We Who Are Alive and Remain (3 page)

Coming home on the
Queen Elizabeth
I was on the promenade deck flat on my back with both legs in a plaster cast from my ribs down. Only my toes were sticking out. I thought, They ain’t going to get me in a lifeboat if we get torpedoed. But by then you figure you’ve made it out alive, so you aren’t worried about much of anything.

As we got closer, we saw the open side of some of the sheds. Stacks of bodies were piled there, probably waiting to be burned to render out the fat. We approached cautiously. We smelled another odor now: horrible, sickening, sweet, putrid—it was burning flesh. What we saw then was the most unbelievable sight I have ever witnessed: human beings, some standing like mummies, most lying on shelves in buildings, live bodies mixed with dead bodies, all together on shallow shelves so hundreds of them would fit in the buildings. There were also piles of bodies burning. The constant sounds of low moaning and crying could be heard. The sound made you want to plug your ears to get away from it. I became sick to my stomach, as did many of us.

We found out where the general was. He had been a commandant in a concentration camp and had some SS troops with him. Some of our sharpshooters took care of the troops. After a little firefight, we captured the general, still alive. We got him up behind a tree. That’s where we shot him by firing squad. That was the first time I saw the back of somebody’s head fly off. The war was technically over at this point, but I’m eighty-six years old as I tell this, so if they want to do something about it they better hurry.

Young Lions, East

I’ll start with this:

I was born and raised in a coal mining camp. My father worked for the coal mines. I went to school in Clinchco, Virginia, the town owned by the Clinchco Coal Company. There were seven in my family. Dad made a hundred dollars a month. We ate on a dollar a day.

My dad was an extraordinary rifle and pistol shot. He taught me how to shoot. It took a quarter to buy a box of .22 rifle shorts. On weekends I shined shoes to get enough money to buy shells.

Squirrel season was two weeks each year. I hunted every day in squirrel season. It not only helped my shooting, it helped me be aware of things in the woods, valuable in combat situations. You think of squirrel hunting as just walking through the woods looking for squirrels to shoot, but there’s a whole lot more to it. You learn to recognize every noise, every sound. If you see a limb shake you learn whether it’s a bird or a squirrel. That’s where I learned most of my shooting. I got to the point where I could throw a coin in the air and hit it with a rifle.

Once I was telling Earl McClung [another great shot] about how I learned how to do this. I started with a silver dollar and shot that. I moved down to a quarter and shot that. I took a nickel and shot that. But I tried and tried with a dime and never was able to hit that.

“Shit,” McClung said, “if you can’t hit a dime, you can’t shoot a lick.”

I was born April 22, 1922, near Atmore, Alabama. Living on the farm meant lots of hard work for everybody, but it was a good way to grow up.

Our farm was far out in the country. My granddaddy had settled us out there. He owned a lot of land. The nearest neighbor was twenty-five miles. We had a radio but that was about it. We didn’t get electricity until my early teens.

I have two brothers, one older, one younger, so I was the middle. I caught all the trouble. What kind of trouble? [laughs] Anything that came up, I was the one that did it—you know how that goes.

My family was pretty close. I don’t reckon we could have had a better mother. But she also had a temper and knew how to use a switch. With Mama, you didn’t cuss at all. Every once in a while I’d let slip with one of those words. So that meant a switch. Sometimes she just knew I needed one and gave it to me anyway. We were Methodists, and went to the church in a wagon. We didn’t have a car. So we hooked the wagon up and away we went.

For first, second, and third grade, I had to walk 2½ miles to school each way. You got used to it. After that the county sent a bus to pick us up and we changed schools. I guess I was an average student. I was not a bright student by any means. But I did all right.

Daddy ran the farm when we were younger. When my brothers and I got old enough we took over the farm and Daddy worked at outside businesses: carpentry, as a guard at Atmore Prison, then in town at a grocery store’s butcher shop. He had killed so many hogs and cows on the farm he knew how to cut them up and all. I liked farming. You were your own boss up to a point. You got up at 4:00 A.M. before daylight and fed the animals and milked the cows, then you got your breakfast and went to the fields. Everybody around where we lived did the same thing.

During the Depression we always had enough to eat. Daddy grew it and Mama put stuff up during the summer. We never lacked for food. In fact, Daddy gave food away to people who didn’t have enough to get by on.

Hunting and fishing—those were my favorite things to do. I liked to shoot doves and quail. I never had a bird dog when I was young, but I never needed one because I always knew where the quail roosted and where they fed. So any time Mama asked for some I went out and got us dove or quail for dinner.

I was in my early teens when I got my first deer. That was a big thrill for a country boy. Deer never came onto our farm, as big as it was, so we had to go to the swamp to get deer. There was always a group that went deer hunting together. You had a post where you were put so nobody got shot. It wasn’t just boys who went, it was older men, too. When you got your first deer they bloodied your face. You didn’t have a choice in it. They caught you and did it. I washed it off as best as I could in the creek before I went home. I was pretty proud still.

I’ve had knives all my life. I was pretty good with throwing a knife when I was a kid. We had this game called Mama Pig. You took an old Barlow knife with three blades and put the littlest blade in the ground. You tried to flip it to make it stick up on the big blade. It would be too dull for kids to play today. We didn’t have the things they have now. But it took a lot of skill with a knife. I liked throwing a knife even better. It wasn’t a contest—most of the time I was down by myself in the swamp, throwing it against a tree.

I’ve had my nickname, Buck, for as long as I can remember. I don’t know where I got it. As a kid, I liked my real name okay—Amos—but Buck just seemed to fit me better.

Dad was with a bank in Philadelphia until all the banks closed during the Depression. He sold insurance after that, which he didn’t like but had to do it to make ends meet. I don’t know how Dad made out sometimes but we always seemed to manage. I guess you could say we were middle class, although no one had much during the Depression. We always seemed to have enough money for food. Dad enjoyed traveling so we did that a lot, even during the Depression.

I was always an outdoor type. There were four boys in our family. I’m the oldest. We were a close family, but I felt like the odd one out because I was always off in the woods somewhere, out on my own. I was in the Boy Scouts and made it to Eagle Scout. I loved being out in the wild. We lived on the edge of Northwest Philadelphia, near a beautiful valley with a creek flowing through it. I spent a lot of time exploring that.

By the time I got to high school I was camping out quite a bit. I don’t think my mother knew where I was half the time. Once on Washington’s Birthday, a three-day weekend, I got a couple of friends together to go camping in the mountains. Only problem was that it had just snowed like the dickens. Down below, traffic wasn’t even moving on the side roads—it would be hard to even reach the mountains. Well, one of my friend’s dads was a policeman. In those days a lot of coal trucks were on the road, and this guy’s father stopped a coal truck for us and asked the driver to take us to the top of Hawk Mountain. That solved the problem of how to reach the mountains—his truck could make it through. So we hopped in, not realizing how crazy the plan was. From the highway, we got off the coal truck and trudged along railway tracks up into the mountains. We hiked far out into the snow, pushing our way through the drifts. I think we had only some canned food with us. We could have frozen to death—or starved if we had got lost. But it all worked out in the end. That’s the type of kids we were—the type who went camping no matter how high the snow was.

After I graduated I took an office job with SKF Bearings in Philadelphia and worked there a couple of years. The war was just breaking out then. I went down to Baldwin Locomotives, who were making Sherman tanks now, and no longer locomotives, and got a job with Baldwin machining turret tops. I worked there until June 1942.

I was born March 10, 1917. I’m the oldest living member of Easy Company today. I’m ninety-one years old. My memory’s not so good anymore, but I’ll see what I can do here.

From as far back as I can remember I’ve always lived in Joliet, Illinois. My father ran a saloon. When I was nine or ten I used to go hang around with my dad. They had a pool table in there. Did I drink then? No. Not at all.

When I was twelve years old my dad died. It was 1929 and we went to live with my grandfolks across town in Joliet. There were four of us kids in the family, so it was a little tight. What did Dad die of? Well, he ran a tavern, so that’s about all I can tell you. That’s all I
want
to tell you. It was okay living with my grandparents. It meant living in a new neighborhood. I went to a different school and got to meet new friends. It wasn’t bad at all. I really met most of the friends I have today down there. That’s right—those are some good friends.

I was a fair student. We were Catholics and so we went to parochial schools. I graduated from high school in 1935. I was always sport-minded and played baseball for school. I played third base. My nephew, Jack Perconte, played with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Jobs were scarce. Those were Depression days. But after high school I got a job. A couple of buddies and me went over to Gary, Indiana, and worked in a steel mill. We commuted out there and back every day. I ran a crane. I enjoyed the work. It was outdoors. It was a good job.

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1921. My parents were both Irish immigrants. Dad came from Dublin. He had about a year or two of elementary school education only. When he was a young man he owned and operated his own pub, quite an accomplishment for his age and educational background.

My mother grew up in rural Ireland. She had more education than Dad, about nine or ten years. Mom and Dad came to the States, met, married, and had three children. One died within the first year. Then I came along. My other brother, John, a year younger than I, was born with a slight mental retardation. He died fairly young, at age forty-one.

When I was three my parents decided to move back to Ireland. We settled in Toomebridge, County Antrim, a small rural village in Northern Ireland, where we lived for the next two years. That part of Ireland was a paradise for a kid. It was completely safe. Every morning Mom opened our front door and said, “Go outside and play.” All the kids’ mothers did. We played outside all day long. For lunch we ran to whichever house was closest and the mother there fed us. During the day we explored the countryside looking for bees’ nests and honey. We chased butterflies. A favorite game was to trick another kid into bending over and holding that posture, then to coax a billy goat into bumping the kid from behind. We returned home from our play after dark. I was very fortunate to experience such an idyllic upbringing.

Dad was kind but very tough. He taught me how to box when I was small. Once I punched him in the face and knocked out two of his teeth. The dentist said he needed to have a couple more out. Dad said, “Naw, just pull them all out now and be done with it.” The dentist pulled all his upper teeth, and Dad went home. Later that day at dinnertime he started chomping a regular meal just like that with his bloody gums. People like that don’t exist anymore.

My father had an incredible work ethic. When we moved back to Ireland Dad ran a small general store and a coal yard. Everybody thinks the Irish burned nothing but peat, but if people ever got a little money they burned coal. When we returned to Michigan my father worked for the Hudson Motor Car Company. He ran a freight elevator and did general maintenance in the factory. It was humble work but it sustained us throughout the Depression. He had automatic retirement at sixty-five, but he fought the policy and won. He worked there until the day he died, at age seventy-four.

As a teenager, I know I gave my parents a lot of worries. I misbehaved in school and lost credit, which I had to make up on Saturdays. School officials let me walk through graduation ceremonies but even on the day of graduation I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a real diploma or a blank. When they handed me my diploma I peeked inside. Fortunately, it was real. I graduated in 1939 from an inner city school in Detroit. They said the neighborhood was blighted, even back then, but we didn’t think it was that bad.

Right after I graduated I worked for a major department store in Detroit, doing parcel and furniture delivery. The job had a hierarchy: the parcel delivery guys were at the bottom, the appliance delivery guys were at the top. I worked my way up and wound up delivering pianos and extra-heavy appliances such as walk-in refrigerators.

It took quite a while for me to realize and appreciate my parents’ accomplishments—emigrating from a foreign country, then losing one child and having another child with special needs. They overcame these challenges and were able to give me a strong start. I think one of the most important lessons I learned from them was persistence, something my dad and mom both had. Persistence serves you well. Even if you don’t have major skills or education, if you keep at your goal and don’t swerve from that focus, you will succeed. Persistence is a tremendous quality, underestimated by most people, I would say.