to pin a Purple Heart on his pillow. “I would lower my eyes modestly and murmur thanks to the small group who had gathered to see the hero.” Then he would hide the medal and wait for the next one.
After eight weeks in the hospital, he returned to E Company. (It was Airborne policy to return recovered men to their original company; in the infantry, when wounded became fit for duty, they went wherever they were needed. The former was, in the opinion of every paratrooper, one of the wisest things the Airborne did; the latter policy was, in everyone’s opinion, one of the dumbest things the Army did.)
Sergeant Talbert got back to Easy at the same time Gordon did. As his wound had been inflicted by Private Smith’s bayonet, rather than by a German, he was disqualified from receiving the Purple Heart. Gordon told him not to worry, he could fix him up with one of his extra ribbons. The 3rd platoon got together and conducted an appropriate ceremony for Talbert. Gordon and Rogers had written a poem to immortalize Talbert, Smith, “and the bayonet that came between them.” The title was “The Night of the Bayonet”; fortunately for posterity, the poem has not survived (or at least the authors refused to give it to me for this book). The indignant Talbert declared, “I could have shot the little bastard six times as he lunged toward me, but I didn’t think we could spare a man at the time.”
Some of the wounded were worried about permanent disability. Malarkey found this out when he and Don Moone were sitting in the mess hall as Lipton passed by. “Hi, crip,” Malarkey called out. Lipton turned and grabbed the two men by their throats, lifted them from their chairs, and declared that he would take them on one at a time or together. They went pale and said they didn’t mean anything by the crack. Later Lipton returned, red faced, and said he was sorry to lose his temper, but he feared that the wound to his hand had inflicted permanent damage that would prevent him from playing college football.
Underlying the release of tension in London, or Gordon’s feeble attempts at some humor, was the reality these men had faced and their apprehension about what they would be facing.
Sergeant Martin looked around the 1st platoon barracks the first night back from Normandy, and half the men who had been there from September 1943 to May 1944 were gone. He said to Guarnere, “Jesus, Bill, here we’ve got a half a hut full of guys, and we aren’t even started in the war yet. We don’t have a Chinaman’s chance of ever getting out of this thing.”
“If we lost half the barracks in one goddamn little maneuver in Normandy,” Guarnere replied, “forget it, we’ll never get home.”
They took their leave in Scotland, where they got tattoos, figuring what the hell, “losing that many men in one little deal like that and the whole war ahead of us, why not?”
Pvt. David Kenyon Webster had jumped with 2nd Battalion’s HQ Company on D-Day, been wounded a few days later, evacuated to England, and returned to Aldbourne before the battalion returned. He hid in the shadows of the Red Cross hut as “the thin, tired column of survivors marched into the area,” hoping that no one would look him in the face and ask, “Where the hell were you, Webster, when the Krauts made the big counterattack the other side of Carentan and F
Company gave ground and E Company’s flank was exposed?”
His embarrassment aside, Webster was overjoyed to see his friends return. “You know everybody in the Battalion by sight,” he wrote, “if not by name, and you feel like part of a big family. You are closer to these men than you will ever be to any civilians.”
He applied for a transfer back to E Company, because with HQ Company he had been an ammunition carrier most of the time, had fired his machine-gun only once in Normandy, and “I craved action. I wanted to get the war over with; I wanted to fight as a rifleman in a line company.” He became a member of 1st platoon.