"Your rifle is your right arm!" Sobel would tell his men. "It should be in your possession every moment." On one night exercise he decided to teach his men a lesson. He and Sergeant Evans went sneaking through the company position to steal rifles from sleeping men. The mission was successful; by daylight Sobel and Evans had nearly fifty rifles. With great fanfare, Evans called the company together and Sobel began to tell the men what miserable soldiers they were.
As he was yelling, the C.O. of Fox Company, accompanied by some forty-five of his men, came up. To Sobel's great embarrassment, it turned out that he and Evans had been lost, strayed into Fox Company's bivouac area, and stolen their rifles.
A couple of weeks later, Sobel hurt his feet on a jump. He and Sergeant Evans returned to barracks while the company stayed in the field. The captain and the first sergeant conducted a private inspection. They searched through all the footlockers, clothing, and personal possessions of the men of E Company. They went through pockets, broke open boxes, rifled letters from girlfriends and family, and confiscated all items they considered contraband. "I don't know what the hell they were looking for," Gordon Carson commented. "Those were the days before drugs."
Sobel posted a list identifying the contraband, the offender, and the punishment. The men returned from the field exercise, exhausted and filthy, to find that everything they thought of as personal property was in disarray, underwear, socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes, all piled up on top of the bunks. Many items were missing.
Nearly every soldier had something confiscated. Generally it was unauthorized ammunition, nonregulation clothing, or pornography. Cans of fruit cocktail and sliced peaches, stolen from the kitchen, were gone, along with expensive shirts, none of it ever returned. One soldier had been collecting prophylactic kits. A few condoms were evidently acceptable, but 200 constituted contraband; they were posted on Sobel's list of confiscated items.
"That marked a turning point for me," Tipper recalled. "Before Sobel's raid I had disliked him but had not really hated the man. Afterward I decided Sobel was my personal enemy and I did not owe him loyalty or anything else. Everyone was incensed."
There was talk about who was going to shoot Sobel when the company got into combat. Tipper thought it was just talk, but "on the other hand I was aware of a couple of guys in Company E who said little but who in my judgment were fully capable of killing Sobel if they got the chance."
On the next field exercise, E Company was told that a number of its men would be designated as simulated casualties so the medics could practice bandaging wounds, improvising casts and splints, evacuating men on litters and so forth. Sobel was told that he was a simulated casualty. The medics put him under a real anesthetic, pulled down his pants, and made a real incision simulating an appendectomy. They sewed up the incision and bound it up with bandages and surgical tape, then disappeared.
Sobel was furious, naturally enough, but he got nowhere in pressing for an investigation. Not a man in E Company could be found who could identify the guilty medics.
How fit the men of Easy were was demonstrated at Mackall when the Department of the Army had Strayer's 2nd Battalion—already famous for the march to Atlanta—take a standard physical fitness test. The battalion scored 97 percent. As this was the highest score ever recorded for a battalion in the army, a Colonel Jablonski from Washington thought Strayer had rigged the score. Winters recalled, "They had us run it a second time, officers, men, service personnel, cooks, everybody—and we scored 98 percent."
Promotions were coming Easy's way. All three staff sergeants, James Diel, Salty Harris, and Mike Ranney, were original members of the company who had started out as privates. So too with the sergeants, Leo Boyle, Bill Guarnere, Carwood Lipton, John Martin, Elmer Murray, Bob Rader, Bob Smith, Buck Taylor, and Murray Roberts. Carson made corporal. Lieutenant Matheson moved up to regimental staff, while Lieutenants Nixon, Hester, and George Lavenson moved on to the battalion staff. (Through to the end of the war, every vacancy on the 2nd Battalion staff was filled with an officer from Easy. Companies D, F, and HQ did not send a single officer up to battalion. Winters commented, "This is why communications between battalion, regiment HQ, and Company E were always excellent. It is also why Company E always seemed to be called upon for key assignments.")
In early May, Winters's 1st platoon got a new second lieutenant, Harry Welsh. He was a reluctant officer. In April 1942, he had volunteered for the paratroopers and been assigned to the 504th PIR of the 82nd Airborne. After jump school, he made sergeant. Three times. He kept getting busted back to private for fighting. But he was a tough little Irishman with obvious leadership potential. His company commander noticed and recommended Welsh for OCS.
Welsh was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th PIR. He had wanted to return to the 504th, but Army doctrine was to send OCS graduates to new units, because it feared that if they went back to their old outfit, they would be too familiar with their enlisted friends. Sobel put Welsh in Winters's platoon. They immediately became the closest of friends. The relationship was based on mutual respect brought about by an identical view of leadership. "Officers go first," as Welsh put it.
At the end of May, the men of Easy packed up their barracks bags and joined the other companies of the 506th for a stop-and-go train ride to Sturgis, Kentucky. At the depot Red Cross girls had coffee and doughnuts for them, the last bit of comfort they would know for a month. They marched out into the countryside and pitched pup tents, dug straddle trenches for latrines, and ate the Army's favorite meal for troops in the field, creamed chipped beef on toast, universally known as SOS, or Shit on a Shingle.
This was not combat, but it was as close as the Army could make it. The maneuvers held in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana from June 5 to July 15, 1943, combined paratroopers and gliderborne troops in the largest airborne exercise to date.
On June 10, the 506th PIR officially joined the 101st Airborne Division, thus making that date the greatest day the 101st ever had. Adding the 506th noticeably raised the morale of the 101st, at least according to the men of E Company.
The maneuvers, pitting the Red Army against the Blue Army, ranged over a wide area of backwoods hills and mountains. Easy made three jumps. Christenson remembered one of them vividly. It was hot, stifling inside the C-47, and the heated air rising in currents from the hills cause the plane to bob and weave. Cpl. Denver "Bull" Randleman, at the back of the stick and thus farthest from the open door, began vomiting into his helmet. The man in front of him took one look and lost his lunch. The process worked right up the line. Not everyone managed to vomit into his helmet; the floor was awash in vomit, the plane stank. Christenson, at the front, was hanging on, but barely. "My stomach was on the verge of rebellion... . 'Why don't they turn on the green light? There it is!' From behind, shouts of 'Go!' 'Go! Goddamn it, Go!' Out I went into the clean fresh air. I felt as if someone had passed a magic wand over my head and said, 'Christenson, you feel great.' And I did."
The maneuvers featured extended night marches, wading through streams, climbing the far bank, making 3 feet only to slide back 2, stumbling over rocks, stumps, and roots, cutting a swath through matted underbrush and occasionally enjoying fried chicken prepared by Tennessee hill people. The men were tired, filthy, itching all over.