Easy Company Soldier (17 page)

Why Winters didn't bust that corporal on the spot is beyond me. Sure, it might sound like a little thing, but in war, screwing up the little things could cost lives.

We moved into position. I selected an area in the ditch and, as instructed, took a machete and cut branches and reed grass to build the blind so I'd have visibility across the Rhine. Bain, who'd been lugging the radio on his back, and Jackson rested in a ditch as we waited for first light. In the quiet and cool of dawn, I whispered a quick prayer, then found myself leaning on William Ernest Henley, the poet I took to war, and his reassuring “Invictus”:

What was that? Something on the skyline, about seventy yards up the ditch. I'd hardly got adjusted in the blind, facing east and waiting for first light, when I detected some movement. I kicked Jackson, who was behind me, and whispered to him about something moving in the ditch. He, in turn, alerted Bain. I switched the safety off my tommy gun and got behind an orchard tree on the edge of the ditch.

There was the movement again: a head bobbing up and down. I challenged him with our password. No response.
I fingered the trigger. But given what had happened to Heyliger the other night, I held back. Wrong choice on my part. A German police dog, a Doberman pinscher, was suddenly sniffing the barrel of my gun.
Shoot the dog pronto.
I remembered that lesson from somewhere back in training, but for some reason, I didn't.

I challenged the soldier again. Then, in the murky darkness, I heard a frightened shout: “Me friend!” Something was being waved. Something white.

“Jackson,” I said. “Move up the ditch and be ready to fire. I'll use the tommy gun if there's trouble.”

He scurried up the ditch, then turned his head. “Eight krauts, Malark.” Eight krauts who wouldn't be here if our outpost hadn't left its position, leaving us wide-open. I popped up, saw them, and with my tommy gun kept them covered while Jackson searched for weapons. Suddenly, I saw him deck a soldier with the butt of his rifle.

“The hell you doing, Jackson?” I said.

“SOB was hiding a P38.”

“Bain, get up here,” I yelled, fearing trouble.

The German patrol was scared stiff, begging for mercy, thinking we were going to kill them. Thinking, apparently, that more troops were nearby and missing the truth—that we were more than a mile from the rest of our outfit. These guys could have taken us in about two seconds. Instead, they'd dropped their arms in a ditch and surrendered.

Bain scurried up to my side. I didn't like this situation. Eight prisoners and a full day of light ahead of us in open country. It spelled danger for us. Maybe we'd need to hold them until dark.

“Get Winters on the radio and find out what he wants us to do,” I said.

Winters wanted them back for interrogation. Now.
Great.
We wanted to live to see another day, but an order is an order. We had about six hundred yards of flat grazing land to traverse, most of which would be in full view of German forces on the north side of the Rhine. We lined up the prisoners, facing the dike, with Bain on the right flank, Jackson on the left, and me following with the tommy gun.

I'd already made up my mind: If we got into serious trouble, I'd have to kill all eight. I had Jackson mount his bayonet to further convince them that we didn't want any funny stuff. I hardly knew any German but thought
mach schnell
meant “run fast.” It worked. I shouted like hell and pointed to the dike. We scrammed out of the ditch running at a full gallop, dog included.

I thought Bain, lugging the radio, would have a heart attack. Then I remembered Currahee, how he used to charge up that mountain with ease. Still, any moment I expected machine-gun fire. Nope. We got them to the dike, well out of effective gun range. As we had them clamber up the side of a cobblestone dike, the Germans' hobnailed boots pounded on the stone. So much for keeping quiet. I ran to the front so our outposts would spot me, not that I had supreme confidence in our out-front folks after their bonehead move earlier that day. I just wanted them to know it wasn't all Germans. I'd already seen enough of our men confused with the enemy; I didn't want the three of us to join the ranks—and we didn't. We got the prisoners to Division without incident.

By now it was late October and we'd been in this soggy, and sometimes deadly, game of cat and mouse amid the dikes of
Holland for nearly six weeks. War wasn't like a salmon-seining job, where you knew when the whistle would go off to say “stop for now.” War was more like musical chairs; you knew, ultimately, it had to end. You just didn't know when, where, and, at times,
if,
a possibility that seemed to be increasing as early November arrived.

We stayed in an old farmhouse surrounded by lots of elm trees. From time to time, we'd send patrols to outposts in the woods. One night, Winters wanted Bain, Jackson, and me to go into the woods for a good part of the night to see if we could detect any German movement on the railroad. We did so, keeping as quiet as three soldiers can be. Suddenly, mortar shells started hitting in the nearby elm trees. The radio squawked.

“What's going on?” said Winters.

“Mortars,” I said.

“Get back here now, Malark. No fooling around.”

After talking it over, we were almost sure the Germans had planted some sort of sophisticated listening device that had picked up the sound of us. There's no other way they could have known we were there.

Finally, the music stopped in Holland—and I still had a chair. The Dutch cheered us as we left Holland for France, yelling, “September seventeenth! September seventeenth!” to remind us of the day they'd been liberated. It felt good to be so appreciated, but we didn't feel like we'd won a damn thing. What was supposed to be a short mission turned into more than two months. We'd jumped that day in September with 154 men. A third were either dead or wounded. My friend Joe Toye, hit in Normandy, had been wounded for a second time.

About the only medals given to Easy Company guys in this
campaign were Purple Hearts, hard to understand given that we had been fighting for seventy days. In retrospect, it was the waste of a top division; I didn't have much respect for the British general Montgomery. He'd kept the 101st and 82nd in Holland far too long. When it was over, Dick Winters came to me and asked if I had anyone in the platoon to recommend for a medal. Seems the British felt they should be issuing some medals to the 101st. I believe he was fishing for me to nominate myself, and frankly I thought maybe I should.

“No, sir,” I said. “Nobody.”

When Easy Company, half-asleep in a convoy of trucks after a fourteen-hour ride, rumbled into Mourmelon-le-Grand, France, I was too damn tired to think about anything other than a shower and something soft to sleep on. Only later would I realize that I was in a place not far from where my uncle Gerald had died twenty-six years before. Château-Thierry was just next door.

Camp Mourmelon, outside the village of Mourmelon-le-Grand, near Reims, was full of history. Julius Caesar and his Roman legions had been here nearly two thousand years before. Beyond the camp, you could see remnants of World War I: the artillery craters and trenches and the churches, many featuring ornate memorials for those who had died in these fields.

Strange how history repeats. My uncles, Gerald and Bob, had fought in the “war to end all wars”; a lot of Easy Company guys' dads and uncles had done the same thing. A quarter century later, here we were, back at it. The wars don't end; the ones fighting them “end.” I didn't want to wind up like my uncles. In fact, somewhere deep down, I think I was on a quiet crusade to show them I could make it, not to somehow shame them for
not
making it. No, it was almost as if they were with me in all this, and my making it would say, Look, we, the Malarkey boys,
we
made it.

Not that a sense of history hit home with most of the 506th. For most soldiers, in late November 1944, this place was just the next holdover camp before our next fight, probably a jump into Germany in the spring, we'd heard. Replacement soldiers were now sprinkled among us, wide-eyed kids either craving—or scared to death of facing—combat. They were only a couple of years younger than us but, in some ways, boys among men, given what we'd seen since June. We also got some of the wounded back, among them Joe Liebgott, Bill Guarnere, Thomas McCreary, and my pal Buck Compton, whose butt was on the mend.

“Hey, Malark, thanks for the barn-door ride back in Holland,” he said.

“Now, aren't you glad we didn't leave you?” I said. “There's talk of New Year's Eve in Paris.” Compton's eyes lit up. So did mine.

We turned in our uniforms, which, after the rain of Holland, hung on us like damp moss. Got paid, finally. Spiffed up the camp, removing all the propaganda that the Germans had slapped up while they were stationed here during their occupation of France. Did some light drills. And though I wasn't among them, practiced for the Champagne Bowl, a
football game that was to be played Christmas Day. The food was light-years better than whatever that was in Holland.

On my way out of the mess hall one night, I stumbled on what looked like a good craps game, a good sign just after payday. I stopped and watched while a hot shooter piled up huge winnings. Hell, I thought, he can't continue to throw passes like that, so I started fading the shooter—covering his bets. So much for that idea; in a few minutes, I was flat broke, an uncommon condition for a guy who usually cleans up.
You idiot, Malarkey, how stupid of you to blow all your money without even shooting the dice!

I stopped by to see Skip, by now a noncom like me, in the house we sergeants were staying in. A dice game was going on.

“Wanna go gamble?” I asked

“I'm tired of being broke all the time, Malark.”

I felt bad for the guy. While I was sending money home to my mom, he'd been sending his money home for a nest egg for him and Faye Tanner after the war. After paying off some debts, he had only $60 left. I
knew
I could win us some loot with that. Never mind that I'd just lost $60 faster than Burr Smith could load an M1. Never mind that Skip had just mentioned that that was all the money he had. Remember, I was the guy who'd raced out into that open field in Normandy, dancing amid bullets, to get a Luger that I never even got. In other words, prone to risk everything on some cockeyed idea.

“Skip, loan me your dough and I'll triple it for us both,” I said with typical Malarkey bluntness.

Muck looked at me and frowned, then shook his head and smiled that wonderful Skip Muck smile. He either had a loose screw or lots of faith in me, because he then stuffed three $20 bills in my hand and said, “There ya go, Mai. Go win us some big bucks.”

Woodrow Robbins, who had a professional gambling background, was in the game. Within fifteen minutes, Robbins and I had all the money from the other five or six players.

“Hey, Malark, let's go to the NCO club and try our luck,” he said.

We did. I started out hot and stayed hot, gathering in dollars, pounds, and francs as if they were chinook, coho, and sockeye in those Columbia River seining nets. I got up to $3,000 in earnings, then $5,000. I was half-afraid to walk out of the club, thinking I'd get jumped. I returned to the barracks.

“Here's your sixty dollars, Skip,” I said. “Thanks for the loan.”

“Any time, Malark. How'd you do?”

“Well, put it this way: Here's your tip.” I peeled off $500 for him.

His eyes bulged. “Are you kidding me? Hell, with this Faye and I can honeymoon in the Poconos for a
month!”

I slapped him on the back and headed for my bunk to get some shut-eye. Things were looking up. Our stock of champagne from nearby Reims was up to twenty-five quarts. The war was going well. The German Luftwaffe had all but been destroyed, meaning no blackout conditions were in place. We were going to be spending Christmas in a camp with hot showers and food far better than what we'd just left. Maybe New Year's in Paris. Other than being home, what more could a guy ask for?

The knock on the door came in the middle of the night of December 18. That knock opened the door to the worst misery of my life. When you think about it, that knock has
haunted me for more than six decades. A knock I wished to God would never have come.

I rolled over and looked at my watch: 2:00 a.m. What the hell was going on? The other sergeants in our barracks rubbed faces, stretched arms, tried to shake off hangovers. It was some yokel from division headquarters.

“Get ready to head out. A major German offensive is under way somewhere in Belgium. Caught us with our pants down. Already put a helluva dent in our line. So pile all your personal items in the middle of the living room and report to company supply to get whatever you can in terms of equipment.”

Nobody said much of anything or started scurrying around.

“Now!”

“OK, OK,” we mumbled.

Later that day, we formed into platoon and company formation to check ranks and weaponry. “Pants down” is right. Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor was back in the States, at a conference; he'd been replaced by Brig. Gen. Anthony C. “Tony” McAuliffe. We'd turned in all our gear for repairs after Holland, and little of it had been fixed. We were short on guns; hell, we'd been training replacements with broomsticks. We weren't prepared to go fight anywhere at this point, much less someplace cold.