We Who Are Alive and Remain (7 page)

On August 19, 1942, I didn’t go to work. I went back to the recruiting office and enlisted again, only this time I didn’t mention the car accident. I passed their physical. I don’t know if they lost my first records or what. It wasn’t like today, where they go to the computer. I don’t even remember having discharge papers the first time.

Everett Gray, Bill Dukeman, Pat Christenson, Dick Garrod, and I [five men who would become part of Easy Company] all joined the army in San Francisco on the same day. We met in the recruiting office. We weren’t from the same hometown or anything. Christenson and I were both from California, but I was from Richmond, while Christenson came from Oakland. The other two guys came from Keenesburg, Colorado. I don’t know where Garrod was from. Dukeman and Gray had been touring around on motorcycles, seeing the country. Their motorcycle broke down somewhere near San Francisco, so they decided to sell their motorbike and join the army.

They put us up in a hotel that first night with a bunch of other enlisted men. The next morning we all went back to the recruiting office. That’s where we found out about the Airborne. We were all interested. What were we thinking? Who knows? None of us knew anything about the Airborne, but hey, we were all strapping young guys, full of piss and vinegar, and—why not join the paratroopers?—this is something new! Could be the adventure of our lives! There was a General Wingate in the British army in Burma, related to me distantly—hell, we might end up there! I don’t think any of us four in the group thought we’d end up in Europe. We all thought
Jap.
Hell, we were all West Coast. We weren’t even thinking about Europe.

Pearl Harbor happened when I was still in high school. I was seventeen in December 1941. I played football the last two years of high school. Football season was over for the year by December, but we had a neighborhood scrimmage organized in a park. On that Sunday, it was probably one or two in the afternoon, I came home from playing football. My dad’s mother lived with us at the time, and when I came inside the front door, Grandma stood at top of stairs and said, “We’re at war.” I knew what she meant right away. The way she said it, very flatly, she was upset. She had had three sons in World War I.

As the radio reports came in, we found out more. I don’t think it dawned on me at that point—I was going to be eighteen in less than a year. I guess I realized I was going to be involved in the war sooner or later, but didn’t think too much about it.

Pearl Harbor pretty much rattled through our neighborhood. One of my aunt’s close friends had a son killed on the USS
Arizona
. Goslin was his last name. His name is on the monument there today. He was a young guy, very wealthy family, just out of Annapolis Naval Academy.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was on my way to work at Bethlehem Steel, where I was on the swing shift. When we heard the news we were all shocked. In those days we had no idea where Pearl Harbor was, the same way we had no idea where Normandy was. I guess we were peeved, too. We were burned up that we could be invaded. It was a new idea to us—that we could be brought down if the enemy tried hard enough.

Rod Strohl and Carl Fenstermaker (two other Easy Company members) and I had grown up together. We went through grade school and always hung around. I didn’t have to go to war because my job at the foundry meant I was exempt. But we just figured . . . well, if you go, I’ll go—that type of thing. We talked ourselves into it. I’m glad we did it.

As kids we didn’t have clubs to go to. You made your own entertainment then. We all seemed to get a car quite early—as soon as we turned sixteen. You could buy a fairly good car for seventy-five dollars back then. My first car was an old 1929 Whippet, rather small, a four-door, nothing fancy. Rod’s father was a car dealer, so he had it made. Carl’s father was a farmer and worked for a dairy as a truck driver. Carl and Rod and I went to a lot of parks and picnics and ran around with the girls. There were great musical programs that we went to, mostly Western hillbilly music. We enjoyed that a lot. It was a good, wholesome growing up.

When I enlisted, there was no opposition from my parents. They weren’t overjoyed about me going to war, of course, but they were very patriotic people. We enlisted early on, in 1942, so there wasn’t much reporting on deaths yet or anything. I’m sure they weren’t aware of what was coming. My parents and I always kept in touch during the war as best we could. Mail was slow. It took a week or two to get a letter, even longer to get a package. So it was hard to keep in touch, but we all tried hard.

Rod and Carl and I took a streetcar from Allentown to Philadelphia and were sworn in. We had our examination and got our clothing, then went on a steam train to a camp near Harrisburg. Along the way we picked up a few guys. Walter Gordon was one we met on the train. He lived in Mississippi. They had turned him down in Mississippi because of flat feet, so he came to Pennsylvania to enlist. He was a very good soldier. Traveling from Pennsylvania to Georgia, it was summertime, and we were in this dirty old train, quite small. A mainline train came through and we had to get off on a sideline somewhere to wait for it to pass.

I was minding my own business as a student at the University of Washington when suddenly we were in a world war with no apparent limitations. December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Many students quit university and signed up for various military branches. We faced the task of defeating Germany and Japan, the two powers who wanted to rule our world.

I was nineteen and decided to finish the school year. I was a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, so I figured I’d be going soon enough. In the Reserves we learned short-order drills, listened to lectures by old-time sergeants of the regular army, and marched. After graduation from college we were to become part of the army as officers.

July 1942, I volunteered anyway, although I wasn’t done with college yet. The sergeant in charge of the recruitment office told me to come back in a month. I went to see my parents at our home at Long Beach, Washington, a seaside resort town of beauty and calm. It was the last calm I saw for quite a while.

Vacation over, the recruiting sergeant sent me by truck to Fort Lewis, Washington. If felt strange to me—my father had enlisted at Fort Lewis for World War I.

On my first day in the army, they placed me on KP. The next day, the assembled draftees took an IQ test. After the test, an announcement was made asking the assembled soldiers if they would like to volunteer for an Airborne unit. If you qualified as a jumper, an extra fifty dollars per month was assured. I was the only volunteer out of probably two hundred, and many a strange look came my way.

The next day, my second as a member of the U.S. Army, I was again placed on KP.

Day three, they outfitted us in army uniforms, with shoes and overalls and everything.

Day four, I was on my way by train to the great state of Georgia, where Airborne men gathered. Never having been out of the states of Oregon or Washington, I enjoyed the cross-country travel—the Rockies, the plains, then finally the Deep South.

You’ve probably never heard this from a paratrooper, but when Pearl Harbor happened, I was recording the Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan just happened to be a favorite of mine—I forget which opera they were performing. We had a recording machine where you recorded music from the radio with a stylus. President Roosevelt came on and announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I recorded the announcement but lost it over the years. Boy, I wish I had that today.

At nineteen I worked in an electroplating plant. I was already the foreman. That’s not as glorious as it sounds—all the guys were going into the service, and I had become foreman only by elimination. We plated all the tools for Wright Air Force Base.

Right away my dad and I became air raid wardens in our neighborhood. Everybody just did what they could. I worked at the plant until I was almost twenty, but staying at home got to be too much. Everybody was going into the service. The attitude was that this was our country, and we had to go. I really wish that you could have felt the aura of that time. It was indescribable. The whole country was united. I just felt I had to enlist. My mother signed for me because Dad was at work.

Two buddies and I went to sign up in LA. As I walked down a hallway to join the air force as an aerial gunner, I noticed a table with all these sharp-looking guys around it with parachutes on their caps. A sign read, “Do you dare?” That was as far as we got. My buddies and I signed up for the paratroopers. In a short time we were headed down to Fort MacArthur.

After I graduated high school, some of us guys went down and enrolled in a vocational school in Norfolk. I took a machinist course. That’s where I first met Popeye Wynn.

Popeye and I finished the course and went to work in the shipyards in Portsmouth. We found out they were going to freeze everybody to their jobs on account of the war effort (we had just started in on Germany). I said to Popeye, “Now, we don’t want to get left out of this war. If we’re going to get into it, we’d better do it now.” So we both went over and signed up for the army paratroopers. When we came back to the shipyards and quit, the guy in charge really jumped on us. We were supposed to stay there and work on those ships, he said. He called a recruiter who said, “There ain’t nothing you can do about it. They signed the papers. They’re in the army now.”

So we left there together—Popeye and I. We went to a little camp in Virginia, where we got our uniforms and all our shots. We were there for a week. Then they sent us to Toccoa.

I graduated from high school in 1940, so I was in college in 1941. I was home in December and watching a football game when the bombing of Pearl Harbor was announced.

That February I left Ohio Northern and transferred to Hardin-Simmons. It was ten degrees below when I left Ohio. I wore a big old horse blanket around me when I left. When I got to Texas they were all in short-sleeved shirts.

Later that spring (1942) I enlisted, wanting to be a paratrooper. I enlisted in Dallas at the Mineral Springs Induction Center and was shipped to Toccoa, where they were just forming the 506th.

I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, then, when they attacked Pearl Harbor. I got in line to enlist. I wanted to get over there and fight. There was a long line of young guys looking to enlist. But they told me I was too young, so I had to wait.

Several times I tried to enlist, but they kept rejecting me, saying I had too much sugar in my urine. Around the third time they rejected me I said, “What in the hell do I need to do to get into the army?!”

The guy said, “You want to go that bad?”

I said, “Why in the hell do you think I keep coming here?!”

I had to wait until they finally drafted me. I went in December 31, 1943. I was eighteen. They came down the line pointing to us saying army, navy, army, navy, and that’s where we went. I wound up in the army.

We were living in Boise then. I was about fifteen at the time. I had a sister about ten years older than me who had two boys; the oldest was about seven. My folks and I were over at her house for dinner. I had taken my nephew over on my bike to Gowen Field to see the planes; it was only about a mile away. For some reason that day the B-26s were really flying around, lots more than usual—just taking off and landing. We headed home and heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio.

My brother, Lou, was seven years older than me. Everyone was worried about him having to go into the service. Nobody ever thought I’d have to go. My brother went into the air force. He went over to Spokane, then to Douglas, Arizona. In four years he never went anywhere except those two places. I was in the service for 20½ months and was in 9 foreign countries and a bunch of states. I really saw the world.

I think everybody remembers Pearl Harbor. I was a sophomore at A&M and had been to a movie that Sunday. When I came back the radios were all on, telling about Pearl Harbor. My first thought was that we were into it up to our necks. My second thought was Wow, well, here we go.

A&M was an ROTC college, so we were technically already in the army upon enrollment as university students. For the first two years you were required to be in the corps. Then you got a contract with the government to get a commission the last two years. Because of the extra training, we went to school year-round.

When we graduated they sent us to Camp Beauregard in Louisiana, then to Fort Sill for thirteen weeks of field artillery, where I went through OCS school to become an officer. From there I went to the 10th Armored Division.

What was my initial goal in the military? To get out! [laughs]. After it was explained to me what an S meant on my report (the poor grade I received for fighting with my battalion commander at A&M), I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere in the service. So it was a matter of putting in time. But I was gung ho to get overseas and get into the fighting.

I finished the eleventh grade, then got a job loading boats in the shipyards. I was making big money. I had every intention of returning to school, but by then all my buddies had gone to the service.

I tried to get into the navy with my cousin. They turned me down because they said I was color-blind. About two weeks later I went down to the post office and saw Uncle Sam pointing his finger at me saying, “I need you.” A paratrooper sign was over on the left and I said, “Now, that sounds exciting.”

So I went over to the recruiting sergeant and said, “I’ll join, but I don’t want the regular army, I want the paratroops, nothing else.”

He said, “That, I can’t assure you.”