Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe

Toledo Blade - Oct. 14, 2001

Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe: Band Of Brothers in the News: Toledo Blade - Oct. 14, 2001

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By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.245.231.60 - 209.245.231.60) on Sunday, October 14, 2001 - 01:13 pm:

A soldier’s tale
Former Toledoan helped inspire HBO’s Band of Brothers

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
October 14, 2001

Donnie Wahlberg plays the role of Lt. Carwood Lipton in the popular HBO miniseries about World War II.

The Thursday night before the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, Carwood Lipton, 81, an unassuming former Owens-Illinois executive from Toledo, sat before the Council on Foreign Relations and had a prescient moment. Beside him was Stephen E. Ambrose, the celebrated war historian. In the audience sat a sprinkling of heavy hitters: presidential advisor David Gergen, America Online CEO Steve Case, and Home Box Office Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes. They all focused on Lipton, some with tears in their eyes.

The occasion was the premiere of the cable network’s $120 million, 10-part, World War II miniseries, Band of Brothers, based on Ambrose’s acclaimed 1992 book tracing the story of Easy Company, the famed 506th regiment of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. In the film, Lipton is played by Donnie Wahlberg. Lipton was a lieutenant in E Company and one of the first men to enlist in the regiment, which found itself dropped in nearly every hornet’s nest in Europe.

At the HBO event, after credits rolled and the lights came up in the room, the audience peppered Lipton with questions, mostly the usual stuff: What did he think of the proposed WW II memorial in Washington? Was the film as historically and emotionally accurate as executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg claim?

Then someone asked a question so prophetic that employees of the Council on Foreign Relations still buzz about it. The question: Did he think today’s military would fare well if faced with a new threat?

"Yes," Lipton said. "They would react if challenged the way we reacted when challenged. They would find the strength somehow to rise to the occasion."

And he backed that up, mentioning extreme sports, snowboarding, bungee jumping, then laughing that the current generation is more daring then his own generation.

When the applause died down, a young woman, an instructor at West Point, stood. "On behalf of the Me-Generation," she said, "we’d protect our country at any cost!"

More applause. "You’re damn right they would!" Lipton shouted above it.

A couple of weeks after the premiere, he and his wife, Marie, still talk about that night, their voices falling between poignancy and pride. Speaking by phone from his home in Southern Pines, N.C., Carwood said he expected the HBO miniseries’ relevancy to be largely about correcting a half century’s worth of sensationalistic war stories. He said it’s the most honest depiction of WW II ever seen in any movie or on any television show - and that includes Spielberg’s own Saving Private Ryan.

"Before this, the most realistic war movie was [1930’s] All Quiet on the Western Front," he said. "The others are ridiculous. People walk around a lot and are always talking to each other and standing up to shoot, and it just isn’t like that."

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Lipton said, "It turns out that the timing of the series is more perfect than expected - the country needs something like this now." He’s talking about a miniseries that emphasizes it was "citizen soldiers," to use Ambrose’s phrase, who fought evil; it was average people, office workers, coal miners, who stormed towns and outsmarted entire battalions, not military geniuses.

Lipton knows all about ordinary people performing extraordinary feats under duress. A native of West Virginia, he joined the military when he was 20. He said he was a loner.

"But there was this strong feeling of patriotism in the country," he said. "Life magazine ran an article on paratroopers and how difficult it was to join them. Since I was in good physical condition at the time, I decided I would be one. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing until I had done it, not until after I enlisted and had to take a train to Kentucky the next morning. That way no one had an opportunity to second guess me."

After the war, for 36 years he worked for O-I as an engineer and a director of development and manufacturing, moving with the O-I job from New Jersey to Illinois to Spain to London to Geneva to Toledo; for a decade, he lived in Old Orchard - his son, Thomas Lipton, still lives in Monclova Township. In 1983, Carwood retired to North Carolina. In all that time, he tended not to mention the war to colleagues.

"I never heard him speak of his military experiences," said friend Bill Niehous (the same O-I executive who was kidnapped by a radical group in Venezuela in the late 1970s). Lipton said he wanted to stick to work topics. Thomas Lipton said his father talked a lot about the war - "though only the funny stories."

Lipton first met Ambrose in the late 1980s - E Company had been having reunions since 1947. (Of 140 members in 1942, there are 20 left today.) The historian sent him a form letter asking D-Day survivors for an audio tape of their memories.

Lipton’s thoughts spread across two tapes. He was a Zelig-like character, always on the front line. He landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and helped capture Hitler’s "Eagle’s Nest" - all dramatized in Band of Brothers. And although it’s a film with 500 speaking roles, Wahlberg’s Lieutenant Lipton, along with company commander Maj. Richard Winters (played by British actor Damien Lewis) and Capt. Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston of Office Space), gets a lot of Hollywood close-up time.

When production on the miniseries began in spring 2000 - most of the 10 episodes were shot on a 1,100-acre back lot inside the Hatfield Aerodrome in England - Lipton was asked to be an on-set technical advisor for the series, but he was recuperating from back and hip surgery. So he talked to Wahlberg by phone, almost every day.

For instance, take Lipton’s parachute drop on D-Day.

The HBO series plays it as chaos, scattering the men in the wind and heightening the tension of a long drop with air singed by long trails of mortar fire. In reality, you’re not in the air very long, Lipton said. That day, they jumped lower than intended.

"My thoughts were, ‘I’m not coming down where I’m supposed to be coming down,’" Lipton said.

"You’re not thinking of being afraid. You’re thinking about what you have to do when you land. I saw lot of gun fire coming up. From the sky I remember I saw there was a fire in a town in the distance and that it was very dark everywhere else. I could recite minute by minute what happened that day."

So before each scene, Wahlberg would explain how the script read and Lipton would explain how an event actually happened. Then Wahlberg would go back to the filmmakers and argue for changes.

"You see, the book is the actions as remembered by the men and then interpreted by Ambrose," Lipton said. "The film is one more layer removed. It can end up a bit far from reality."

But Wahlberg nailed what he’s like, Lipton said. His Lipton is the most stoic, unemotional character in the miniseries, a disciplined, respected soldier who doesn’t waste a move on the battlefield.

"I was a leader but I never threw my weight around," he said. Still, Lipton adds, the film’s fight scenes show more outward emotion, more running around than real battle. What stands out to Lipton are smaller details, tweaked for dramatic reasons. In episode two, Wahlberg’s Lipton is crawling in the dirt when Warrant Officer Andrew Hill raises his head to ask where headquarters is and takes a bullet in the forehead.

In life, Lipton, though now 81, remembers better. Before leaving England, Hill married an English woman. After he left for France, he had a son and years later the son called Lipton. He wanted to know how his father died. Here’s what Lipton told him:

"I was crawling back to a gun position. The Germans were firing heavy machine gun fire right over us. Hill was behind me. Someone was in front of me - that guy turns his head back and asked where headquarters was. It was a stupid question. I turned back to Hill and he raised his head no more than four inches and a bullet hit right in the middle of his forehead and came out behind his ear.

"It stands out in my memory because it was the first American I saw killed. I had seen others, lying on the side of the road, in fields, lots of bodies, but that was the first one where I was there. I remember the moment clearly. It was about eight that morning. He was the first American I saw killed and I knew him well."

By uufheawvgmt (195.127.150.117) on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 01:15 am: