We Who Are Alive and Remain (11 page)

Rockingham was a dry town; you couldn’t buy booze. We found a cabdriver who had some. Boy, the stuff he gave us was right out of a stone. Man, it was rocky stuff. I wanted to drown my sorrows because my date didn’t show up, so I got drunk. It was the only time in my life I ever got drunk like that. I don’t remember going back to camp. I don’t know today how the hell I got back. I probably got in
because
I was so drunk—or else they would have found out I didn’t have a pass.

But I got caught anyway. It happened like this. On the morning the four of us had decided to go to town, they had taken roll. Now, they usually called the companies in order. But that day they called the companies out of order and called E Company last. I had gotten tired waiting because I was supposed to have this date with that girl. So I just took off and went and wasn’t there when they called my name.

The next morning somebody shook me and said, “Captain Sobel wants to see you in his office.” I got up, and oh, man, I wasn’t even in the right bunk. I was in Gray’s bunk. He had a lower bunk. I had a higher bunk. I had to run to the end of the building. I went out the door and got off of the porch just far enough to puke on a tree. I must have killed that tree with the stuff that came out of me—green it was, I can almost see it today. I went down to the headquarters and stood in front of Captain Sobel’s desk. I couldn’t even stand up on my own. I had to lean against the desk to keep myself from falling over. I managed to salute him. I remember Sobel looking at me for the longest time. Then he says, “One of the best soldiers in the goddam company, and look at you—just look at you.” I didn’t want anybody to look at me. He shamed me. He just flat shamed me. That may have been one of the reasons I never got that way again.

Captain Sobel, our company commander—I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about him. Real hard training there. The thought was that if we went to war with Captain Sobel, he was going to get a lot of us killed because he just didn’t know that much about tactics. But over the years I’ve thought about Sobel more and I’ve realized that he’s responsible for making Easy Company such a good company. He trained us well. Anything he’d ask you to do, he’d do it—I always admired that about him.

Here’s a story about Popeye: While we were in Toccoa, Captain Sobel told us, “Anybody who makes expert rifleman gets a three-day pass.” Me and one other guy, Buck Taylor, made expert. Well, Toccoa, Georgia, is three states away from Virginia, where I lived. Popeye and I were good friends by then. He asked, “You going home, Shifty?”

“Nah,” I said, “I don’t have enough money.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Popeye said. He got one of those steel helmets and walked through the barracks giving a big talk: “Shifty’s got three days off and doesn’t have enough money to get home. Everybody chip in a bit. Here—I’m going to start it with five dollars.” He placed a bill in the helmet. Everybody else threw in a dollar or fifty cents, whatever they had. Popeye handed it to me to count. “How much money you got in there, Shifty? You got enough?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got a little bit left over.”

Popeye grinned. “Then give me my damn five dollars back.”

So I gave him back his five dollars [laughs].

Toccoa was tough. Captain Sobel wanted his boys to be the best. He really drove us to do a good job. Sobel was disliked by some of the enlisted men for that reason, but I never had a problem with him for pushing us hard. I appreciate it now.

It’s true, one time at Fort Benning I got very annoyed with Captain Sobel. To explain: Back in early 1942, before I enlisted, I had gone to a sorority club meeting one evening to pick up a girl I had a date with. Instead of one girl meeting me, three or four girls jumped in my car—none of whom was my date. That was fine with me because one of the girls who jumped in, Elaine, was a gorgeous brunette and I thought, Boy, she’s better than the one I was going to meet. So I took all the girls home and Elaine was the last one I dropped off. That was the start of it all. She was in high school still; I had just graduated. We dated pretty heavily from then on.

Anyway, when I was at Benning we had all been given three-day passes after our jumps. I had made arrangements with Elaine to spend time with her that weekend. She worked in Philadelphia but was able to get a train ticket to meet me down in Jacksonville. Everything was set. But on Saturday morning something irked Sobel and all passes were canceled. I thought, Gee, what am I going to do? Here’s a young girl on the train all by herself coming down to Jacksonville with nobody to meet her. There was no way of getting word to the bus station to explain what had happened.

So I started figuring out a plan. I had already gotten my pass earlier on Saturday morning before Sobel canceled them. I thought, Heck, the worst thing they can do is bust me. So I went AWOL and took the bus to Jacksonville anyway, met Elaine, and we had a great weekend together. Carwood Lipton was married, his wife was in North Carolina, and he had made similar arrangements to spend the three days with her. I think Carwood skipped out of camp same as me.

We never heard a word from Sobel.

Elaine and I were married right after the war. That was the first important thing I did Stateside—marry Elaine. She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. We’re still married today, more than sixty-three years later.

You have to understand that I never hated Sobel. But this is also true: Sobel could be quite unfair sometimes, and it went much farther than just the incident with the passes. Some of the men downright hated him even to the point where Sobel’s life was in danger. As NCOs, we had all heard comments from the other enlisted men such as, “Boy, if I ever get Sobel in my sites he’s a goner”—stuff like that. You never know if those comments are actually going to be played out, but there was a strong feeling among the men that Sobel couldn’t be trusted in a combat situation. If the bullets were flying it could have been easy for someone to catch Sobel in the crosshairs.

I was involved in the meeting that the NCOs had in England [to all turn in their stripes as noncommissioned officers in E Company, thereby casting a nonconfidence vote for Sobel in hopes that Colonel Sink would remove Sobel as company commander]. Mostly I just listened during the meeting. Sergeants Mike Ranney and Salty Harris ran the meeting. It happened about eight o’clock one night. They called together some of the NCOs; not everyone was there. We all knew the troops were unhappy with Sobel, and the big question was, “What can we do about it?” We all knew Sobel wasn’t cut out for combat. We knew that if he made the wrong decision it would cost some of the fellows their lives. So we decided that something should be done—that was how it was left at the end of the meeting. I assumed (though I never had confirmation on this) that Ranney or Harris went to Captain Winters—I don’t know who else they could have gone to who would have understood the situation. Anyway, within about two weeks Sobel was moved down to a training assignment. Ranney and Harris were both busted. Harris was shipped out to another company. Ranney was busted down to private.

As I’ve thought about that incident over the years, here’s my conclusion: Captain Sobel was a good training officer, strict, he wanted his men to be the best. I admire him for that. But you could not trust his judgment in a battle situation. For the good of the outfit, I think what we did was right.

In 2002, at the Easy Company reunion in Phoenix, I was sitting by the pool at the hotel one afternoon, taking life easy. This young man came over to me and said, “Mr. Taylor?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “I’m Herbert Sobel’s son. Could you please tell me why you fellows did what you did to my father?”

His comment nearly knocked me off the chair. Why did he talk to me? I think because when he came to the group and introduced himself someone said, “Hey, why don’t you go over and see Taylor.” I think that was the case. Otherwise why would he have come to me?

I explained to him that we did what we did for the good of the company—in fact, it was for Sobel’s own benefit, too. I think his son understood that. I certainly mean him no harm in telling this story. Sobel’s sister was invited to our reunion in Valley Forge several years ago. She came with a small speech prepared. She said, “I understand exactly how you felt about my brother. He was a little strange sometimes.” So I think her saying that has sort of smoothed things over.

How the Rest of Us Trained

I never went through Toccoa. I went to camp in Utah and took tests, then they sent me to Fort Walters, Texas, for basic training. Basic training didn’t bother me. I thought it was pretty easy, kind of fun. The city kids didn’t care much for it, though. I always liked to be outside rather than inside. During basic you were outside a lot and did a lot of walking. You learned something new, something you had never heard of. For an Indian kid that was altogether a different life.

There was no ridicule in the service for being an Indian—it was more or less the other way around. The other guys thought that was pretty great. If they found out you had Indian blood, well, you were made first scout. I was a good shot, too, on the rifle range, so I was popular with the infield.

After we finished basic training they put us in a big hall and asked where we wanted to go from there. Most of us had taken infantry basic. Somebody said something about a new outfit being formed, the paratroopers, where you jumped out of airplanes. I remember a couple of guys saying, “Well, who in the heck would want to do something like that?” Then another guy says, “Well, it pays fifty bucks a month extra.” So about five of our hands went up. I did it for the fifty bucks a month [laughs]. That was a lot of money in those days.

For parachute training we were sent to Fort Benning, Georgia. I think it took five weeks. Training at Benning was harder than the infantry training. First week was strictly running, tumbling, climbing ropes, doing push-ups eight to ten hours a day all day long. You never walked anywhere, you ran, all in the Georgia heat. The heat was miserable. I was in shape, so the training never bothered me, but a lot of guys washed out.

When the time came for my first jump, I just went out the door. When the chute opened, I thought, Hey, this is fun. You’re scared the first four or five jumps, but I never had any problems jumping.

From Georgia I went to a repo depo [replacement depot]. Whenever somebody was short of people they’d call in and you’d go from there. So I joined the 506th E Company in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after they had finished jump school.

We were outsiders in E Company. They had all been together for over a year and knew each other really well. Some would talk to you, some wouldn’t. They were looking at us seeing if we were going to last. You were an outsider until you got in combat; then things changed. I came in with a bunch of guys with the last name M—Mellett, McMahon, Mayer. I don’t remember them all. Some of them didn’t last too long.

After I enlisted I went to basic training at Camp Blanding in Florida. At Blanding the mosquitoes were bigger than goddamn B-17s. We did a lot of work in the swamps there, escape, evasion, and survival training. It was okay. I already knew how to eat the animals found in a swamp and navigate at night—I had learned that back in Louisiana.

Then I went over to Fort Benning, Georgia, for airborne training—the frying pan area, they called it. It was across the river from the main post. The first three or four weeks of training there were pretty horrific. The easiest jump I ever made was my first because I didn’t know what I was in for. The hardest was your second—then I wondered what the hell I was doing up there.

It helped to have a lot of preparation for the first jump. We learned how to exit the door, how to land, how to guide our chutes. To train, we jumped off thirty-four-foot towers. But it was a little different when we got up about nine hundred feet in a damn C-47. Then it was shake, rattle, and roll. I couldn’t look down or I’d never jump. When I looked down I saw ants, and that was a shock. So I always looked straight ahead. One time I looked down just as I was jumping and damn near couldn’t jump. I had to haul myself out the door.

In those days the chutes opened up and you felt like a tassel on a whip. Bang! It didn’t break your back but it damn sure pulled you around. When you’re jumping out of an airplane, you’re never not afraid. I don’t care who says they’re not. You always have that little fear that says your chute won’t open. But after a while you settle in and it all becomes second nature.

On a few jumps I experienced what they call a Mae West. That’s where your suspension lines go over the parachute and your parachute looks like two bosoms. It was my fault. When I jumped I twisted, and the lines went that way. I was always able to shake off the Mae Wests and be okay. A few other times I got blown panels in my chute. Those old T-5 chutes were crazy. As soon as the chute opened up you had a hell of a snap. Then with blown panels you whistled down a lot faster. I had two incidences of that.

From Benning, I got my wings, then went home on furlough. Then I was sent to England, to Chilton-Foliat Jump School. Chilton was the place for all the guys who weren’t paratroopers but were going into Normandy (such as doctors and priests) to learn how to jump. I got there the last part of February 1944 and was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 506th. Me and a couple other guys were picked to train these guys at Chilton. Then we went back to our respective companies last of May in Upottery. Of course, on June 6 we jumped into Normandy. That’s where I got hit. After I got out of the hospital I was reassigned to Easy Company. That’s where I stayed. That was August 1944.

I went to boot camp at Fort McClellan. It was a lot warmer weather in Alabama than I had grown up with in Minnesota. One day I was just itching to go for a swim, even though somebody with stripes had said, “Do not go into the water under any condition.” I couldn’t figure out why they were so strict about that. I peeled off my duds and dove into a creek that ran behind the barracks. Well, it didn’t take long for me to figure out why they were so strict. When I came up from the dive I peered at two water moccasins swimming right at me. Right then I figured if Jesus could do it, it was time for me to try. I swear I was walking on water getting the hell out of there. From then on I decided to listen to those guys with stripes on their sleeves.