We Who Are Alive and Remain (9 page)

Well, when the time for the big hike came along, Irish went to Sobel and said, “You have a car, I’d like to make the hike, but somebody needs to take your car to Benning, and I’d rather help you with your car.” Sobel had a newer-model Ford and agreed. Irish further volunteered to pack along any of the other officers’ valuables in the car. Other officers obliged.

The day of the hike came. Irish got in Sobel’s car. The rest of us started walking. We arrived in Benning, but Sobel’s car was nowhere to be seen. Sobel received a telegram saying the car’s transmission had broken down in Atlanta and that Irish needed a hundred dollars to get it fixed. Sobel sent the money, but the car still never arrived. Nor did Sherman Irish.

Months later, they caught him. He had sold all the officers’ items, including the wheels off Sobel’s car. Irish was court-martialed but was represented by some strong legal counsel evidently, because he was found not guilty on all charges. Irish came back to the outfit. I was there when he knocked on the company orderly room door (Sobel’s office). I think Sobel almost had an apoplexy. Sobel had him transferred out the same day.

After the parade in Atlanta we got on the trains to go to Fort Benning for parachute training, then to Camp Mackall, then to Fort Bragg for refitting. We still didn’t know where our destination was. When we went to Camp Shanks, New York, we had a pretty good idea we were going to Europe.

In my estimation, Captain Sobel was good for us. He was tough and very much a disciplinarian. As far as I’m concerned, Sobel was the one who made E Company tough.

You could get out of paratroopers anytime you wanted, or if they didn’t like you, they sent you out in a hurry. I never wanted to quit or even thought about quitting. I said, “If this guy can do it, then I can do it.” Some of these guys were city boys and not used to rough work, but we had been brought up with not the best living condition so we didn’t expect a heck of a lot more out of the army.

Everything was very competitive: between the companies, between the platoons, and definitely with the Japanese—that’s the reason we marched to Atlanta.

After jump training at Benning we went across the river to Camp Mackall, North Carolina. We did the same thing—lots of marches and runs, and more jumps, at least one a week. It was summer, hot and miserable. We had jiggers to contend with, the little bugs, but we still horsed around and were never too serious about anything. That’s what I remember most about the service: the good times, the camaraderie with the fellows. We’d pick on guys. One guy didn’t like creepy-crawly stuff, snakes, spiders or lizards, so we put lizards in his trunk and ammunition bag—always something like that. Floyd Talbert was often a target. Walter Gordon was brilliant and could think of more ways to tease a guy—he was usually one of the ringleaders. Paul Rogers was always making up songs about guys. If a fellow had a weakness, you wrote a song or a poem about him. The whole company seemed to blend together; it didn’t matter if you were the target of a joke or the one who made up the joke.

The first night at Toccoa I was put in a tent with another boy. They were still building Camp Toccoa then. Rain was pouring down, and water came right down through our tent, filling the floor. I said, “C’mon, let’s go into town. We’ll come back in the morning.”

He had been in ROTC in school and said, “No, we can’t do it. That would be AWOL.”

So we put all our stuff up on our cots and sat on the piles all night. We never did get any sleep.

The next day we started running Currahee. It didn’t bother me. On the first run—I’ll never forget it—they had ambulances waiting for you. If you couldn’t make it they picked you up, carried you down the hill, and you were discharged. That was the deal: you had to have the stamina to stay in and run it. Either that or find something else to do.

Once, we were on a forced march going up a hill. James Alley and I were marching together. He said, “Let’s sit down on this log, wait here, and catch the company as they come back down.”

That sounded like a good idea to me. (It’s a wonder we weren’t washed out for doing this.) We were sitting there just having a good old time when along comes Major William Boyle (of the 517th). He said, “What are you boys doing sitting over there?” We shrugged and tried to answer the best we knew how. He said, “Nothing doing. Fall in behind me!”

We fell in behind Boyle. He took off up the hill faster than I’ve ever seen—boy, he was really putting us to it. We weren’t marching now, we were running. On the way up the hill we passed our company coming down. We got some funny looks, that’s for sure. We went to the top of the hill, turned around, and ran back down. We passed through the company and kept running straight by. We kept running and ran up another hill. Then another. Finally we looped around and joined up with the end of our company. The major said, “You boys can fall out now, but don’t let me ever catch you doing that again.”

Later, Lieutenant Dick Winters asked us why we were running behind Major Boyle. We told him. Winters sort of smiled and said, “I bet you boys didn’t know Major Boyle was a cross-country runner.”

On the march to Atlanta a little dog started following us. He had no collar or identification and must have been a stray, for he kept up with us for several miles. Finally we noticed he was limping. I picked him up and saw that his toenails were worn to the quick and the pads on his paws were sore. I told my buddies, “If y’all will take the stuff in my backpack, I’ll put that dog in my backpack and carry him.” So they did. The dog rode to Atlanta on my back and on to Fort Benning. We named him Draftee. He became our mascot. He was a pretty cute old thing. At Benning, a bunch of nurses had just transferred in. They took one look at him and said, “We’ll take care of him.” So we gave Draftee to the nurses.

Along with the dog, I carried my machine gun for the whole march. Some guys traded off the heavier weapons, but I figured I had been issued that weapon and might have to use it someday. So I needed to keep my hand on it.

At Benning we had four day jumps and one night jump. On the first round of jumps, the pilot turned on the green light for us to jump, but the jumpmaster wouldn’t let us jump. We wanted to know why. He said, “Well, if you jump now you’ll land in the Chattahoochee River.” We had to make another circle, come around, and line up for the drop zone again.

One man ahead of me got in the door and froze. I had my foot on his butt but couldn’t push him out, he was wedged against the door so tight. Other guys tried to push him out. Finally the jumpmaster pushed him out of the way and I jumped. The man went back to Benning, but I don’t think he ever made paratrooper.

A lot of guys didn’t make the training. When I jumped I was scared. I don’t know about everybody else, but I was scared every time I jumped. I had never been in an airplane before that. Down on the farm, I had no reason to go anywhere on a plane. So I was always on the leery side of that. I figured the good Lord was taking care of me, so I let it go.

A large group of tents had been set up called W Company. We called it Cow Company. That was one area you didn’t want to be in. Sometimes guys went there for a few days before training, but mostly W Company was for the guys who couldn’t make it. The W stood for “washed out.”

Right away, one guy did something wrong—I don’t know what, maybe blew his nose the wrong way—and they put him in front of the whole regiment with his barracks bag. Drums rolled and they stripped the stuff off his uniform. It was real shameful. A lot of guys got kicked out from then on—it wasn’t always as public as that. Guys washed out for not being able to do the physical training, for breaking rules, or if they just flat-out quit.

I should mention that the first day at Toccoa I met Ed Pepping, who also became a medic. He’s proven to be a great friend over the years. That first day, Ed and I and a couple other guys decided to jump off those thirty-four-foot training towers, just to see if we could do it. We didn’t want to be chicken the next day if they asked us to jump. So we jumped. We didn’t have harnesses or anything. That was a long way down. It’s a wonder we didn’t get hurt.

It’s true, as a company we were pretty high-charge guys. We finished training at Toccoa and went to Benning. The first week of Benning was supposed to be all physical training. But we had had so much of that already, it was all duck soup for us. Right away the training sergeant told us to run five miles. I was on point, leading the group, and I stepped up the pace, which meant the sergeant had to step it up, too. We ran for some time. Then I said, “Aw, this is too slow,” and took it up another notch. All the guys just laughed. We could see the sergeant starting to fume. Then I yelled, “About face!” and we all ran backward for a while. Boy, did that infuriate the sergeant.

“Two more miles for that!” he called.

That was just what we wanted, ’cause he had to run two more miles with us. A seven-mile run was nothing to us. Hey, a run on flat ground [laughs]—that was practically like going to sleep for us. We could run on flat ground all day.

One medic, Phil Campezi, was a bodybuilder who hated to run because he thought it slimmed his physique too much. But Phil could do push-ups forever. During the first week at Benning a sergeant told Phil to crank out a hundred push-ups, which was pretty standard. Phil said, “You’ll have to be more specific.”

The sergeant snapped, “What do you mean, ‘
more specific
’?”

“Well, do you want me to do them with my left hand or my right hand?” Phil said.

“All right, wiseguy,” said the sergeant. “Do a hundred with each.” Phil cranked them out—a hundred one-arm pushups with his left, then a hundred one-arm pushups with his right. When he was done, he turned to me. “Al, get on my back,” he said. Phil did a hundred more pushups with me on his back. I bet he could have done a thousand.

Phil’s arms got broken in a glider accident in Holland. That was the last time I saw him. He was a great guy.

It’s true, medics were a bit of a breed of their own. One time we were at a party. When I came back it was late evening. I walked into the dispensary and saw two medics—Captains Shifty Filer and Buck Ryan. Ryan was sitting in a dental chair. “What’s going on?” I said. “Why are you pulling his tooth at this time of night?”

Shifty, the regimental dentist, answered, “Well, we have this deal. I’m going to pull one of Buck’s teeth and he gets to pull one of mine.” They had both been drinking pretty heavily. Buck nodded. (There was nothing wrong with their teeth.) I convinced them they might want to wait until morning.

A guy found a bobcat and brought it to camp, planning to put paratrooper boots on him. Some guys built a chicken-wire cage for the bobcat, big enough to get a couple of guys in it. Well, they called some medics over to give ether to the cat to put him to sleep so they could get the boots on. The cat looked pretty calm, the guys were talking to him all nicely, so me and a couple guys went into the cage. Boy, suddenly that cat came to life—claws all over the place. The other two guys slipped out quick but for some reason I had more difficulty reaching the door. I swear—there were nine cats in there with me all at once.

We were able to get that cat calmed down and put boots on him. Later we made a jump with him. That wasn’t uncommon; we made jumps with a lot of things—bobcats, stray dogs, souvenirs. Once a Red Cross girl made a jump with us. I don’t know how she slipped in there.

We created a makeshift operating center out of tent material and headlights. It was all enclosed. The idea was to simulate the medical conditions we’d encounter under combat. Different men were designated as casualties and given various wounds for us to treat. Captain Gross was a big, burly guy with a mustache. We put him under, put his arm in a cast, and shaved off half his mustache. Well, he was going to get married that same afternoon. Boy, you talk about one mad guy when he came to. He wasn’t putting up with any of this. He pounded his arm on a truck, trying to break the cast. But his fiancée was tickled pink because he needed to shave the rest of his mustache off. She had never liked it much to begin with.

It wasn’t all crazy stuff. We did some good, too. The Deep South—that was tough country in the 1940s. You got outside of the base and were able to observe families who lived in the area. The kids were cute as all get-out but the parents all looked much older than they really were. One of my jobs was to make medical checks in the community, checking to see if the water was safe to drink.

The war was right around the corner. Once while making a training jump, my musette bag came loose, smacked my head, and knocked me out cold. The bag had all my medical equipment in it—it was pretty heavy. I came to as I hit the ground. The sunlight was just catching the white silk of my chute, and some tall grass was brushing my face. In that instant I thought I was in heaven.

I signed up in LA and was sent to Fort MacArthur in California, then got on an old coal-burning train cross-country to Georgia. From the moment we signed up as paratroopers we considered ourselves elite.

I met Al Mampre one of the first days at Toccoa. He was a real sharp guy with a good sense of humor. We were instant friends and have been friends ever since. We both became medics.

We ran Currahee more than a hundred times—sometimes just for fun. We ran Currahee in 110-degree heat. Sometimes it was so cold there was frost on the rocks. Rain exposed the rocks on the dirt trail and made it very difficult to run. We had guys who fell and broke an arm or leg. We hopped over them and kept going. Course, that guy was washed out.

We were so gung ho to jump—one of our early jobs was to put mattresses on all the beds. A warehouse nearby had beams across the ceiling. We piled the mattresses on the floor, climbed to the top of the beams, and jumped off into the pile of mattresses. I used to be six-foot-one, but I think all those jumps shorted me up. I’m about five-foot-ten now.