We Who Are Alive and Remain (13 page)

We continued on through advanced airborne training. That December I got my first furlough. When I came back, the Battle of the Bulge was happening and the Allies were really hurting for men. (We found this out later.) Instead of ten to twelve men to a squad, the troops over there were down to four or five men per squad. The army rushed people out as fast as they could, so away we went. We knew we were heading to Europe, but we didn’t know where we’d end up or why they were fast-tracking us through.

Right after New Year’s Day we shipped out. It was a cold, cold day in January 1945. We went across the Atlantic on the
Aquitania
, a sister ship to the
Queen Mary
. The trip took eight days, which was considered fast. We had no convoy with us because our ship could outrun subs. We had a couple of big guns on board, too.

We embarked in Glasgow, Scotland, then went by rail through London and ended up in Portsmouth, southern England. We were in Portsmouth for a day or so, then took a ferry to Le Havre, France, where we were put on trains again. We traveled across France up to Alsace, on the eastern border of France. We ended up in Hagenau, on the Moder River, where Easy Company was on the line. They had just returned from Bastogne, and the ranks were really thin.

I mentioned I had tried to join the navy but couldn’t because I was color-blind. Well, you couldn’t be color-blind in the paratroops, either. When they drafted me I went into the regular infantry and took basic training down at Camp Roberts in California. When I finished basic they gave a talk there, looking for volunteers to go into the paratroopers. Me and another guy in my platoon volunteered. He never did make it; he got blisters on his feet from all the running and couldn’t get through A-stage. He went back several times to start over and try to get through A-stage, but I don’t think he ever made it. That wasn’t uncommon. In the class I trained with, we started with 1,250 men and graduated with 550.

We trained at Fort Benning, four hours every morning and four hours every afternoon. If you quit they had a big red brick wall there, maybe ten feet high. Written on it in big white letters were the words “I am a quitter.” Anytime you wanted, you could go stand against that wall with your nose and knees touching it and you were through. Boy, a lot of guys stood against that wall. And boy, the drill sergeants did everything they could to try to make you quit.

So how did I get in the paratroopers if I was color-blind? Well, when we volunteered back at Camp Roberts we all went to take the physical. We were all stripped off stark naked going from one place to another. For one test they had all these colored balls of yarn in a box. This guy in front of me stepped around the screen and I heard them telling them to pick out a red ball. (Now, I can see larger colors like that anyway. I just can’t see the colors on those charts.) It didn’t matter anyway, because I was looking right at the guy when he lay down the yarn ball and I saw where he put it. I came in, they said the same thing to me, and I picked up the same ball. That was all it took. I was in, and I never told them different.

I never had any trouble with my color-blindness all the way through. When you jump you have to watch for different-colored lights, but I could always distinguish those. I just could never see those eye charts. Even today it says I’m color-blind on my driver’s license, but I have no problem telling which traffic light is which.

The training I got at Benning was a real henhouse, just like those guys at Toccoa went through. We got off the train and boy, we were all gung ho to be paratroopers. Then we saw those 250-foot towers that they dropped you off of, and our mouths gaped. They had us line up and the drill sergeants told us how it was going to be. One says, “We have a deal around here. We say, ‘Knock out twenty-five.’ And you do them. We’ll show you what we mean.” One of the other noncoms drops down and doubles it. He does fifty push-ups, just bang, bang, bang, bang. Then it was time for roll call. The sergeant tells us to say our first name and middle initial. He gets to the third guy, and his voice is sort of soft. The sergeant says, “You son of a bitch—sound off like you’ve got a pair of balls. Drop and give me fifty.” That’s the way it was from that day on. It was all push-ups and running and calisthenics. If you were in your barracks and had to go to the latrine you ran there and back. If they caught you walking, you did fifty push-ups. They had guys out there watching for you.

Training involved four stages. A-stage was all calisthenics. B-stage was jumping out of a mock-up of an airplane and half a day of calisthenics. C-stage was jumping off the high tower and calisthenics. D-stage was five jumps, one a day for five days, and calisthenics whenever you weren’t doing that.

During B-stage the second week we jumped out of 34-foot-high towers. You climbed up stairs, they hit you on the butt, and said, “Go!” You were wearing parachute harnesses with lines hooked on the back. When you jumped, the cable caught and snapped you so you felt an opening shock. You bounced up and down hanging there, then you hit the ground and they moved you around like the wind was blowing you.

Well, a big, burly guy in the barracks next to me could do all the physical training during A-stage; no problem. One of the noncoms called him the best soldier in the battalion. But during B-stage he got up to one of those 34-foot mock-ups and he wouldn’t jump. He put his hands on the sides of the fuselage and wouldn’t go for nothing. They tried shoving him, but he fought back. He wasn’t moving. Finally this big, burly guy started crying. They let him off the towers and he went and stood against the quit wall.

During C-stage they raised you up a 250-foot tower. You took a piece of paper with you. They yelled on a loudspeaker to let the paper go so they could see for sure which way the wind was blowing. If the paper blew away from the tower in any of three directions, they let you go, but if the wind was blowing into the tower, they wouldn’t drop you. When they dropped you from that height, you came down fast.

I remember each of my five jumps during D-stage. You stand up, hook up, and check the equipment of the guy ahead of you in the aisle. You crowd up together, and the jumpmaster says, “Stand in the door.” The first guy pivots on his right foot and puts his hands on the edge of the door. The other eleven guys are pushing on him. Pretty soon the green light comes on, the jumpmaster hits him on the rump, and hollers, “Go!” Boy, it’s just one right after the other out of that plane.

I made one jump where the third guy out slipped on the metal flooring and fell down. Everybody went right over the top of him. We didn’t even stop. He was the last guy in the plane. There’s a bar above there, and the jumpmaster swung on that and kicked him hard with both feet. Out he went. You need to go out all as a group like that. If you don’t, you’re strung out all over the place when you land.

You don’t have any sensation of falling. You make a pivot on your right foot, put your left foot right on the edge of the door, and kick with your right leg. The airplane’s going about 120 miles per hour, and the prop blast from the engine on the side hits you. You don’t jump out, really; it blows you out of the edge of the door. Then you’re counting, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. If you get to three thousand and don’t feel the shock of your chute, you pull the reserve. We made some low jumps, too, and I don’t think the reserve chute would have even had time to open on those jumps.

How’s it feel when the chute opens? Good [laughs]. First thing you do is check the canopy to see if any of the panels are blown out. You’ve got twenty-eight panels in those old chutes. You can blow one or two, I’ve had that happen, but you don’t want many more blown than that. You look around you to see if you’re falling about the same rate as everybody else. Too fast and you’ve got too many blown panels.

I was in one of the last classes who ever trained to make a night jump. I went through jump school in September and October 1944. D-day had been the previous June. It was a night jump and it had been such a mess that they soon stopped doing night jumps altogether.

Night jumps are hairier all around. You’re floating in blackness. You can’t tell whether you’re drifting backward or forward. Our drop zone that night was about three miles long and a mile wide, with low timber all around. I was drifting backward and missed our drop zone but landed in a little cut-out space at the edge of the timber. When I got up I could just make out a huge tree stump a few feet away. If I had hit that I would have broken my back for sure. Boy, I didn’t like jumping at night. I never had to do it after that.

I knew an Indian kid named Blaine, every day he had something bad happen to him. He was always right behind me in the plane. On his second jump he got his chin strap hooked under one of his risers. It skinned the hell out of the bottom of his chin. It about half hung him.

About the third day we jumped, I went out of the plane, checked my chute, and heard somebody hollering above me. I looked up and there’s old Blaine knee-deep in my silk. He was looking down at me through the apex of my chute, screaming and hollering. I told him to get the hell off me. He had jumped and came down right on top of my chute. When he did that, his chute collapsed because there was no weight on it anymore. I knew we couldn’t land like that. Even if all went fine, Blaine would fall the length of my chute, about thirty feet, as soon as I hit the ground. I kept hollering for him to step off. Flying through the air as we were, he was able to walk himself to the edge of my chute, where his chute filled out again and he could jump off.

On his last jump Blaine was really nervous. I was standing right next to him in flight. By mistake he pulled his reserve chute while he was still in the plane. They wouldn’t make him jump without a reserve, so he didn’t jump. When the plane landed, they went and got him and made him take off his jump boots. There was a gravel road about a mile long that led from the field back to the camp. They made him run back to camp bare-footed on that road. The next day he was shipped out.

There were two Indians in our group. They’d come in together. Just before Blaine left, the other Indian found out that Blaine washed out. He said, “You son of a bitch. We joined together and now you’ve done and quit.” Boy, he was burned. He took Blaine out back and beat the hell out of him. Paratroopers were a breed all by themselves, particularly when it came to fighting.

After all four stages, we graduated. When we graduated a cadre come along, shook hands with us, and said, “Congratulations, paratrooper.” That was a proud moment, brief as it was. From then on we wore jump boots and got to blouse our pants. We went over to Phenix City, Alabama, a lot and saw regular infantry guys blousing their pants. That was an instant fight. We figured we were the only ones with the right to blouse our pants.

After training at Fort Benning I got a twenty-one-day furlough and went home to Portland. When I got back we had advanced training until December. We made a few more training jumps then.

One more story that happened during training—this happened while traveling by train from Camp Roberts over to Fort Benning. There was a good-looking Mexican kid on the train with us, Armando C. Caballero, who lived in Tucson. He was married and had a couple kids. He hadn’t seen his kids for five months at least. He knew it would be a long time before he saw them again.

Well, the train we were on went through Tucson, and the tracks went right by his house. His home was only about two blocks from the depot. That train stopped, and Armando could see his two kids from the train window. They were out playing in his backyard. But they couldn’t see him, and the kids didn’t know their dad was on the train. Armando wanted to see his kids so bad.

Now, they had told us before we got on the train that if anyone ever got off for any reason it was desertion. They didn’t beat around the bush about that one. Finally Armando decided he was going to get off the train and go see his kids, just for a minute. He was a good soldier and we knew that if the train started going he would never be able to catch it. Everyone held him down. He fought us but we didn’t let up. Everybody felt really sorry for him. That’s tough for a guy.

Aboard the
Samaria
, Toccoa Men

In September 1943 our regiment went from Camp Shanks to the docks at New York. We rode across on an old ship called the
Samaria
. It was a little ship, not too big. An English ship. We didn’t like the English ships. The bunks were six foot high. I got sicker than hell and went out on the deck to stay. I guess there were a couple subs hanging out around our ship. But we didn’t see them. I didn’t sleep at all. It was bouncing around so much.

How was the Atlantic crossing? The food was horrible. I think all I ate was Hershey bars.

On the ship, most of the guys spent their time playing poker, shooting craps, just enjoying life. We didn’t know what it held for us on the other side, when we landed.

We crossed the Atlantic in a convoy. All the ships with us had antiaircraft gun crews up on the deck, so everything was uneventful.

Carwood Lipton and I decided to not sleep belowdeck because it was so hot and smelly down there. We staked out positions with the British crew at the stern of the ship. The food on board was pretty bad—I don’t think I ate anything other than candy bars on the trip over. In fact, I don’t remember going to eat at the mess facilities at all. The fellows who did all said it was just awful.

Salty Harris was with us on the trip. Here’s a story that involves him, one that’s never been publicized as far as I know—I don’t know if Captain Winters even knew about it. One afternoon we were up on deck. It was foggy and you couldn’t see very far. Before becoming a paratrooper, Salty had had two years at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. So he looked over the side of the ship and saw a little thing being dragged on a line through the water. It was spraying water up about four feet. Salty knew it shouldn’t be there. He alerted the British crew right away and they adjusted the course of the
Samaria
. It could have been disastrous.