Easy Company Soldier (24 page)

Allied forces were pushing deeper into Germany. On April 2, we were trucked to the west side of the Rhine River
to act as blocking backs for any major escape attempts out of the Ruhr region. We were positioned in various villages, watching with interest as German citizens worked on their war-damaged properties rather than flee.

In a village named Dormagen, Lt. Harry Welsh was looking for someone to check on a factory on the Rhine where it was rumored German soldiers might be holed up. I said I'd go. I went out with a rifleman, Ralph Orth, about noon. We worked our way through the large building, finding nobody. On the way out, we were walking through the yard area. At times like this, you couldn't help thinking, after surviving all the tough stuff, if your number would come up on something simple like this. As I'd written Bernice, “I'm a fugitive from the law of averages, which isn't good.”

“Hey, Orth,” I asked. “How long's it been since you fired that rifle?”

“I dunno, Sarge. A long time, I guess.”

I pointed to a stack of railroad rails about fifty yards away.

“Why don't you fire into that stack?”

He aimed and fired, then immediately yelled, “I'm hit!” and crumbled to the ground. What the hell? At first I thought he was joking, then we realized he'd been hit by a fragment of his own bullet that had hit a steel rail and ricocheted. It had penetrated his kneecap.

“Thanks, Sarge,” he said, his look of fear suddenly replaced by a smile. “You just earned me a ticket home.”

Our life now was not day-to-day combat, but mop-up duty. Patrols here and there to check for enemy soldiers holed up in various places. “Remember this,” Speirs once told us. “No prisoners. Shoot 'em all.”

One night, we crossed the Rhine to check for krauts in some building and, finding none, were returning when
machine-gun fire hailed down on us. We were still about fifty feet from the shore. It was a mad rush for the bank but none of us got hit.

In some ways, as the strength of the real enemy diminished, another enemy rose up: ourselves. Sometimes it was serious, some guy getting drunk and killing another guy, other times just some alcohol-fueled high jinks, like the night I showed up at the company headquarters soaking wet from having jumped into the Rhine in the middle of the night, fueled by the strangest booze I've ever had.

They told me it was schnapps. It turned out to be wood alcohol, probably 200 proof, and it locked up my respiratory system like a frozen block on a pickup. I couldn't breathe. I started flailing my arms in anguish, which only heightened the laughter from the guys around me. But Floyd Talbert realized I was in trouble. He threw me down on a cot and jumped on my chest. My breathing started again. Once recovered, I picked up a bottle of the stuff, poured it in an ashtray, and dropped a match in it. The flames leapt into the air like a homecoming bonfire.

Several nights later, I was lying in my bunk and broke out into a deep sweat, followed by chills. Back and forth. Finally, our medic, Eugene Roe, came and took my temperature.

“We're gettin' you the hell out of here, Malark.”

“No, no, no. I'll be OK.”

Nobody in Easy had spent more consecutive days in combat than me. I didn't want the streak to end because I had a piddly case of the flu.

“I'm getting Speirs,” said Roe.

“Roe, I'm—”

“Shut up, Malark. You're sick.”

He got Captain Speirs, who did a quick assessment and
ordered me to a hospital. “We're pulling out in the morning, Malark. You're not fit to come. Get well and rejoin us for the victory celebration in Hitler's place in the mountains.”

An ambulance took me to a field hospital, where I hazily recall several doctors standing over me, bright lights in my face, and hearing talk about some strain of Rhine River malaria.

The next day, I was sent to an army hospital at the University of Liège in Belgium. It was there, in Liège, that the German drive to Antwerp had stalled. I was assigned a bed abutting a windowed outside wall, directly across from a platoon sergeant from the 28th Division. The guy had been here since the Bulge, when he'd frozen his feet off in the Ardennes Forest, and was in serious pain. Fourteen beds lined each side of the room.

In the days to come, I made the weirdest discovery: Except for the sarge across from me, nobody there was really sick. And the doctors and nurses seemed to be playing right along with the script. The patients would kid around like guys on some fraternity porch, then someone would whistle, and everyone would hop back in his bed. As the door opened, they'd paste these poor-me looks on their faces. In would walk some major from the medical staff, going from bed to bed, listening to the wildest stories of woe imaginable. And with apparent sympathy. What kind of Mickey Mouse outfit was this?

Finally, the doctor reached my bed, looked at my chart, and asked how I felt.

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever I had must have broken in the time I was being shuttled here from the Rhine.”

“According to this chart, Sergeant Malarkey, what you have is more serious than you might think.”

I shrugged. “All I can tell you is I feel fine. I'd like to get
back to my company.” He looked at me with furrowed brow and moved on. This went on for days—the well people acting sick and me telling the major that I was well and ready to get out of this place.

“Sergeant, why do you want out of here?”

I couldn't stand it anymore. “Because someone's gotta fight the friggin' war!” I said.

Just when I didn't think his brow could furrow any further, it did. “Are you—are you
serious}”

“Damn right I'm serious.”

Guy thought I was nuts. “You
want back
out there?”

This went on for ten days. It was as if I were trapped in some freakish theater comedy. But it would have been funnier had it not been sickening; these were a bunch of yellow-bellied cowards turning their backs on the country they'd promised to serve.

Next day, I was told the doctor wanted me on an upper-floor lab. He wanted to give me something called sodium pentothal, as part of an examination.

“What the hell is that stuff?” I asked.

“It's a drug that'll relax you and help you describe your feelings.”

I wanted to tell him that I was quite capable of describing my feelings without his shooting me full of that crap. Like this:
I feel like I'd like to punch you in your furrowed-brow face and leave this loony bin forever.

He offered me an afternoon pass into Liège. “Walk around, get some fresh air, Sergeant Malarkey, and let's see how you get along,” he said.

I thought about just bolting, but figured going AWOL this late in the game wasn't a good idea. I got along just fine and returned, ready to pack and leave.

“Wait, wouldn't you want to donate some blood for us?” the doctor said. “We could use a pint.”

“You can get all the blood you need from these crybabies around me,” I said.

And I left, knowing that the guys in Easy would never believe this one. When I walked out of that hospital, I felt freer than I had felt since the night I'd sat around that campfire on the Nehalem River before leaving for the army.

When the war in Europe ended, I was in a pub in Venders, Belgium. All by myself. Trying to figure out how in the hell I was going to find my division. I had come to Verviers because I knew that an army transient facility there helped soldiers get reconnected to their units.

After Bastogne, the Belgians would see that eagle on my shoulder and buy me drinks on the spot, so I was enjoying some of that hospitality in a sidewalk pub on the town's main street when it happened: Out of nowhere, the church bells started ringing. Then I heard some shouts.

“It's over!” people started yelling in all sorts of languages, including some in broken English. “The war is over! The Germans have surrendered!”

I hoisted my mug in the air. Others did the same. This was a country the Germans had goose-stepped into in 1940 and basically said,
You are now under our rule.
Except for a few months after the original Allied sweep toward Germany, they hadn't known freedom for nearly twice the time I'd been in the service. They'd lost sons in battle. Lost civilians who got caught in the cross fire of war. People were hugging each other. Kissing each other. Dancing.

Belgians. Americans. Brits. Canadians. All wrapped together
in a sort of frenzied celebration born of pain and loss and a million memories we all wanted to forget but knew we never would.

Only one thing was missing: Easy Company. My band of brothers. As much fun as I was having with the locals, it wasn't quite the same without a connection to those guys whom I'd been with since Toccoa. You could look in those guys' eyes and, without saying a word, feel a connection I'd never felt before or would ever feel again. As if our strength hadn't come from being Don, Skip, Joe, Bill, Frank, Burr, Gordon, and the rest, but from being one single unit. Not perfect; hell, far from it. But absolutely committed to one another amid our imperfection. And to doing whatever it took to win this war.

Shortly after, as if I'd had a prayer answered, I looked through the window and saw him: Frank Perconte, a 1st Platooner in Easy Company, a good-looking Italian from Chicago. I'd last seen him in the snow of Bastogne, bleeding badly from the neck, not thinking he was going to make it.

“Malark!”

“Perconte, you old son of a—”

“Let me buy you a drink, or a dozen!”

“I wasn't sure you'd even made it,” I said. “You OK?”

“Just a scratch.”

Turns out he was headed back to rejoin the company after recovering in England. Somehow, just having one Easy Company guy there made all the difference. And the day only got better when a trolley rolled up out front and there, perched on top, was someone familiar to us both: Burr Smith. He, too, was returning after a wound at Bastogne.

The three of us locked arms around each other.

“This is it, boys,” said Smith. “We're going home!”

Home was never quite as close as we'd think. After we'd caught up with Easy Company in Saalfelden, Austria, in mid-May, all of us were packing our bags and heading for the nearest ship back to the States—at least in our minds. But then you'd start hearing the name of a place that none of us had given much thought to.

Japan. War in Europe was over, yes, but many in the 101st might be shipped to the Pacific. There was talk of an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Your future depended on your “points,” which were based on months of active duty, campaigns, medals, and whether you were married. I was five or ten short from a ticket home. Where was Bernice when I needed her?

I'd written her in May, when hearing that those going to
the Pacific would get twenty-one days of leave in the States before shipping out. “For twenty-one glorious days we'll make up for the almost three years of heartache and loneliness,” I wrote. I wanted to marry her as soon as possible. “Perhaps,” I wrote, “it would be wiser to wait till the war is over and I have some sort of a decent job, but I don't know if it pays to be wise.”

By the time Perconte, and Smith, and I rejoined the guys, the division had captured Hitler's famed Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, Germany. Yeah, we'd missed that fun, including Hitler's private wine cellar, but plenty of good times were still to be had.

After Saalfelden, we moved on to Kaprun, Austria, where we were housed in knotty-pine duplexes, formerly occupied by German engineers. The city of Zell am See, between Kaprun and Saalfelden, was a jewel nestled in the Alps. There, we swam, boated, and simply soaked in the kind of warmth that, in Bastogne, I'd forgotten existed.

We were no longer a combat outfit but an occupation force. To the winner goes the spoils—so goes the saying, and so went Easy Company. First to reach Hitler's much ballyhooed Eagle's Nest perch high in the Alps, my buddies had cashed in big-time with souvenirs, and also ransacked the personal train of Hermann Goring, the Nazi's second-in-command. Most of the good stuff was gone by the time I arrived, but I still found ways to get some wonderful mementos.

Few were more ambitious with souvenirs than Alton More, the guy who'd somehow found a way to get that motorcycle and sidecar on the LST back in Normandy. He had come out of the Eagle's Nest with two of Hitler's picture albums showing him meeting with foreign delegations. One
of the privates in the platoon came after me one day, telling me of a confrontation between More and a company officer who was demanding the albums. Alton threatened the officer, who in turn threatened a court-martial. I went to Winters at Battalion to defend More.

Winters listened, then said, “Come with me, Don.” He took me down to his jeep driver and said to him, “Take Sergeant Malarkey back to his quarters and return with Private More and all his gear.” Somehow, this didn't seem right; More hadn't done anything wrong. But Winters, as always, was one step ahead of us. He made More his personal jeep driver, a sort of shot across the bow to the company officer.

More was always thinking. After his new assignment, he took the jeep to Saalfelden, where he had a shoemaker turn one of the seat cushions into a carrying case for his albums. He carried it with him at all times.

Meanwhile, Don Moone, in the interest of being well fed, became a waiter in the officers' mess. And, more important, kept his ears wide-open when he was serving the brass so he could pick up all the latest information on what Easy Company's future held. Moone heard that if you were going to Japan, you'd get a thirty-day furlough in the States, then would have to report back for duty.

Not me. I'd all but made up my mind. If that was the case, I was going to go home, period. If the army wanted me in Japan, they'd have to come get me. And I wouldn't tell them which bend in the Nehalem River I'd be fishing. I'd seen enough war. Not to brag, but when I got sent to that hospital in Liège, it ended the longest streak of consecutive days of combat of anyone in the company, 177 days. I'd given enough, seen enough, and left my best friend buried back in Belgium, in pieces. I was through with war. I wanted to go
home and marry Bernice. But I wasn't sure she wanted to marry me.