We Who Are Alive and Remain (34 page)

As I worked, I found myself looking at the world differently, through the lens of World War II.

A new determination emerged. If the men of Easy Company could run up Currahee, I could certainly go for my morning jog without complaining as much as I usually did.

Challenges were seen in a new perspective. In December I went to a car auction and stood for two hours in the snow as each vehicle came to the block. As I stamped my feet to stay warm, I reminded myself I wasn’t in Bastogne with my feet wrapped in burlap bags.

I came to see soldiers as men willing to lay down their lives for the sake of others. They fight for themselves and the generation under immediate attack, but certainly they fight for the futures of free peoples. Decades beyond World War II, I am one who benefited. That I can vote in presidential elections and not bend my knee to Hirohito’s grandson is testament to the enduring work of the veterans of World War II. That I can write books for a living instead of sweating in a Third Reich factory is a product of Allied triumph.

What is my hope for my generation? As a whole, we’d probably admit casualness in our patriotism. Most friends I know view Memorial Day as little more than a good day for a barbecue. But I wish we might glimpse anew the freedom we’ve been handed. I wish we would read books about World War II and watch war movies and talk to veterans and rent rooms from them. I wish we’d pray that future generations will never be called upon to make the same sacrifices as those who gave up everything for the sake of freedom.

And I wish we would live as those who have been given much. That is what I take from men like Nate Miller, Buck Compton, and all the men of Easy Company featured in this book. They have given much so that we might live for what matters.

Memories of My Father

This is literally how it happened.

It was just before the release of the miniseries in 2001. My mom, in her early eighties, called me from Florida, where she lives and said, “Did you get that newspaper article that I sent you?”

“No, Mom,” I said. “What’s it all about?”

“Something about this HBO miniseries
Band of Brothers,
” she said. “I saw your father’s name mentioned in it.”

We chatted a bit more. I hung up the receiver, went to the mailbox, and found the envelope with the article in it, which I read and became intrigued. Immediately I went to the local cable company, rented a cable box, and plugged it into my television. As fate would have it, almost immediately when I turned it on, HBO was airing the second showing of the first two episodes of
Band of Brothers
.

I watched and was blown away. My dad had been depicted in the miniseries as an inept ne’er-do-well. My initial reaction was shock. Every kid envisions his father as a kind of Rambo, and I felt my father came across as anything but a hero.

I called my mom back, told her what I had seen, and asked her what she thought. She said, “I got the book and started to read it but couldn’t get beyond the first chapter—what they said about your father was just so much garbage.”

A short time later I posted a few short lines on the
Band of Brothers
Web site: “I’m the second of three sons of Captain Herbert Sobel. If anybody has any information about what really transpired, I’d be interested to find out.”

I was deluged with feedback. The input ranged all the way from “Your father was a chickenshit no-good motherf——” to “Everyone who had been in the service understood that your father’s role was not to win a popularity contest, but to harden these men for the combat that he knew was coming.” The opinions were diverse and far-ranging. I responded to them all. Initially I took some of the negative comments personally, but later, as I was able to speak to some of the men from Easy Company, I understood more where people got their ideas.

It wasn’t all a smooth ride. Shortly after the miniseries aired I got in touch with one of the chief attorneys at HBO, surprisingly with little difficulty. I said I wasn’t too thrilled with how my father had been portrayed, and I had gathered information that was contrary to what they had aired. The bottom line, said the attorney, is that “What’s done is done,” and when somebody is deceased, they’re fair game. He was cordial about it, mind you. Our decision as a family at that time was not to press the point or try to set the record straight. Although the negative portrayal hurt our family, we understand that Hollywood needs a fall guy. A while back [Easy Company historian] Jake Powers came to Maui, where I live. He and I sat down for several hours, and he had a plethora of good information as to what really happened.

I found it interesting that after the production the men and their immediate families were flown to various premieres and to Europe by HBO. The Sobel family was never communicated with. My mother is retired military. My older brother is retired military and has the same name as my father. I don’t know why we weren’t contacted. I guess that although the book was fundamentally sound, every Hollywood drama follows a format, and needs conflict to be successful. My dad was the obvious fall guy.

In 2002 I ended up as an impromptu guest speaker at the Easy Company reunion in Arizona. One of the men’s sons hugged me through tears, I can’t even tell you who it was, it was such an emotional time, and he said, “My father told me that if I ever had the honor of meeting you to let you know that it was because of your father that I’m alive today.” That was pretty much the sentiment of the men I had the honor to meet that day. I receive calls from men who served with my father and who praise him to this day.

On my behalf, there is no animosity toward Stephen Ambrose, HBO, or any of the men of Easy Company—none whatsoever. The way my father was portrayed is subject to personal interpretation. He was a drill instructor. I believe that the men understand what my father’s function was and how he operated.

Dad grew up in Chicago and attended the strong-disciplined Culver Military Academy in Indiana, where he did well on the high school swim team. He graduated from the University of Illinois. He was six feet tall, a slender build, and bore a striking resemblance to David Schwimmer, who portrayed him in the series.

My dad was home from the war and about thirty-five years old when I was born. He was nine years older than my mom, an American who had worked as a nurse in a hospital in Italy during the war. Later she worked at Hines VA Hospital in Chicago. They met there when Dad visited a fellow soldier who had been wounded. We had three boys in our family and a younger sister who died several days after birth.

My mother was blond-haired and blue-eyed, a very attractive woman. Her family was dirt farmers from South Dakota, German immigrants. She was Catholic but my father was Jewish. Dad’s parents were business-people from Chicago, part of the old aristocracy in many ways. Unknown to us when we were kids, his side of the family never really accepted my mom—I guess Jewish families then weren’t generally open to their sons marrying Catholic non-Jews. We didn’t know that until much later, but I’m sure it created tension between the parents. As kids we were raised Catholic. We attended Mass on a regular basis with my mom. My father attended sporadically. He also went to synagogue occasionally with his sister. There was never much discussion of faith and religion in the home.

As a child, on several occasions I asked my father about the war, but he never had anything to say about it. He could be very private when he chose. My mother told me later that he had never talked to her about the war either. He stayed in the reserves for many years, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

Dad was very conservative, very Republican, and never missed a day of work. Even when it wasn’t popular to drive an economy car, he had a little four-cylinder Metropolitan that he drove to the Chicago L station to ride the train to work. Dad worked as a credit manager for a wholesaler, A. C. McClurg & Co., in downtown Chicago, then for the Mathias Klein Company, which made tools for the telephone industry. Dad’s positions were midlevel. He wore a suit and clean, starched white-collar shirts. I don’t recall a single day when he was sick or stayed home.

Mom worked, too. Every morning Dad got up early and made breakfast for her. If it was the dead of winter he pulled Mom’s car up to the front of the house, cleared off the snow, and turned on the heater for her. Every night after work Dad had a cocktail with Mom and they chatted about the events of the day. We went to family gatherings, where Dad was always well liked and lively. He was a great dad—very loving and attentive. He doted on my mother and was very much in love with her. I never heard him use profanity or witnessed him losing his temper. He never raised a hand to us kids when we didn’t deserve it—and there were plenty of times we did deserve it and didn’t get it.

We lived in the same house where Dad had grown up as a kid. It was a large, redbrick house with a slate roof, the biggest house on the block, and all the neighborhood kids hung out at our house. On Sunday mornings Dad made pancakes, and there was always a place set for any of the neighborhood kids who straggled by. My father spent a lot of time with us boys playing sports, especially baseball. He always addressed us by the nicknames he had given us: I was Inky; my older brother was Footsie; my younger brother, Skookie.

This is funny: we couldn’t have been much older than four, five, and six years old. Every night if we had been good boys during the day, we had the honor of doing twenty minutes of calisthenics with my dad before bed, push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks. If we had been goofing off he wouldn’t allow us to do them. He was always in great physical shape and could bang out push-ups, no problem. (It’s odd that the series shows him struggling with push-ups.) As kids we did fifty to seventy-five pushups per night, and Dad did them right with us. It was a game, fun for us. I’m pushing age sixty today, and I can still hit tennis balls at a highly competitive level thanks to the strength and disciplines Dad developed in us as kids.

One incident where I was very appreciative of my father is this: as an eighth grader in Chicago it was cool to be a bit of a tough guy. Everybody was a greaser back then. I was kind of a cool kid and socialized with a lot of girls. At a Friday night dance a skinny kid came up and kicked me in the stomach. I crumbled to the floor, started crying, and was horribly embarrassed. So I told this kid I was going to get him.

Now, I might have fostered a tough-guy reputation, but I had never thrown a real punch in my life. It was January, bitterly cold. I followed the kid outside the dance, and he smacked me in the face. I threw him on the ground, pinned him, and hit him three times in a fury. Blood was drawn, so I got up and walked away.

First thing Monday morning I was called to the principal’s office. My dad was also called. He came in from downtown Chicago, about an hour away, for a closed-door meeting with the principal. I was expelled for three days. In those days that was a big deal.

After the meeting Dad and I walked home in the snow without saying a word. At home he asked me to explain the fight. When I was finished he said, “Okay, tonight we’re going to go to this kid’s house, you’re going to apologize to him, and I’m going to talk to his father.”

I remember this clearly—that evening as we walked to this kid’s house, my dad put his arm around my shoulder. He said, “Son—if you ever get into a fight, you want to win.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “You really cleaned that guy’s clock, didn’t you?” I assured him I had. He continued, “I never want it to happen again. But I’m glad you came out on top.” He left it at that—clear in his expectations of me, yet with pride in his voice, too.

We walked to the kid’s house. Dad talked to the father. I apologized. On the way home Dad put his arm around me again. This time we walked home in silence. I never got in another fight the rest of my life.

Dad was conservative in his savings and put money aside for all three of his sons to go to college. We were not wealthy, but my father made it known that second only to family, an education was imperative. It was the Vietnam War era. The relationship between my father and me became strained during those years. My younger brother was a diabetic, so he was exempt from the draft. My other brother got a low draft number and enlisted in the coast guard. I grew my hair down to my shoulders and went to Berkeley. I was quite at odds with my father politically, and I know that hurt him a lot. I was arrested for protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I know those years stressed our relationship quite a bit.

It’s tough to know how to tell this. After the Kent State massacre in 1970, I was attending college at Southern Illinois University. As a result of the killings there were student riots going on all over America. I had been involved in some political groups that were unpopular at the time and had decided to lay low for a while. It took the police three days to track down my whereabouts before being able to deliver a message that my father had attempted suicide and that I needed to call home.