#Saving My Enemy: How Two WWII Soldiers Fought Against Each Other and Later Forged a Friendship That Saved Their Lives

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Don Malarkey didn’t shoot himself in the foot. He couldn’t. Apart from anything else, it would have been a dishonor to his World War I uncles—a self-inflicted wound to send a selfish soldier home. Beyond that, Malarkey looked at the men around him, the ones still left. He had lost eight buddies since they’d gone to war, not counting the wounded ones such as Toye and Guarnere. Buck Compton had just been given a breather; the shelling had pushed him over the edge. He couldn’t take it anymore. But as much as Malarkey wanted to leave it all behind, he realized something: those who were left needed him. If he quit, it would be easier on him but all the harder for the others. He couldn’t do that. He was a Malarkey. He couldn’t quit. He owed something to his uncles. To Easy Company. Hell, he thought, to himself. Soldiers just soldiered on—even after January 10, when Roe, Easy Company’s medic, came to him. “Malark, I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s Skip. He’s dead. Penkala, too.” Don’s disposition didn’t change. It was as if he was frozen in grief. Or numb. Maybe both. “How?” he asked softly.

“Direct hit… shell found them like it had eyes.” Again, no collapse. No angry fists to the sky. No tears. He was already past the breaking point. For Malarkey, the moment wasn’t just about Skip. It was about a hundred-plus days on the front line, seeing bodies torn apart and broken and smashed, bloated in summer’s sun and frozen by winter’s cold. It was watching Fritz Niland, right there in your foxhole at Carentan, break down and weep after believing all three of his brothers had been killed in the war. It was the legs of Toye and Guarnere in the blood-splattered snow. All of it had flooded Malarkey with so much unexamined pain that Skip’s death was just one more set of unclaimed laundry in England that he couldn’t deal with. After a while, you learned to use the pain almost like an anesthetic, to protect yourself from more. By the time he heard about Skip, he had the emotional dry heaves. Nothing left to come up. “Here,” said Roe, pressing the cross of the rosary beads into Malarkey’s hand. “He’d want you to have these.” Malarkey held onto the cold cross. All around, men’s eyes were wet with tears; Muck was clearly a favorite, and there was nobody closer to him than Don. Winters noticed that Malarkey had the “thousand-yard stare.” He offered him a break at the rear. Thanks, but no thanks, Malarkey said. Every man still left in Easy Company was at a breaking point, and there were no time-outs in war. You couldn’t stop and talk about the death of your best friend, the guy who had wanted to introduce you to his fiancée and show you where he had swum across the Niagara. The guy you were going to take salmon fishing over the Columbia River Bar and treat to dinner at the Liberty Grill afterward.

~ Bob Welch

[mercurygray]

Since Lysel originally put together this list in 2020, several other Easy Company adjacent books have come out in print:

🦅Jared Frederick and Eric Dorr - Fierce Valor: The True Story of Ronald Speirs and his Band of Brothers

🦅Jared Frederick and Eric Dorr - Hang Tough: The WWII Letters and Artifacts of Major Dick Winters

🦅Bob Welch, Saving My Enemy: How Two WWII Soldiers Fought Against Each Other and Later Forged a Friendship That Saved Their Lives This book is about Don Malarkey's later-in-life friendship with a German, Fritz Engelbert

Band of Brothers bibliography

Non-exhaustive list, only my 506th PIR Easy Co/101st Airborne related readings so far:

🦅 Stephen Ambrose - Band of brothers

Only kinda mandatory because the show is based on it but to be taken with a pinch of salt.

🦅 Dick Winters - Beyond Band of brothers

Very interesting to read Winters’ own words. Although not my fav because it’s (unsurprisingly) very factual and analytical. Good for historical/chronological reference.

🦅 Cole Kingseed - Conversations with Major Dick Winters

Interesting, mostly focused on Winters’ leadership qualities

🦅 Larry Alexander - Biggest Brother

❤ A fave! The approach is more personal and human (also most of the nuggets about Nixon are from this book).

🦅 Don Malarkey/Bob Welsh - Easy company soldier

❤ A fave!!! Little warning, it’s pretty melancholic, I always cry a lot rereading. (If I loved TV!Skip before, I totally fell in love with he real guy after that, second hand feels and all)

🦅 William Guarnere/Edward Heffon/ Robyn Post - Brothers in battle, best of friends:

❤ A fave!!! This one is both hilarious and devastating -because war is hell. (I usually reread a chapter after Malarkey’s to soothe my poor little heart.)

🦅 Marcus Brotherton - Shifty’s war

❤A fave!!! Biography written with 1st person POV, Shifty’s voice is beautifully captured. (It’s so heartwarming, I’m in perpetual beaming “Awwwwww” mood)

🦅 Marcus Brotherton - A company of heroes (anthology):

❤A fave. Individual focus on a selection of biographies with testimonials from their family. (I totally fell in love with Smokey reading this one)

🦅 Marcus Brotherton - We who are alive and remain (anthology): Global retelling of the whole story with multiple accounts.

🦅 Larry Alexander - In the footsteps of the Band of brothers, Return to Easy Company’s Battlefields with Sgt. Forrest Guth

What the title promises! Prepare the travel bucket list!

🦅 David Kenyon Webster- Parachute infantry

I was a little refractory at first, because it looks like it was a big referencee in the writing of BoB and I’m still salty about Ambrose’s work.

That being said, it’s interesting as an individual’s experience of the war and gives little details on the sceneries and every day activities of a private.

🦅 Chris Langlois - How Easy Company Became A Band of Brothers

❤ A lovely book for younger audiences from Doc Roe’s grandson. Beautifully illustrated by Anneke Helleman.

🦅 Ed Shames/Ian Gardner - Airborn, the combat story of Ed Shames,Easy company

(Quite salty) POV from the (at some point) 3rd platoon leader (A little mention of Nixon, whom Shames found difficult to work with, in S2)

🦅 Marcus Brotherton/Lynn Compton - Call of duty: I’ve tried to read that one several time but it just doesn’t speak to me

🦅 Donald Burgett - Currahee/The road to Arnhem/Seven Roads to Hell/Beyond the Rhine

Easy reading, the whole ride from an Able company paratrooper’s POV, same kind of personal memoirs packed with interesting details like Webster’s (with less complaining 😂).

🦅 Ian Gardner - Tonight We Die As Men/ Deliver Us From Darkness/ No Victory in Valhalla

Following the 506 PIR 3rd battalion. A bit heavy but interesting for a larger view of the actions (from the battalion Doc Roe couldn’t find in Bastogne, lost his way)

*The short documentary film “Seize and hold Carentan” by N3DLand follows this battalion.

🦅 George Koskimaki - D-Day with the Screaming Eagles/ Hell’s Highway/Battered Bastards of Bastogne 

Very information packed collection of personnal recollections. A bit confusing if you are not already familiar with the subject.

(I only picked bits of each book so far, wanting to find out what happened to the 326 airborne medical unit. Also interesting for Lipton and other vets’ recollections)

🦅 Charles Whiting - American Eagle

Very interesting, from an non American POV. I learnt about some stuffs only mentioned in passing or not at all, like the disaster of operation tiger in Slapton sand, or that the higher command wasn’t exactly confident about the efficiency of such airborne units until Bastogne.

🦅🏥 Paul Woodadge - Angels of Mercy: Two Screaming Eagle Medics in Angoville-au-Plain on D-Day

❤ Medics!! The title says it all. Beautiful story. The medics are from the 501st PIR

*There’s a WWII Foundation documentary “Eagles of Mercy” about this.

🦅 Robert Bowen - Fighting with the Screaming Eagles

Interesting personnal account from a glider’s pov (401st glider infantry regiment) and life as a POW captured in the Battle of the Bulge.

🏥 Martin King - Searching for Augusta: the forgotten angel of Bastogne

❤ Remember the black nurse “Anna” in Bastogne? Her real name is Augusta Chiwy and that’s her amazing story. (Just be aware that the author is a bit “salty” towards Renée Lemaire, more likely about the spotlight she received while Augusta was forgotten for so long)

*The book has a documentary counterpart.

🦈David Kenyon Webster - Myth and maneater: The story of the shark

❤ Don’t mind the sensationalist cover choice from the publisher who finally accepted to publish it (posthumously), profiting from the cinematic success of Jaws.

It’s beautifully and humorously written, very interesting and surprisingly ahead of its time (1960s) viewing sharks as much more than bloodthirsty monster.

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Every crazy story Don could tell—about rogue ocean waves and salmon the length of ironing boards—Skip could equal or exceed. Don’s favorite was how Skip had swum across the Niagara River, just above the falls—at night. They decided each would experience the other’s world when the war was over: Don would take Skip salmon fishing in the Pacific, and Skip would show Don where he had crossed the Niagara. On the three-day march to Atlanta, Malarkey developed shin splints and blisters. When the unit camped at the eighty-mile mark, he needed to crawl to get his food. Muck saw him and cringed. “No friend of mine crawls anywhere,” he said, after fetching Don’s dinner for him. “That’s just the kind of guy he was,” said Malarkey decades later. “In some ways I was closer to Skip than to my own two brothers.” In England, before the paratroopers left for France, Sobel was replaced as Easy Company commander by First Lieutenant Tom Meehan. And Don and Skip made a vow. “Friends no matter what, right?” said Muck. “No matter what,” said Malarkey.

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

... a cold war like the one between the United States and the Soviet Union was emerging deep in the soul of Don Malarkey. The memories would not go away. They were with him when he was walking to the McDonald Theater in downtown Eugene and a car backfired; instinctively, he dove into a bush as his friends’ incredulous looks turned to laughter. The memories were with him when he awoke on the sleeping porch at the Sigma Nu fraternity house sweating like a man in a sauna, having been sucked back to Bastogne in a nightmare: Muck exploding. Legs in the snow. The sixteen-year-old German soldier, an angel in all-white camouflage. Malarkey began to wonder where the dividing line was between good and evil. He tried—God knows he tried—to default to what the army had taught him: dehumanization. It was just another faceless soldier, the enemy that had to be thwarted. And yet he had seen that boy’s eyes, and his skin as smooth as Ardennes snow. Had Malarkey committed murder? Was he going to hell? Where was the purification for whatever curse he carried? Where was the absolution for the sin of having survived when others had not?

[...]

Malarkey wasn’t expecting a ticker-tape parade for him and others who’d fought; a beer and a listening ear would have been enough. But he found little interest in, or affirmation of, his experience in Europe. Everyone wanted just to “get on with our lives.” Few talked about the war or showed any interest in trying to understand it. Nobody got it. Nobody got him. Oh, outwardly, he was Joe College. A crooner with good looks, he directed the fraternity choir, starred on the Sigma Nu basketball team, and dragged his grades up from the depths of the Cs. But on a deeper level, he felt lost.

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

What he loved about her was that she was different from the others when it came to Don’s war baggage. When he was suddenly in tears because someone reminded him of Skip Muck, she understood. She listened. She cared. A grenade of bad memories could explode on Don, and he and Irene could pick up right where they left off. As if nothing at all had changed. As if she could love him, protect him, keep him safe from the war—for now and forever. Never mind that Irene, like Don, was only human, and the ghosts of Bastogne were insidious. Years later he was asked what it was like for him after returning from the war. “Tough,” he said. “Tough meaning what?” probed the journalist doing the interview. “It was hell.” “What was the worst it ever got?”

“The worst?” His eyes were misting before he opened his mouth to speak. He sniffed. “Every evening after work,” he said, “I’d go out for a drink. And at the bottom of my glass of scotch… I’d see the faces… of every man I left in Bastogne.”

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

It was May 7, 1945, nearly five years since German soldiers had goose-stepped into city after city. The Allied victory in the Battle of the Bulge had ended that Nazi occupation; as of February 4, 1945, Belgium was free again. As Malarkey sipped his beer, bells started ringing outside. “La guerre est terminée! Les Allemands se sont rendus!” people were shouting in French. Instantly: Smiles! Hollers! Hugs! “The war is over!” an English-speaker, face aglow, said to Malarkey. “The Germans have surrendered!” The grateful Belgians bought so many drinks for Malarkey that when he saw someone who looked like Frank Perconte walk by outside, he wondered if it was only the buzz from the beer. But then Perconte saw Don, burst through the pub’s door, and gave Malarkey a huge hug. The reunion only got better when Burr Smith, another Screaming Eagle, rolled by on a trolley—in fact, doing handstands atop the trolley—and joined the celebration. What could be greater, thought Malarkey, than celebrating the war’s end with guys you’d been with ever since Toccoa? The three locked arms. “This is it,” said Smith. “We’re going home!”

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Though the Americans had been taken by surprise and were slow to respond, their resiliency—particularly the 101st Airborne’s—had made the difference. They had held off the Germans just long enough that Patton’s Third Army could help turn the tables. The cost was great. U.S. casualties in the Battle of the Bulge exceeded eighty-seven thousand; German casualties, sixty-eight thousand. More than three thousand civilians died. And fifty thousand soldiers were simply never accounted for: buried in rubble, ground into the earth by tank tracks, obliterated by shells, lost in plane crashes, spirited away in ways that only war can imagine. Fifty thousand men. Vanished.

And there was never a statistical category for the other casualties: those with hidden wounds. Wounds buried deep. Like the ones already infecting the souls of Don Malarkey and Fritz Engelbert. Not flesh wounds. Soul wounds.

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

What the Germans couldn’t have known was that every day that the 101st repelled an attack—every day the Germans weren’t able to punch a hole in the line—was giving General George S. Patton and his huge Third Army time to advance from the south. And America’s flyboys an opportunity for the skies to clear so they could get their birds in the air, allowing the now-grounded aerial attack to resume. The question was: How long could the 101st hold on? What the Americans lacked in resources, they made up for in resolve. When Staff Sergeant Malarkey took a jeep into Bastogne to pick up what limited supplies he could, he learned that the Germans had completed the circle. The 101st Airborne was officially surrounded. There was no way out—except by fighting their way through the enemy, which, against huge odds, they were just cocky enough to believe they could do. “They’ve got us surrounded,” said a 101st medic while giving a wounded man crème de menthe for pain because they were out of morphine. “The poor bastards.”

~ Bob Welch

Good enough for pain!

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Some neighbors of the Malarkeys were keeping a watchful eye on “the little troublemaker.” But Michael Noland, the bewhiskered maritime pilot who lived next door, found him harmless enough; he believed Donnie just had a “sense of adventure.” Flask at his side, Noland would sit on his front porch with the boy and regale him with stories of guiding ships in from the Pacific Ocean across the Columbia River sandbar, one of the world’s most dangerous. “Donnie, at times them waves’d be three stories high,” he would say. “See that telephone pole? Them white horses’d snap that like a toothpick.” Eyes wide, Donnie glanced at the pole. “There’s a reason,” said Noland, “they call it the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific.’ ” “Sounds scary,” said Donnie. “Why do you do that, Mr. Noland?” “It’s the adventure, lad. It’s wondering what’s behind the next wave—and the one beyond that, and on and on.”

[...] In contrast to Michael Noland, some people regarded Donnie with a touch of suspicion. The issues? Mischief in general and marbles in particular. Donnie was such a good player that the kids in the neighborhood would routinely lose most of their marbles—and their allowances—to the kid who lived on Kensington Avenue.

[...] He lived a sort of Huckleberry Finn life, particularly in the summer on the river. He loved the land, loved the water, loved the freedom that came with both. The Northwest was rich in Indian lore, and when Louie Jacobson—half Native American—took Donnie under his wing, the boy relished the lessons he learned. Jacobson taught him to shoot a yew-wood bow and arrow, to trap small animals, and to catch crawdads. People joked that Louie was half-Indian—and Donnie full-blooded. He explored the river in an old rowboat, fished for sea-run cutthroats, picked wild blackberries, and camped on the riverbanks. No schedule. No responsibilities. Nobody to answer to—least of all his father, whose insurance business capsized in the Depression and who, if not lost at sea, was beaten and battered trying to stay afloat. His father was “never the same,” Don Malarkey remembered as an adult. “Just went numb.” Books deepened Donnie’s sense of adventure; like Mr. Noland, he began wondering what was beyond the next wave. When the rains came in November, he would curl up with Roy Rockwood’s Bomba the Jungle Boy series. Inspired by Bomba’s living-off-the-land spirit, he adopted a swath of alder saplings at Fifteenth and Madison as his own private jungle. He would climb to a treetop, grab a branch, start swinging it, then use the “whip” to send him to the next tree, where he repeated the process. He could go an entire block without touching the ground. If Bomba inspired Donnie to climb up, his own imagination inspired him to jump down. In the early 1930s, when the U.S. Army was only beginning to experiment with the idea of parachuting men out of airplanes, Donnie climbed to the roof of the Malarkeys’ two-story house. He popped open a beach umbrella and eased himself to the roof’s edge. As if he were the Statue of Liberty holding her torch, he thrust the umbrella skyward. And jumped.

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Malarkey. (Courtesy of the Malarkey Family Collection. From Bob Welch' "Saving My Enemy: How Two WWII Soldiers Fought Against Each Other and Later Forged a Friendship That Saved Their Lives")

Scott Grimes definitely understood the assignment!!

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Don could be utterly charming, the life of any party. He was handsome, bronzed up well when Oregon’s sun allowed, and stayed lean and taut swimming early morning laps. In some ways, he was straight out of Hollywood. Once, when Sharon was fishing with him on the Deschutes River, he saw something to her side, told her, “Don’t move,” pulled out a pistol, and shot a rattlesnake. He sang some great Sinatra, flirted shamelessly with younger women, and preferred what he called “forties girls”—thin waists, shapely legs, high heels. He was never short on confidence—at least outwardly. It wasn’t uncommon for him to tell people, “I was the best-looking guy in Easy Company.” And he had no patience for liberal politicians. Malarkey was a slim Archie Bunker. Each evening Irene delivered his dinner on a tray as if she were his own personal waitress, and sometimes a second dinner for their neighbor Ralph, who often joined him. He favored shows that made him laugh, The Three Stooges, Carol Burnett, The Honeymooners, and, yes, All in the Family after it debuted in 1971. He also watched the news.

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

"...I had a lot of trouble in later life..."

~ Bob Welch

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

German doctors in the seventeenth century called this condition—a soldier’s longing for a home that no longer is—Heimweh. The Spanish called it estar roto, “to be broken.” After the Civil War, Americans used the term “soldier’s heart,” an indication that a soldier’s deepest parts had been changed by war.