Reprinted with Permission:

This piece was written by Robert Burr Smith. Thanks to Susan Finn for contributing this story!

Introduction

In attempting to encapsulate the "506 Experience" from Toccoa to Kaprun (for the latter is where my association with the regiment ended) I will undoubtedly, and almost inevitably, fall prey to a failing memory, on the one hand, and to an admittedly active imagination on the other, which in my case, tends to minimize the retention of the horrors of those years and retains only memories of the warm, the human, the humorous and the heroic happenings of those three years. I will not apologize for those times when my memory differs from yours. I will, however, ask that you remember the immediately-after-action debriefing reports of S.L.A. Marshall, who demonstrated, for all the world to see, that soldiers can't even agree on the details of a small unit action in which they took part hours, or a day, before the mass debriefings he conducted, and forgive me.

The engine behind this aide memoir is that unconquerable warrior, Bill Guarnere, who has been my friend for nearly forty years, and my most severe critic for the same length of time. "Willy-Willy-Deuce" was not my only war, nor is Bill the only superbly brave soldier with whom I have served, but he stands out, head and shoulders, above them all. My hero worship of the incredibly tough "South Philly Wop" is a strictly personal appreciation, but you won't find many Easy Company survivors who will find fault with my selection, right, guys?

Dick Winters, sometime Easy Company platoon leader, company commander, and 2nd Battalion staff officer, is a photo-finish second, but even he (I would bet a bundle) would vote for Bill as "Soldier of any Year". In all wars, and in most company-sized units which sustained heavy casualties, one can say with certainty that the real heroes didn't survive their bravery, but in this case, they did… Their bravery, revealed in Normandy, and sustained through Holland and the Bulge, grew stronger with each firefight and each encounter with the enemy, retaining its bright luster until the day they were separated from active service. That neither man was awarded the CMH remains an unsolved mystery to me…as much as the continuing mystery of Harrison Summer's DS, which exceeds CMH standards by a country mile. The currency of U.S. military decorations has been shamefully devalued in recent years, first by the Air Force with their Cracker Jack Box proliferation of the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and later by the Army, with Bronze Stars going to thousands of non-combatant soldiery. Thru all of this the 101st, almost alone, in my opinion, resisted the temptation to dump cheap decorations on its soldiers…reserving its two Congressional Medals for men who died in combat within a few days of each other, and its DSC's and Silver Stars to a comparative handful of truly distinguished soldiers. (There were a few exceptions to this general rule, but even these can be suffered in silence because they were so few, and because those awards had redeeming virtue in the mirth they caused among those 'who knew'.)

I digress. In brief, this short work is dedicated in part to Bill Guarnere and Dick Winters, my personal heroes, and in equal part to those who didn't survive the war and were seldom cited for bravery. To the later we owe the greatest gratitude of all…for to them we owe our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Toccoa

'W' Company, in September of 1942, was a tent city on the grassy slope of a hill just below the regimental medical processing facility. The squad tents, as brand new as the citizen soldiers who occupied them, were aligned to form a company street, but W Company was a company in name only. It served as the regiment's in-and-out processing machine, and it was a fast train in both directions. The incoming volunteers (mostly draftees, some enlistees, but all volunteers for parachute training) were frantically busy from morning to night…drawing clothing and equipment, filling out forms, falling in for meals, marching to examinations, etc. The train was moving much too fast to jump from it and there was never, to my knowledge, a single disciplinary action among the thousand of "in-processees". Few lasting friendships were made during this period, but I made one which was destined to be one of the strongest of my life, one which ended only with the death of my first "Army buddy" in a foxhole near Bastogne in January, 1945. His name was Warren "Skippy" Muck, an upstate New Yorker of great charm and wit, who drew people to him like a magnet. Quiet, unassuming, totally "real", his strength was revealed in combat, where his 2nd platoon mortar section earned a fearsome reputation as Easy Company's most effective heavy weapons element. Skippy was a happy guy, and those who knew him basked in the warmth of that happiness and were happy too. His closest friend, and, inevitably one of mine, was Don Malarkey, another warm, friendly and happy-go-lucky individual who likewise rose to the top of my list of personal heroes like cream to the top of the old-fashioned glass milk bottle.