The next morning, Sunday, Colonel Sink ordered a special Officers Call. They assembled outside the hotel. Sink laid into them. He said their behavior was disgraceful. He touched especially on the brawling and on the practical joke. He had just gotten off the phone with General Taylor, whose car had run out of gas and who had sat there for hours while his driver searched for a jerrican. Foley, who did not confess, reported that "Sink didn't give a damn whether enlisted men stopped and listened, he was angry and he didn't care who heard him give everyone of us hell, spelled H-E-L-L."
Sink never stayed mad long. A week later he laid on a huge Fourth of July celebration. But on the Fourth it rained, and again on the fifth. Never mind: the sixth was a beautiful day and the celebration began. "Sink on the Sixth," the men called it.
There were athletic events of all kinds. Gliders and sail planes sailed across the lake, riding the mountain currents. Troop Carrier Command lent the regiment a C-47 for the afternoon, and there was a jump of twelve men into the lake. Food and drink was plentiful. In the park, local musicians dressed in lederhosen played all the oomp-pa-pa tunes. The G.I.s requested pop songs from America, but the Austrians needed practice. Everyone danced. All the girls wore D.P. armbands (nonfraternization applied only to Germans and Austrians; D.P.s were exempt; the armbands D.P.s wore to distinguish themselves were lavishly distributed to the local mountain girls) but, as Lieutenant Foley remembered it, "there wasn't one Displaced Person at the celebration."
Mountain weather, unlimited sports, women and booze, easy duty, good hunting and a hard-assed colonel whom everyone loved, Zell am See provided, in Webster's view, "the soldier's dream life."
It should have been the most perfect summer ever for the men of E Company. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, most of them hated it. They were frustrated by the Army bureaucracy, they were bored, they were drinking far too much, and they wanted to go home.
Getting home depended on points, which became virtually the sole topic of conversation and led to much bad feeling. The point system set up by the Army gave a man points for each active duty service month, points for campaigns, points for medals, points for being married. The magic number was 85 points. Those with that many or more were eligible for immediate shipment home and discharge. Those with fewer points were doomed to stay with the division, presumably right on through to the Big Jump in China or Japan.
So for the first time in their Army careers, the officers and men became seriously concerned with medals. A Bronze Star was worth five points. Inevitably the Army's hierarchical and bureaucratic systems played favorites. Lieutenant Foley recalled "the regimental adjutant who picked up a Bronze Star for—according to rumor—selecting the Hotel Zell for Sink's HQ."
The men of Easy felt cheated in another way: in the paratroopers it had been damn near impossible to win a medal other than the Purple Heart. "In the 101st, for example," Webster wrote, "only two men had been awarded the Medal of Honor— a private and a lieutenant colonel from the 502—and they had both been killed in action. Major Winters, who had acquired it legitimately in a fracas with a German battery in Normandy, wore the only Distinguished Service Cross in the 2nd Battalion. In E Company, Captain Speirs and two or three others had 100-proof Silver Stars and about twelve men displayed Bronze Stars. Of Purple Hearts there were aplenty, but that was not a decoration but a badge of office: Infantry."
Most of the men in E Company had for decorations only the four battle stars on their ETO ribbon, no more than a personnel clerk who had never left base camp. "There was MacClung, for instance," Webster complained. "He was quiet, lanky, and unimpressive, and nobody noticed him. But his buddies in the third platoon swore that old One Lung had killed more Germans than any other man in the Battalion. MacClung could smell Kraut; he hunted them,- he pursued them in dawn attacks and on night patrols; he went out of his way to kill them; he took more chances and volunteered for more dangerous jobs than any other man in E Company. MacClung had made every day of Normandy, Holland, and Bastogne, and what did he have to show for it? An ETO ribbon and four battle stars."
Sgt. Shifty Powers was in the same category. As good a soldier as there was in the 101st, he had no medals, no Purple Heart, so not enough points. But the grumbling had grown to such proportions that General Taylor decided to have a drawing in each company,- the winner would be rotated home. Powers did not want to attend the drawing. "Hell, Paul," he told Sergeant Rogers, "I've never won anything in my life." But Rogers persuaded him to go, and he won.
Immediately, another soldier offered Powers $1,000 for that trip home. Powers recalled, "I thought about that for a while, $1,000 was a lot of money, but finally I said, 'No, I think I'll just go home.' "
Powers gathered up his loot, mainly pistols, got his paperwork done, drew his back pay, and joined the ten other lucky men for a ride to Munich. Going around a curve, a G.I. truck hit their truck head on. Powers flew out and over the top of the truck, hit the pavement, broke some bones, and got a bad concussion. Another one of the "lucky" soldiers was killed. Powers went to hospital, where he lost all his back pay and souvenirs to thieves. He eventually got home via a hospital ship, months after the comrades he had left behind.
Adding to the frustration of seeing cooks and clerks get the same points as front-line infantry was the haphazard record keeping. All the men spent hours totaling up their points, but the trick was to convince the regimental adjutant's office. Webster was sure he had 87 points, but his records indicated he had fewer than 80.
General Taylor tried to help his veterans. He decreed that every man who had taken part in Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, or who had made two of those campaigns and missed a third because of wounds, would receive a Bronze Star. This was widely appreciated, of course, but temporarily caused more frustration because it took weeks after Taylor's announcement before the medal and citation—and with them the all-important five points—actually came through.
All this chicken stuff created intense dissatisfaction with the Army and its ways. Recruiters were circulating among the officers and men, trying to persuade them to join the Regular Army. Almost none did. Webster articulated the feelings of most of his fellow soldiers: "I hate this army with a vehemence so deep and undying I'll never speak good of it as long as I live," he wrote his parents. "I consider my time spent in the army as 90% wasted." The only thing that he would concede was "I did learn how to get along with people." When Sink offered Winters a Regular commission, Winters thought about it for a moment or two, and then said he would rather not.
Adding to the problems of frustration and anger caused by the point system was the combination of too much liquor, too many pistols, and too many captured vehicles. Road accidents were almost as dangerous to the 101st in Austria as the German Army had been in Belgium. In the first three weeks in Austria, there were seventy wrecks, more in the six weeks of June and July. Twenty men were killed, nearly 100 injured.