Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe

Lansing State Journal - Sept. 8, 2001

Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe: Band Of Brothers in the News: Lansing State Journal - Sept. 8, 2001

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By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (209.245.229.234 - 209.245.229.234) on Saturday, October 27, 2001 - 02:15 pm:

Band of Brothers tells heroic tales of ordinary folks

By Mike Hughes
Lansing State Journal
Saturday, September 8, 2001

They landed behind enemy lines, exposed and endangered.

The men of the 101st Airborne Division arrived five hours before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. The next morning, they attacked a fortified enemy.

"You just keep going, moving forward," recalled Donald Burgett of Howell. "What else can you do?"

Many of his colleagues were killed or injured. Others would later tell some of the most powerful stories of World War II.

Now those stories resonate in books - including four by Burgett - and a stunning miniseries.

Band of Brothers premieres Sunday on HBO, complete with an epic budget ($120 million), major producers (Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg) and a sprawling story. It follows the men of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne.

"These guys were everywhere," said Stephen Ambrose, whose book is the basis of the miniseries. "They started in Georgia; they ended up at Hitler's Eagle's Nest. And they covered everything in between."

Burgett knows that vividly. He wasn't in E Company, but he was in the same regiment.

His war ranged from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and the freeing of concentration camps. It then sent him back home as a hardened veteran - who wasn't quite 21.

"I couldn't buy a drink," said Burgett, now 76. "I couldn't vote; I couldn't get a car without having someone else sign the contract."

By then, he had helped change history. "The fate of the world hung in the balance," Hanks said.

One of the Easy Company soldiers (Sgt. Mike Ranney) would be asked by his grandson if he had been a war hero. "No," he said, "but I served in a company of heroes."

Now this heroic company is getting fresh attention. These are men like Burgett who returned home to burrow into quiet lives.

As Hanks put it: "I can't get past the reality that in 1952, on Christmas Eve, (they) probably decorated the tree and put the little train tracks around it so their sons or daughters would wake up and see that Santa had delivered an electric train.

"Eight years prior to that, Christmas Eve was spent freezing in a foxhole in Bastogne, and their best friends died in the artillery barrage that happened that night."

That was during the most horrific moments of the Battle of the Bulge.

"High explosives are going off all around you," Ambrose said. "Great trees are coming down. You're trying desperately to get into your foxhole - and if a shell comes in, you're gone anyway. It is the most helpless feeling in the world."

Still, this was no ordinary generation of men.

"We grew up during the Depression," said Carwood Lipton, who was a sergeant in Easy Company. "We knew hard times. We knew hard work. We knew that things did not come easily to us."

Then came Pearl Harbor. "That was an atrocity," Burgett said.

He was the teenage son of a Detroit cop. He quit school and tried to enlist, but he was rejected because he was 16; on his 18th birthday, he volunteered for Airborne.

"We were all very gung-ho," Burgett said. "We were all volunteers. They tried to weed us out, but we wouldn't go."

The paratroopers would land behind the lines before D-Day, then capture key spots. There were elaborate plans, many of them thwarted by the chaos of the day.

The flights into France ran into clouds and anti-aircraft fire. "You could walk on the flak out there, it was so thick," Burgett said.

He landed 12 miles from the drop zone. Then he found a few colleagues and began the long trek to attack an enemy-held village. "The Germans had every foxhole and every building," Burgett said. "They knew where the roads were; we didn't."

Amid the gunfire and death, a tiny group of paratroopers took the village. It was, Burgett said, the first captured in the invasion.

Back in England, his company added replacements.

"Even though I hadn't turned 19, I felt like an old-timer," Burgett said. "I would try to show the replacements how to stay alive."

Many died during 72 days behind the lines in Holland, or during the Battle of the Bulge.

"Not everyone had a weapon," Burgett said. "One man just had a stick. He said, 'I'll have a rifle by the time we get there.' He meant he'd get one off a German, or a fallen comrade."

Then came the horrors of Bastogne - and a deeper horror.

"We had never heard of concentration camps. The first thing you noticed was the smell. You have 4,000, 5,000 dead bodies. I saw some tough guys who had seen a lot of combat throw up from the smell."

The young Airborne men had seen deep horrors. Many simply wanted to retreat from it all.

On the first night of D-Day, Lt. Richard Winters, the Easy Company leader, made a promise to himself: If he lived through the war, he would find an isolated farm and spend his life in peace and quiet.

He did that, eventually. After being a manufacturing executive, he bought a farm at the foot of mountains in Pennsylvania. "That's where I find the peace and quiet that I promised myself on D-Day," he told Ambrose.

By one view, that's just what Burgett did. He bought 18 acres near Howell and settled into a quiet life as a carpenter.

Still, that peaceful image may be deceiving. "I spent 50-some years coming out of a fog," he said.

Even during the fog, he said, he married, had five children and shared vivid war memories. In 1967, a time when people showed little interest in World War II, he wrote Currahee! A Screaming Eagle in Normandy.

It was condensed by Reader's Digest and drew strong praise. That ranged from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ("a fascinating tale of personal combat") to Ambrose.

"I have read a lot of books on the experience of combat from both world wars," Ambrose wrote. "This is by a long shot the best."

Burgett used the book money to buy his Howell place. Still, he said, it's only been in recent years that his personal fog faded. That's when he wrote three new books, all published by Presidio Press.

This time, the world seems fascinated by the subject. Ambrose and others have stirred interest. One night, Ambrose dined with Lipton, Winters and others from E Company.

"What fascinated me the most was not their battle record, which is outstanding," Ambrose said, "but their closeness. They knew each other. They knew each other's children. They became so bonded that they are a band of brothers."

Hanks and Spielberg were preparing the movie Saving Private Ryan when they read Ambrose's book. Soon, they began planning their epic miniseries:

"(We) try to put it into human terms," said Hanks, "so it is not just a flickering, black-and-white myth. You might think, 'Well, what would I do under those same circumstances?' "

No one knows what they would do. But for a few horrific years, some almost-regular guys bonded into a company of heroes.

Contact Mike Hughes at 377-1156 or mhughes@lsj.com.

By cqbizrbdn (213.166.224.15) on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 07:16 am: