A Company of Heroes

> Seven decades ago, we were all so young.

Full of piss and vinegar as they say, ready for the great crusade which lay ahead of us.

We were out for payback because of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

Some far off place many of us have never even heard of, prior to December 7th 1941.

When I finished off that school year and enlisted in the army in 1942.

August of 42, I ended up in Taccoa, Georgia.

> Most of us were still teenagers with nicknames likes Burr, Popeye, Buck, Moonbeam, Smokey, Moose, Frenchy, Punchy, Hack, Red, Skinny and Moe.

We joined the fight from all over the country - California, Virginia, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.

We came from big cities and small towns.

We chose to become paratroopers because it was new and promised adventure.

The extra 50 bucks in our paychecks didn't hurt either.

When they pay you 100 dollars a month, to be a paratrooper, to jump behind the lines, that is blood money.

You earn it.

>I volunteered and sometimes the guys would start bitchin', and I said, you know, guys you volunteered, so it worked out.

We had a lot of good guys, a lot of them.

And I'll never forget it.

There was a new outfits coming on that was airborne and they needed people and then, anybody interested, they would sign them up and nobody said a word, then the guy says and you get 50 dollars a month extra, well about 20 hands went up, mine included.

Because 50 dollars in them days was a lot of money.

>I wanted to be a gunner and I was color blind and I thought I'd take that I wanted to get in combat I was afraid it would be over before I was ready before I could get in.

I was even scared of heights but I thought well, if they can do it, I can too.

I had no idea what a mortar was, I didn't have any idea about much of the things in the service.

Like they told me you're a mortar man and then they haul out this three-legged thing and taught you how to use it.

The worst part of that was carrying it.

>Many of my fellow Easy Company soldiers were good friends like Robert Van Klinken, who would never see America again.

And they still lie in peaceful cemeteries in Holland, France Belgium, Luxemburg.

> They're our heroes.

We're not heroes; they are.

We are survivors.

For those of us who did come home such as fellow E company veterans, Amos "Buck" Taylor.

There wasn't a day that went by that we didn't think about our friends who never enjoyed life after World War II.

For us old guys who are alive and remain, such as Ed Tipper, the bond we still share after all these years is unshakeable.

It's an unspoken thing that links the paratroopers of Easy Company.

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, a connection as firm today as it was on July 1st 1942 when company E second battalion of the 506 was formed in the oppressive heat and mosquito infested woods of Toccoa, Georgia.

>None of us as far as I know talked about the war at all until we were in our 60's and 70's and the reason we didn't was that war is so horrible that unless you have actually been in it there is no point in even trying to talk to somebody and explain it to them.

Fellow soldiers like Lynn "Buck" Compton and millions of other Americans were just doing our part on WWII, doing a job for our country but in combat we mostly fought for those fellow paratroopers alongside us.

The men we could always count on when the fight became fierce, especially in far off land with names that have become legendary for sacrifice and courage.

Places like Normandy, France, Hell's highway in Holland and Bastogne, Belgium.

>I think the military experience and especially combat and has a certain way of bringing people together that probably different and stronger maybe then any other forces or circumstances you might have imagined.

We became brothers, we citizen soldiers men such as Clancy Lyall, Floyd Talbert George Potter, Ed Pepping, Walter Hendrix, Jerry Wentzel, Lavon Reese, and Herman "Hack" Hanson.

Relationships that were forged under circumstances and conditions only experienced in combat.

And as witnesses to atrocities, which men can commit against one another.

Just a handful of us from Maine.

And our numbers grow smaller each day.

But the stories will always be with us even as our comrades join those who never made it home and who lie under the white crosses and stars of David in foreign cemeteries.

Countries the boys like Warren "Skip" Muck, Alex Penkala, Terrence "Salty" Harris, and Robert Bloser, fought so hard to liberate from the Germans.

>When you go through combat together the men who have been there, it's such an extraordinary experience that they are melded into this incredibly tight cohesive unit.

You had to come across that knoll and if you remember when you went on the other side you had to go down there, you slid down that hill and the Germans were over on your right there.

>Slipped?

You slide right down that hill [laughter] .

>I didn't sled.

Yeah you did too.

>We jumped over it.

Yeah, it was steep there.

> Darrell "Shifty" Powers and Earl McClung didn't know each other before December 7th 1941, McClung grew up on the banks of the Columbia River on an Indian reservation in eastern Washington State.

Powers also with a touch of Native American in him, in the hills of rural Dickinson county Virginia.

WWII brought them together and back to the woods outside of Floyd Belgium more than 6 decades later.

In between all those years since the battle of the Bulge, an unwavering friendship endured.

Its foundation built during battle and reliance on one another.

Not unlike the bond all we paratroopers in Easy Company share.

When I think of it, it was probably the factor we were both of Native American descent.

If you were an Indian they made a first scout out of you.

Whether you could walk, crawl, cross eyed, blind or anything.

If you were an Indian you were a first scout that's it.

> It does bring back a lot of bad memories but we had tried to have some distractions you know, we would aggravate each other and in that case maybe go under a tree and shake some snow down on somebody.

This is great to be standing here and know that I can stand up and not be shot.

I think about this area, I think about the place and the people I served with here.

There is not much argument from the other soldiers in E Company.

From Wild Bill Guarnere to Don Malarkey, the combat brought us together and is the reason for the relationships many of us still hold close today.

But before we jumped into the fight, there was training and for the original paratroopers of the 506 that meant camp Toccoa Georgia.

Currahee mountain and Captain Herbert Sobel, the black swan as he was known to his men.

Sobel was as mean as a grizzly bear with a toothache and as predictable as the stock market.

We all thought that if Sobel ever did lead us into battle it was better than a 50-50 chance he would have been shot by one of his own soldiers.

> I never did get along with Sobel I didn't understand him, I was in conflict with him almost all the time.

But a lot of the guys say Sobel made E Company and I agree with that.

If it hadn't been for Sobel I wouldn't have been here.

He trained the heck out of us.

They didn't like him, they got rid of him but Sobel made us.

> An excellent training officer, didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground about combat.

Every time we had men over there, he screwed everything up.

Period he didn't know what the hell to do.

He was a drill instructor, I mean very few men enjoy their drill instructor.

> The physical training in Toccoa was intense for the 132 enlisted men and the 8 officers who made up the company.

Men like Salve Matheson, Gordy Carson, Tommy Burgess, Chuck Grant, William Dukeman, Al Mampre, and Paul Rogers were preparing for the mission ahead of them.

Colonel Robert Sink was the Commander of the 506.

Sobel reported to Colonel Robert Strayer, who reported to Sink.

It started in Toccoa, Georgia; that's where we got our training.

It had a lot of physical exercise you know and night time marches and things like that.

> Maybe 15-20 miles a day.

Real rigorous training there in Toccoa.

And a lot of people couldn't make it.

>It was real good, I made it ,but it was worth it.

And at the end of that period in Toccoa we had to go for parachute training .

>To get your wings you had to jump 5 times.

There is definitely something about being there from the start.

And yet you know man like Earl McClung was not a Toccoa man he joined a little bit later and he was excepted very well.

He's definitely one of the stalwart men of the group.

Buck Compton as well he didn't join until England and yet he was very much excepted by the men.

>The story of the men of Easy Company 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment 101st Airborne debuted in print in 1992.

In reality the author of the book could have focused on a company regiment in any division in Europe.

It just so happened that he and his team came across us, a group of rowdy paratroopers; we could get rowdy.

And we walked in went to the concierge and said you have a group here from the 101st airborne having a reunion where might we find them.

And it was really the first funny thing that happened that day because the concierge looked at me and said I don't know who they are but they are mighty loud.

> I was having dinner with my wife, and she said, "There's somebody on the phone who wants to talk to you, his name is Ambrose", and I talked to him and I said - this was 50 years after the war - I said, I really don't remember an awful lot about what went on, but I'll give it a go, and I did.

And I'm glad I did.

It all came back to me; took a while, but it did.

The book would become a television miniseries that began filming in the spring of 2000, debuting to critical acclaim in September the following year.

For the Hollywood actors chosen for the miniseries, it would prove to be the most important roles of their careers.

This is more than just acting for them, it was history.

And, every detail and mannerism had to be spot on for the veteran they were representing.

They tell me it wasn't acting as much as a tribute to the soldiers who fought and died in World War II.

> We just knew from day one that this was real.

And we knew it was big, and we knew it was important, and I think every single one of us made sure that we went home at night, knowing that we'd done our men justice, because it was a story that everybody knew about World War II, but we knew that we were going to reach an audience of our generation, which was important to us to put this story out to our generation to let, you know, the kids of today know exactly what these men did and what they went through and what they've achieved for us in our lifetime.

The funny thing about these guys is that you couldn't get information from Frank about Frank.

Like if you called up Frank, and been like, Frank, I need some information about this, you know, what happened in Foy, and you know, when you got shot - his first instincts, well, he would be telling the story, then he would automatically go to talk about the person who was to the right of him or to the left of him.

And, you're like no, Frank I need to know about you.

He'd be like, yeah - but, it was just so funny.

So, in order to get information about Frank, I actually went to Donny Walberg and said Donny, can you give me Lipton's number, because he's always talking about Lipton, and maybe Lipton will tell me something about him.

You know, they never said things about each other- > This project was not just some form of entertainment, this goes so far beyond anything I ever expected to be a part of in my lifetime.

To do something that is your work, that you love, but can affect the families on so many levels; affect Americans and people around the world who are still alive to help understand these stories of what these people went through on both sides.

And, I think that for these men to share these stories is- I just got to believe it's good for their souls.

Being there for the early formation of Easy Company, or being labeled a Toccoa man is a badge of honor worn by a select few men, such as Daniel West, Rod Bain, Roy Pickel, Bill Wingett, Burton Pat Chistianson, Ralph Stafford, Rod Strohl, Robert Marsh, and Don Hoobler.

It meant you were there for the birth of 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, from dealing with Captain Sobel, to the grueling physical training and miles-long nighttime hikes with full packs.

It also meant running the three miles up and three miles down of legendary Currahee Mountain.

Later, on December 1st, we also had to endure a 118 mile, record-breaking march to Atlanta in winter-like conditions.

Took us 75 hours and 15 minutes.

Being a Taccoa man meant having an unshakable bond, built through both mental and physical duress.

> I learned things in Taccoa the first week or so that have helped me all the rest of my life get through problems and things, and it does mean something to be a Taccoa man.

Right now, it means to me that I've got some damned fine friends in my late life.

> Taccoa is where t8he story of the men of Easy company began, and it continued in Georgia at Fort Benning in December of 1942.

With actual jump training for me and fellow soldiers such as Carwood Lipton, Dick Winters, Lewis Nixon, George Lavenson, Mike Ranney, and George Luz.

At Benning, we officially earned our jump wings as paratroopers after making five qualifying training jumps from a C-47.

In parachute ju8mping, it's basically, you have to learn to do everything right the first time, and you go over and learn it and you repeat and repeat and repeat.

So, what happened to me in my first jump, I went to the door of the plane and my mind went completely blank, but I did everything right because I'd had this drummed into me for so long.

> We jumped from a high altitude, you know, about 2,000 feet, I think.

And, just stood up and hooked up and jumped out the door and that was it.

After more training in the United States, including tactical maneuvers and night jumps, the 506 officially became members of the 101st Airborne Division on June 1st, 1943.

In early September of '43, Forrest Guth, Maxwell Clark, and the other men of Easy boarded a troop ship and left New York Harbor, bound for the European War.

> We went over on the- Her Majesty's Ship Samaria.

It was pretty smelly, and the British food was terrible on that ship; we didn't like it.

It took us about two weeks to get there from New York to Liverpool.

> The S.S.

Samaria arrived in England on September 15th.

And out of the harbor, there were masts sticking up, American ships had been sunk.

Eight or ten of 'em.

That was our first experience with- that we knew we were in the wrong place.

> I and the other Easy Company men, such as Ed Mauser, settled into our new home in Aldbourne, England, where we would train for the invasion of Northwest Europe - D-Day.

We lost our first man in one night jump training exercise there.

Rudolph Dittrich's 'chute didn't open, and he was killed.

We trained there for nine months.

We had practice jumps, we had one night jump there and it looked like the area of France was where you realized we were gonna go.

> General Eisenhower said it was going to be 94% casualties, so we all knew that already.

We probably wasn't supposed to know it, but we did.

Yank paratroopers receive last-minute instructions before taking off for the invasion coast, 100 miles across the English Channel.

> We soldiers of the 101st and 82nd Airborne would lead the way into Normandy prior to the beach landings on June 6th.

On the evening of June 5th, at 11 P.M., Easy men such as Ed Joint, J.B.

Stokes, Dick Davenport, Wayne "Skinny" Sisk, Alton Moore, and Robert Rader, as well as thousands of other paratroopers, left England on nearly a thousand C-47 transport planes.

Easy Company took off from Upottery airfield while others left from bases in other parts of Great Britain.

We headed across the English Channel.

Our destination: Normandy.

Decades later, Don Malarkey and Earl McClung walk that same runway at Upottery, England with a feeling of dj vu.

Just as if we w8as going to combat.

What we'd been training to do.

> First thing you know, we're ready to- we're over the Cotentin Peninsula, and ready to jump.

Low cloud cover and intense flak by the Germans, first put over the Jersey and Guernsey Islands, and later, over the Cotentin Peninsula, sent the majority of the C-47's scrambling off course.

It got real bad when we hit the Normandy coast.

> The sky lit up and the flak came up and the machine gun traces were coming up; you could hear the bullets hit the side of the plane.

There was no problem getting the guys to jump.

They wanted out, they wanted that green to go on so they could get out of that damn thing.

> I think everybody wanted, you know, you want to get out.

One of our planes was shot down and we lost, you know, 12, 14 men.

The Company Commander, the 1st Sergeant.

That was just... before those guys even got on the ground.

> Landing on the targeted drop zones behind Utah Beach would become almost impossible for the majority of the Easy Company men, such as Moose Heyliger, Joe Lesniewski, Dewitt Lowery and Johnny Martin.

My buddy, Bill Wingett, splashed down behind the beach in an area flooded by the Germans.

I landed in water over my head.

I had on all of my equipment, plus a leg bag.

The Lord was with me, I tell ya.

I managed to get out of the trench.

> Earl McClung landed in St.

Mere Eglise, in a spot not too far from me.

The exact location still familiar to him, even after all these decades.

I landed on a little shrine, right about a block from the church, down in a little hole there, and it was, like I say, dark.

And, when I landed on this roof, I thought I was probably going to break a leg coming off of that thing, but the roof slanted down, you know, I was trying to get the hell out of town, because there were a lot of bullets flying around there.

> And when I landed, another guy landed very close to me, and I turned and - still in my parachute - and I opened my mouth to say the password, and he yelled out, "Tipper!".

We had known each other so well in all this training that we could recognize just by the way we moved, you know, you'd see somebody, and he recognized me and then I recognized him.

I was the last man out.

I was the last man in the stick, to make sure everybody got out, and I was a Sergeant at the time.

And, I landed just like that.

We couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 hundred feet off the ground.

> I was there for- stared up in the sky for about a minute or so, and I saw Cobb come over, and- this ain't no joke.

When I saw Cobb, I says, I was kind of happy; I figured it'd be an ol' minefield, you know, The moon was going in and out behind the clouds, and I just thought about what you could see and then you couldn't see.

> We was- we didn't know where we was at, but we was there.

Before he jumped into the Normandy darkness, Ed Mauser witnessed Company Commander Lt.

Thomas Meehan's plane - #66 - get hit and go down.

> I saw the plane going down, and it looked like it was going to make a landing, and hit the ground and it hit the hedgerow and exploded.

And, I lost 18 good friends of mine on that plane, and every time I talk about it, it kind of hits me.

Meehan and 16 other members of Headquarters Company died in the crash.

Good men, like Bill Evans, Richard Owen, Carl Riggs, Elmer Murray, and Ralph Wimer.

They never fired one bullet in Normandy after all our intense training as paratroopers.

Early McClung and Don Malarkey visited the crash site several years ago.

> He replaced Sobel in E Company, and I always knew the man when I saw him, I never spoke to him, but this is where they found the remains of his plane, and they found his dog tags here.

Normandy was the first taste of combat for the men in Easy Company.

For some of my friends, it would be their one and only fight.

Private Ed Tipper was seriously wounded a few days after D-Day, in the battle for Carentan.

> Our resistance was not very heavy.

The people were- the Germans that were resisting us had one machine gun, we had three, and so we just moved ahead.

And, what happened was the Germans were one step ahead of us.

So, they had that whole- that wide intersection zeroed in with mortar flak.

They knew that they could withdraw, and we'd move up forward into that intersection, and so I was in the doorway of a building I had cleared, and a mortar shell landed at my feet, and I got very badly wounded.

Liebgott came running over and said the mortar shell hit you, and so, he risked his life to help me, but every one of us - that was just normal behavior for our group; everybody was capable of risking his life on an instant for anybody else.

I had my right eye destroyed - that was what I think was the worst of it - I had both legs broken, I had shrapnel in my right elbow, and in my right- no my left elbow and my right knee.

Either one of those could have caused me all kinds of problems later in life, and neither one did.

I've lived a very active life.

I skied well into my eighties, I played four-wall handball for 20 or 25 years, and I've always been extremely active, but when I was wounded, I thought my life was over.

I thought, my God, I just won't be able to do anything.

I won't be able to get a driver's license, and you know, that was my reaction and I found out that all of that was just not true.

I taught school for almost 35 years, and 8I don't know if that's a normal experience, but I did what I wanted to do.

I'm satisfied that I did some good in the career that I took, and I never regretted it.

Most of the E Company men thought Tipper died as a result of his horrific wounds.

> When I was in the hospital in Indianapolis, I went to visit Floyd Tolbert's family - Floyd was still in.

And, they wrote a letter to him, he was still fighting, and he wrote back - he said, Ed Tipper visited you?

That's crazy; I saw him killed!

He said the top of his head was blown off and whoever's saying he's Ed Tipper is impersonating him.

Call the M.P.

's and get that guy put in jail!

[ Laughter ] Normandy would also be the first time many of us, such as Bill Wingett, would be faced with the task of doing what we'd been trained to do: kill Germans.

> I think it was difficult in the sense that... killing people... isn't a normal thing.

I think it was simple enough in th8e fact that I'd been training, and this person was interested in doing me the same way.

Normandy was also a place where, due to the logistics of the fight, we were not exactly encouraged to, uh, take prisoners.

Same on the German side, I was told.

> I figured, well, they'd probably do the same thing to us, you know, so after we captured these Germans, what happened to them I don't know.

So, if that's what they did, they did it.

But, I didn't see it, though.

Walking the Normandy Battlefield at Brcourt Manor, decades after the fight, brings back thoughts of being indestructible.

We all thought that way.

I know Don Malarkey did on D-Day.

> So, without doing any thinking at all, I ran out in a field, because I could see a canvas pouch on this German's side, and I immediately thought it was a holster.

Well, I got there alongside him - it was empty.

But8, while I was kneeling down by him, Winters yelled at me, he was near the second gun, and he said, there's Germans all over the place, get the hell out of there.

Private Albert Blithe was portrayed in some circles as a shell-shocked soldier who lost his nerve in Normandy, then regained it in the fighting around Carentan.

Blithe was seriously wounded by a sniper, just days before we were pulled off the line.

It was said he died in 1948 as a result of wounds.

Yet in reality, Albert Blithe went on to fight in Korea, earning several medals.

He also made a career out of the military, passing away in 1967.

> He opened up with my mom, pretty much, and she knew what happened, but she didn't- she never told me.

All she told me, she said, well, one of these days when you're grown and I'm not here no more, you know, maybe you'll find out what happened, and you know, maybe what he went through.

But, she never told8 me, she just said the war really messed him up real bad, you know, which, you know, he drank a lot.

He was a real heavy, heavy drinker, and that led to his death.

How I want my Dad to be remembered?

Oh, that Al Blithe just did what he loved, and that was being a paratrooper.

After fighting in Normandy for more than a month, we were sent back to England in mid-July to regroup.

That meant replacements for the 65 E. Company men who were killed, wounded, or missing in France.

Babe Heffron, Tito Mendoza, Tony Garcia, Les Hashey, and Don King joined us in Aldbourne.

> Treated 'em just like us.

They was new, they was good replacements.

Maybe somebody didn't, but I did.

Holland and Operation: Market Garden was the next jump for all of us, but not for E. Company man Phil Perugini, who broke his leg on the D-Day jump.

> It was a Sunday afternoon, 12 o'clock.

People were in church and that, and 13,000 troopers were jumping, and we jumped right down there, and closed that church all at once, bells started ringing and people come running out and they looked up at the sky and seen all the umbrellas, and they were so happy.

Got into the city there, and got some beer and some food, and hugs and kisses and they were just so, so happy about it, so I knew what freedom was then.

Buck Taylor had also been wounded in Normandy, and he rejoined Easy Company prior to the jump into Holland.

His biggest fear wasn't heading back into combat, but rather, being assigned to another unit.

Many E. Company men escaped from hospitals just to make sure they got back to their friends in time for the next fight.

> I didn't want to be assigned to another unit, not knowing anybody and especially going into combat with people you really didn't know well.

You have to know all the fellas there with you; know what they're going to do in a tight situation.

I think of one of the men, Forrest Guth, and Forrest, when he jumped in Holland, he had a malfunction in his parachute, so he comes down and he doesn't have time to pull his reserve.

So, he hits the ground with a thump and messes up his back and his legs, and gets shipped to a hospital in England.

So, his war is basically through.

You know, if he wants to go home, he's got a green card home, and while he's in the hospital, he regains the feeling in his legs, and he's like, well, I'm going to go rejoin my unit.

I'm going back to the fight.

And, examples of that type of determination are just amazing.1 > Well, this is the Wilhelmina Canal, and that is the bridge that the Germans blew as we were coming in.

I happened to be the first scout, and way out in front, so I was across the bridge and there were some big trees directly across from this here, and I went up in, and got in amongst them and just about the time I got there, the bridge blew.

Behind us is the location of the Second Battalion headquarters, and that became Dick Winters' office area at the time that he became Executive Officer of the Second Battalion.

> They faced stiff German resistance in Operation: Market Garden.

After liberating Eindhoven, Robert Van Klinken, a fellow Taccoa man, was killed in Neunen, Holland on September 20th.

Bill Dukemen got it on the island in Holland on October 5th.

One of our medics, Al Mampre, was wounded coming to the aid of Lt.

Robert Breuer in Neunen.

He was shot through the neck, and I tried to get plasma; I mixed up bottles to get plasma and tried to find a vein that would accept the needle, and then I heard a crack and, oh - they broke the bottle.

Well, then meanwhile, the medic that should've been on their team out there, he got clipped in the heel.

And then, the dirt started kicking up around me, and so I lie down next to Bruer, and I said in my best bedside manner, "Are you dead?"

And he - [ laughter ] - but he answered, so I assumed he wasn't dead.

And, he said no, but I don't know why I'm not, and I said well, I'll stay with you.

> He was a new 2nd Lieutenant.

New to the company; nobody knew him very well, but he was out in front, leading them across this open area, and a shot rang out from the buildings.

He went down, and Stohl was - he was my mortar man - he was on my left side.

He ran over and looked at him, and I ran up; I wasn't too far behind.

I looked at him, he was bleeding out and that kind of thing, I said, oh - he's finished.

We got to keep moving.

And, you know, I met him 20 years later in Washington, and we joked about that, he heard me say that!

This is the second time I've been in these woods, in this area.

It brings back a lot of memories.

> German's offensive in the Ardennes forest in mid-December of 1944 led Easy Company, and men such as Frank Soboleski to Bastogne, Belgium, where, on December 18th, one of our older guys, Ed Mauser, celebrated his 28th birthday.

We didn't have the right equipment, not very good winter equipment.

Didn't have on much ammunition, just a few rounds in the clips and that, but they said, they'll suffer a couple and we'll pick up, and you'll get it.

> So, we started up to Bastogne for a highway, and the first thing we ran into were Americans from the 106th Division, and it was unbelievable to us to see them coming at us with no weapons, no- half of them didn't have overcoats, helmets, some were bandaged.

I don't know, I liken it almost to Washington at Valley Forge; that kind of picture.

Well, we got all the way to Bastogne, and these Americans thought we were retreating there.

We asked them for their ammo and some of their clothing and that, and some would give it; some wouldn't.

I don't know why they wouldn't give it to us.

So, then we got into Bastogne, in the forest there, and it was the 16th that we travelled, and about the 18th, we got surrounded and I was thinking about, you know what?

That's my birthday, December 18th, and I think that's when we got surrounded.

> We was down on our hands and knees and the goddamn shells kept coming in.

It was really bad.

It was terrifying, really.

Couple of them hit in the trees, and Guarnere was only 30 feet away from them, and he went down.

So, I ran over to him and I could see he was in bad shape, but not much you can do in a situation like that; hope for the best.

> The weather was horrible.

Snowing and damp and cold and planes couldn't fly in that, and we had to sleep on the ground on top of snow.

Sometimes, we'd cut some branches down and lay them down and stood on guard duty that way.

But, the fellows that were in there before us, they built- oh, boy I tell ya, they dug some good foxholes.

They were so good that you could get three of us into a foxhole, and that's how we kept warm.

I have no recollection, at any point in time, of ever even suspecting that I wouldn't go home from the war.

I don't know why, it just simply never occurred to me.

> Paul Rogers, wounded in Holland during our 73 days of action in Market Garden, rejoined us, and the surrounded 101st Airborne, just in time for the Battle of the Bulge.

The fight around Bastogne that winter forever defined the men of the 101st in the history books.

I could have gotten out of the army then, if I'd probably wanted.

No.

I wanted to see it through.

> Nobody wins medals.

No bands playing.

No singing the national anthem.

You did what you had to do.

I think the stories had been bottled for so long, and just- even lately, there's a new emphasis on, it's okay to talk for combat veterans.

It's okay to tell your stories; people do want to hear them.

They do want to listen.

> Hank Zimmerman and Herb Suerth joined Easy in Mourmelon, France, just prior to our leaving in trucks for Bastogne.

They were two of 226 men to join the company as replacements during the war.

E Company officers, like Ed Shames, had no issues with accepting men like Suerth.

You know, there's been a lot of controversy about that, or people have said that the replacements weren't well-received and they were hazed and all that, and I really don't remember any of that.

Now, I don't know why'd I happen to bunk McClung, which I thought was- I didn't know, but it was really a blessing in disguise because, you know, Mac was one of the respected guys in the outfit.

We had no idea where we were going or what was going to happen.

But all the guys around me were very calm, you know, they weren't- they were worried about their ammunition and their grenades and all these things, and they had that, I guess you might call it a "hardness" that you develop after a while and getting thrown into someplace or into combat.

They were ready for it.

> Just thinking about it makes you a whole lot colder, right to this day.

Sure does.

> But I tell ya one thing - I had some good soldiers right alongside of me.

Your hands weren't cold in the studio.

[ laughter ] > We had summer uniforms on; the same uniforms that we'd fought with in Normandy.

We had inadequate ammunition, inadequate everything, and a couple days after we arrived here, why, it snowed every day.

Every day was below freezing, extremely cold nights, and how you survived out of that, I don't know.

It was in these very same woods outside of the village of Foy where two of the most popular men in Easy, Skip Muck and Alex Penkala, were killed when a shell hit their foxhole.

Hard for any of us to forget that day, or the over 30 days guys like me and medic Ralph Spina, spent freezing and being shot at in Belgium that winter.

> And, somehow or other, an artillery shell penetrated through the timber and landed right on a foxhole occupied by Skip and Alex Penkala.

Killed them both instantly.

Seven days earlier Wild Bill Guarnere and Joe Toye were also hit and lost legs.

Two more Toccoa men and close friends of Don Malarkey gone from the fight.

> I had got to my foxhole when the heavy artillery fire hit, and then I heard a scream and I jumped up out of the foxhole, and the shelling had subsided a little bit, and I could see Joe Toye got really badly hit, and Guarnere running out to help him.

And as Guarnere went running out, then he got hit just as bad as Joe.

It was rather cold-hearted, I guess.

You weren't surprised.

We all knew it could come any time to us, and there was no weeping or anything like that.

> Pat Christenson, one of the men of Easy Company, I was fortunate to get a hold of his journals in the researching process, and he talks about how the exact experience of war is impossible to convey, even by those who did the fighting.

And, Pat was a rare combination of - he could write things in his journal, and then he also drew pictures.

He was sort of the resident artist of Easy Company.

What he saw, he drew, but even then, he confessed the inadequacy of words and pictures to really talk about what was happening.

Over a period of time, after I was here during the war, I've often thought about this, especially in the winter time when snow's back in Virginia, and I think about this area.

> Revisiting places like the Bois Jacque woods outside of Foy, Belgium where Toccoa Man Frank Mellett was killed by a sniper in the village, or the rebuilt city of Hagenenau, France where Easy Men such as Norman Neitzke and Don Bond saw their first and last offensive action of the war, brings into perspective the incredible experience we were a part of.

Fellow soldiers like "Shifty" Powers and Earl McClung are able to recall their time in locations such as Hagenau and the Ardennes forest like it was yesterday.

Their travels to Hitler's Eagles Nest high above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, which soldiers such as Don Moone and Paul Lamoreaux helped to capture, are as vivid today as it was in 1945.

Well, Hitler's home was completely obliterated.

There was nothing left of that.

And, as far as I was concerned, they just- we got into to Berchtesgaden, and they said the road was blown out so they couldn't go up there, and I said, hell, I've climbed over a few rocks in my life, so I went on up.

I was first scout and that was my job.

> The liberation of the concentration camp at Landsberg in Germany certainly brought the reason for the war home to all of us in Easy.

I know it did for replacements Roy Gates, Eugene Gilmore, and Patrick O'Keefe, who saw first-hand what the Nazis were capable of.

Contrast that with the beauty of Zell Am See, Austria, where we in Easy saw the war end.

It's amazing to me that, way back then, when somebody was talking about destiny and an appointment with destiny, and we all kind of passed it off and, well, it all kind of came true.

> After the war, the Men of Easy Company mostly went our separate ways.

We got married and raised families; we returned to work, getting on with our lives after being a part of the most horrific and heroic experience the world had ever witnessed.

Some of us had nightmares, some drank away the memories, some died from other causes, but we all just got on with life.

I just kind of forgot about it.

I didn't dwell on it, I didn't.

I went to bed, it didn't bother me; I went to sleep.

I was a little older than some of 'em, but I didn't dwell on anything.

I think I've always believed when my time's come, I would die.

No matter where.

I still believe it.

> The experience of World War II was something I and the other 365 veterans who made up Easy Company during the war mostly tried to forget, but being a part of that company was, at the same time, the proudest moment of our lives and would be our greatest accomplishment.

It wasn't so much that we jumped into Normandy or fought in Holland or held the Germans off in the Battle of the Bulge, or spent 337 days in combat, it was that we found that we could trust and depend on one another to keep each other alive.

Our shared experiences were unequalled and didn't need to be talked about after the war.

Our family members and friends could never share this bond.

They didn't see what we saw or do what we did.

When the Men of Easy gather for reunions, which we have done pretty much annually since 1947, the talk isn't so much about Captain Sobel, Toccoa or even combat in Europe, but rather about the good times we shared during the war.

Often the names of those paratroopers who are no longer with us come up.

Men such as Dick Winters, Lewis Nixon, Walter Gordon, Ron Speirs, George Luz and Eugene "Doc" Roe.

In recent years that list has grown dramatically.

Their spots at the table now occupied by sons, daughters or grandchildren, all still part of the Easy Company family.

I didn't really first-hand sit down and say Pop-pop, tell me some stories about the war.

My mom, my aunts and uncles said that any time he would talk about it, it was always about the happy times, the good times, his buddies - things like that.

> You know, I was pretty fortunate because as a son, you know, he would share them with a son where he wouldn't share them with a daughter, so.

And the story that I always remember the most was the Muck and Penkala, you know, getting killed in Bastogne.

So, that was a story that I always remembered.

When they get together once a year at these events, it's as if it's 65 years ago; they're kids again, and they think like kids and there's an extra little spring in their step, and it's really cool to witness that.

You see 'em and you think about something that happened, and a lot of it's funny, a lot of it's not funny.

> We must like each other because we come.

It's hard to tell, we're pretty close.

Rod Bain, I didn't see for 66 years; I just met him now, so.

And, I didn't even recognize him, and I mean, I don't think he recognized me until he seen my name or something like that and I saw his name and that.

> Their boys were part of the family, to me.

My boys were.

As we all say, there were a thousand other good rifle companies like ours in the ETO, or we would have never won the war.

But, at the same time, we're very, very proud, and - it's been fun.

> See, the Germans were over there, and we were over here.

Shifty, he had cancer at the end and he had good days and bad days, in his words, and so, when he'd call I'd say, well, you know, Shifty, what kind of day are you having today, and he'd say, oh, I'm having a good day, I'm having a bad day.

I said, you know, Shifty, tell me about a good day for you.

What does a good day look like?

And he said, well, you know, the thing I just love to do is, I love to stand on my front porch, I love to shoot rifles.

He had an M-1 rifle that some guys had given him, and he would just, you know, just stand on his front porch and shoot these guns, just target practice.

Yeah, he lived in a remote area; he could do that.

I said, so Shifty, you know, tell me - what does a bad day look like for you.

And, he said, well, you know, if I'm having a hard day, I pretty much just sit in my recliner and I, you know, I like to listen to books on tape.

I said, you know, what are some of your favorite books.

And he said, well, I like westerns, I really like Louis Lamore, and well, he said, I- I like the Bible.

And, I thought, you know, that's a pretty good image of a man.

A man who he enjoys shooting guns off his porch and listening to the Bible.

> For We Who are Alive and Remain, and for those Easy Company brothers who have passed on, a gun and a Bible serve as a fitting visual of our shared experiences in World War II; a bond that can never be broken, in life or in death...