#bill guarnere

[luckyreds]

Something that makes Bill finding out his brother got killed through Johnny’s letter more heartbreaking was that it had already been 5 months since it happened. Nobody told him. Not his mother, not his girlfriend, nobody. He had written several letters to his brother with no response back and Bill thought it was because of the distance between them. Not that his brother would never respond again. The fact that their older brother Earnest probably wouldn't find out until he got back from war because he couldn't read or write. The fact that Bill realized Johnny's wife knew before he did. When did they plan on telling him? Never? was he supposed to keep writing letters to Henry until the penny dropped? why he never got any back?

(Also can you imagine being in Henry's company, being his friend getting letters from his younger brother for months after he passed away, his name getting called out by a runner as a constant reminder of someone they lost? I don't know what would happen to those letters, are they sent to the family instead?)

[blood-mocha-latte]

RARELY SOFT OR CONSOLATORY | 4.7K | RATED T

Merry Christmas (Eve), @sachart! I was your Secret Santa <33. I hope you've had a lovely lovely winter and will continue to have happy happy holidays, and truly hope you enjoy this fic. Your art and kindness is an inspiration, and I truly had the loveliest time creating for you :).

Bill used to think more about his brother. The lack of knowledge about his death and only learning from an accident used to keep him up some nights, mulling over a visage of Henry that never received the letters that he’d still written.

However, now, in the frozen black belly of burnt-down France, he can barely think past Joe Toye’s blue-turning-black toes or George Luz’s red-ringed eyes or a dozen other things that stick out sore along the white backdrop. 

(Bill Guarnere, winter during the war, being out of commission, and winter after it. A reflective.)

READ ON AO3 OR BELOW THE CUT

His stomach hurt. 

A slight exacerbation. 

Everything hurt, but his stomach most of all. Half from being empty, half from being cold, and another half on top of the first two from the goddamn worry. 

Bill was used to worry, too. That was the thing. He was used to worrying about his brothers — for Earnest, at least, and over his Ma for Henry — and used to worrying about the men — he’d thrown up behind a mole hill a few hours after Bull had gone missing. Not his proudest moment, one he kept secret. But one nonetheless. 

He was also used to worrying about pain. About how it felt, and more distinctly, the way that shrapnel had felt, like molten, liquid heat that’s only goal was to burn. 

As it was turning out, the cold burned, too. 

Most notably — or, maybe, most impactfully, at least to Bill — it was burning Joe.

“I’m fine.” Toye, in question, said, face tensely lined with what he wouldn’t voice aloud as he shifted against the frozen dirt of the foxhole, careful to keep his foot stretched out in front of him, leg ramrod straight. Bill just stared at him. 

“Joe, you look like a half-frozen vegetable.” Bill told him. Toye grimaced at him, like the action could somehow be mistranslated as a laugh. “Listen—” He started and winced, having shifted against the wall of the foxhole and alighting the sharp, bitter twang of old wounds all over again. “—there’s extra food with Ramirez, and I think that Skip has—”

“I’m not taking more than my fair share.” Joe told him firmly, not for the first time, uninterested in the rest of Bill’s sentence when he knew it would just be the same thing everyone had been telling him. Bill threw his hands up in the air, and the cold seemed to bite at the tips of his fingers like it was alive. 

“Your fair share ain’t enough, you know that—”

“There’s other guys that need it more—”

“Who? Because you’re the only idiot I see around stupid enough to still be—”

“Thanks, Guarno, but I’m fine.” Joe shut him down, more tense than before, as soon as the words left his lips. Bill shut his mouth with a click, reopened it with something to say on the tip of his tongue, then sighed and closed it again. 

“Fine.” He muttered, pressing his palms to the teeth of the frozen mud in order to pull himself up, shifting his weight gingerly from foot to foot until he feels loose enough to clamber out of the hole. He paused before he did so, however, glancing over his shoulder and watching how Joe watched him, face set in pain. “It’s… I care about ya’, you know.” 

Something in Joe’s eyes loosen, but not in his expression. Still, he says, “yeah, Bill. I know.” With enough gentleness to convince Bill to turn around again, pull himself out of the hole and wince at the sharp complaint of the shrapnel scar at his hip.

He started pushing back through trees and snow without much preamble, not exactly interested in waiting around and watching Toye freeze to death, and found George Luz waiting for him.

Waiting was probably the wrong word, since Bill was certain Luz wasn’t there for him, in specifics, but the other had his arms crossed over his sternum, fingers curled into his own body heat. In the absence and lack of cigarettes Bastogne has provided, he’d taken to running his tongue over his top lip before pulling the bottom one between his teeth.

He tilted his head at Bill when he saw him. A silent question. Bill shook his head, unneeding of preamble, and Luz just closed his eyes, brief, mulling and tired, before opening them again. They were ringed with red, and Bill didn’t have to ask why. Luz had been spending more time with Toye than Bill had, anyways, and even the limited time he had had was enough for his chest to feel tight. 

“Thanks.” He said anyways, voice somewhere between a deadpan that always seemed somewhat light on him and something genuine. Bill just cuffed him carefully on the side of his face before moving down to shake his shoulder. 

“No point in talking to him, I don’t think.” Bill told him. Luz just looked over his shoulder, pulling his bottom lip back in between his teeth. 

“Yeah, well, I think I’ll—” He began. Bill tossed an arm over his shoulders before he could get too far, and George walked with him without much restraint.

“Don’t see how you could get through to him when I couldn’t.” Bill told him, which seemed too harsh to say, but he couldn’t regret voicing when he knew that Luz would just keep trying anyways, with, he was near-convinced, the same results. 

They were both Toye’s friends, and if Joe wouldn’t listen to Bill, he doubted he’d listen to Luz. 

Luz went with him without much fanfare. Ramirez didn’t actually have extra food, not really, but Bill knew that they’d’ve been able to scrape something together between at least a few guys, in case Toye would have actually agreed. 

Luz turned to him as they hit the slight slope where some of the others had dug in, mainly Perconte and Skip. He looked tired, more tired than Bill had ever seen him and more beat down than some of the guys in the regiment. “Thanks for tryin’, Bill.” He said, seeming genuine, and Bill just shrugged.

“Joe’s my friend.” He said, didn’t tack on the so are you, and hoped that it was understood. He still didn’t understand, entirely, why Luz had asked him to check up on Toye, but figured that it had to do with having more guys on board leading to a likelier chance of the goddamn moron accepting more help. 

Roe may have gotten him new shoes, but Bill doubted that frostbite was the sort of thing to be cured with a dead mans worn down leather.

They parted ways, after that. Bill went off to find Babe or Buck. Or maybe Lip.

-----

Bill didn’t write very many letters anymore. Earnest couldn’t read, and Henry was dead, and, as much as he hated to admit it, he had trouble trusting his ma, anymore. 

He didn’t understand, why she wouldn’t tell him that Henry was killed. Why they wrote letters back and forth about nothing for five months and he wrote one sided letters that never reached Henry for five months and nothing ever came of it until he had to learn about Monte Casino from Pat Martin. 

Still, he was trying to be dutiful, and he tapped the blistered, frozen end of his index finger against the letter he’d been trying to write for the better part of a week before lowering it, slight, with a huff. 

It was hard to focus, out here. Not a lot to talk about, anyways. Nothing he wanted his mother to know about, at least. 

It was still early in the day, at least when a watch was counting, but the sky was dark from a combination of an early setting sun and clouds of artillery fire, and Bill carefully folded the already ripped and freezing letter before putting it back into his pocket.

Compton was asleep next to him, barely moving. Bill would even doubt that he was breathing, if not for the white clouds that hung intermittently in the air, neatly suspended.

Careful not to wake him up, Bill pulled himself out of the grave and turned, careful, on a knee. He bent down enough to grab his rifle and pack and, glancing around for half of a second, set off. 

He was looking for Lipton, mainly because Lip probably had something for him to do and, if he didn’t, at least would put up the effort of attempting to find something. 

Navigating through the forest mainly on memory, Bill paused, for half of a second, when Toye’s voice caught on the icy shards of the air for half of a second before dispersing. 

“‘S not going to work.” He said, sounded tired, and there was an exhale of breath that didn’t seem to belong to him, equally tired but maybe more determined.

“It might.” George Luz retorted, voice hoarse. “It might, so I’m not gonna stop—”

“George—”

“Joe.” Luz’s voice again, but firmer, less like himself in how little room he left for any type of humor. “Please.” 

His voice broke on the word. 

Bill hesitated in place, boots shifting against the snow for half of a second, unsure of whether or not to move on. If Luz was still trying to convince Toye to eat, or at least take some semblance of more rations than the other guys, then Bill should be there, he felt. But this felt like something different, more intimate, somehow, and he wasn’t sure about how to intrude. 

It felt like maybe he wouldn’t need to, since the silence from the foxhole stretched on for too long, carried by the stillness of the frozen air, until Toye said, voice lower, rougher, “fine.” 

Luz sighed, a quiet, heavy and relieved sound, and Bill shifted, started walking away. 

He still had to find Lip, anyways.

-----

Two days later, it was December 25th, and there wasn’t much fanfare. 

Earlier in the day, they had talked about it briefly. Malarkey had said, rather glumly, that he didn’t think Christmas could exist, here, and Bill had decided to agree with him and move on. No use dwelling when there were better things to complain about.

However, but and in spite of this, when it was dark enough out again that Bill thought it may be midnight at four in the afternoon, George Luz pressed a cigarette into his palm and said, “Merry Christmas, Ghonorrhea.” 

Bill just blinked down at it. “You’re shitting me.”

Luz, apparently mistaking Bill’s bewilderment at his ability to save a cigarette out here, just shrugged. He turned against the foxhole he’d dropped into to present the gift to Bill, sliding down to sit next to him and pressing their shoulders together for warmth. “Nah.” He said, rather dully. “It’s Christmas.” 

Bill snorted a laugh. It was sort of happy. A bit of an in-between, half-hearted amusement that was only funny because of who told the joke. “You give smokes to everyone?” 

“Everyone I could.” Luz agreed. When Bill looked over at him, his eyes were closed, head dipped back against the frozen wall of the foxhole. The tip of his nose was blue. 

Bill shifted, patting down his pocket with numb fingers until he found his lighter. 

It was almost out, as Bill had taken habit to flicking it on and off for temporary warmth once the nights had stretched darker and smokes had run out, and it took him four tries to correctly spike the wheel and get the cigarette to catch. 

Once it did, he held it out to Luz. George just shook his head, pushing Bill’s hand back towards his own mouth. He didn’t say anything, and Bill just shook his head before taking a drag. 

“Hell, I’d think you’re dying.” He said grimly, perhaps slightly ironic. George huffed, like it was any sort of particularly amusing. “Giving up a smoke and then refusing to share it.” 

The laugh he got for that seemed rather real. Luz shifted enough for them to be further apart but still share warmth, propping an elbow onto his knee as he pressed fingertips to his lips, as if in memory. 

“Nah.” He said around his hand, quiet, but still amused. “It’s… I shared one earlier.”

He looked vaguely embarrassed. Bill watched him, close, for half of a second before shrugging. 

“Alright.” He said, ambivalent. “I’m not gonna complain.” 

The tip of Luz’s nose was still tinged with blue, but his face looked almost red. Bill chalked it up to the cold and left it at that. 

-----

Bill used to think more about Henry. The lack of knowledge about his death and only learning from an accident used to keep him up some nights, mulling over a visage of his brother that never received the letters that he’d still written.

However, now, in the frozen black belly of burnt-down France, he can barely think past Joe Toye’s blue-turning-black toes or George Luz’s red-ringed eyes or a dozen other things that stick out sore along the white backdrop. 

Among those things stand sound. 

When he was younger, his mother had once told him that he could hear a bell ring from five miles off and come running to see the what for. Now, in war, it turned out to be very much the same. 

He’d come to his friends when he’d heard them laughing, he’d come to them when he heard them swearing, and he didn’t have to think about it for very long at all before coming to his friend when he was calling for help. 

That was all that he remembered, for a long while. 

I gotta get up. 

-----

The slow hobble back to America started in France, and the hospital that was just outside of Foy was crowded, smelled putrid, and was still somehow cold. 

In spite of that, Toye was running a fever, and the dots of crystal that ran along his brow made Bill more worried than the fact that he couldn’t feel anything below his belly button. 

“Y’think George is alright?” Joe asked him, his words slurring in strange places and vowels drawing out in others as his voice dragged along the line of incomprehensible. 

Still, Bill could understand him, and just coughed. He was thinking of his friends, too, of Babe and Malarkey and Muck and Penkala and Compton and Lipton and hoping they were alright.

He reached out clumsily, clammy palm knocking against Toye’s too-dry one in a gesture he hoped was comforting. 

“Sure.” He said, patting Toye’s hand again. “He’s on a lucky streak, ain’t he? Never been hit.” 

He couldn’t move his neck at all, some sort of numbing, absent ache that had settled in between his vertebrae on the transport over here. They’d already put him through one surgery, and he hadn’t looked down since. Didn’t know if he could, didn’t want to. 

Joe was worse off, though, was nearing delirious, and he coughed, once, the noise almost as dry as bone, and said, “I miss him.” 

Bill… Bill didn’t know what to say to that. 

He kept his hand on Toye’s and listened to other wounded men cry.

-----

Once, when he’d been a kid — maybe eight or nine years old — he’d walked with Henry down to the local pound. 

It was a miserable place, smelled like vomit and piss and was run by a mean old woman with an even meaner mug, and Henry hadn’t let him get too close to the bars that held the dogs back as she walked them through the halls. 

Looking back on it, Bill didn’t know why she even let them do that. They clearly weren’t gonna get a goddamn dog. Maybe she was bored.

At the end of the hall, where one of the lights had stopped working and it was easy to tell something with the electricity had been fried by the smell in the air, there were two dogs, grown and skinnier than sticks, pressed together with big eyes and bigger teeth.

Pack bonded, the old woman had excused with a wave of her hand, like it was a disease without any cure. Can’t get one out without the other. Giving them another three days before it’s lights out. 

Bill didn’t like to think of the pound. It made something underneath his skin crawl.

Still, the words pack bonded probably had meaning. 

They somehow stayed together from France and into England, beds together and everything. 

The hospital in England was much nicer than the one in France, and although Bill was sure being back in the States would be better, the warmth of the hospital made the subsequent, subsisting ache of his leg and hips and back die out, somewhat. 

Joe’s head was bent over his work, nose almost touching the paper as he traced over the same words he’d already written out twice.

Ages ago, Bill probably would have poked at him for it, but now, that type of entertainment has vanished, as intangible as being sick. 

Since getting out of France, Joe had been writing out a letter every Saturday without fail, and always did so at least three times. 

Would write out the letter clumsily, triple-check the spelling, wait for the ink to dry, and then write the exact same thing out again, and a third time for good measure. 

Bill didn’t necessarily get it. Joe didn’t have the neatest handwriting, but it’s not that bad. Still, he didn’t say anything, and Joe didn’t look up when there’s a clatter on the other end of the hall.

They’re still mostly bound to the bed, January becoming a friendly greeting of wet ground and cold air that makes walking so soon after everything nearly agonizing. Both of them — most of the time, at least — want to get moving, but it could be worse.

Joe sat upright and slouched in his own bed, bad leg stretched out to the side as he wrote on the tray that a nurse had brought around about a week ago that he just kept re-using. The second letter he’d rewritten was by his elbow as he redid the third with ink-stained fingers. 

It was a bit ridiculous, Bill thought, since he always trashed the first two letters. Only ever writes to one person consistently. Still, he didn’t say anything. 

He missed his friends, too (Babe, Malarkey, Compton, Lip. Didn’t want to think about Skip or Penk, anymore), but not with the same devotion that Toye seemed to miss George Luz. 

Bill didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t look to closely at it, either. 

He didn’t want to. 

-----

When they finally get back to the US, it was still cold, but in the same way that everything felt cold, now. Same way that everything ached. 

Still, Toye snorted a short laugh when Bill flipped a handful of sand at him, and then used the wire-and-wicker side of his wheelchair to get a hold of it and dump him into the sand.

Bill swore, startled as his elbow hit the soft, heated surface, and he kicked more sand at Joe with his remaining leg before maneuvering back around, smacking at Joe’s bare shoulder.

Toye was unperturbed. 

He had, frustratingly, infuriatingly, and perhaps traitorously, taken to the wheelchair like a fish out of water. His own chair, a few yards back, had been easily abandoned, and Bill envied him only slightly for the coordination that seemed to come more naturally to him. 

“You’re a bastard.” He said to Joe, who just shrugged. 

He was wearing a white undershirt, but the waist of it had ridden up enough for the thick, rubbery scarring of old shrapnel and flak surgeries to still show. 

Bill was dressed nearly identical, down to the too-warm slacks pinned at the bad leg and bloused at the good one. 

“Any word from the Airborne?” He asked, as had become half-hearted tradition since mail-call had begun with more regularity since winter had begun to wane into a precariously hopeful and no less bloody spring.

Bill just grunted, shifting around in the sand for half of a second in order to tug the thin stack of letters out of the pocket he’d initially shoved them into. 

“One from Malark, one from Liebgott, of all damn people. And…” He trailed off, dropping the last letter onto Joe’s lap without having to address it. 

Technically, there’s two from Luz, although the envelopes have been secured together with a fraying piece of twine. Bill counted it as one, anyways, and went about tearing open the letter from Liebgott. 

Toye opened Luz’s letters in much of the opposite way, carefully working open the edges. It always drove Bill up the wall to watch, so he looked away again. Out at the sparsely occupied beach, the water, back to the handwriting in his lap. 

They were still on hospital grounds, out here, with the only other people around other men with similar problems. Bill doubted that Joe would have come out here at all if that hadn’t been the case.

“Any news?” He asked, something along the dip of his throat itching for a cigarette as he dipped his hand into his pocket to fish out a pack and a lighter. 

Joe just hummed, the sound low, more focused than he usually was. “Nah.” He said, quiet. “No news. Boring.” Contrary to his words, the corner of his mouth was curved up into a smile that Bill hardly ever saw.

Bill just snorted, pushed at his shoulder. “Yeah, yeah.” He said, dry and rapport in an effort to remain guileless. “War’s a real boring affair, y’know. Real boring.” 

“Real boring.” Toye agreed, toneless. 

“Real boring.” 

Bill flipped over Liebgotts letter. Something about swimming trunks. 

There was extra space at the bottom of the page, and, after fishing briefly for a pen, Bill wrote out ASK YOUR DAMN MA in big block letters and made a note to return to sender.

-----

It was cold most nights, and this one was no different. Still, the walls and windows did most of the work to keep the cold out and the rest unphased him, nothing as worse as it had been even a year ago.

Fran laughed as he pretended to dip her, and then nosed at his cheek playfully when she was righted once again. 

Pressing her lips to the spot before pulling back just briefly enough to glance over her shoulder, she says, “I think that the lights on the wall are going out.”

Bill taps lightly at her calf with his left crutch but still looks over at them, squinting against the blinking soft reds and greens of them. “Guess so.” He said, not really being able to tell but trusting her anyways. “Want me to fix ‘em?” 

“Nah, someone else will get them.” She let him turn her around again. When she shook her head, a curl fell into her face and Bill brushed it back with two fingers. She smiled at him, brilliant, and Bill snorted and looked away. 

The Christmas party that they’d pulled together had turned into somewhat of an Easy Co. reunion, with enough guys close enough to Philadelphia being able to drive or take a train down to the tiny conference room they’d rented out with whatever savings they had to go to waste. 

Johnny was dancing with Pat about five feet from them, and Fran pulled his focus back to her by patting him on the side of his face. 

“Joe okay?” She asked, by way of conversation starter, and Bill blinked at her. 

“Joe? Joe’s fine.” He said, turning around to locate Toye and prove his point before pausing, frowning. “Huh.” 

Joe had — grudgingly, if the letter and short phone call had been any tone indicator — come out from Hughestown for the party, and had been sitting in the same place for about an hour. Turning around and finding him absent was new, but Bill just shrugged. 

“Probably moving around.” He dismissed easily. “Y’know, stretching out the muscles, and the like.” 

Fran just hummed, stepped back half of a step in a silent request to be spun again. Bill did so, and, after listening to her laugh, realized that he didn’t know where Luz had went, either. 

For being further away, Luz coming to Philly had been easier to convince and swing than Toye, the man as easygoing as ever and brushing off Bill’s grudging offer to assist in travel with a simple statement of planning on being in the area anyways, and then not elaborating. 

The music switched and a Sinatra song came on. Fran crossed her eyes at him, playful, and Bill did so back before forgetting all about it. 

-----

Bill didn’t even think about it until later.

Franny was talking to Pat about something-or-the-other after announcing she’d gotten tired of dancing, and, with Johnny and Babe wrapped up in some sort of conversation that Bill had decided he wanted no part in, he’d started down the hall in order to find something to fix the lights with. 

Old habits must die hard, however, or something within Bill must, because he heard George Luz’s laughter — quieter than usual, and maybe more breathy — and paused, leaned against the wall. 

“Just come back with me.” 

Toye hummed back, the sound turned up at the edges, and Bill shifted between his crutches and the wall. “I already got the ticket.” He said, like a fine point. “That’s good money to waste.”

“Give it to Johnny. He said that they were lookin’ to see more of Pennsylvania before getting back home.”

When Bill turned around the corner, just enough to see the sight beyond it but not be spotted in return, he blinked. 

Luz’s back was to the bleached brick of the hall, otherwise empty, head tilted back against it. Toye, leaning heavy against one of his crutches while his other arm wrapped around Luz’s waist, had bent his head enough to press his forehead to the others cheek, Luz’s hand carding through his hair, keeping his head in place. 

Bill blinked and stepped back again. 

“That’s not a bad idea.” Toye said, sounded warm and not entirely grudging. 

“‘Course it’s not, it’s mine.” Luz said back, like a joke. “Plus, that gives us — what? An extra day? Half of one?” 

“Could have a whole lot more than that if you moved.” 

“Impatient, impatient. Three more months, right?” 

“Three more months.” Toye said back to him, the last thing uttered before a lull in sound. 

Huh.

Bill beat it.

-----

He couldn’t say that he never really understood Joe’s whole relationship with Luz. 

He felt like it was a friendship, but deeper, somehow, than the others in the Airborne (at least that he knew of) and the scene in the hall — which he now moved briskly away off, keen on not being caught — had lit up some other thought in him about them that he decided to not look at too closely.

And maybe that was the best way to go about the whole thing, in a way. Don’t look at it too closely. 

Toye seemed happy, and so did Luz, and Bill didn’t want to think about what their friendship was, exactly, so the best way to go about it seemed to just not think about it. 

-----

By the time he made it back to the room, Sinatra was still playing, and Fran lit up and waved when she saw him. Bill waved back and made his way over to her, still thinking about the hallway. 

“Find the right stuff for the lights?” She asked him, staying seated but turning at the waist as he leaned against the wall beside her. 

“Nah.” Bill said, then paused. He looked across the floor at the still blinking lights and then shrugged, reached out enough to press his fingertips to her shoulder. “I think it’s probably fine. Just don’t look at it too close, I guess.” 

Fran just leaned into him. “If you say so.” She said easily, but didn’t seem to mind either way. 

-----

(Three months and two weeks later, Fran is sorting through their mail. 

“Huh.” She said absently, flipping a letter over to examine the blank back before turning it back again. “Guess George Luz moved down to Hughestown.” 

Bill was sitting opposite her at the table, painstakingly writing out thank-you letters to Christmas cards received. “It say why?”

“Guess he got a job down there. Good for him, I suppose. If it pays better, and all.” 

Bill realized after half of a second that he was smiling, somewhat. “Yeah.” He said, tapping the side of his nose absentmindedly. “Good for him. Pennsylvania’s better than Rhode Island or Massachusetts, anyways.” )

[andromeddog]

bob requests 👍

[historyl3sbian]

"baby boy" and its a grown man in uniform

[bxberoe]

‘i never see you at the club’

okay?? well i never see you scrolling through the band of brothers tag on tumblr

[lupoteodoro]

Guide for the recent BoB fandom information explosion

Essentially, the US Army and Heritage Education Center possesses a vast collection of materials related to Dick Winters, which served as the original source for writing the book Band of Brothers and for the production of the TV series. This includes a huge amount of photocopies of Winters' personal papers and personnel documents; photocopies of correspondence, memoirs, news clippings, oral history transcripts, and photographs from the men in Easy Company.

There are a total of 20 boxes, containing 100+ PDF documents that can be read online, involving most of the E Company soldiers whose names we can recognize.

These materials may have been on the internet for many years, but no one paid attention until very recently.

Here are some notable files among these materials: The complete catalog of the Dick Winters collection

Dick Winters interview in Aug 1990

Another Winters interview transcript with 10 pages all about Nix

Lewis Nixon file

Harry Welsh file

Ron Speirs file

Carwood Lipton file

Herbert Sobel file

Doc Roe file

Bill Guarnere file

Babe Heffron file

David Webster file

Floyad Talbert file

Skip Muck file

Don Malarkey oral history: 1/4 2/4 3/4 4/4

Johnny Martin file

Bull Randelman file

Joe Toye file

George Luz file

Band of Brothers TV series "Bible": 1/4 2/4 3/4 4/4

...

For all other materials, you can search on the main page here: https://arena.usahec.org/

ps, you can also find the 506's newsletters from the late 70s-early 90s: The Five-O-Sink

[wtrpxrks]

i can fall asleep to heavy artillery and cries for a medic like it’s nothing 😴

[beachszn]

band of brothers • behind the scenes

[lookatperconte]

creds to meme lord @gothscientist

[ronsenthal]

Band of Brothers + Mean Girls

[magnoliasforyourmedic]

I was dead. My right leg was blown off, and the snow was red from all the blood. I went from burning hot to freezing. Me and Joe lay there freezing in the snow, shivering, bleeding, both of us were full of shrapnel. He said, "Jesus Christ, what the hell do I have to do to die?!" It was Joe's fifth time hit. Lipton, Malarkey, and Babe came running over to help, I was half out of it. Doc Roe was right there, trying to patch us up. Without him, we wouldn't be alive. Roe was the best medic we ever had. He was born to be a medic. You could always depend on him. You hollered, "Medic!" he was right there come hell or high water, he knew what he was doing. He was compassionate, took care of you mentally, physically, every way.

— William “Wild Bill” Guarnere describing Eugene “Doc” Roe in the book he cowrote with Babe Heffron, Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

[pastlivesandpurplepuppets]

Frannie and I wanted to get married right away, but our families tried to talk us out of it. They didn’t want Frannie to marry a cripple. They gave us a lot of trouble. They told Frannie, “You’re going to have to take care of him. The older he gets, the worse it’s going to get.” But that wasn’t me. I knew I’d live a normal life. I never believed in saying “I can’t.” If someone else can do something, I can do it. I may do it different, it may be awkward, but I’ll do it. If you climb a ladder, I’ll climb a ladder. I may go up every rung on my ass, but I’ll do it. I have done it. April 23, 1945, Frannie and I ran away to Elkton, Maryland, and eloped. Not a penny between us, just each other. When you got something good you don’t let it get away. I married an angel. She put up with me and my crazy ways. Calmed me down. She understood me, helped me, never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do. She was my leg, she was everything. Gotta give the gal credit. We went on our honeymoon in Columbus, Ohio. Drove to Johnny Martin’s house. Where were we gonna go, Hawaii? We didn’t have a damn dime. Johnny got discharged early for medical reasons, so we went to see him and Pat. We did things simple, but we had fun.

~ Bill Guarnere

[iamthejam]

[pookielious]

Happy 79th anniversary of these photos of easy company in hitlers nest !! (Berchtesgaden, may 3rd 1945)

[atomicradiogirl]

who are these DIVAS 💜