"In 1950, I went bird hunting with some guys from the fire department. I shot a bird and was remorseful as I looked down at it, the bird had done me no harm and couldn't have. I went to the truck and stayed until the others returned, never to hunt again."
Sgt. Ed Tipper went to the University of Michigan for a B.A., then to Colorado State for an M.A. He taught high school in the Denver suburbs for almost thirty years. After retirement, he writes, "I went to Costa Rica to visit one of my former students. There I met Rosy, 34 years old. After an old-time courtship of about a year, we married in the face of great opposition from most everyone I knew, Dick Winters excluded. It was hard to disagree, especially with the argument that marriage to a 61 year old man probably meant sacrificing any hope of having a family, a major consideration for Latin women. Our daughter Kerry was born almost ten months to the day after our wedding. Rosy went to medical school in Guadalajara and in 1989 got her M.D."
He has recently been operated on for cancer. "My wife, daughter and I have just moved into a new house. It may seem strange for a seventy-year-old to be buying a house, but our family motto is, 'It's never too late.' "
Sgt. Rod Bain graduated from Western Washington College (now University) in 1950, married that year, had four children, and spent twenty-five years as a teacher and administrator in Anchorage, Alaska. He spends his summers "as a drift gillnetter, chasing the elusive Sockeye Salmon."
Ed Tipper sums it up with a question: "Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers! Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions."
Pvt. Bradford Freeman went back to the farm. In 1990 Winters wrote him, saying that he often came South to see Walter Gordon and would like to stop by sometime to see Freeman's farm. Freeman replied: "It would be a great honor for you to come to see us in Mississippi. We have a good shade to sit in in the Summer and have a good heater for Winter. About all that I do is garden and cut hay for cows in summer and feed in Winter. Fish and hunt the rest of the time. We have the Tombigbee water way close and I watch the barges go up and down the river. Sending you a picture of the house and cows. I have a good place on the front porch to sit. Here's hoping that you will come down sometime."
Winters did. They had a good visit. He asked Freeman to write an account of what he did after the war, for this book. Freeman concluded: "What I wrote don't look like much but I have had a real good time and wouldn't trade with no one."
Maj. Richard Winters also wrote an account of his life after the war: "On separation from the service on November 29, 1945, Lewis Nixon invited me to come to New York City and meet his parents. His father offered me a job and I became personnel manager for the Nixon Nitration Works, Nixon, New Jersey. While working, I took advantage of the G.I. Bill and took courses in business and personnel management at Rutgers University. In 1950 I was promoted to General Manager of Nixon Nitration Works.
"I married Ethel Estoppey in 1948. We have two children. Tim has an M.A. in English from Penn State and Jill a B.A. from Albright College.
"I was recalled to the army for the Korean War. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, I was put on the staff as regimental plans and training officer. After discharge, I returned to Pennsylvania, to farm and to sell animal health products and vitamin premixes to the feed companies. In 1951 I bought a farm along the foothills of the Blue Mountain—seven miles east of Indiantown Gap. That's where I find that peace and quiet that I promised myself on D-Day."
This is typical Winters understatement. He lives modestly, on his farm and in a small town house in Hershey, but he is a wealthy man who achieved success by creating and marketing a new, revolutionary cattle food and other animal food products.
He is also the gentlest of men. In July 1990, when he finished telling me about practically wiping out an entire German rifle company on the dike in Holland on October 5, 1944, we went for a walk down to his pond. A flock of perhaps thirty Canadian geese took off; one goose stayed behind, honking plaintively at the others. Winters explained that the bird had a broken wing.
I remarked that he ought to get out a rifle and shoot the goose before a fox got her. "Freeze her up for Thanksgiving dinner."
He gave me an astonished glance. "I couldn't do that!" he said, horrified at the thought.
He is incapable of a violent action, he never raises his voice, he is contemptuous of exaggeration, self-puffery, or posturing. He has achieved exactly what he wanted in life, that peace and quiet he promised himself as he lay down to catch some sleep on the night of June 6-7, 1944, and the continuing love and respect of the men he commanded in Easy Company in World War II.
In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' " 'No,' I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.' "
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
In the fall of 1988, the veterans from Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, held a reunion in New Orleans. Along with my assistant director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ron Drez, I went to their hotel to tape-record a group interview with them about their D-Day experience, as a part of the Center's D-Day Project of collecting oral histories from the men of D-Day. The interview with Easy Company was especially good because the company had carried out a daring and successful attack on a German battery near Utah Beach.
When Maj. Richard Winters, an original member of the company, later company C.O., finally C.O. of 2nd Battalion, read the transcript from the interview, he was upset by some inaccurate and exaggerated statements in it. He wanted to set the record straight. In February 1990, Winters, Forrest Guth, and Carwood Lipton came to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to visit Walter Gordon. I live in the village of Bay St. Louis, across the bay from Pass Christian, so Gordon is my neighbor. He called to ask if the Easy Company veterans could do a follow-up interview. Of course, I said, and invited them to our home for a meeting and dinner. We spent the afternoon in my office, maps spread out, tape-recorder running. Later, at a roast beef feast prepared by my wife, Moira, the men sketched out for me their experiences after D-Day in Normandy, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.
They had all read my book Pegasus Bridge, which the Eisenhower Center gives to every veteran who does an interview for us. Winters suggested that a history of Easy Company might make a good subject for a book.
At that time I was working on the third and final volume of a biography of Richard Nixon. Winters' idea appealed to me for a number of reasons. When I finished Nixon, I wanted to go back to military history. I intended to do a book on D-Day, but did not want to begin the writing until 1992 with the intention of publishing it on the 50th anniversary, June 6, 1994.1 have reached a point in my life where, if I am not doing some writing every day, I am not happy, so I was looking for a short book subject on World War II that would have a connection with D-Day.