7 HEALING WOUNDS AND SCRUBBED MISSIONS
* ALDBOURNE
July 13-Septemberl6,1944
"It's the only time I ever saw the Army do anything right," Gordon Carson said. "They put us on those LSTs, brought us into Southampton, took us back to Aldbourne, gave us two sets of complete, all-new uniforms, all our back pay, $150 or more, and a seven-day pass, and by 7, 8 in the morning we're on our way to London."
The men of Easy have little memory of that week in London. The American paratroopers were the first soldiers to return to England from Normandy; the papers had been full of their exploits; everyone in town wanted to buy them a meal or a beer— for the first day or so. But the young heroes overdid it. They drank too much, they broke too many windows and chairs, they got into too many fights with nonparatroopers. It was one of the wildest weeks in London's history. One newspaper compared the damage done to the Blitz. A joke went around: the MPs in London were going to receive a presidential citation for duty above and beyond during the week the 101st was in town.
Not everyone went to London. Harry Welsh traveled to Ireland, to see relatives. Winters stayed in Aldbourne to rest, reflect, and write letters to the parents of men killed or wounded. Gordon and Lipton, after recovery from their wounds, went to Scotland to see the sights.
In the hospital after his evacuation from Normandy, Gordon had been given skin grafts, then had his leg enclosed in a cast that ran from hip to toe. He was the only combat wounded man in his ward; the others were ill or had been hurt in accidents in England. He was therefore "an object of great respect. They were in awe of me." Three times officers came in to pin a Purple Heart on his pillow. "I would lower my eyes modestly and murmur thanks to the small group who had gathered to see the hero." Then he would hide the medal and wait for the next one.
After eight weeks in the hospital, he returned to E Company. (It was Airborne policy to return recovered men to their original company; in the infantry, when wounded became fit for duty, they went wherever they were needed. The former was, in the opinion of every paratrooper, one of the wisest things the Airborne did; the latter policy was, in everyone's opinion, one of the dumbest things the Army did.)
Sergeant Talbert got back to Easy at the same time Gordon did. As his wound had been inflicted by Private Smith's bayonet, rather than by a German, he was disqualified from receiving the Purple Heart. Gordon told him not to worry, he could fix him up with one of his extra ribbons. The 3rd platoon got together and conducted an appropriate ceremony for Talbert. Gordon and Rogers had written a poem to immortalize Talbert, Smith, "and the bayonet that came between them." The title was "The Night of the Bayonet"; fortunately for posterity, the poem has not survived (or at least the authors refused to give it to me for this book). The indignant Talbert declared, "I could have shot the little bastard six times as he lunged toward me, but I didn't think we could spare a man at the time."
Some of the wounded were worried about permanent disability. Malarkey found this out when he and Don Moone were sitting in the mess hall as Lipton passed by. "Hi, crip," Malarkey called out. Lipton turned and grabbed the two men by their throats, lifted them from their chairs, and declared that he would take them on one at a time or together. They went pale and said they didn't mean anything by the crack. Later Lipton returned, red faced, and said he was sorry to lose his temper, but he feared that the wound to his hand had inflicted permanent damage that would prevent him from playing college football.
Underlying the release of tension in London, or Gordon's feeble attempts at some humor, was the reality these men had faced and their apprehension about what they would be facing.
Sergeant Martin looked around the 1st platoon barracks the first night back from Normandy, and half the men who had been there from September 1943 to May 1944 were gone. He said to Guarnere, "Jesus, Bill, here we've got a half a hut full of guys, and we aren't even started in the war yet. We don't have a Chinaman's chance of ever getting out of this thing."
"If we lost half the barracks in one goddamn little maneuver in Normandy," Guarnere replied, "forget it, we'll never get home."
They took their leave in Scotland, where they got tattoos, figuring what the hell, "losing that many men in one little deal like that and the whole war ahead of us, why not?"
Pvt. David Kenyon Webster had jumped with 2nd Battalion's HQ Company on D-Day, been wounded a few days later, evacuated to England, and returned to Aldbourne before the battalion returned. He hid in the shadows of the Red Cross hut as "the thin, tired column of survivors marched into the area," hoping that no one would look him in the face and ask, "Where the hell were you, Webster, when the Krauts made the big counterattack the other side of Carentan and F Company gave ground and E Company's flank was exposed?"
His embarrassment aside, Webster was overjoyed to see his friends return. "You know everybody in the Battalion by sight," he wrote, "if not by name, and you feel like part of a big family. You are closer to these men than you will ever be to any civilians."
He applied for a transfer back to E Company, because with HQ Company he had been an ammunition carrier most of the time, had fired his machine-gun only once in Normandy, and "I craved action. I wanted to get the war over with; I wanted to fight as a rifleman in a line company." He became a member of 1st platoon.
Webster's attitude was, as he wrote his parents, "I am living on borrowed time. I do not think I shall live through the next jump. If I don't come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machinegunned in the face. You have to keep going. It's not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected."
When his mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this attitude (and her worries about his younger brother, who had just joined the paratroopers), Webster was blunt in his reply: "Would you prefer for somebody else's son to die in the mud? You want us to win the war, but you apparently don't want to have your sons involved in the actual bloodshed. That's a strangely contradictory attitude.
"Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy. Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroops. If the country all had your attitude, nobody would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of a country would that be?"
Lipton felt that "when men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become callused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger. Enemy bodies and wounded don't affect them. Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment that it was not them. [Thank God it was him and not me is a feeling common to many combat soldiers when their comrades fall; later it can produce guilt feelings.] There is still work to be done, a war to be won, and they think about that."
Once out of the line, back in a rest camp, Lipton goes on, "they begin to think. They remember how their friends were wounded or killed. They remember times when they were inches or seconds from their own death. Far from combat, death and destruction are no longer inevitable—the war might end, the missions might be cancelled. With these thoughts men become nervous about going back in. As soon as they are back in, however, those doubts and that nervousness are gone. The callousness, the cold-bloodedness, the calmness return. Once more there's a job to be done, the old confidence comes back, the thrill of combat returns, and the drive to excel and win takes over again."