training for simulated artillery.) We were all smoking cigars. All the buildings around there are built on stilts because of heavy rains. Every time we came around one of those Holy Roller churches we lit a cherry bomb and chucked it under the building. We rode back away and watched the people boil out of the windows and doors. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of nowadays, but we thought that was great sport back then.

The third transfer—Cox—he and I didn’t get along. He was a burly corporal, very athletic, a Golden Gloves something or other from New York State. We had an inspection every Saturday morning, and one Saturday we were all dressed up, cleaning our rifles, getting ready. I was sitting on my cot doing the final touches on the rifle—you had to get every speck of dust out of there or you were afraid Sobel would see it. Somebody passed a T-shirt down—a wonderfully clean T-shirt—to get the final oil and dust out of the guns. So I’m using the T-shirt, and along came Corporal Cox and grabbed the goddam T-shirt. It hooked on my rifle and it went flying. He said, “What the hell are you doing with my T-shirt?” Now, I don’t know why his T-shirt came down there. Gordy Carson or someone at the head of the barracks picked it up and started it down the line. Everyone was using it. So I mouthed off to Cox, and he mouthed off back, “Right after inspection, I’ll meet you behind the latrine,” he said. “We’ll settle it—I won’t be wearing my stripes.”

That put me on the spot. I was not fond of the idea. He was a boxer and I didn’t know anything about boxing. I figured he’d clean my clock. But it had to happen. And it did. I don’t remember how it ended up except that I wasn’t whipped. He got his meal. But I got my sandwich. I’ll say this: I must have stood my ground okay against Cox because no one ever challenged me after that.

This is a real mystery to me—in my memory, there was an Indian in E Company named Quick Bear, in 1st Platoon. I don’t know if that was his nickname or his last name. He was a great big fellow, as big as Bull Randleman. I came in the barracks at night to go to bed and this man was sitting at the table writing a letter. I said to him, “Sending a smoke signal to the squaw?” He didn’t bat an eye, just said, “Yep, got to do it once in a while.” In my mind it was just a good-natured remark. I certainly didn’t have any aggravation with the Indians. I woke up later on. Gray, and I think it was Albert Blithe, were struggling with Quick Bear. He had a trench knife and was going to kill me for having said that. In years since, I have not found anybody who remembers Quick Bear. I haven’t asked everybody. But I cannot accept that I dreamed that up, or even the name.

Sergeant Gordy Carson was a good friend of mine. He was a real ladies’ man. He went with some real nice-looking ladies. I was more shy with the girls; I never chased them much. One time we had finished maneuvers in Tennessee and were waiting orders to go back to Camp Mackall. We got a pass and went into town at Evansville, Indiana. Carson and I hadn’t gone to town together, but we met on the street in Evansville. The truck that was supposed to pick us up was gone. There was a Ford V-8 sitting at the curb with the motor running. I said, “Gordy—jump in.” So we jumped in and took off. I knew the way out of town. Thank God a cop didn’t come along—we’d have been in hot water for sure.

Carson and I got out on the highway. There were no lights on this damn car—no headlights, no dash lights; it was completely dark. So I tucked in behind this big truck. That son of a gun was going like hell. We got to this one place where we went through a big cut in a hill. Two or three cars were coming the other way. I could see them edging over. I knew the second car was going to pass the first. Sure enough, it did. He could see the truck but couldn’t see me. The car came right at us. I drove up on the bank and did a big half circle and kicked in back behind the truck—all at full speed. About a quarter mile from the camp gates we dropped off the car there and walked back. The first time I saw Carson after the war was in San Diego in 1984. That was the first thing Carson talked to me about—taking that car back to Mackall.

Another time at Mackall I made a jump and I landed one leg on a tree stump, so I was assigned to sick quarters. On Saturday four of us decided to go out to town. I didn’t have a pass but went anyway, so I was AWOL. We went to Rockingham and met these girls. I was supposed to have a date with one, but she didn’t show up. So I tried the others. I was hot to trot but didn’t get anywhere with them. I was too backward to get anywhere, I guess.