A Company of Heroes Read online

  But the second mistake, the bigger one, I knew I had to have it corrected. The series said that Albert Blithe never recovered from his wounds and died in 1948. That simply wasn’t true.

  I became obsessed about finding out more and setting the record straight. For five days straight I left messages on Internet sites. I got a lot of e-mails in reply, then a woman in Maryland, Linda Switzer, came to my aid in a big way. She helped me get word out even more, and soon I actually received e-mails from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg apologizing for the oversight.

  It seems that Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron had sworn up and down that they attended my dad’s funeral in 1948. I have the utmost respect for those guys and I can see how that made sense to them. The last thing they knew about Albert Blithe was that he had been seriously wounded, somewhere near the face, head, or neck area, near Carentan. They never saw him alive again. But it must have been another Albert Blithe’s funeral they went to (there are a few of them out there—for instance, I have a cousin named Albert Blithe), or else they were simply relying on their memories when the book was being researched and had been to so many funerals over the years that they were thinking about somebody else. I have documents (they’re now posted at the 506th Infantry Web site)1 that show my dad at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1948, so he couldn’t have died then.

  At first the task of convincing people that Albert Blithe had lived beyond 1948 was a bit of a hard sell. I got some pretty nasty e-mails from people who couldn’t believe that Stephen Ambrose and HBO had actually made a mistake. They felt simply that because my last name was Blithe I was jumping on the Band of Brothers bandwagon and wanted attention for myself. One person, who had done a lot of research into Easy Company and has a pretty well-known name in these circles, basically called me a liar. “Send me your dad’s DD-214s [military records],” he said. I did that. But even then he wasn’t convinced. He had a picture of Albert Blithe’s grave in Philadelphia.

  That didn’t matter to me. I knew it wasn’t my father’s grave. I was there when my dad died. My mother was there. We buried him. My dad died December 17, 1967, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.2 I have a picture of the gravestone, which I sent to this man.3

  My dad and Gordy Carson were close friends during the war. His son, Gary Carson, lives in Seattle. Gary showed me a wartime diary his dad had written that said, “I don’t know what I’d do without Al Blithe.” I had a sack of documents and Gary and I went through them. One of the documents is a signed and stamped military affidavit showing that my dad jumped with E Company during WWII, then went on to jump with the 82nd Airborne in the 1950s—so he couldn’t have died in 1948, according to this affidavit. I’ll tell you, Gary Carson is a prince of a gentleman. When we met, we hit it right off. He gave me Bill Guarnere’s phone number, but I didn’t have the courage to phone Mr. Guarnere up and tell him he went to the wrong Al Blithe’s funeral. So I just let it lie. Evidently Mr. Guarnere was convinced in the end because he and Babe Heffron mentioned in their book that although they never saw my dad again, they later heard he ended up back in combat in Korea.4

  For some time I did whatever I could to prove that my dad wasn’t dead [in 1948]. For instance, I interviewed with the 506th Infantry’s web-master for about three hours and showed him all the documents I had. In the end, all the people who needed to be convinced were convinced. The error in the book and the miniseries were never corrected, but I guess it’s hard to correct something when it’s been that widely distributed. But the new Blu-ray version of Band of Brothers has an interactive guide called “In the Field with the Men of Easy Company,” stating correctly that Albert Blithe died in 1967. So that’s good. In Dick Winters’s memoirs, he sets the record straight as well.5 That was good for me to see. I felt I had done my job.

  The Real Albert Blithe

  Albert Blithe was born June 25, 1923, in Philadelphia. His mother worked in the garment district. His father worked for the United Parcel Service as a deliveryman.

  Now, it’s hard to say this, and I don’t know how you’re quite going to put this in a book, but my dad was a thug. There’s no other way to say it. He was raised on the rough side of the tracks and was always in trouble, even though he came from a very religious extended family. Most of them on his mother’s side were missionaries. I can’t say any of that faith ever rubbed off on my dad. He always said that their religion was forced on him as a kid. Later, he became an agnostic. He didn’t know one way or another if there was a God. My mother told me that when he was a kid my grandmother used to give him money to put in the offering plate. My dad would skip out on church and gamble the money away in the alley-ways of the city.

  Dad graduated from high school and worked at the Westinghouse plant after he graduated. As a young man he got in so much trouble that he finally concluded he had to get out of Philadelphia, away from his old friends and influences, and the only way to do that was to join the Army. The war was going on by then, so he enlisted, and the rest is history. I’ll tell you all I know about his wartime experiences in a minute.

  My dad was married twice. His first wife’s name was Flora Mae, from West Virginia. When Dad was wounded and sent back to the states, he was in a veteran’s hospital in Ashland, West Virginia. I assume he and Flora Mae met there. When he went back into the Army he was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. That’s where my half-sister Barbara was born, in 1948, at Fort Bliss. I know the family went to Germany about that time, then came back. My dad and his first wife divorced around 1951.

  My parents—his second marriage—were married in 1957. My mother’s name is Sadie, but she went by Kay. She had two daughters from a previous marriage, Sandra and Pinky. My mom and dad met on a blind date at the USO in Fayetteville, NC, where my dad was stationed with the 82nd Airborne out at Fort Bragg. The date was set up by my oldest half sister, Pinky. I was born in 1959.

  Fayetteville is mostly where I grew up. In many ways it was a lot of fun to grow up with my dad. He was a chronic alcoholic, probably due to the war, but he was a Good Time Charlie, too. He was always fun to be with. We went to the beach and to carnivals. In many ways we were a happy, small, army family. Mom and Dad loved to go out dancing. In her later years, my mom says the happiest she had ever been was when she was with my dad. Those years encompass my best memories of him, too. It’s good that I have some good memories, because the rest of my father’s life became pretty ugly.

  In the Mind of Albert Blithe

  My dad died when I was just eight years old. He never talked about the war to me, but my mom told me several times, “You just don’t know how badly the war messed up your dad’s mind.”

  When I was maybe seven, I asked my dad two questions straight-out. The first was: “Did you kill anybody?”

  He nodded his head slowly, but didn’t say anything more.

  “Were you scared?” I asked. That was the second question.

  “Yeah, of course I was scared,” he said.

  I’m pretty sure he told my mom a lot more about what happened during the war, but those were the only two questions I ever asked him about it.

  We know now from other sources that Dad was one of the original Toccoa men who trained under Captain Sobel.

  We know that my dad liked to gamble. Apparently, they had a little business going on that Dad was in the midst of, running a dice game back in the barracks in England.

  The big story of Dad in the war is when he became temporarily blind [hysterical blindness], after the battle of Carentan. I asked Mom about it in later years and she never doubted that it happened to Dad. The men all went through so much and saw so much. Carentan was a fierce battle. Dick Winters wrote about it as fact in his memoirs. He also states that Dad immediately returned to duty as soon as he regained his vision, which speaks about the guts and determination it took to keep going.6 Dad evidently was brave, despite the incident with the blindness, because later he fought in Korea and earned both a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. He was a private in World War II, but he achie
ved the rank of master sergeant in Korea. He was proud of his military career. It meant the world to him. I don’t think I ever saw my dad out of uniform. The uniform was always a part of who he was.

  In a letter to my mother dated December 18, 1967, from the Department of the Army, it describes how my dad died. He was on active duty with the 8th Supply and Transport Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, in West Germany. A week before his death he had attended a commemorative weekend in Bastogne, Belgium, and returned from the event feeling unwell. He was taken to the emergency room and diagnosed with a perforated ulcer. Emergency surgery was performed the next day. Complications set in, his kidneys failed, and he died December 17.

  I don’t doubt that’s all true. But I will say that what’s in that letter is mostly polite talk. My dad drank himself to death. That’s how it really happened.

  My dad drank every day. After work he went to the NCO club until it closed at two in the morning. He came back home bringing a couple bottles of Seagram’s 7 with him, which was his favorite. My mom and he were drinking buddies, and most times they drank until five in the morning. My dad would sleep an hour, shave, shower, get on his uniform, go to work, and perform duties like it was nothing. That’s how it went pretty much every weekday for my dad. He’d sleep more on the weekends, but even then, as soon as he got up and ate something, it was back to the drinking again. I’ve never seen a man drink as much as my father. He could drink enormous quantities of alcohol. At least he was a happy drunk: that was about the only good thing about his addiction.

  There were other problems in the marriage. Mom and Dad split up a couple years before he died. Dad liked to gamble as well as drink. My mom put up with that for eleven years. Mom handled the money and gave him a lot of leeway in how much money he used for gambling. He used to gamble away the rent money until Mom put a stop to that.

  We were stationed at Fort Lee for a time where he got a job as a parachute-rigger instructor. Then he had a ministroke, so they put him on temporary retirement. But dad loved the Army and worked to get his strength back. Finally he was strong enough, so they let him go back in. He had eighteen months to go before he retired. They stationed him in Germany in June, 1967. He was dead by December of that year. He was forty-four years old when he died.

  My mom and dad always loved each other, I don’t doubt that. When my dad died, it just destroyed my mom. She started drinking more and eventually became a severe alcoholic herself. Toward the end she would sometimes drink twenty-three out of twenty-four hours in a day. She drank herself into dementia. She grew very sick at the end; she was in the hospital on full life support. I don’t think she ever got over the death of my dad. She died in 1996.

  I went through a lot of the same problems as my dad. I got in trouble a lot as a kid. As a teenager I liked to drink. I figured the Army was the only way I could get straightened out, so I joined the service. I was mostly stationed at Fort Lewis. I put in my four years but didn’t want to enlist again. I liked the Seattle/Tacoma area in Washington State a lot and settled down there after the service. I got married and had a son, then got divorced. For a while I had custody of my son. He lives across the country now, but we’re still close. Washington State treated me good and is my home now. Good people. Good fishing. I’m happy here. Washington’s where I love to be.

  I know my dad certainly had his share of problems, but nobody is perfect. I want people to remember my father this way: He was a true American paratrooper who put his life on the line for this country and thousands of other people in this world. He fought for people he didn’t even know. I’m proud of him, so proud. That’s how I want people to remember Albert Blithe.

  2

  TONY GARCIA

  Interview with Greg Garcia, son With additional information from Kelly Garcia, daughter, Carmen and William Deshler, sister and brother-in-law, and Suzanne Eckloff, niece

  When I was a kid and asked Dad about his combat experiences, I always asked in general terms—“Did you kill any Germans?”—that type of thing, and my dad’s answers were equally vague—“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.” After Band of Brothers came out, we learned to ask more specific questions, and in turn, Dad gave us more specific answers. But even then there was a lot that remained unsaid. I wish that thirty years ago we had known how to ask questions better. Maybe we all wish that with our parents.

  You first see a glimpse of my dad, Tony Garcia (as portrayed by actor Douglas Spain), toward the end of episode 3 of the Band of Brothers, the one titled “Carentan.” Then in episode 4, titled “Replacements,” when the original men of Easy are back from Normandy, three very young-looking privates—Les Hashey, James Miller, and my dad—are sitting at a table in the Blue Boar Inn in England. The now battle-hardened Bill Guarnere sits down with them, tells them an off-color joke about getting inside a plane named Doris, then warns them to listen closely to whatever their squad leader, Bull Randleman, tells them. Later, while on the ground outside the plane just before the jump for Operation Market-Garden, my dad’s character is seen nervously trying to get his rifle and gear in order, and Bull gives him some last minute advice about jumping, which sets Dad’s mind at ease.

  We learned a lot about our dad’s combat experiences only after the miniseries came out. Dad talked as we watched TV together. It was the most we had ever heard from him about it. As a rule, Dad kept the war to himself. I believe he didn’t want to burden anyone else with it. He had seen such awful things—the shellings, the concentration camp, his buddies getting killed and wounded. But even though he didn’t say much, you could tell that the war had affected him. Every so often Mom would say, “Your dad had a nightmare again.” His dreams would usually be about fighting in combat or jumping out of a plane. On several occasions the dreams must have been intense. When I came over to visit, he might have a new scratch or cut, or maybe a bruise on his forehead. He’d fallen out of bed and hit his head on the nightstand during a nightmare, thinking he was fighting or jumping from a plane.

  I saw evidence of these dreams firsthand a few times. In 2000, Dad, my sister Kelly, and I went to an Easy Company reunion in New Orleans where we all shared a hotel room. (Mom didn’t travel by plane anymore because she was disabled with multiple sclerosis.) We could hear Dad in the night mumbling and thrashing around. I called out to him: “Relax. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine.” He went back to sleep, and we didn’t mention it the next morning. We also saw this while on the trip to France for the premier of Band of Brothers. The vivid memories surfaced in his dreams, making for troubled sleep. I can imagine that any kind of event relating to Easy Company or the war brought back the memories and dreams.

  There were things that he readily shared, though, from his wartime experiences. Once after watching a war movie as a kid, I remember asking him how a bazooka destroyed a tank. He drew me a detailed diagram and explained how the bazooka shell worked. He was happy to share that kind of information.

  What was my dad really like? Some details are lost forever, and we’ll never know, but this is what we do know:

  A Considerate Kid

  Anthony Garcia was born in 1924, in Inez, Texas. The timing of his birth came as a surprise. His family lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but my grandmother was visiting relatives in Texas when she gave birth to him prematurely. When the baby was strong enough to travel, they rejoined the rest of the family in Wyoming.

  Dad’s parents were full-blooded Mexicans who had moved to the United States in search of a better life. My grandmother, Isabel, was the daughter of a sharecropper, and came to the states first. My grandfather, José, came later. They met and married and moved about the country following work—everything from coal mining in Appalachia to handling freight for the Union Pacific Railroad, where José eventually gained permanent employment. My dad was the fourth child in the family. All of José and Isabel’s seven children were born in the United States. They spoke Spanish in the house and picked up English as time went on. Dad spoke it fluently by the time I knew him.
He didn’t have any accent at all.

  My dad’s family wasn’t wealthy by any means. My grandfather decided to build the family a house. By hand, he and the boys dug the basement. For a while they actually lived in the hole in the ground. The family joke is that dad was born in a foxhole. Then, gradually, they built the rest of the house, much of it with salvage wood that my grandfather brought home from work. That house still stands today.

  My dad learned early how to be self-reliant. He and his brothers and sisters picked cotton, tended turkeys, and helped out with the calves, which he and his siblings sometimes saddled for fun and rode around the farm. His sister remembers him as a laid-back kid, an average student, someone who got along with all of his siblings and was especially considerate to the younger children. Dad had a large paper route. Come rain, shine, or Cheyenne snow, the papers always got delivered on time.

  Only in the Movies

  When the war began, Dad’s older brother Ben had already enlisted and survived the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. That clinched Dad’s decision to join up, so he dropped out of high school in 1943 to enlist.

  My dad and a buddy first tried to enlist in the Marines. At the recruiter’s office, they were told, “Sorry, we’re all full up. Why don’t you try the Army?” So they did. His first assignment was with a searchlight battalion.

  He saw posters advertising the Airborne and had his mind set on joining it, but he failed the physical twice because his heart rate was irregular. Someone gave him a couple of pills to help steady his heart rate. Not knowing any better, he took more pills than necessary, which made his heart race during the exam. The doctor commented, “I guess they worked you guys really hard in physical training today,” to which my dad, not missing a beat, said, “They sure did!” And with that, he passed the exam and got into the Airborne.