Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II's ''Band of Brothers''
288
Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II's ''Band of Brothers''
288eBook
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Overview
Elite paratrooper Sgt. Don Malarkey takes us not only into the World War II battles fought from Normandy to Germany, but into the heart and mind of a soldier who lost his best friend during the nightmarish engagement at Bastogne.
Drafted in 1942, Malarkey arrived at Camp Toccoa in Georgia and was one of the one in six soldiers who earned their Eagle wings. He went to England in 1943 to provide cover on the ground for the largest amphibious military attack in history: Operation Overlord. In the darkness of D-day morning, Malarkey parachuted into France and within days was awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in battle. He fought for twenty-three days in Normandy, nearly eighty in Holland, thirty-nine in Bastogne, and nearly thirty more in and near Haugenau, France, and the Ruhr pocket in Germany.
Easy Company Soldier is his dramatic tale of those bloody days fighting his way from the shores of France to the heartland of Germany, and the epic story of how an adventurous kid from Oregon became a leader of men.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429938044 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2008 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 313,360 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
DON MALARKEY was born in 1921 and grew up in Astoria, Oregon. After trying to enlist in several branches of the service, he was drafted in 1942 and spent more consecutive days in combat than any other member of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division---the most recognized fighting unit in American history. Today he lives in Oregon.
BOB WELCH is a nationally recognized author and journalist whose book American Nightingale, about the first nurse to die in World War II after the landings at Normandy, was featured on ABC's Good Morning America and was an Oregon Book Award finalist. He lives in Oregon.
DON MALARKEY was born in 1921, and grew up in Astoria, Oregon. After trying to enlist in several branches of the service, he was drafted in 1942 and spent more consecutive days in combat than any other member of “E Company,” 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne--the most recognized fighting unit in American history. Today he lives in Oregon.
BOB WELCH is a nationally recognized author and journalist whose book about the first World War II nurse to die after the landings at Normandy, American Nightingale, was featured on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and was an Oregon Book Award finalist. He lives in Oregon.
Read an Excerpt
Easy Company Soldier
The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II's "Band of Brothers"
By Don Malarkey, Bob Welch
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2008 Don Malarkey with Bob WelchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3804-4
CHAPTER 1
THE CHOICE
Bastogne, Belgium
January 3, 1945
One shot.
That's all it would take, I figured, as I warmed my hands around the campfire with a few other shivering soldiers. One shot and this frozen hell of Belgium's Ardennes Forest would be over for me.
It was January 1945, seven months since me and the guys in the 101st Airborne's 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had jumped into that dark sky over Normandy. Now, a handful of us E Company guys were numb from war, death, and bitter cold and snow. In the flames' flickering light, I looked down at my boots, wrapped in burlap bags and purposely dipped in water so they'd freeze and keep my feet warmer.
One shot and those damn feet would never be cold again. One shot and the sight of Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere lying in the snow, each missing a leg, would never haunt me again.
Why Toye? Why not the SOB who I'd seen a few days ago slicing fingers off the dead German soldiers to get their rings, the guy who was almost smiling when he told me "cuttin' those fingers was just like cuttin' a candle in half." Toye was wounded in Normandy, Holland, and once here, coming back with his arm in a sling to fight. Maybe I'm biased because, like me, Joe was Irish, but hadn't he already paid the war piper?
And why Guarnere? He gets it trying to save Joe. The Germans are raining down artillery shells like a Fourth of July show gone wrong, and Bill sees Joe out there trying to get up and so runs across the snow to save his buddy. Sort of like one swimmer trying to help another swimmer who's drowning. And, boom, both end up drowning. At least it hadn't been Skip Muck, whose 1st Platoon was a few hundred yards away from our 2nd. He was closer than a brother to me.
I blew on my cupped hands to warm them up. I then put my right hand onto the pistol's holster, and around the wooden grip, cold as a frozen salmon. We were virtually surrounded by the Germans, the proverbial hole in the doughnut. And had been here for more than two weeks, though time wasn't easy to keep track of when you couldn't see beyond the fog and snow of some iceboxed forest that's so far from home that you can hardly remember what home is like anymore.
Sometimes, in the night, when the quiet wasn't feared as much, I would remember home. Not so much my family or our house in Astoria, where I'd grown up near where the Columbia River meets up with the Pacific Ocean, but the cabin.
It was snug to the Nehalem River, in Oregon's Coast Range. I lived like an Indian. Swam in the Nehalem each day. Dove for crawdads. Went bird hunting with a bow, carved from a yew tree. While crouched in a foxhole in Bastogne, I remembered watching the riffle in the river, knowing that beneath that water lived sea-run cutthroat trout and crawdads galore. I remembered easing into the current and letting it take me — fishing pole in hand — wherever it might. I remembered fires on the banks at night. The sound of a hoot owl. And the smell of late-summer blackberries. All things that now didn't seem possible. Unless ...
One shot.
I looked at the flames and fingered the pistol, a P38 I'd picked up from a German we'd taken prisoner in Holland. One shot and I'd be back to all that. Not a shot in the head, though a few soldiers were known to do that, too. But in the foot. Hell, there's no sugarcoating it: This was a coward's way out. It wasn't common, but it happened in war: One squeeze of the trigger and you'd be unable to fight. You'd be a liability to your company, so they'd have no choice but to ship you back to the safety of England, maybe even the States. Accidents happen.
But would the guys really buy that your gun had accidentally gone off? Don Hoobler's had just yesterday, but he bled to death on the way to an aid station. I'd make sure I missed a main artery. Regardless, the price for my ticket home would be my integrity. All these guys forever wondering, Did Malark do it on purpose? But, then, integrity is an easy thing to lose in times of war, accidentally or on purpose. And when you watch others lose theirs, it becomes easier to let go of your own. Hell, back near Utah Beach, you'd see the bodies of soldiers stacked up like so much cordwood. Where's the integrity in that? Or hear those stories about 1st Lt. Ronald Speirs gunning down a bunch of German prisoners, even one of his own men, some say. Where's the integrity in that? Or even before the war, at Fort Benning, watch the drumming-out ceremonies. The guys who couldn't cut it — the guys who weren't going to make paratroopers — would be marched up in front of everybody with a tommy gun at their backs and an officer would strip them of basically everything they had, including their pride. Where was the integrity in that?
In war, you quickly realize that you're playing a game of odds. The longer you fight, the better chance you have of something bad happening to you. You die. You get wounded. You get sick. You get captured. Or you quit.
Like my father. He quit. Not in war. But in life. Went bankrupt during the Depression — he was an insurance man — and just quit. Quit trying. Quit caring. Quit noticing anything and anybody around him. When times got tough, when he lost his business, my dad was like some twenty-foot runabout trying to get over the bar at the mouth of the Columbia: crushed to splinters.
My father missed World War I because he had been 90 percent blind in one eye; he was 4F so he worked in a spruce mill making airplane parts. But World War I took the lives of two of my uncles, his brothers. Though I never knew them, they were my heroes. I felt a bond with them both. So much of a bond, in fact, that when learning that Easy Company would be shipping out, ultimately to fight the Germans, I felt the need to somehow avenge their deaths. To bring back something — some symbol — that would tell my family, I did it. I evened the slate. Some sort of souvenir. Like the pistol whose hammer, in the chill of the Ardennes Forest, I now cocked.
Truth is, I'd gotten to this point for reasons beyond Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere getting their legs blown off. Beyond missing the Nehalem River, I also missed Bernice Franetovich, a girl I'd known from Astoria who was now living in New York, where she was a singer. I'd started to wonder if it was only a matter of time before everyone in Easy Company was going to wind up like those frozen Germans you'd have to all but step over when heading to an outpost. We were like the shipwrecked sailors on a raft, waiting for the sharks.
I felt hopeless. Numb. Not from the cold, as I'd been since we'd arrived in this god-awful forest December 19, but from something that chills you far deeper inside you: death. We'd lost more than a dozen guys in the last few weeks, some of whom were my friends. You see a dead enemy soldier and you say, At least it wasn't one of ours. You see a dead American soldier — one of your own — and you say, At least it wasn't me. You lose a friend and you say, To hell with this. Get me out of here. At the same time, though this might sound strange, you almost envy the peace they now have. No more being cold. No more war. No more pain. All that bad stuff gets left to those of us who remain.
Things started swirling in my mind, like a cottonwood bud caught in an eddy on the Nehalem. I didn't say anything because there are certain things soldiers don't talk about. Like a lot of other jabs of pain — say, the time after we'd gotten back from Normandy when our laundry woman kept handing me clothes for dead guys who weren't going to be needing them — I stuffed it deep inside, thinking it would somehow just go away. It didn't. It just builds up, like carrying one more brick on your back, and one more, and more, and more. And finally you say, Enough. I can't walk another step.
So I found myself standing in front of that fire, which was growing weaker and weaker as the late afternoon grew darker and darker. Somewhere out there, the enemy still lurked, waiting for morning — and me. And somewhere inside me, another enemy lurked as well, waiting for my decision. Soldiers around me smoked cigarettes and made small talk, but I didn't hear a word of it. Instead, I stared at the embers, mesmerized. Slowly, my right forefinger curled around the pistol's icy trigger.
CHAPTER 2BOMBA THE JUNGLE BOY
Astoria, Oregon
July 1921 to September 1939
Maybe it was what they call destiny, a sign of what would become of me in the future. Then again, maybe it was just me being little Donnie Malarkey and doing a damn-fool thing because I always had a little of the devil in me. All I know is that when I was about twelve years old, at a time when nobody in Astoria, Oregon, or hardly anywhere else in the world had heard of a man jumping out of an airplane while wearing something called a parachute, I jumped off the roof of our house on Kensington Avenue, clutching only a beach umbrella.
How I didn't bust myself all to hell is beyond me. I just remember trying to avoid hitting the concrete walkway and somehow surviving the jump with only minor injuries that I didn't dare confess to my mother, Helen. And, afterward, believing more fervently in the law of gravity than in the ability of a five-foot-wide umbrella to float an eighty-pound kid fifteen feet to the ground.
Besides being one of the more daring kids in Astoria, I was the best marble player. As kids, we'd gather in vacant lots and shoot marbles, and I'd win over and over. On Saturday mornings, I'd stand on our front porch, and as kids came by, I'd toss back all the marbles I'd won from them during the week. I still remember some mother yelling at me, "You, Malarkey boy, come here!" Some of our games were for money, and I guess I'd won a little lunch money from her kid.
But marbles, if good business, weren't as exciting as more physical pursuits. My pals and I played war behind the house in a forest that seemed to stretch on forever. And I dreamed of someday playing football and basketball for Astoria High, the vaunted Fishermen, whose rival down the coast was the Seaside Sandfleas. Basketball, in particular, was big in Astoria; seems like every telephone pole had a rim nailed to it, though you had to be careful because much of the town was notched into a hill overlooking the Columbia River and a runaway ball could wind up at the fish canneries fourteen blocks away.
Astoria won three state basketball championships in the mid thirties. A couple of Astoria players on those teams, Bobby Anet and Wally Johanson, would go on to the University of Oregon and, in 1939, help the school win the first NCAA championship ever held. As a kid, I watched practically every game they played at Astoria High and wanted badly to play for the Fishermen someday.
Meanwhile, I not only thirsted for adventure, but found it. Winters in Astoria usually meant rain followed by more rain; seventy-inch years weren't uncommon. Growing up, I had no less than eleven ear infections that required lancing because of our dank winters. Summers were far better, particularly a bit inland, where our family's tented cabin was on the Nehalem River, about thirty-five miles from town.
I would swim for what seemed like miles on a summer day up and down that river, my only audience the alder and fir and hemlock that lined the snaking waters. I imagined myself as an Indian living off the land. I'd row my boat upriver half a mile, make camp, build a fire, and stay the night. Trap chipmunks. Hunt with my yew-wood bow. Climb a ridge to Lost Lake. I was a curly-blond-haired Huck Finn, an independent cuss living the life of Riley.
Beyond the books I had to read at St. Mary's Star of the Sea School — and a few, about poetry, which I actually liked — there was one set that I buried my head in night after night: the Bomba the Jungle Boy series by Roy Rockwood. The books started coming out in the mid twenties just as I was learning to read. They included titles like Bomba the Jungle Boy in the Swamp of Death and Bomba the Jungle Boy in a Strange Land.
I loved those books. I lived those books. I was the Bomba of Astoria, Oregon — at least in my mind. At the corner of Fifteenth and Madison, a massive growth of alder saplings ran kitty-corner to Fourteenth and Lexington. I would climb up those slim alder trees and start swinging on a branch until it propelled me forward a bit. You'd let go of that branch and grab hold of the trunk of another tree, and before you knew it, you'd gone an entire block without touching the ground. Amazing!
Astoria is known as the place where the explorers Lewis and Clark ended their journey west, then turned around. As a little boy, I'd read their journals — in Astoria, kids were spoon-fed Lewis and Clark as if it were our morning Malt-O-Meal — and how some of the men in the Corps of Discovery were going mad, mainly because of the never-ending rain and eight guys crammed into twenty-by-twenty log-built rooms at Fort Clatsop, just across Young's Bay from where I lived.
It's the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, founded in 1847, a few decades after John Jacob Astor, a rich New Yorker, first established it as a fur-trading outpost. By the time I was born, fur was no longer the draw. Instead, it was fish, lumber, and farming. The town lay mainly on a hillside in Oregon's far northwest corner, surrounded by water everywhere: the mighty Columbia River, separating Oregon from Washington; the Pacific Ocean to the west; and Young's Bay.
It was a raw, rugged world that never let you forget life was tough, dangerous, and sometimes deadly. Logging, fishing, and shipping freight across an ocean weren't for the light-hearted. You'd show up for school one day and the kid who sat next to you wouldn't be there; he'd be at the funeral for his dad the logger, who'd been crushed by a widow maker. The Columbia's bar at Astoria, with swells to forty feet, was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. And if we needed any reminding of such dangers, we could always see the skeletal remains of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted British sailing vessel that had gone aground in 1906 on the Clatsop Spit.
There were pockets of sophistication in Astoria, a lot of old-money families who lived in the ornate Victorian houses perched on Coxcomb Hill. But, for the most part, Astoria in the twenties and thirties was the smell of fish canneries and salt air and lumber mills and dairy farms. Of blackberries, cedar trees, and, of course, the crap that was dumped straight into the Columbia River from all our homes. It was the sound of ship whistles, seagulls, log trucks rolling down Commercial Street, and rain tapping on our windows, day after day after day after winter day.
Astoria was warehouses jutting out over the river on pilings, brawls outside the bars and brothels of Astor Street, the Salmon Derby each August, playing baseball in the field notched into the hill behind Star of the Sea School, and a mix of people as different as the ingredients in a bowl of fisherman's stew. The Finns lived in the west part of town, nearest the Pacific Ocean, which pounded ashore about ten miles away. The Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians lived in east Astoria, up into the hills. The Irish, including the Malarkeys, lived in the center.
Our house was a bungalow near the top of the hill, 595 Kensington Avenue, that had a white chimney, smack in front, not off to the side like most houses. That chimney looked almost like a lighthouse. We had a great view of the barges and tugs — white-water cowboys, we called 'em-pulling and pushing rafts of logs; ferries going to and from Megler, Washington, five miles across the river; and ships heading to and from Portland, about sixty miles upriver. To the east of us, on the corner of Kensington and Fourteenth, lived a rugged man named Michael Nolan, a bar pilot, one of the guys who guided ships over the feared Columbia River bar. From his porch, he would tell us all sorts of stories. Of shipwrecks. Of miraculous recoveries. Of rogue waves three stories high.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Easy Company Soldier by Don Malarkey, Bob Welch. Copyright © 2008 Don Malarkey with Bob Welch. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 The Choice,2 Bomba the Jungle Boy,
3 "Mom, Don't Worry, I'll Be Back",
4 Toccoa, Sobel, and Survival,
5 Skip Muck and the March to Atlanta,
6 Prelude to the Great Crusade,
7 Jumping into the Darkness,
8 Beauty and the Beast,
9 Unclaimed Laundry,
10 "Beyond This Place of Wrath and Tears",
11 The Knock on the Door,
12 "What's a Guy Gotta Do to Die?",
13 Burying It Deep Within,
14 Letters from Two Women,
15 Dreaming of Wild Blackberries,
16 The War That Never Ends,
Epilogue: Remembering the Band of Brothers,
Afterword,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
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