We Who Are Alive and Remain (15 page)

On my first evening with the 101st I asked some guys where I could find a latrine. They showed me where. It was kind of dark in there and all I could see was two holes in the floor and a set of footprints next to it. I had never seen anything like it and had no idea what it was. Next to it was some kind of a basin that I figured was the urinal, so I relieved myself in that. I had just buttoned my pants when another guy came in and started to wash his face in the same basin. Thank God he didn’t see me! I’m sure I would have ended up dead.

Easy Company had come off the line from Holland on a Wednesday or a Thursday in late November. Everyone celebrated Thanksgiving the day after that. Within a day or two of that we had a full retreat parade—ODs [olive drabs, uniforms], boots shined—the guys didn’t have half the stuff they needed. I was in good shape for the retreat, gearwise. I had a good pair of boots, not too hard to polish, not too much wear yet. I still had my ODs, so I was pretty well ready. But some of the other guys definitely had other thoughts about the parade. The way some guys talked, I thought there was going to be a mutiny.

Earl McClung’s bunk was next to mine. He wasn’t moving. Just before the parade, somebody came to Mac and said, “Hey Mac, gimme your boots.” Mac handed them over and the guy started shining them for him. I wondered what was going on. Another guy came up and said, “Hey Mac, gimme your pants. He started pressing them for Mac, and so on till Mac was completely ready for the retreat. They were polishing McClung’s boots and pressing his pants for him! They knew he wouldn’t, and if everybody in the company didn’t participate, then nobody would receive any passes.

Over the years I’ve had to ask myself if I remember that story correctly. Now, you have to realize Earl McClung was one hell of a combat soldier, one of the best that ever was. That’s why the guys pressed his pants for him. Well, one night years after the war McClung and Shifty Powers and I were drinking Calvados together and McClung says, “Y’know, I wasn’t a very good garrison soldier.” I said, “Well Mac, my impression is that you were maybe the world’s worst.” He looked right at me and said, “You’re right!”

After we did that retreat, the guys got their passes. I went back to the barracks. Mac came in, took off his pants, kicked them under his bed, took off his blouse, kicked it in a corner somewhere. As I was saying to him years later, “Mac, I bet they’re still there to this day.” He says, “I betcha they are, too.”

The Battle of the Bulge began near the end of our advanced training at Benning. They split us up in three shipments to head overseas. I went in the first shipment. It was just after Christmas 1944. We went to Fort Meade, Maryland, then to Camp Shanks, New York, then went over on the RMS
Aquitania
, a Cunard ocean liner, run by the English.

The crossing took just over a week. About ten thousand of us were on the boat. Big as the ship was, everybody got seasick. The whole ship smelled like vomit. That was the first time I ever ate Brussels sprouts—you got your meal, then they threw a big bunch of boiled Brussels sprouts on top of your mess gear. I ain’t never liked them since.

We landed in Scotland. You came off the gangplank and walked under this canvas deal right up to where you got on the train. People couldn’t see who was getting off the ship. We went by train to Southampton in England. We thought we would be training in England for some time, but just a few days later I joined the 101st in Hagenau.

We went up there in semi-trailer trucks. There were maybe six or seven hundred guys who went to the 101st at this time. Signs were all along the road warning about mines. When we got there, Colonel Sink came out on the balcony of the regimental headquarters and gave us a pep talk. He wanted to know if anybody had questions. A guy raised his hand and asked when the 506th would go back on the line. Colonel Sink looked a bit flabbergasted. He said, “Trooper, the Germans are right over there about two hundred yards. You’re
on
the line.” That was the first time we realized how close we were to the enemy.

They peeled us off and sent me and about five other guys to company headquarters. I reported to Captain Ron Speirs, a stern-looking guy with dark, bushy eyebrows. He had come over to E Company from D Company, and there were all sorts of stories floating around about him shooting guys—both the Germans and his own guys if they goofed off. Speirs made me sit in a chair across the desk from him and asked me if I had ever been in combat. Now, when you’re back at Fort Benning, all the paratroopers go over to the bars in Alabama and get in fights. So I said, “No, sir, only in Phenix City.”

Speirs stared at me for a long time from under his bushy eyebrows, not saying a word, never cracking a smile. “That’ll be all,” he said at last. I worked closely with Speirs from then on.

One of the five new replacements went right on guard duty. He was hit in the neck within forty-five minutes. I don’t know if he lived, but he never did come back. His war was pretty short.

Aldbourne: Calm Before the Storm

Easy Company arrived in Aldbourne, England, in mid-September 1943 for more training. It was a nice place, not too bad. We were hardly ever there, actually; mostly we were out in the field. I was in a Quonset hut. I don’t remember how big it was. A lot of guys slept in the hut.

In Aldbourne we spent most of our time walking: ten- to twenty-five-mile hikes in the mud. That’s what I remember. It was pretty cold, miserable. We did a lot of training there, but I’ve forgotten most of it.

Aldbourne was made up of lots of nice English people who treated us well. I don’t know why—they were overrun by Americans. But they were very obliging. They did laundry for us or baking if we asked them. The English had a saying, “The Americans are oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” Some of them felt that way anyway.

We spent time in pubs after hours and in fish and chips joints. They didn’t have wax paper but wrapped the fish and chips in newspaper. Fish and chips was a mainstay.

Aldbourne was a small village in a rural area. I was told that the residents of Aldbourne were preparing to be invaded by the Germans. They had hidden some food out in the woods and were practicing to defend themselves against German soldiers. All they had to fight with were pitchforks, shovels, and hoes—no guns. After the war and what I had seen in combat I’ve thought about what a massacre that would have been. The Germans had burp guns, Mausers, and machine guns and would have wiped that village out. I think the people in Aldbourne felt a sense of safety to have the American soldiers there.

Most of the guys had never experienced surroundings like Aldbourne before, but it was not unusual for me because of my experiences in Ireland when I was a child.

The English in Aldbourne tended to live simple lives. Big excitement to them would be to go to a café and have a cup of tea. Our guys were quite a contrast to the English. We were loud. They were reserved. Sometimes our vocabulary proved offensive to them. Often we didn’t understand them. For instance, “bum” meant “vagabond” to us, not “ass,” as it did to them. Bloody in England (used as an adjective) was a horrible word, referring to menstrual blood. I was a bazooka man, but I learned to be careful in describing what I did—you couldn’t say bazooka, because it was their slang word for penis.

We were told to be nice to our billets because we would be staying in Aldbourne for a long time. I had no problem there. Near my billets lived a tremendous family, the Mindenhalls. Sometimes I stole tea from the mess hall and brought it to them. All kinds of groceries were being rationed by then, so they were happy to get it. For at least fifty years after the war I kept in touch with the family. Today I’m still in contact with the last surviving member. We write two or three letters per year.

I enjoyed myself in Aldbourne, though the training was intense. We were looking forward to combat. We were ready and knew we were ready. Altogether, we had a year and nine months before we went into combat. In those days, a typical infantryman received about four months of training before going into combat. So we were receiving all this specialized training, including how to drive a train. Many of us expressed doubts that we’d ever need to know that. But one guy I knew, not in our outfit, was captured and then escaped. He got in a train and raced away from the town he was imprisoned in. So the specialized training paid off for at least one guy.

Sometimes they brought in English sergeants to train us. We couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand us. One sergeant’s English was almost incomprehensible. His mouth came open and sounds came out but that was about it. The word he used consistently after he showed us something sounded like “appee.” It was always a question: Appee? Appee? He said it all the time.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” all the guys said, though we had no idea what “appee” meant. Finally one of us figured out it meant “happy”—like, “Are you happy with what I’ve said?” He was asking if we understood him. Sure, I guess so. We could figure out what he was showing us far better than we could by what he was telling us.

At one combat range targets popped up and we shot at them as we advanced through the range. It was probably February or March of 1944, and by then most of the men I knew were totally unhappy with our company commander, Captain Sobel. We worried about having him lead us into battle. Sobel sometimes wore a big sheepskin jacket with a lot of wool around the collar. Just before target practice one day he walked out on the range ahead of us. A few guys started shooting really close to where he stood. Pretty soon we were all shooting close to his head as he moved forward. It was live ammunition. Nobody was trying to hit him. We just thought he’d get the message. We were putting shots about a foot from his head. I’d say a dozen shots were aimed as close to Sobel as possible. He just sort of waved, his back facing us as he led us through the combat range.

There were some Scotchmen in Aldbourne who went for drinks in a pub every morning about ten o’clock. Sometimes I went there, too. They argued back and forth in their Scotch dialect—just “barumpt armph bah”—I never did understand what they were saying. Every morning they argued. I couldn’t understand a word. One morning I decided to join in. “Barumpt armph rut rut,” I said. It was complete gibberish. One of them looked at me and said, “That’s right, Yank,” and kept right on with his conversation.

I met a girl in Aldbourne; she was sixteen, I was twenty. I like to say that she trapped me. One day I was walking up Oxford Street and heard piano music. She had her door open and was playing the piano. That was the start of a wonderful friendship. We went for long walks, to concerts, and to church. We danced together in her kitchen. She was a lovely girl, slim, with beautiful hair. She was very polite. We really matched each other well—we were both sort of polite, shy people. Her full name was Josephine, but everybody called her Jo. There was definite romantic attraction. It was very difficult to leave each other. She was in school when I left for the staging area, so we didn’t have a chance to say good-bye. We wrote but lost contact after I was out of the hospital. For many years I had no idea what happened to her.

Well, in 1994 I went back to England. I was hesitant to try to contact her because I didn’t know what her status was. At a party the tour organizers had for us they gave us a magazine that had been distributed in Aldbourne. When I got back to the States I wrote to the magazine distributor to ask if he knew Jo’s family.

It turns out that Jo’s sister-in-law worked for the distributor. He gave the sister-in-law the letter, she gave it to Jo, and we’ve been writing ever since. She had married a guy nineteen years older than her who apparently didn’t treat her very well because she suffers from depression. My sending her cheery letters and cards has helped her a great deal and encouraged her to take her medicine regularly. She’s gotten better and better. We talk on the phone about once a week.

I had wanted to join the 101st from the beginning. I joined them in Aldbourne, England. It was late 1943. When you’re a new guy coming into an old outfit, there are a lot of guys who don’t like you at first. That’s what happened to me. I had a couple fights with them, and I knocked the hell out of a couple of ’em. I made short work of the guys—two of them, I ain’t going to mention their names, both are deceased now, and that would be wrong of me. One was a real smart alec with everybody. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but he pulled a gun on me once. I told him, “You better make sure you kill me, because if you don’t, you’re done.” So the guys kept us away from each other.

After that most of us were real good friends. Finally, after about a month and a half, things started to look pretty good between us. I didn’t have any more problems. Later on I had more friends than I ever expected to have. Alex Penkala and Skip Muck became great friends of mine.

One day we were sitting in this room in Aldbourne, this kid had a guitar, I can’t think of his name, he was playing one of the songs I knew. Alex and Skip came over. When I was in the States, I had learned a lot of the Western songs, so I started teaching the guys the songs, and we started singing. We had a pretty good group there. We kept it to ourselves mostly. I’m not sure if the other guys enjoyed our voices. I had a book with some of the Western songs, so I could teach them the exact words. Our group didn’t have a name. It was just for fun. I still have the song-book somewhere. It’s been so long ago.

Alex and Skip didn’t make it. They were killed in Bastogne. It’s hard to talk about.

A Bad Day for a Lot of Young Men

At the end of May 1944 we went to the marshaling area in southern England and were quarantined—nobody in or out. That’s where we learned our mission was to invade Normandy.