One night Sgt. Robert Marsh was driving Pvt. John Janovec back from a roadblock by a side road. Janovec was leaning on the unreliable door of a German truck. They hit a log. He lost his balance, fell, and hit his head on the pavement. Marsh rushed him to the regimental aid station in Zell am See, but he died on the way of a fractured skull. Captain Speirs gathered up his few personal possessions, a watch, his wings, his wallet, and his parachute scarf, and mailed them to Janovec's parents. "He had come a long way," Webster wrote. "He had jumped in Holland and fought in Bastogne. He hated the army, and now, when the war is over and the golden prospect of home was in sight, he had died."
Marsh had not been drinking. Easy Company was proud of its record with regard to mounting guard duty or manning roadblocks with sober, responsible soldiers, and in not driving drunk. Others were not so careful. Private O'Keefe recalled the night he was at a roadblock with Pvt. Lloyd Guy halfway between Saal-felden and Zell am See. "An open German staff car came barreling down the road, not prepared to stop. Guy and I jumped out in front of it and made them stop. There were two men dressed in German uniforms, both drunk. 'What the hell you stopping us for? We're on your side.'
"They were a couple of our paratroopers, but from some other company. We told them, 'Damn it, you could have got your heads blown off!'
"They finally promised to slow down on the driving. We told them the next guard post was about ten miles up the road, to keep an eye out for it, and to slow down to a crawl. They promised to take it easy.
"But when we got back we learned that those two damn fools had barreled right through Welling's post with Welling out yelling, 'Halt! Halt!' After the third 'Halt!' Welling took one shot and hit the driver." Later Welling visited the wounded man in the hospital; he said he had no hard feelings toward Welling, that he would have done the same thing.
Sgt. "Chuck" Grant, an original Toccoa man, was a smiling, athletic, fair-haired Californian who was universally respected— he had knocked out an 88 in Holland—and liked. One night he was driving a couple of privates to a roadblock for a changing of the guard. As they arrived, they saw a commotion.
A drunken G.I. was standing with a pistol in his hand, two dead Germans at his feet. He had stopped them in their vehicle and demanded gasoline, as he was out. But he had no German, they had no English, he concluded they were resisting, and shot them.
A British major from military intelligence happened to have been driving by. He and his sergeant got out of their jeep to see what was going on. The drunken G.I. pointed his pistol at them and told them to back off.
At that moment, Grant came driving past. The drunk took a shot at him, but missed. The major made a move to disarm the man. The G.I. turned on him and shot him dead, then his sergeant. Grant came running over; the drunk shot him in the brain, then ran off.
Speirs thought the world of Grant. When he heard of the shooting, he and Lieutenant Foley jumped in a jeep, drove to the site, got Grant on a stretcher, and roared off for the regimental aid station. The doctor there was a disgrace, unshaven, unkempt, wearing a badly stained shirt. He took a quick look at Grant and said there was "no hope."
"Bull shit," said Speirs, who put Grant back on the stretcher and roared off again, this time for Saalfelden. Speirs had heard there were some German specialists there. One of them was a brain specialist from Berlin. He operated immediately and saved Grant's life.
Word of the shooting flashed through the billets. E Company went out en masse to find the culprit. He was found trying to rape an Austrian girl in Zell am See. He was a recent replacement in Company I. To the expressed disgust of many of the men, he was brought back to company HQ alive.
He almost wished he hadn't been. Half the company was milling around him, threatening, kicking, swearing vengeance. Before anything more serious happened, Captain Speirs came rushing in, straight from the hospital.
"Where's the weapon?" Speirs shouted at the prisoner.
"What weapon?"
Speirs pulled his pistol, reversed his grip to hold it by the barrel, and hit the man right in the temple with the butt. He started screaming, "When you talk to an officer, you say 'Sir,' " and hit him again.
The G.I. slumped into a chair, stunned. Pvt. Hack Hansen from Grant's 2nd platoon, and close buddy, came running in. He whipped out his pistol. "You son of a bitch," he cursed. "I've killed better men than you." He put the pistol right in the man's face. Four men grabbed Hansen from behind and tried to pull him away, shouting that death was too good for such a coward, but he pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired.
"You ought to have seen the look of that guy," Gordon Carson remarked.
They beat him unconscious, then carried him to the regimental guardhouse and turned him over to the provost sergeant. When he revived, the provost sergeant beat him until the blood ran.
Sink came to company HQ. He strode in and asked Sergeant Carson, "Where's Speirs?"
"Up on the second floor, sir."
Sink went up and got the facts from Speirs. It took the better part of an hour. Sink left, and Speirs came down.
"How'd it go?" Carson asked.
"Pretty rough."
"Well, what did he say?"
"He said I should have shot the son of a bitch."
That he did not is remarkable. One explanation I got from a number of men was-that Speirs must have had some doubt that the arrested man was the right man. When I asked Speirs about this, he replied, "As to the Sergeant Grant shooting you have it right. There must have been doubt in my mind, because summary action never troubled me."
But I wonder if there was not another factor at work. Speirs was not the only man who had a chance to shoot the coward. Grant had an opportunity in the initial encounter. The man who found the I Company drunk could have shot him on the spot, and nearly every man in the company interviewed by me said he wished it had been done. But many of them were at company HQ when he was brought in, wearing pistols, but only one of them actually tried to kill the man, and he was being held back by four others.
Almost every man in that room had killed. Their blood was up. Their anger was deep and cold. But what stands out in the incident is not the pistol whipping and beatings, but the restraint. They had had enough of killing.
Shortly after the incident, Captain Speirs wrote a long letter to Sgt. Forrest Guth, who was in hospital in England and who had written Speirs expressing a fear that he would be transferred to another division. Speirs liked Guth, thought he was a good soldier, and was appreciative of his ability to keep all his weapons in prime condition. He especially appreciated the way Guth could take a file and work on the tripper housing of an M-l and make it fully automatic. (Winters got one of those Guth specials. He kept it and, when he set off for the Korean War, took it with him. Unfortunately, Guth cannot remember today how he did it.)
In his reply, Speirs expressed another side of himself. It was a long chatty letter about the doings of E Company since Guth went to the hospital, full of the kind of information Guth most wanted to hear: "Luz fell off a motorcycle and hurt his arm— not seriously, Sgt. Talbert didn't like being 1st Sergeant so I gave him the 2nd Platoon and Sgt. Lynch (2nd Plat.) is 1st Sgt. now. Sgt. Alley got drunk again and we had to bust him. Lt. Lipton is on furlough in Scotland and is very happy. I'm sweating out a furlough to England to see my wife and baby. Sgt. Powers was on his way home and the truck overturned and he fractured his skull and he is hospitalized. Sgt. Strohl (3rd Plat.) is on his way home to the States. Chuck Grant got in the way of a bullet from a drunk American and his head is not too good—he is in a German hospital near here and is getting better. Sgt. Malarkey just came back from a long stretch in the hospital. Sgt. Rhinehard just came from the Riviera. McGrath won't take a furlough—he is saving his money."