"There were a great majority of the guys who were what you'd just call good soldiers." "You could depend on them." "They were always there." "These kids were from farms." "They weren't paratrooping guys." "They wanted to be the best, to look and do their job the best." "It hadn't been done before." "You're dropped at 1000 feet which means if anything goes wrong, you die." "Once you've assessed the situation and how dangerous it is and then you go and do something, that's true courage." "These guys were everything to each other." "In a way, they were more than family." "It is a story of courage and comradeship endurance and sacrifice." "Executive producers, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and HBO re-create the true story of Easy Company an elite WWII parachute infantry regiment in the epic miniseries Band of Brothers based on the best-selling book by Stephen Ambrose." "They followed one group, from them signing up to the end of the war." "They were in Normandy on D-Day, fought in Holland and were in the Battle of the Bulge." "Very well-chronicled all the way." "The massive production spanned three years and cost over $ 120 million." "Primarily shooting on an 1100-acre back lot in Hatfield, England." "A 12-acre village set was continually modified  to portray 11 different European locations." "It's five times bigger than what we had on Saving Private Ryan." "We're in Aldbourne and Upottery in England, France, Normandy, Holland." "We're in Bastogne." "We're all over the place." "The costume department provided 2000 German and American uniforms including 500 pairs of Corcoran jump boots." "Twelve hundred civilian costumes were authentic vintage clothing." "On our project every department has the best people you can find." "It's a first-rate production facility for re-creating the past as well as the next generation of special effects and computer-generated effects." "In some ways, it's intimidating, but it's also incredibly fun." "10,000 extras worked on the miniseries, which featured 500 speaking roles." "Everybody in this had the role as soon as they walked through the door." "We had this fabulous session where we said:" ""Let's see how they relate to each other in different roles. "" "Steven operated the camera, and Tom staged the action and we would mix and match different roles." "Steven was down with his video camera, filming." "He asked me and another guy:" ""When you say that line, can you move this way a little?"" "We said sure, and the scene started." "Before you knew it was over, we were being shuffled out." "And the guy said to me:" ""Did I just get directed by Spielberg?" l says, "Yeah. "" "Senior military advisor, Capt. Dale Dye, served as a watchdog for military accuracy and trained the cast in a 10-day, actor boot camp." "When they portrayed something, when the director said, "You're exhausted" or "You're frightened," they would have something." "Some sort of understanding of what exhaustion and fear mean to a soldier." "I wanted them to know that." "There's no way to do it but to put them in that position." "You're in barracks with the guys." "The barracks smell like feet." "I remember going, "l'm never gonna make these 10 days. "" "Boot camp 's exhaustive 18-hour days  were filled with physical training and military drills." " Hold your fire!" " There!" "Behind the house!" "I want concentrated bursts of fire." "Don't waste ammo!" " Go, runner, go." " Get them round the side as well." "We have somebody in here on the left-hand side." "See who he is." "He's in a black coat." " Got him?" " Lipton, come with me." "Private, get a weapon on this guy." "Capt. Dye can tear you down make you realize what you need to do and then bring you right back up within a sentence." ""Now just shut up. " Then you'd go do your thing and he goes:" ""Sgt. Luz." "Earn them stripes. "" "1940s-style jump training included jumping from a 40-foot-high plane fuselage mockup." "So we climb up this tower." "Some little woman walks up to me and puts two little hooks around my waist." "She's like, "Okay, you're safetied in. "" ""What do you mean?" "I'm not safetied in. "" "She's like, "Go! " "l'm not safetied...! "" "I jump off, " 1-1000, 2..." What the hell is that?" "The worst was sleeping in sleeping bags." "It was colder inside them than being outside." "Guys took off their socks to give others to stay warm." "You'd give your jacket to someone else." "You hit walls in boot camp." "These personal, mental, physical walls you have to go over." "Some guys, the first night, cried themselves to sleep." "We were there for each other." "I came out of the boot-camp experience doing anything for these guys." "We became soldiers." "When I went into boot camp, I thought I was ready." "When I left, I felt like a different person." "It's like you did something no one could take away." "The same way that no one could take away what Easy Company has done." "To be a paratrooper in WWll, it was experimental and elite." "It was the first time it was being done." "Their job was unique in that they were dropped out of planes." "They had to be, in essence, one-man armies." "They had to bring everything with them." "Just the thought of being dropped in the middle of enemy territory surrounded on all four sides knowing that there's gonna be no help, it's just you." "There's a grit and a resolve they had to just never quit." "It was beat into them at boot camp, and they wouldn't quit then." "It prepared them." "They didn't quit under the most dire conditions that, really, any soldiers could've faced." "There was a scene at a crossroad, where we surprise Germans." "And it's just about a hundred Germans running away." "Then they start firing at us." "We're popping off clips, having to reload." "Another German platoon storms down this hill and attacks." "All of a sudden, this riverbed just explodes." "All the way down." "The ground's shaking." "I remember when I was reloading that's when you're most vulnerable, because you can't defend yourself." "And I was having trouble because my hands were shaking." "I was thinking, "l'm gonna get shot in the head when I'm not looking. "" "Then you come out of it, and you go, "That's what it's like. "" "When you go through years of war with guys next to you you're dependent on this person." "Their small mistake or their one heroic event can save or destroy your life." "You have to bond." "If you're not one unit you're not gonna necessarily survive, you know." "One of the most ambitious re-creations occurred in the first week of shooting." "From a physical production standpoint the most challenging scene was taking off for D-Day." "Hundreds of extras had to be accurately equipped and uniformed and webbed and geared up." "As a paratrooper, everything you survive on, you must carry." "The amount of equipment they're carrying..." "Getting on those planes with 100 pounds of excess equipment." "They had to be shoved onto these planes." "It was a tremendous feat of coordination." "We had four C-47 aircraft from the period that actually could work." "We had seven cameras shooting planes take off, all in different positions." "Cameras had assignments." "As soon as the plane passes you, you run here so you can get the takeoff." "Then get this aerial shot." "Then the planes will return so you can get a flyby." "Everybody had multiple assignments." "It was pretty thrilling to watch those old planes roaring around." "You knew that some of you wouldn't be coming back and some would." "I can only guess how those guys must have felt." "To get to the point that you can understand:" ""Okay, this is the routine." "I jump out of a moving plane and I fall to the earth, and hopefully a chute opens." "And then the easy part is to grab my weapon and go kill people. "" "It's a totally different world." "They flew pretty much into mayhem." "They lost 1000 paratroopers before they hit the ground." "Planes shot down or being shot, just in their parachutes." "Guys were dropping at 500 feet." "The ground is very close at 500 feet." "The pilots didn't know what to expect or weren't trained for that amount of fire and flew too low, flew too fast." "Some of them flew too high and got scattered all just to hell and gone." "A -camera." "The special-effects department constructed a gimble." "It's a very large, hydraulic-driven apparatus that sits under the plane." "They can control every possible axis of movement in varying degrees of intensity." "That thing is rocking, as if you were in a real plane." "We went onboard, and we said, "Show us how it works. "" "And he, very gently, did the controls." "Fool that I am, I said to him jokingly, "Come on, show me what you got. "" "It was an E-ticket ride." "My episode starts with the aircraft, the C-47s, full of paratroopers." "It starts with the guys jumping." "We decided we'd predominately keep with Winters one of our main characters in the episode." "Eight seconds." "That's all it took." "Plane to the ground." "I'm gonna do it in about four." "Very dangerous, highly-skilled stunt I'm about to do." "We decided to follow him to the ground in one go." "From the time he jumps to when he hits the ground is one shot." "We do that by hanging him against blue with a lot of air being blown at him so we can swivel and pivot him." "Then a camera crane is moving, representing a floating camera." "He's not falling at all." "The aircraft is moving away so it looks like he's falling. it's done in an optical process afterwards." "If you shoot someone against blue, the computer can remove the blue and put whatever background you want: aircraft, sky, paratroopers." "We have our actor falling." "The camera moves in, goes up to his face looks down to the ground, looks back up to him again, all in one shot." "Let's go!" "That looked real." "Very good." "Cut." "The look and feel of Band of Brothers was enhanced at Cinesite, London using a revolutionary, all-digital film-finishing process." "The technologies we pioneered were really about electronic color timing." "It was about the ability to electronically control all of the aspects of hue and color and to match them shot for shot." "There were instructions about what the look of things had to be. lt's desaturated." "It's as though you were back in the 1940s with a 1940's camera, shooting stuff for real." "With postproduction and digital effects, we keep a consistent theme throughout." "Cinesite also provided many of the 700 visual-effects shots  that re-create Easy Company's experiences." "We're dropping into occupied Holland." "Our job is to liberate Eindhoven." "We're re-creating the drop of thousands of troops." "This is the first shot of the parachute sequence." "We're looking at low-resolution models so we can very quickly and easily lay out the look of the shots, speeds, animation and timing." "This is an individual soldier with a parachute." "There's animation on the soldier as he comes down, just to give life to it." "Then from this, we can render our resolution models." "In this case, we're taking Mike's CG, and I then layer those CG elements over the live-action background which, in this case, is this shot." "What we needed to do is separate the background from the foreground." "So we create a matte, which would look like this." "And anything in the black area will allow the parachutes to be visible." "When they hit this white area, they'll disappear from view." "You give the impression of them falling behind the foreground elements." "All those details need to be achieved so you believe it really is happening." "Re-creating the battles required up to 14,000 rounds of ammunition a day utilizing about 700 authentic WWII weapons and 400 rubber prop guns." "Over here on the right we have the M-1 Garand rifles." "On the opposite side, we have the Germans with the K-98 rifles." "This is a paratrooper version of the M-1 carbine." "That means it has a folding stock, which makes it easier to jump with." "This is one of our MG42s." "Roll, please!" "That's an 88 flat-ground high explosive." "This is what would've been fired from the planes when they went in on D-Day." "This is one of the rubber pistols that we'll be using." "Wherever possible, we'll use a rubber gun." "When it's in its holster it should look like the real thing." "This is one of our rubber 5-0s that we've just finished painting up." "We highlighted the rubber here to make it look a bit like metal." "Isn't that amazing?" "Isn't that amazing?" "I thought for sure that thing was made of total metal." "This is a Tiger tank." "We actually built this on a chassis of a T-34." "We've actually put wheel spats and hubcaps and things on to make it look more authentic, like a Tiger tank." "All this sheeting is covered in this zimmerit finish which the Germans use like a paste which actually stops magnetic mines from being put on the side." "The turret works, and we will be having the gun firing with the special effects, with the full ricochet." "These are some British army armored personnel carriers which have the smaller wheels, which work very good for the Panzerkampfwagen lll." "The big problem with these is that we have to extend the length with one more wheel." "We got six wheels there and only five here." "The engine on these comes right at the front." "Obviously, it's in the wrong position." "We will be cutting it off right through there and moving the engine further back." "We are building, all together, six tanks and renting in four." "The scene we've just finished shooting is a major assault on the American line in the forest in the Ardennes." "The battle was planned by Capt. Dale Dye, and we only shot it once." "This'll be a close-in, hole-to-hole fight between Easy in these holes here and that infantry." "We have five cameras running, and because we had explosions we had to make sure the stuntmen, the extras, the drivers know exactly where they are and where their vehicles should be." "Action!" "Here they come!" "This is a big shot. lt's one of the biggest ones so far." "By the time they completed shooting the third episode  the special-effects department had used more pyrotechnics than Saving Private Ryan." "What we've developed here is an air hit." "There's a system that activates this valve here, that allows the blood and the air that's pressurized in here to come straight out." "And it blasts through the little cloth cloak that we put on here and pushes the blood out at high velocity." "The great thing with this is, the actor can wear this, run around and fire it himself from a button that we conceal up his arm." "You press this button, and off we go." "Action!" "Cut it!" "These things here, as you can see, are air mortars." "We bury these in the ground and we use compressed air in the yellow tank there." "The air comes through the tank and out through this cone." "The cone, we fill with debris." "We can put people right on top and have them look like they're blown up and there's no danger at all." "And it's an 88mm shell or a hand grenade whatever we want it to be." "In addition to executive producing the film with Spielberg  World War II buff, Tom Hanks, also directs part five." "I go home and I tell my parents:" ""Yeah..." "Tom Hanks, you know, he's giving direction or whatever. "" "They're like, "Son, that's great! " "How was your work today, Mom?"" ""Who cares?" "Tom Hanks is telling you to knock it off." "That's awesome. "" "Cut." "Sweet." "Thing of beauty." "He knows all the characters." "He knows who we should care about and who we wanna see and who's got something going on four episodes later." "What he absolutely is sure of is how he wants to tell the story." "We're gonna start with just your firing on the Germans." "But then on a cue, you're gonna see those 100 other guys coming." "Episode five lands squarely in the middle of our 10-part series." "Now we're dealing with a lot of combat veterans for whom..." "All they want to do is get home." "The only haven they have is the company itself and friendships they've made because the rest of the world really is not a pleasant place." "Part six and seven re-create a time when Easy Company  was pushed beyond human limits." "It is the moment that they became a band of brothers because what they experienced they could not relate to anybody who wasn't there." "The conditions in Bastogne were horrendous." "Freezing cold no long johns, just a pair of socks and no mittens." "About 200 yards away, there's enemy fire coming right at you and you have to stay your position for the next month and try not to get killed and try to take more ground." "And most of the guys didn't make it." "These guys were losing limbs, dying for their best friends." "You've got no food, you're eating snow, and you're hallucinating and everything's falling off because of frostbite." "That doesn't come close to what it really was." "The art department constructed the forest in a airplane hangar using hundreds of real trees and 250 trees created by the special-effects department." "We created our own trees which are a mixture of fiberglass, like this one, hemp and latex to give a shattered-tree look." "And hard-foam trees with a cardboard tube core that keeps the weight down." "The Germans set their timers on their mortar rounds so they exploded in the treetops." "The soldiers got shrapnel from the mortar rounds and from trees being hit." "When we've got to do a tree being hit by mortars like this one we've got the tree section, and there's a hole in the middle here." "We put our narrow, full-size foam section of the tree onto the stump, and we can blow the whole tree." "Do a big hit in the bottom, and the tree falls over." "Incoming!" "Incoming!" "Find a foxhole!" "Come on!" "Take cover!" "We can have people as close as 5 feet." "Looks like the real tree has taken a major hit and it's safe." "It took four weeks to dress the Bastogne sets with man-made snow." "What we use mainly is cellulose-base snow. lt's like pure paper." "We mix that with polymers and certain plastics so we can have slush." "We're using more of that outside on the bombed-out towns." "The forest set is a composite of three different parts." "We're actually using a third of a million pounds of paper." "It's the biggest amount ever used on one set for anything." "It should be in the Guinness Book of Records." "Most of the machines are huge things." "This is a lovely device." "We saw Ghostbusters and fell in love with the look." "I felt the snow wasn't glamorous enough, so we made these." "They're really great." "You just switch them on and that's snow." "You can turn the snowflakes so they're bigger or smaller." "You can dissolve it faster or slower." "This backpack contains..." "Almost like a children's bubble-bath solution." "Everything's rigged to make this thing give realistic-looking snowflakes." "In part nine, the production re-creates the reason for the incredible sacrifices Easy Company made fighting World War II." "The episode deals with liberating a concentration camp." "That has a lot of personal meaning to me. I had family who died in camps and also family who escaped Nazi Germany." "The most challenging scenes are the scenes at Landsberg, the concentration camp." "Trying to capture what it must have been like to find a concentration camp." "Most of them didn't even know they existed." "But to see it in the flesh and to see so much dead flesh was traumatic for a lot of soldiers." "The first time you come here and there's nobody here, it seems like a monument to people who died in camps rather than a movie set." "I have a lot of personal emotion tied up in this episode so it's very satisfying to be able to bring it to life." "The men in Easy Company were unquestionably heroes because of their strength in adversity their ability to come through what must have been Babylon to them." "They did a job that frightened them that was bigger than them, that was overwhelming." "And they did it courageously and took care of each other under extraordinary circumstances." "There's nobody like them." "Or ever will be like them." "Elite." "The real Easy Company guys, they will never call themselves heroes." "But now that we're getting to play them, and people are calling us Easy Company, we can say it for them." "They are heroes." "These guys lived hell for years for the betterment of the world." "Doing a movie like this, hopefully is a small shred of a sliver of a thank you and a little piece of information that we can pass along to others." "Don't forget." "Don't forget. lt was really hard, and they did it so you don't have to." "It's an amazing program. I think this is really gonna be special TV." "All of us will watch this next year and be like, "Wow." "I miss those guys. I can't believe I was part of that. "" "We'll never be part of something like this ever again." "Pretty amazing." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "I'm at the office doing research and Tony, the producer, says, "People from HBO wanna do a 'Behind-the-Scenes Actor Diary.' " We'll get you a camera." "We'd like you to carry it and shoot as much as you can of what goes on. "" "My first thought was:" ""You know, I'm already kind of jumping into actor boot camp." "Do I really wanna be carrying this camera around for the whole thing?"" "Yeah, in the end I said okay." "I figured, why not?" " l'm annoyed already." " Are you gonna miss me?" "I'm not gonna miss you leaving the milk out." "As it got closer to the time to go, the list of people I needed to say goodbye to before I left for nine months, got longer." "So we had a last-minute farewell party, and Grace Nixon came." "Grace is Lewis' widow. incredible." "I mean, amazing woman." "Smart, vibrant, has an amazing story of her own." "She helped me a lot explaining what the guy was about." " That's a good picture." " He's so handsome." " l think so too." " This guy was handsome." " You look just like him." " l don't know." "I think Lewis might be a little more handsome." "I do research to know what I'm talking about." "It's pretty easy to start on this one with Stephen Ambrose's books." "D-Day, about D-Day." "Citizen Soldiers, about the rest of the war." "Field manuals." "These are all period field manuals." "Rifle company." "Haven't gotten to that one." "Map and photograph reading." "Nixon was an S-2 intelligence officer, would've done a lot of that." "These I got from the production office." "There's the man himself." "I got six years on him." "He was 26 at the time of the war." "Sometimes you can't see much, just a sense of maybe what they look like, the way they carry themselves, the hair." "They carry themselves like goddamned men." "This is my favorite here." "This is Winters and Nixon." "Devilish rascal, huh?" "There's Winters." "Ambrose described Winters as the soul of Easy Company." "Dick worked for Lewis when they came home." "And they were best friends, really, for the rest of their lives." "I put off calling Winters for a month." "He's kind of a larger-than-life guy." "After you... ln your head he is, anyway, after you read Band of Brothers and D-Day and all the Ambrose stuff." "I kind of holed up in my office and I set the camera up." "I had this big plan. I have a phone that's like a speakerphone." "I was gonna put him on speakerphone and get the conversation." "And I dialed him up and I said, "Hello?"" "And the phone goes:" "...will be tomorrow at 5:30." "And he's like, "Hello?"" "Excuse me." ""Who's...?" "Hello?"" "And I couldn't get the damn thing off." "Sorry about that." "Yeah, we're here." "Sorry." "But I did a lot of nodding and saying, "Uh-huh. "" "That was our first conversation." "I guarantee you I'll give it everything I got." "Bye." "Wow." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "The first thing they did for us was they set up a 10-day actor boot camp." "They train us the same way they train military people." "If you say, "Screw you," in real boot camp, they can throw you in jail." "If you say, "Screw you," in actor camp they can't put you in jail they call Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks." "So I got on a plane to London." "Did a little weapons training on the way." "We almost had casualties in customs:" "Matthew Settle and Eion Bailey." "The guys playing Speirs and Webster didn't have work permits." "So they got detained for a while." " We'll be sent back." " Brilliant." " We're gonna be sent back." " l don't care about that." " Yes?" " You can't make a movie here." "He didn't realize he was recording." "The first of many times when somebody tried to take the camera." "They gave us these jump boots." "They felt like they were made out of like corrugated tin when we first got them." "We were going to run in them." "One of the guys who played hockey said:" ""Stick them on your feet." "Stick them in a tub full of hot water and then wear them that night, and if you can, sleep in them." "And by the morning, they'll fit well. "" "Any time a show starts, one of the first things that you do is kind of size each other up a little bit, you know." "It's kind of like, "All right, who's this guy, is he gonna be a good guy?"" "This was the first day everyone was together and nobody knew what to think." " Ron." " Ross." "Everybody's apprehensive about meeting Captain Dale Dye." "He's basically carved out a franchise niche as military adviser to the movies." "He and his company had been involved in pretty much every war movie that's been made." "There are stories floating around." "We knew all the guys in Private Ryan mutinied and wanted to quit you know, halfway through." "Everybody had a different story and something different to expect." "The next thing we did is get sent to wardrobe." "You'll see an amazing transformation." "There's an airplane hangar just filled with racks of uniforms." "Underwear, thermals, poncho." "That's it." "Looking good." " Webbing?" " Please." " Name, please." " Livingston, playing Nixon." "Webbing is that, you know, G.l. Joe kind of harness backpack." "Use that to hang stuff off of you." "You get all suited up and it's like, "Damn, I look like a soldier. "" "To a soldier you don't look like a soldier, but you think you do." "So we're standing in the commissary in Hatfield, ready to get on the bus and in come the sergeants." "From here on out, you're no longer called by your civilian name." "What you came in as, is no longer you." "Use the name you're going to have throughout this picture." " Nixon!" " Sir!" "I, of course, am dutifully recording the whole thing for HBO and posterity when the cadre, the sergeants who apparently haven't been notified by HBO that this is gonna happen, see it." " That camera you're using, put away." " Okay." "Because it's..." "I know it's okay." "I had to put it away for a couple of days." "There's a gap of about four days that no one's ever gonna see." "When you reply to somebody, it's, "Yes. " Get used to it, "Yes. "" "If you're British, "Yes. " lf you're American, "Yes. "" "Not, "Yeah." "Yep." "Yo." "What's up, yo?" "Dog. "" "All that stuff's gone." "1940s, right?" "Start using it." "If somebody says, "Sergeant Farnsworth, here's the captain" when I see him, I'll call attention, salute, and you will stand at attention." "He'll tell us to stand at attention, chew our ass, make us do push-ups." "I like that you're smiling, it won't last." "We are so fucked." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "The day would generally start at about 6:00." "They'd have us do a five-mile run." "Little old lady walking Down the street" " Pack on her back and boots on her feet" " Pack on her back and boots on her feet" " Hey, old lady, where you going to?" " Hey, old lady, where you going to?" "She said, "The U.S. Army Airborne School"" "We worked up to it." "The first day was maybe four miles." " Hey, old lady, don 't you be so bold" " Hey, old lady, don 't you be so bold" "Save that stuff For the young and the bold" "Not all of us had really done five-mile runs every day at 6:00 a.m. for a while." "It took a while to get the hang of it." " Hey, young buck, don 't you be so fool" " Hey, young buck don 't you be so fool" " I'm an instructor at the Airborne School" " I'm an instructor at the Airborne School" " She was hardcore." "Airborne" " Hardcore." "Airborne" " All the way" " All the way" " Halt." " Drill sergeant, take charge." "Take them inside." "The next formation will be called at 0830." "Carry on." "Square your shit away." "Get ready for the field." "Go." " Yes, sergeant." " Move it out!" "Move it out." "They had taught us all the general orders." "For two days, we were obsessed with learning them." "What is the third general order?" "There's an old military adage that says, "Shit rolls downhill. "" "And I guess what that means is that:" "This guy yells at this guy yells at this guy." "If this guy screws up, then it's this guy's fault this guy's fault and this guy's fault." "Damian Lewis, playing Dick Winters, had been made platoon leader." "And so he was in charge at that point of bullying everyone into learning their orders." "Know your shit, if not, I'm gonna be taking the punishment." "That's pretty much how it came down, because if somebody screwed up we'd get punished." "You know, after they've run you around for 14, 15, 16 hours they get tired and don't want to run you anymore." "So they figure, "Put them on guard duty. "" "You'd sleep for two hours, then do an hour of guard duty sleep for two hours, then do an hour of guard duty." "By then, it was time to go run." "The seventh general order is to talk to no one except in the line of duty." "I don't know. I guess I figured at the time it was in the line of duty to see what he was doing." "He was afraid we were gonna be descended upon by a cadre of people." "Which, I gotta say, those guys, they did have a way of jumping out of nowhere when you least expect it and yelling." "Private Tipper was new." "He was a replacement and I was a squad leader." "So we grabbed somebody and showed him how to field strip an M-1 and put it together." "It was his first day." "And sure enough, the next day, Staff Sergeant Freddy Joe Farnsworth..." "We're like, "We taught him. " He did it in the bathroom the night before." "The kid did it in a minute and a half." " l got $20 on Tipper." "Who's taking it?" " l'm in." "He's gonna do it." "I was all cocky. I was like, "Watch this kid go. " Well, sure enough..." "There's lots of pressure. I got a video camera on him." "He freezes up a little." "At which point, Sergeant Freddy Joe turns to me, I'm the squad leader." "Shit rolling downhill, takes the video camera..." "Put your hands in a diamond push-up position until he's done with that." "I think he's tired of being videotaped." "He was mad that he told me I couldn't have the camera anymore and I still get to keep it." "So he puts me down on the ground, about like that and about halfway down." " Like those hands in a diamond?" " l do." " lt's a nice camera." " lt is a nice camera." "I'm gonna take it home with me." "I'm gonna be a camera weenie when I get done." "I was down there for two minutes and Frank John Hughes, who's playing Bill Guarnere says:" ""All right," and he gets down too." "And the next thing you know, we had both squads pretty much the whole platoon volunteering to be down there with me." "And, by God, Tipper got it." " You got 20 bucks to hand out." " Airborne all the way." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "I got news for you." "It's wet." "Even if it stops raining now, it is going to be cold tonight." "They want us familiar with map and compass." "This is kind of a personal thing because Lewis Nixon, the guy I play, that was his job." "He was the guy that kept the map and had to know where the enemy was." "You know, I'm okay with maps." "Give me a good Rand McNally and I'll have a hell of a vacation." "But this is something new to me." "Our objective was a dismantled railway." " Grant?" " Yeah." " Where's our objective?" " Right down there, dismantled railway." "Well, I didn't really exactly know what a dismantled railway was." "Apparently, a dismantled railway is a hump in the middle of a big field." "So we pretty much went right to it, found the thing, walked along it, going:" ""Look at this hump in this field on the way to the dismantled railway. "" "That blue line there is the..." "Watch out for Adders fence." "And we took a left turn on that road." "We came to this intersection here." "We took a right turn there." "Came to that big junction there." "You see these terrain features?" "That's that big-ass hill we had to huff down." "We're going roughly parallel to where we're supposed to be." "Must have gone back and forth over the whole damn camp before we found something that wasn't a dismantled railway, but looked like it was." "This is Tipper." "Approaching second team objective." "Putting it on camera." "Abandoned railroad track right there." "See the carriage in the background?" "Come around to the left-hand side." "Here we are, abandoned railroad track, about fucking time too." "Night compass march was the same deal, at night." "Our objective on that one was to find a little coffee pot." "I think the significance of the coffee pot was that it was a Vietnam souvenir of Captain Dye's." "I'm not sure if that was true." "I'm not sure if he'd trust us with his coffee pot." "So they stuck that out in the middle of a field with a lean-to over it." "This was Damian's exercise." "Listen, are we suggesting that we went wrong around that first tree?" "The difference was, this was the officers." "One, two, three, four, five." "We were a bunch of fresh second lieutenants." "You know, gold bars." "And everybody wants to get a spoon in the pot." " This road leads to our right." " Let me see." "We put a good half an hour on the thing arguing over how we should go about it." "On the actual terrain road, then we can see what angle it's running on." "I'll tell you what we've been doing." "We've been walking in scrub all along here." "But in the end, we found the thing." "Got something here." "Looks like a lean-to." " That is the objective." " Nixon found the coffee pot." " That's your trophy, Nix." " l don't..." " Congratulations." " Wait, you navigated here." "Yeah, I really just walked in front of you." "Lipton went as the senior non-com." "He pretty much hung back and let the officers all work it out." "But I can't think he had a good opinion of us when the night was over." "Blind luck is what that was." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "Get with your partner." "We're gonna do sit-ups for two minutes." "Look at that. I don't believe in omens, but I think I see one." "Time to exercise, two minutes." "Standby." "Go!" "Probably day five, six, something." "Captain Dye brought out these extraordinary exercises that, I guess, he invented." "With colorful names like the "Atomic Sit-up," the "Caterpillar Press-up. "" "You'll put your right arm over the left arm of the person to your right." "Do it now." "Right arm over the top, left arm..." "Both of these things only work if everyone's in sync." "Mr. Compton says he's gonna call the rhythm for you." "Listen to Mr. Compton." "His will be the next voice after I say "go. "" "Ready!" " Go!" " Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "They only work if you sit in the right order." "If you have a guy that's too big next to a small guy, you can't do it." "Randleman." "Randleman." " Come on, Webster, you fuck!" " Down!" "Up!" "Down!" "Up!" "Yes!" "Easy Company!" "Your whole body should go rigid, and it should go rigid instantly." "There must be a snap and surge of power." "Bollocks!" "You have three tries to make it happen." "In addition to the physical challenge, there's an organizational thing:" ""Okay, you gotta get up here. "" "If you can do this... lf you can do this, it is a new record." "You have two more people than the current record." "Up!" " Get up!" " Down in the center." "Down!" "You didn't make it!" "I think it was kind of a test for the leaders as well, to go:" ""Okay, organize this thing and make it work. "" "Who didn't make it?" "We'll switch you to a lighter man." "Who did not make it?" "Raise your hand." "E Company, let's do this!" "Let's do it right!" " Up!" " Push it!" "Come on!" "Come on!" "Come on!" "Come on, guys!" "Down!" "Last try." "Give it all your heart now." "Ready!" "Up!" " ls it up?" " lt's up!" " Down!" " Yeah!" " All right, get on your feet." " Yes!" "All right, Easy!" "All right!" "The new record." "The Caterpillar Push-up isn't as hard as it looks and the sit-up thing is a lot harder." "My name is Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "By midweek, the training aspect of what we were doing started to pick up." "A couple of knee injuries." "The insurance people were getting worried." "The production office was saying:" ""lf someone else gets hurt, we'll shut this thing down." "Just a shot of everybody's feet." "We didn't want that." "We're throwing grenades and learning to clear a house." "Neal McDonough, playing Buck Compton..." "Big G.l..." "He's G.l. Joe." "And somebody catches him with the muzzle of an M-1 across the lip." " There." " Does it hurt?" " Does it hurt?" " Not for Buck Compton." "They were worried this was gonna be the straw that broke the camel's back." "They drove him 90 miles out of town and checked him into some local hospital under the name "Buck Compton. "" "Thank God for socialized medicine." " Buck." " Yeah." " You got a bug on your face." " Those are two stitches." "Was there anesthesia with this thing?" "I do not think so. I am Buck Compton!" "On a given afternoon, we might do a grenade assault." "Grenade that spot!" "We'd do "isolate and eliminate a sniper. "" "We have snipers to our left-hand side!" "House-clearing. ln between these drills, which seemed to take place on opposite ends of the camp we'd be marching over there and marching over here generally in full gear." "You'd read, "The full gear was 80 pounds. "" "Eighty pounds is a third-grader saying, "Give me a piggyback ride all day. "" "Okay?" "Not like, "All right, okay, a piggyback," but all day." "So they'd have us sing, and for some reason, it does work." "It makes it go faster and easier." "Everybody gets into rhythm and something happens when you lock into rhythm." "That's why they do it." "It's too pleasant to be allowed in the military if it didn't have an ulterior motive: making you march." "I'm gonna teach you a new kind of attack." "Dangerous operation. lt depends on your machine gunner's skill." " lf they've got it, you can do this." " They do, sir." "Capt. Dye, he'd have the cadre running around with these little submachine guns, shooting blanks." "These guys are good." "That's what they do." "So you can't catch them, you can't find them." "You're lucky if you can see them." "No matter where they are they're always behind you, popping up out of nowhere." "Your first instinct is to freeze." "Your second instinct is to run." "Somebody had opened up here with one of these submachine guns." "A third of the guys would freeze and hit the deck." "A third would start running towards him." "Machine gunner!" " Hold it!" " Hurry up, buddy." "A third of the guys start running off to the side." "Get down!" "It degenerated into cowboys and Indians where everyone's running off by themselves, popping off blanks, going:" ""l got you. " "No, I got you. "" "Cease fire!" "We'd finish up, and Capt. Dye, he'd either come up and tear us a new one or begrudgingly say, "You did some good things." "You did all right, Easy. "" "I think it went fine." "Notice that they cleared the tank that came up in here." "The consolidation was good." "Machine gun got off, grenaded the piss out of it." "That's the key to consolidation." "Get in here against that counterattack..." " ...and it came off, didn't it?" " Yes, sir." "But you were ready for it." "Not bad." "That's as good as it got." "My name is Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "We spent one night out in a shelter, these bombed-out buildings." "The problem is the buildings are all bombed out." "If this isn't authentic, I don't know what is." "Some of them have no roofs, and there's holes in them." "We had guard duty that night, so nobody got a lot of sleep." "I shared quarters with Captain Dye and Lieutenant Stokey." "Which is nice, I didn't have to do guard duty but I'm also sharing quarters with Dye and Stokey." "It was very, very cold." "And Captain Dye says:" ""Here's an old infantry trick." "Take those jump gloves, there put them on your feet." "Keeps your feet warm. "" "I said, "You gotta be kidding, right?"" "is this...?" "This is what happens when the new guy comes we do the thing, we get the gloves on the feet then, "He has gloves on his feet. "" "So for about half an hour, I was like, "Thanks for the tip. "" "Half an hour later, I put my gloves on my feet and I was warm all night." "That was the turning point when everybody kind of crossed the exhaustion line and really started getting tired." " What are we at, day six, day five?" " Man, day 20, isn't it?" "Look at Perconte." " Let's see." " Look at..." "There was one day when they said:" ""Okay, everyone's all banged up, we'll take the afternoon and everyone will relax, heal up and rest. "" "Relax, get our bodies healed so we can do our jump stuff." "Yes, sergeant!" "You're gonna square yourselves away." "You can spit-shine your booties if you wish." "You can do whatever you want." "It was a trick." "They got us all with all our gear off and 20 minutes later, they came in screaming:" ""Okay, we're moving out! "" "And we had to throw our shit on and go." "There was constantly something to do." "And if there was nothing else to do, there was polishing your boots." "Hour three of boot-polishing." "You could get it to look all right, but it would take an hour." "You get the can, the polish, you've to do it with the little dip, the water and the time-honored spit shine of the thing." "Polish, and polish, and polish..." "That hour you spent polishing boots turned out to be the best hour of the day." "You were inside, sitting still there's heat." "Nobody's jumping out of a corner throwing a grenade at you." "We'd get to talking, shooting the shit about the day." "Randleman was in the jeep today." "Sobel and Randleman were trying to start the jeep." "The beautiful old 1942 Willys Jeep." "Randleman tries to start it, it doesn't start." "He tries again." "He's going on and on trying to start it." "Finally, I take weapons, we all get behind it push it down the hill and jump-start it. lt doesn't start." "Finally, we're all the way down the hill, battery's dying we pushed it back up the hill." "Here comes Sarge." "Sarge gets in, turns the key, starts it and takes off." " Out front?" " Right out front." "He showed us up." "So the joke is, how many sergeants does it take to start a jeep?" "One." "How many officers?" "None." "It doesn't matter how many no officer can do anything right." "It got to be pretty relaxing." "It was kind of nice." "They still look like shit." "My name is Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "The last three days of training was called "jump week. "" "Parachuting is unnatural for men to do." "It is simply a method of getting infantry onto the ground." "They came down pretty hard." "When they jumped, it was about 150, 200 pounds of gear on." "Get used to rigging each other." "For now, let's move these buckles here." "Captain Harris will do that while the rest of you attempt to don the gear." "Let's just say it's pretty tight down there." "Once you have the gear on, you can't see it." "You can't turn around." "You've no room to maneuver." "You can't check your own equipment." "You have to check the guy in front to make sure none of the laces are loose." "Hand up!" "Hook up!" "Equipment check!" "We're not wearing the gear yet." "It was just to get us used to doing it by the numbers." " Sound off, equipment check!" " Eight, okay!" " Seven, okay!" " Six, okay!" " Five, okay!" " Four, okay!" "Three, okay!" "Which meant that equipment check was an excuse to grab the ass of the guy in front of you." "Make him as uncomfortable as possible." " 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000..." " Malfunction." " 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000." " Go." "You can't judge time." "You jump out of a plane time speeds up, slows down, you don't know what it'll do." "So you yell, " 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000. "" "It takes about four seconds, which is when you want to pull the chute." "A big part of training was to get them not to freeze at the door." "You go out as fast as you can in a line so you don't spread out." "So it won't take as long to come together and not get lost or to get separated." "We worked on this stage in this kind of classroom area." "Jumping into this mat." "Getting chewed out every time we did it wrong." "Two of you went out the door without your hands on a reserve." "Do it until you get it right." "Go, go, go!" "One-1000, two-1000..." "Again and again and again, "Stand up." "Hook up. "" "Don't sacrifice position coming out." "It will cause you a malfunction." "It's easy to do it when you're really on the ground, see?" "You put us a couple thousand feet in the air, a couple hundred we'll screw it up." "Picture day came along." "We had about an hour and a half where kind of everything relaxed a little." " The light's beautiful." " Took pictures." "Liebgott, hit it!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" " Outstanding." " Thank you." "I hear Liebgott becomes the next Eisenhower." "Apparently." " Yeah, that's right." " Yeah, apparently." "Who, Mamie?" "Ike or Mamie?" "One, two, three!" "I'll squat down here." "All right, be best buddies now." "He gets 10 seconds as my best buddy." "Everybody's got a Captain Dye imita..." "It's not hard, you know, "Easy. "" "There he is, former youth Communist party." "Richard Speight actually has one that involves a hand puppet." "Bull Randleman has the best Captain Dye that anyone has." "No fucking smiles, I'll rip your heads off and shit down your goddamn necks." "Use alliteration, I'll rip your head off and shit in your shoulders." "Picture day was the first time he did it in front of Captain Dye." "Everybody grab a partner, we'll be doing open-heart surgery." "Don't think I won't find out who that fucker is." "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "Our final field exercise was basically..." "The idea was to do a maneuver as a company." "So all 40, 50 guys are gonna be involved." "The squad's gonna defend the bridge and this one's gonna be with the machine guns and this one's gonna do a double-pincer movement..." "We're here. I bomb the shit out of them, you guys roll in make a circumference and attack." "This was a big deal for Damian because he had to run the whole thing." "You people watching HBO don't see Nixon do much stuff." "You should have seen him on the battleground the other day." "You're a bad man, Nixon!" "I was the company intelligence officer." "It was my job to go and do a reconnaissance of the terrain." "Can you tell us what we're looking for?" "Yeah, we're looking for any indications of enemy activity." "You see fresh dirt strewn around, signs of entrenchment spare parts off a tank, anything mechanical." "I kind of thought there probably wouldn't be German soldiers out there, or minefields." "Even if you know you are an actor in the middle of central England and there's nothing out there, no one's coming you hear and see things." "There's always an army coming over the hill." "This might indicate a minefield." "Do not step on any of these." "Dye's cadre was running around in German uniforms." "Now they had German uniforms and submachine guns." "Cover me now." "We're gone, we're gone." "Second platoon under Harry Welsh took a left-flanking movement." "A left-flanking movement basically means "sneak around on his left. "" " We're gonna go." " Cease fire!" "Do not fire." "I want the 30s up here with me, now!" "Go!" "Go!" "Just to here, just to here." "Gun left, gun left!" "Pass it down, get them up on line." "Come on." "Come on." "Weapons platoon set up inside the command post." "Put a machine-gun nest up top." "First platoon sort of came at them from the front and put a base of fire..." "Base of fire basically means we shoot at you a lot, so that you put your head down as opposed to looking for the sneaking-up left-flanking movement." "Hold your fire." "Hold your fire." "Right there, behind the house!" "We have snipers to our left-hand side." "I want concentrated bursts of gunfire." "Do not waste ammo." " Go, runner, go." " Cover him, cover him." "I want him on a 180 all the way around, and get them around the side." "Okay, we have somebody in here on the left-hand side up our rear." "Get to the window, Compton." "Get to the window now." "See who he is, he's in a black coat." "Got him." " Got him?" " Yeah, he's gone." "Done." "Let's move it out." "Lipton, you're coming with me." "Guns, go!" "Search for documents, check pockets." "Private, get a weapon on this guy." "Here's the good news, Easy Company, you passed your final field exercise." "And the whole thing came off pretty well, I gotta say." "Not bad for a bunch of actors." "One, two, three, four!" "101 st Airborne!" "My name's Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "You're beginning to look like something." "It pains me, but you're beginning to look like something." "Our final day of training, the very last day." "This is it." "This, this and we go home." "We got tomorrow then we go to war." "We went to Brize Norton. it's the British equivalent of Fort Benning." "It's where they teach how to parachute." "They wangled the facilities for us for the day and the instructors stood back scratching their heads because of course they're teaching us  1940 techniques with 1940 gear." "We were really excited... 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000." "...because they had good toys there." "We're not just jumping off of a three-foot bench into some sand which we'd been doing." "Prepare to land!" "Right land!" "At Brize Norton we had ramps." "You jump off the end of a ramp and then you run up the ramp and jump off, running." "What's in store for you today is PLFs off the inclined ramp." "So if you haven't learned PLFs down in the pits you'll suffer because we're gonna add velocity." "You're gonna run up the ramp and get airborne." "And then you swing on this big ring-thing and fall off the big ring-thing." "This is exactly how you're trained at Benning." "We're gonna put you in parachute harness suspension." "Lift you, and actually show you how to turn and maneuver the parachute." "They had us learning to slip, which means to steer the parachute." "We're gonna give you commands of turns and moves we want you to make." "Get used to hanging in harness for a while." " That thing looks good." " lt's heavy." "Once again, weapons platoon is doing excellent work." "Let's watch." "Any comments about weapons platoon, lieutenant?" "They're the Big Ben of this company." "Always on time, always ready to kick some ass." " Nice." " Thank you." "It was a good day." "Spirits were high." "Everybody saw the light at the end of the tunnel." "There's a lot of standing in line, so, you know it was an opportunity to..." "Everybody got to shoot the shit." " Could you jump out of a plane?" " l need a half day." "Another half day?" "Here's Popeye Wynn." " He just joined..." " Do I look like Popeye?" "He's our new recruit who has not yet been broken in." " That doesn't make sense." " You know why?" " Why?" " He's a dummy." " You got what?" " Two harnesses." "You need two, you fat fuck." "Now hit it, don't laugh." "1000, 2000... 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000." " 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000." " Recover." "There is the tower." "The tower of destiny awaits us." "My name is Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "When the original guys did this all their training led up to their jumps." "They did five of them." "At the end of the fifth jump, they were paratroopers." "And they got the wings pinned on, and that was it, they'd made it." "It was a huge deal to them." "It was enormous." "It was a big deal to us because they'd structured it in the same way." "For us, it was jumping out of the tower at Brize Norton." "There'd been a buildup." "And the thing's actually a lot scarier, I think, than it looks." "Stand up!" "Hook up!" "Check equipment!" "Sound off for equipment check!" "Number 20, okay!" "Nineteen, okay!" "Eighteen, okay!" "Hand on the door!" "Go!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "One more time." "1000, 2000, 3000, 4000!" "That was great." "Unbelievable." "Yeah, it was good." "You didn't think twice about it." "And it made me think of my mom saying:" ""Well, you know, if they told you to jump off of a cliff, would you?"" "And I think if Captain Dye told me to jump off a cliff, I probably would." "Everyone shout "hooray. "" "Hooray!" "When the original guys got the wings pinned on I can't even begin to imagine what a big deal it must have been after everything they went through." "For them it was a mark of distinction." "This was a whole new thing in the history of war." "The idea that soldiers are gonna jump out of planes and land behind enemy lines." "They were doing something completely new and innovative and they knew it." "That was one of the proudest moments of their lives." "For us, it was a proportional fraction of that." "There was a sense of relief, of, "Okay, you know what, we made it we're through." "We did it. "" "We came a long way, Easy Company, just to get to this moment." "Hope it means as much to you as it means to me." "Saw a lot of courage today, I saw skill I saw a lot of dedication and determination." "That's what makes the airborne soldier." "As such, it's my proud privilege today to pin silver wings on your chest." "Lieutenant Sobel." "Airborne, sir." "My name is Ron Livingston." "I'm playing a man named Lewis Nixon." "He was the intelligence officer for Easy Company in WWll 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment and I shot a video diary." "Here it is." "We do a stand down every night, which was after dinner where Captain Dye would just talk." "Talk about what we'd done that day." "It was toward the end when he gave us a big pep talk about what we were doing." "You are embarked on a monumental mission." "A mission unlike anything that's been undertaken for television in recent history." "Are we ready to do this?" "Can we handle a project like this?" "Can this unit pull it?" "I think you can. I think you can." "You have earned where you are." "You won't believe the change in you." "That was some rock 'n' roll paratrooper motherfuckers standing out there." "That's the unit." "That's the unit." "You're there." "That's what you worked so hard to build." "That's what's gonna make this sing or make it sink." "You can't believe the phone calls I get." ""Captain, we understand that three of them died today. "" "You're fucking awesome." "Your familiarity with each other." "The way you work together without thinking about it. lt just happens." "I'm seeing it every day, more and more." "Don't you think that's gonna be on film?" "Don't you think what you do naturally right now which is the right thing is gonna come across on film?" "The truth is in you." "The truth will come out of you." "Through your eyes, your actions your gestures, your handling of weapons, your wearing of the uniform." "The truth is there." "Let it shine, boys." "Let it shine." "Make the world proud of Easy Company." "And the world will celebrate our forefathers the people who wore this uniform for real." "We've got that chance, folks." "I consider that an honor." "I consider it an honor to be here, to have the opportunity to salute those gents." "And you're my good right hand when it comes to saluting." "It's gonna take your courage, it's gonna take your tenacity it's gonna take your focus and your concentration." "It's gonna take it for a long time." " You all hit walls here, didn't you?" " Yes, sir." "You hit physical, psychological and emotional walls." "I told you you were going to." "Well, here's the neat thing." "You broke through every fucking one of them." "You're in a place where you're more capable as a human being, as an actor, as a soldier." "Don't blow it." "Do the right thing." "What you've earned, what you've paid for is the right to call yourself Easy Company." "And that, gents, is a high honor." " Let's not fuck it up." " Yes, sir!" "Damn, I wish we'd recorded that." "Anyway..." " We did, sir." " Shit." "I gotta learn to watch you, Mr. Nixon." "All right!" "The place was Utah Beach, Normandy." "The event:" "A memorial service and a special HBO screening." "Parts of a moving tribute to the heroes who fought WWII." "You and your Allied brethren will always be remembered." "Not as conquerors, but as soldiers of freedom." "And as the architects of peace." "Over 40 veterans of the 101st Airborne and their families reunited and joined HBO on a chartered flight from New York to Paris." "Then, on the 57th anniversary of D-Day  they traveled to Utah Beach for the memorial service honoring the men  who fought in the battle of Normandy." "The only time I came here was with a rifle." "Now I have a rose." "HBO continued the tribute with a screening of Band of Brothers a 10-part epic miniseries executive produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg." "Each time I come back is an emotional experience." "An experience that builds up my feelings for E Company and the men I was here with on D-Day." "I love all of these guys." "The emphasis is gonna be on the memorial." "That's how it should be." "On this beach, they sacrificed their lives so we could be who we are today." "Not just for Americans, for everyone." "It allows us to honor men who can't be here." "Those that couldn't make it." "I feel privileged to be here." "I'm a little nervous." "I hope the veterans feel we did them justice." "WWII veterans and their families, cast members and special guests filled the theater for the kickoff of HBO's most important project to date." "As Donald Malarkey said:" ""Brave." "So brave as to be unbelievable. "" "The men of Easy Company." "Thank you, gentlemen." "God bless you." "It was very powerful." "It's hard to talk about." "To have the premiere here, on this day is a once in a lifetime thing for all of us." "It was as intense as was shown." "It wasn't Hollywood. lt was real." "It is war, and I say this as a former war correspondent, at its most realistic." "It is a totally overwhelming, moving experience." "Kids in America need to understand what the men of WWll went through." "Pass these lessons along." "Don't forget them." "They were hard lessons to learn." "Band of Brothers premieres September 9th on HBO." "This has been a special edition of HBO Entertainment News." "You'd do something crazy to get out of this..." " l know, you'll kill me." " Even if you're dead, I will." " Right there." " Hey." "You're mad because they like me?" "Beat it!" "Stay down!" "Stay down!" "Good-looking broad, Buck." "She's finished with me." "Take cover." "Find some cover!" "One okay!" "Seven thousand, 8000, 9000..." "You from Philadelphia?" "I could tell." "I don't know whether to slap you, kiss you, or salute you." "I'm AWOL from the hospital to get here." "Hope it won't cause a problem." " Would you care if it did?" " Not a bit, sir." "In combat the only person you trust is yourself and the guy next to you." " How many Krauts we facing?" " No idea." "No idea?" "Sergeants reverse!" "Cover that hill." "Next time I say wait, you wait, sergeant." "Yes, sir." "What happened?" " Where you going?" " They slaughtered us." "Stay." "Come on!" "Come on!" "Move them out!" "Move them!" "Liebgott, Joseph D., sir." "Rusty bayonet, Liebgott." "You wanna kill Germans?" " Yes, sir." " Not with this." "I'm always fumbling with grenades." "One might go off by accident." " So, what did you study?" " Hey, man." " Literature." " Get out of here." "You serious?" " l love to read." " Do you?" "Yeah." "Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, mostly." "Keep running, sir!" "You hit a home run, huh?" "Hang in there, buddy." "Why are they here?" "They're Jews." "What if he's just a soldier?" "What if he's innocent?" "Were you at Landsberg?" "You know I was." "Think he's a soldier like you and me?" " Can you make the jump?" " Sure I can." "I just can't sit." "We could be lined up against a wall and shot. I'm ready to face that." "And everyone of us had better be too." "Second floor." "Building on the right." "Don't miss." "I have no confidence in our CO, sir." "He'll get a lot of Easy Company killed." "Find a foxhole." "Come on, take cover!" "Come on, buddy." " Lip." " Sir, we are sitting ducks here!" "We have to keep moving!" "What made you join the paratroopers?" "I wanted to fight with the best." "Tonight is the night of nights." "Remember boys, flies spread disease." "So keep yours closed." "What is the goddamn holdup?" " Where did everybody go?" " l have no idea." "Jesus, Web, can you believe this place?" "This guy's reading an article over here that says the Germans are bad." "No dice with the Fräulein?" "No dice." "She smacked me in the mouth." "We're invading Europe, my friend." "Since when do I drink?" "If I thought you'd drink it I wouldn't offer it to you." "Nice." "What will you do when you get into combat?" "I have every confidence in my scrounging abilities." "And I have a case of Vat 69 hidden in your footlocker." " Really?" " Oh, yeah." "This ain't spaghetti." "This is Army noodles with ketchup." "If you had any class or style, like me someone might mistake you for somebody. I'm just kidding." "They're all ticking." "Unlike their previous owners." "When will we jump into Berlin, see some real action?" "You in a rush?" " No, I just thought I'd ask." " Do us all a favor." "Don't think." "Sir, we found something." "We came across this." "What?" "Frank, what is it?" "I don't know, sir. I don't know." "It's been two years since I seen home." "Two years." "Fall back!" " Pull back!" "Pull back!" " We are pulling back, over." "Captain." "We got four dead, 11 injured." "Okay." "Let's move them out." " Sir." "Randleman's missing too." " Randleman?" "Yes, sir." "Your only hope is to accept the fact that you're already dead." "The sooner you accept it, the sooner you'll function as a soldier's supposed to." "Mind if D Company takes a shot at the next gun?" " All yours." " Let's go, Dog Company." " Where is he?" " How's Grant?" "You okay?" "Where is he?" "!" " Sir." " Where's my stuff?" "Over there, sir." "Your folks will have quite a collection by the time you get..." " ...home, sir." " Finders keepers." "I'm taking over." "Easy Company is willing to find another way up." " l recommended you to Col. Sink." " Let's find out where Hitler lived." " Why are you here?" " l wanna go back to the line." "You don't have to do that." "Get back to the aid station." "Heal up." "I'd really like to head back with the fellas, sir." "All right." "Then go." "Thank you, sir." " Vincent van Gogh was born in Nuenen." " Teach you useful stuff at Harvard." "They all speak English and love us." "What a country." ""They got me. " You believe that?" "You believe I said that?" "That's right!" "Say hello to Ford!" "And General Motors!" "You have horses." "What were you thinking?" "What if he's just a soldier?" "What if he's innocent?" " Shoot him!" " No." "You're not a Nazi." "My mistake." "How about a human being?" "You one of those?" "Listen up." "We're taking Carentan." "It's a game, Blithe." "That's all." "We're just moving the ball forward one yard at a time." " Don't fire till I tell you." " l knew you'd get me killed." " Hold your fire!" " No, that's too close." "Hold your fire!" "I'll get you outta here." " Get you back to England." " l didn't wanna let anyone down." "Let's go!" "Let's go!" "Follow me!" "I lost a man today." "Man." "Not even old enough to buy a beer." "Fire for effect!" "Over!" " We may face more tanks." " l don't like retreating." "Go forward!" "Always a first time." "You will be surrounded." "We're paratroopers, lieutenant." "We're supposed to be surrounded." " Okay." " Welcome." "Hi." "Thanks for sitting down with us." "We appreciate it." "Would you recount for me the incident where you were wounded?" "Well, I was standing on the top of this hill at the aid station and a random shell came in." "It couldn't have gone off more than 10 feet away because all I remember is a tremendous blast and a flash." "And the next thing I knew, I was on the ground in the snow and I tried to get up." "And when I tried to get up, I..." "Only thing I could see were the broken ends of my legs." "And I thought my legs were gone. I was..." "Because that's all..." "Both femurs were shattered." "They were laying down here as I was on my back, trying to raise my legs up." "And I thought:" ""l'm dead," you know, "l'm about to die. "" "And I said... I said my Act of Contrition, because I am a Catholic." "And then the next thing I thought of was my mother." "And I thought, "What's she gonna say?"" "Because I was an only child." "My name is C. Carwood Lipton." "I was born in Huntington, West Virginia." "Grew up in Huntington." "Frederick T. Heyliger." "Concord, Massachusetts was my hometown." "I was born in a town named lnchelium, Washington." "It's on an Indian reservation." "My name's J.B. Stokes." "I was born close to Bonham, Texas in an area called Leonard." "Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio my dad worked for the railroad." "My mom was a housewife." "My nickname was Babe." "And my mother she was a little Irish broad." "Red hair." "Fiery." "Great woman." "Born and raised in Philadelphia, where times were tough." "Mom had 10 children, so you had to work to survive." "It was just survival in the streets of Philadelphia." "We came up in the Depression." "Sometimes we'd live on a farm and have pigs and raise a garden." "I saw people that really were hungry and had hard times." "My father was able to find employment." "We never went hungry." "We lived on a farm." "Everybody was poor." "That was the Depression." "When I got to about 10, I got a paper route." "I made $5 a month." "Something like that." "But it was something." "There's a work ethic the Pennsylvania Dutch in this area are very proud of." "I was the oldest one, so I sort of branched out on my own at an early age." "I was married when I was 19 years old in 1941." "On December 7 of '41 we were in a store, and a guy, he says:" ""The U.S.A. is in a war with Japan. "" "And everything just went silent." "I said, "Let's go in the Army. " He said, "l don't want to. "" "I said, "You're gonna have to go sooner or later. "" "Something was wrong with you if you weren't in the service." "It was what you had to do." "I wasn't gonna be in the infantry." "I was gonna be in some top kind of a unit, or I wasn't gonna be in the Army." "LIFE magazine had run an article on paratroopers sometime in early 1942." "And it told about the training that they got and the difficult physical requirements, and I got interested in seeing if I could become a paratrooper." "Nobody forced you to do this, you volunteered." "And it was the notion that you wanted to do something." "You wanted to be with the best." "But once you got in there, you was proud to be." "We was proud of our boots, and our shoulder patch." "And we was proud to be paratroopers." "And we was proud to be working with the guys we were working with." "You know these people that you're in service with..." "You know those people better than anybody in your life." "You know them right down to the final thing." "And that comes when you start your training, while that progresses." " Each man was like a championship boxer." " Out of 100%, only 10% made it." " l thought I'd die." " No holding back." " You had to hang in there and be tough." " We marched 118 miles in three days." "The training I got and the men I trained with gave me the confidence to go into battle." "We were just a bunch of ordinary kids when we went in." "The training was to build you up physically and mentally." "Some of them lost as much as 40 pounds." "But I didn't have nothing to lose." "I weighed about 130." "If I lost 40 pounds, I'd have been too small to stay." "You know, they weeded out so many." "They'd be there one day, and they'd be gone the next." "They couldn't keep up with it." "They couldn't take that hard training." "You had the cream of the cream of the cream." "We had to climb this mountain called Currahee every morning." "Run up and back." "If you couldn't, you'd end up in another unit." "The name Currahee means "We stand alone together. "" "That's an Indian name." "It became a symbol of the camp because it was rough and tough, going up and down." "A lot of times, when some of the guys would go and get them a drink or so you'd see them laying on the road, where they were sick." "It didn't matter how hard you trained and how tired you got you would still go out on your own and run the mountain at night which was ridiculous because during the day all you did was bitch and moan." "At night, they'd get a couple guys and go up and do it on your own." "We learned how to be soldiers at Toccoa as a group, all of us coming in from no experience in the Army at all..." "I'm gonna say this, I believe that the paratroopers of the 101 st Airborne Division was as well-trained as you could get a soldier to be at that time." " We packed our own chutes." " Nervous as hell." "You're asking yourself, "What am I doing here?"" " Coming down is great." " lt affects everybody different." " l broke my foot." " You're dropping 16 feet a second." "I can remember just like it was yesterday." "That morning after breakfast they marched us all out there to the airfield." "There were guys that already made their jump." "And they were all hollering, "You're gonna be sorry! " You know?" "You didn't want to be afraid, you know because these other guys are there with you." "Your bravado and all that..." "You didn't wanna be afraid, so you kept that out of your mind." "Jumping out of a plane wasn't like today." "My first flight up, I jumped." "That was years before I landed an aircraft." "Most of the troopers was the same story." "Foolishly, I didn't think it'd be so tough, but..." "The first time..." "The first jump you make is not all that bad." "You don't know what you're doing." "When you step out the chute just opened right then." "As I went out the door, I was blank." "I cannot remember leaving the plane until after the chute opened up." "My God." "But after that, it wasn't as bad." "It was a thrill." "It was like going on a roller coaster." "You get off and want to get back on." "It was a thrill." "It was a high, as they say these days." "Everybody enjoyed themselves." "Landing was the hardest part." "Once that chute opened, I was happy as a lark." "You know, coming down is great." "I was small too, and I didn't hurt myself when I hit the ground." "Some of the big ones hit like a ton of..." "What's his name?" "You worried most about your chute." "Did you pack it right?" "You'd pack it one day and jump the next day." "You thought about it all night." "You had ideas of what you might have done wrong, or..." "But it worked out fine." "We made five jumps in the third week there." "Then you were a qualified paratrooper." "Got your wings pinned on and became one of the elite members of the parachute regiment." "We were thoroughly prepared." "The men were trained, hardened physically and mentally." "And they were ready to jump." "That's how we started off for Normandy." "When you walk up that gangplank, you know you're gone." "As you pull out of harbor, and you pass the Statue of Liberty..." ""Will I ever be coming back?" "I don't know. "" "You know you're in a parachute troop." "You're gonna be jumping behind enemy lines." "What do you expect?" "You have no idea." "That'll make anybody stand and search his soul for a few minutes." "We were ready." "We were stationed in England for about a year before D-Day." "We had a lot of maneuvers and parachute jumping." "They put us in a camp preparing us for D-Day." "At just about a week before D-Day they put us in." "No liberties, no nothing." "You couldn't get out of camp." "They had guards around the marshaling area so nobody could leave." "That's when you felt that, "This is it. "" "We did not know which day." "We did not know where we were gonna jump until we were locked in." "And then they had the briefing to tell you exactly what your mission was." "And they took this map and they made a model of the features of the land." "They put in all the buildings, the bridges, the knolls all the sand dunes." "Everything was in on that layout." "We knew it by heart." "We knew where we were going." "We knew exactly what to do." "I mean, if you could've been there at the time to see where the planes were lined up and all the gliders hooked up to the planes." "Tanks and trucks and fields and fields of them." "I had no idea that there was that much hardware." "No question, we knew it was gonna be big." "And that day that we got the orders to get on the planes..." "This is it." "We had confidence in our leaders and all the plans and preparations that took place before the invasion." "We were confident and calm." "We were all loaded down." "We carried everything we thought we could in the line of personal items plus the necessary things we were assigned to carry." "And we were loaded." "Everybody got in there and a lot of them were very scared. I was scared too but probably in a different way that other people were." "As long as I was in that plane and they were gonna get me there safely that's all that I worried about." "At the time, I had no feeling whatsoever." "My feeling was for my brother, who was killed." "That infuriated me." "And that's why, when I jumped on D-Day, I swore... I swore I would kill every damn German I came across." "That's why they nicknamed me Wild Bill. I killed a lot on D-Day." "The sky was clear, coming across the channel." "Since I was jump master, I could lie at the plane door with my head out in the slipstream, looking down." "And I saw the thousands of craft ships everything from LCls to battleships down there in the channel." "I think that's when I first realized how large the invasion was." "Tremendously large, the invasion was." "We were out for 11/2 hours before we..." "We went down the south end of England and then across the Jersey islands and then across the Cherbourg peninsula." "And that's when the fireworks started." "Flak was terrible." "Anti-aircraft was absolutely horrendous." "It was like a July the 4th celebration, 10 times over." "Then it would hit under the wings and body and you could hear it go..." "like gravel hitting a car fender." "You could see tracers all over." "Everybody wanted to get out of the plane fast." "Whether it was high, low, no matter where we were." "Out!" "They were getting shot up." "Finally, the pilots..." "I happened to read their minds..." ""Okay, we got so much gas and we're gonna have to get back to England." "What do we do with all the guys back here?" "Give them the green light." "Get out. "" "We're ready to jump." "There was a relief when the green light came on, and we said, "Let's go. "" "Well, I jumped up on a run and hit the static line with the hook and out the door and got such an opening shock from the prop blast, that it broke this chin strap that we had on this helmet liner." "And that's when I lost this famous leg bag that everybody talks about just from the shock of the opening." "It just flew right off my foot." "The British call them leg bags." "They gotta be this big, and you stuff everything you can into them." "They're supposed to weigh 15 pounds." "By the time you're done, they're 60." "Everyone that jumped with a leg bag, they lost it." "Most of the paratroopers that landed didn't have nothing." "I was one of them." "It tore right off because we jumped at speeds of 150 miles an hour maybe even higher. I don't know." "And lower than we should've been." "That wasn't bad either, because you got to the ground quicker." "When we went out the door, I looked to see if my chute was open and I saw tracer bullets burning holes in the chute." "And they told us all you'll have to do is shuffle up to the door throw that leg out, prop blast will hit it, and you're gone." "Well, they were right." "Only I was going out, and my leg was in and I was hanging upside down looking at everything down with my leg in the plane." "All this happened in a split second." "Paul rolled me out." "Paul Rogers rolled me out." "I just helped him out. i just picked him up and threw him out, I guess." "I had to get out." "We wanted to get out so bad." "And I come down right behind city hall watched them shoot at me all the way, which wasn't very long." "I could see the tracers." "They were kind of spraying around in the air." "Whoever the machine gunner was down there that was concentrating on me apparently was not a very good shot." "They were firing in every direction." "You don't know which way to go." "The next thing is that you are getting close to landing and you're saying, "There's some trees." "There's a road." "Try and slip to avoid the trees." "Try and slip to avoid landing on the road. "" "I slipped and my chute fell across power lines, and I hit a fence and fell into a farmer's garden." "I'll never forget that fence." "It had glass on top of it and cut me up, but that didn't bother me." "I just..." "I was down, and I got down with my gun." "I hit the ground in a field, and we were way..." "I got looking at my map and we weren't close to where we were supposed to be." "We was plumb off our maps that they'd given us." "So we had to make our way back." "We knew that the beach was to the east." "We headed that way to find out where the outfit was." "My friend from Erie was in another plane." "When I hit the ground, I hit about 2 feet away from him." "And him and I start walking around looking for more of our troops." "And we were running into Germans everywhere, but we had to hide." "You know, because if we didn't, we were dead meat." "And I laid in a tree." "I had my trench knife." "And I reached up and grabbed hold..." "It was a big trunk, the tree, and I swung into it." "I cut those risers with, I think, one swipe." "And I come down that tree like a monkey." "And then there I was with a trench knife and a canteen and about six candy bars in my pocket ready to fight the German army, you know." "So there's four guys that were with me on D-Day who didn't have nothing but a jump knife when they landed." "So we had to hope, scrounge." "As it worked out for all of us later on, we'd run across somebody who had been killed and you'd take his weapon." "And that's how you get a weapon for D-Day." "Rather haphazard." "We were scattered all over the peninsula so it was quite a confused situation but we were better prepared than the Germans were." "The Germans didn't know where we were." "Whereas on the beach, those people coming in on boats those Germans had guns aimed at them, waiting on them." "They had it tough." "I admire every one of them." "These guns were pointed and firing right down on the beach." "People on the landing craft were coming onto the beach and were being fired at." "This battery of 105s was placed precisely where it should be to protect any troops coming up that causeway." "As you sit back years later, you think:" ""This was laid out exactly right, tactically. "" "We thought we knew every foxhole in Normandy." "We knew where everything was." "We knew it cold." "But on this one, the Germans had moved in there and camouflaged it so well, we didn't know it was there." "E Company was the assault company of the battalion." "We were trained from special assaults and whatnot, special assignments." "They weren't aware of what we had." "They didn't realize we only had 12 people." "We worked our way down through the farm area to a hedgerow." "Lt. Winters had us set up a firing position." "And I went up to scout it for myself crawled out along this hedgerow to get a little closer, to look it over, and I felt I could see a trench." "And I thought I knew where our machine gun was." "Winters was an exceptional leader." "And he was able to size up, all through the war size up combat situations and decide quickly and correctly the best way to take care of whatever the problem was." "I divided the group into two units." "Lt. Compton was with me." "I gave him half the men, and I took half." "I gave instructions, "l want Compton, Malarkey and Wynn to crawl up there and hand-grenade that machine gun." "Crawl through the grass, and as you throw your grenades I'll charge up with the rest of the guys. "" "I had the two machine guns set up to give him covering fire while he crawled up there." "I get out to this hedgerow and I peek..." "I look out, and I peek through the bushes and I see a couple of Germans over there, about 30, 50 yards away stoking this gun and firing it." "I pull out a grenade and pull the pin and I threw it as high and as far as I could throw it in their general direction." "It had enough hang time on it that by the time it got to them, it went off in the air." "I jumped up with other guys, and we charged so that we all jumped into the first position together." "They had trenches cut in where they worked, the Germans did." "They jumped down in them trenches and they worked them Germans like a ghost assault." "Three Germans broke off from this position to run across the field, which was the wrong thing to do from their viewpoint." "We cut them down." "I was in a trench, and I looked, and I saw an arm." "I didn't even see..." "The man was in a camouflage tent and I didn't see him." "Then I saw an arm stuck out of that tent and one of those potato-masher grenades you know, with a stick come out of there." "I said, "He's gonna miss me. "" "It fell right down in that trench with me." "I was trying to scuttle my way out of the way, and it went off and I felt like it blew my butt over my head, and it pretty near did." "He's behind the enemy lines on D-Day." "Does he holler, "Help"?" "No." "He hollers, "l'm sorry, lieutenant." "I'm sorry. I goofed. "" "I felt like I kind of let him down, but that's neither here nor there." "My God." "It's beautiful when you think of a guy who's so dedicated to his company, to his buddies that he apologizes for getting hit, but that's the kind of guy he was." "That's the kind each one of them was." "They were all the same." "I look upon them, each man, with great respect." "Respect I can't describe." "Each one of them proved himself..." "Each one of them proved himself that he could do the job." "We've been through Normandy, through battle." "Maybe if I had been harder if I had done a little bit better job, more men would've gone home." "I never thought I'd get through D-Day let alone the next phase. I thought I was gonna get killed instantly." "The chances of survival is very slim." "There's the parachute." "I got that done in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1944." "Me and Johnny Martin." "Drunk as a skunk." "Guarnere and I decided we'd go to Scotland and get a tattoo." "We didn't figure we had a chance to come home." "But..." "Yep." "We thought, "Well, hell the war is just starting, and Christ, we're 50% gone now." "So it's a long haul. "" "The 101 st came back from Normandy after about 33 days and we were replacements for those who were killed or wounded in Normandy." "There were young kids that came in and for some reason, I don't know why they were the first ones killed." "And I think maybe they were trying to impress the older guys, maybe people like me or Shifty." "We were in awe of them." "They had infantry badges on their uniform." "They had a star on their jump wings." "They..." "They were our heroes." "That's how we looked at them." "I don't know why, but I got right there to where I didn't want to be friendly with replacements coming in because, God, I didn't like seeing them get killed." "It just tore me up, and... I don't know why, but they were the first ones killed." "My 10-man squad that I was in, eight were replacements." "The squad leader and the assistant squad leader Sgt. Muck and Cpl. Penkala had been to Normandy." "We hadn't." "The eight of us hadn't been anywhere but Aldbourne." "The training got really tough between there and the Holland jump." "Training, training, training." "We had missions scratched." "We were to jump on a French city of Touraine." "And it got to the sand-table part where we gathered round to see who was gonna do what and Patton's troops overran the drop zone, so that was called off." "We were wondering if we'd ever get to go, and then it got to be September." "It was a Sunday afternoon, noontime, 70 degrees." "The drop was perfect." "Everybody was dropping on the same field." "Daytime drops are a lot easier." "You can prepare for the landing." "I saw a plowed field, and I slipped right over it." "I believe I almost landed standing up, you know, soft." "A great jump." "The most dangerous part about it was that people were losing helmets and equipment, and all this equipment's raining down and if you got hit with this, you're gonna be killed or wounded before you got off the drop zone." "Everybody got together." "We all assembled very fast." "We moved out towards the Wilhelmina Canal." "Our mission was, first, to take a bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal." "It took us hours to get there." "And taking hours to get there, the few German troops that were securing this bridge had plenty of time to set their charges to blow the thing up." "And just as we got to it, I was maybe 150 yards away it blew up in our faces." "Rocks and timbers were flying and falling all around you and you can't help but think, "My God, what a way to die in combat to be killed with a flying timber. "" "We were that close." "It delayed us until morning." "We wanted to get across that night but it took us till the next morning to get across." "But once we got in, the Dutch... lt was just marvelous, their reaction." "They loved Americans, and still do for coming in there and pushing the Germans out." "They called us "angels from the sky," which we were." "I mean, you're under German occupation for four years, right?" "It's horrible, and you see paratroopers come out of the sky." "Who were they?" "They were the angels." "They loved you." "Their welcome was unbelievable." "They couldn't restrain how happy they were to see you." "It was hard to get down the streets because the people were swarming over us trying to congratulate us for being there." "They hugged you and kissed you, and we didn't mind." "Naturally, we was young, We didn't mind at all." "And they were really proud to see us in there to the point where it was dangerous for us trying to clean out the town because snipers did damage in a situation like that." "We had a lot of fighting because we're on the Rhine River and Germany is across the river." "They're fighting like heck to keep us out of Germany." "It's called "The Island. " We called it The Island, and we set up positions there." "We had some substantial battles there." "They could observe any movement we made during the daytime and at their will they could just shell us." "Mortar..." "Put mortar fire on us when they had a target of opportunity." "I heard something coming down." "I knew what it was a mortar shell, and I threw my arm up, like that...and went down." "It lit within 3 feet of me, 4." "But when it blows, it goes up like that:" "It went through my arm and hit me in the head. I was bleeding pretty good." "Well, I was picked to go up on a dike." "So, of course, when you get to the top, you don't expose yourself." "I took my rifle and put my helmet on it and put it over, even with the road, on a dike." "No action, so I brought it back down, put the helmet on and I sort of peeked over." "When I peeked over, I saw a hand with a potato masher, and he threw it at me." "I ducked. lt hit my helmet and bounced off." "When that thing bounced off my helmet, I hollered to the guys below:" ""Live grenade. "" "If Lesniewski hadn't hollered, "Grenade" and I had enough sense to know that that's that grenade that hit my rifle and is right in front of my face, practically I'd have either had my head blown off or I'd have definitely been blinded." "There's no question about that because I just got turned, just part way and it exploded, and it caught me in the face, neck left arm, under the arm, in the shoulder." "I hollered for them to take off." "I said, "Get the hell back. "" "I had eight grenades, so I had taken them off pulled the pins and threw them over." "And while the grenades were rolling down or landing wherever they were they were hitting some of the Krauts because I could hear screaming, crying." "I think I threw eight grenades in about four seconds." "And then I took off running." "So the doctor that counted the holes in me down at Nijmegen..." "Yeah, Nijmegen." "The first doctor that really counted the holes said there was 32." "That was our first experience with artillery in large numbers." "I can remember sitting there a couple of nights listening to artillery land." "And the 88 was the fiercest cannon that the Germans had." "It was the way they used it, an all-purpose gun." "It could shoot anti-aircraft tanks, anti-personnel, airburst." "That was the bad ones, when shells went up." "I saw a huge mushroom cloud from the shell and Joe Toye stepped out of it." "I run up. I remember that like it was yesterday." "I run up, and I grabbed him." "He said, "Don't touch me. "" "I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "l'm hit all over. " He said, "l'm bad. "" "I said, "Okay. " l said, "l'm gonna go see Jim. "" "He said, as bad as he was hurting, Joe Toye, he said:" ""Heffron, I already checked him." "He's gone. "" "Jim Campbell might be alive today if he hadn't said to me:" ""Heffron, you stay here with your gun." "I'm going up. "" "And I never, never, never..." "I sleep on it, I eat on it... I never, never forgot that." "And anybody that went through it will tell you the same thing." "They can't... lt's just so bad all your life, you gotta remember what one guy did because he thought it was his job to do, and he took a shot for you." "The exhaustion on these men, the physical exhaustion affects their endurance to be able to cope." "You don't realize it at the time you come off the line from living in the mud and being absolutely miserable for 70 days straight." "You didn't realize that you'd only be off the line for a few days, and you're gonna be facing Bastogne." "This is the last desperate action of the Germans to turn the tide of this whole war." "What it is, it is Bastogne. lt is..." " This is Bo Jack's woods, right?" " lt is the woods." "Sure looks different now." "There ain't no snow." "These trees might've been replanted." "I think if the trees look like they did in '44 or '45 we could get a better idea." " That's it." " Yeah." "That's the town of Foy." "Oh, this is definitely the area." "This is definitely." "There's the town of Foy, after the empty field, where those cattle are grazing." "About half a mile away." "Yeah, we had an outpost set up looking right into the town of Foy." "They had to watch everything because we'd come in here and sleep." "We had our foxholes right over here, and the other area and the other." "Wherever we had to move out and dig in again because the Krauts had artillery." "Most intense I ever went through here, shelling." "Most intense in the world." "Couldn't believe it." "You had to be here." "You just dove in the hole and prayed, and that's it." "If it comes in, you ain't gonna know it." "We lost Muck and Penkala over on this side." "They were killed instantly." "The shell went down, direct hit right in the hole." " Made mush out of them." " Luz come over and hollered:" ""l can't see nothing of them, nothing there. "" "They were all gone, just disintegrated." "Unmerciful shelling, really." "Everything out here was shredded." "Yeah, shredded by it." "I tell you, it's an odd feeling." "To me, it brings a lot of memories, memories of the men, the times good and bad, a lot of memories." "It was the most miserable place I've ever been in my life, even today." "On a real cold night, we go to bed and my wife will tell you, I'll say, "l'm glad I'm not in Bastogne. "" "The Germans wanted Bastogne because of the road network." "That's why it was such an objective." "So that's where we had to hold, which we did." "318 trucks come in around noontime, and by that evening everybody was loaded and moving out." "We were short of equipment." "We didn't have enough ammunition or enough warm clothes." "But we had confidence that our higher military authorities would get to us whatever we needed." "When we got up there, we didn't know what we were getting into." "There was very little information only that the Germans had broken through." "We went down, loaded on the trucks." "Another truck came by with weapons and pitched weapons." "You catch one, that's what you got until Bastogne." "As it worked out, there was some men who actually got on the trucks and left for Bastogne that didn't have a rifle." "When we got there, we saw men singly and in twos and threes working their way back, some of them without weapons without equipment." "Some of them were terrified." "They were beat to a nub." "Every one of them were saying:" ""They're gonna kill everybody. "" "They couldn't believe, when they saw us up there, that we intended to set up lines and stop the Germans." "They said they couldn't be stopped." "We went in and started taking up their weapons and ammunition." "Asking the retreating guys, "You got any extra ammunition or grenades?"" "You could hear the firing going on up ahead, and we're marching to it with little ammunition." "We marched through the night, went to the front of Bastogne and dug in." "And then it snowed." "Snow, cold up to your rump." "We didn't have no winter clothing or nothing." "A third of the doggone casualties was either frostbite or trench foot, whatever you want to call it." "Bad move." "A lot of snow a lot of everything you didn't like." "It was a cold place." "At this particular time, we was on top of kind of a hill and the top of the hill had pine trees." "We set up our positions around the fringe of the woods." "In Belgium, trees are planted." "They don't grow like in Maine." "There are rows of trees." "You look down a row and can see half a mile." "On top of this hill, there was a ridge with a tree line." "We were dug in there." "The Germans knew right where we were, and they really gave us a shellacking." "To an infantryman in wartime, the mother earth is your best friend." "You could always dig a hole and get out of sight, you know." "We dug plenty of those." "You get through hard ground quickly when someone's shooting, and shells are falling." "You can make fast work of it." "We just have to dig that hole." "We say we became experts on foreign European soil." "We dug in, and two people could dig better than one." "In ground that's frozen, it takes a while." "You just chip it out." "By the time you finish, they whistle to you, "We're moving out. "" "And you go someplace else and dig another one." "You must understand, the Germans were..." "We were surrounded." "The Germans were maybe 100 yards away from us." "No matter where you looked in a circle, you could see artillery flashes." "So we knew from that that we were surrounded." "But we went through a couple of shellings at Bastogne that were earthshaking." "If you lived through them, you remember them for the rest of your life." "I'm not sure you're the same for the rest of your life after you live through them." "You never forget them." "There was one moment I remember. I'll never forget it." "One guy got hit in the arm with shrapnel took his arm off above the elbow." "They were taking him out, he said, "Get my watch off my arm. "" "Before they took him out." "That always stayed with me." "I mean, calm voice and everything, "Get my watch off my arm. "" "On the 3rd of January, we withdrew back to our former positions there, up the hill from Foy." "And when we got there we could see that the Germans had zeroed in artillery there." "Trees were knocked down." "There were holes in the ground." "It was right at dusk, and the Germans had this..." "This woods of ours zeroed in completely." "And as we hit the woods, this tremendous artillery attack came." "They knew where we were and started shooting, point-blank, 88s into our area." "They let us have it." "Everything, the kitchen sink mortars, a rocket thing with a screaming sound." "It scared the hell..." "I was scared, but I think I was petrified then." "I thought the whole world was shooting at us at once." "I jumped into a foxhole somebody had started and hadn't finished." "So I was crouched down in that foxhole, but it wouldn't hold all of me." "From about my nose up was above the ground." "I could see all these shells hitting." "Sgt. Guarnere and Joe Toye each lost a leg in the same place, right there on one hill. I remember." "Just this certain instance." "Joe got caught not near his hole, and Bill and I were ahead of him and Bill had not been hit." "He came up out of his hole quickly." "We were still under heavy fire." "Joe said, "Jesus Christ what do I have to do to die?"" "He got hit real bad in the back of his leg." "He's out hollering, "Medic," and he can't find a medic." "I went out to see what I could do for him..." "I got it too." "I went over to Guarnere." "He was sitting on the ground." "His leg was badly mangled." "He was holding his leg, and it was jerking like that:" "He said, "Lip, they got old Guarnere this time. "" "He had been hit before, but they really got him there." "We got him out of there, Babe Heffron and I and some others." "And they brought a jeep down, and we put him on stretchers." "I better not talk about him." "I better not talk about him." "It was terrible." "We had lost some very good men there." "Toye and Guarnere had lost their legs there." "A number of other people were killed." "It was a difficult situation there." "When a man was wounded, we felt glad for them we felt happy for them." "He had a ticket to get out of there, and maybe a ticket to go home." "And when we had a man who was killed we found that he was at peace." "And he looked so peaceful." "And we were glad that he found peace." "We had this assistant squad leader, name of Mellet." "He was from New York City." "And I overheard him talking one time this was in Bastogne, he says:" ""l been through Normandy and went through Holland and to this day, I haven't got one scratch. "" "He says, "l'm afraid when I do get it, I'm really gonna get it. "" "And he was right." "In this little town of Foy, he got killed." "I don't think he had any premonition of it." "He just wondered about it." "But I never did wonder." "Never give it much thought." "You just live from day to day." "Keep your fingers crossed, and that was it." "I have the honor to present the supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower." "It is a great personal honor for me to be here today." "To take part in a ceremony that is unique in American history." "Never before has a full division been cited by the War Department in the name of the president for gallantry in action." "This day marks the beginning of a new tradition in the American Army." "With that tradition will always be associated the name of the 101st Airborne Division and of Bastogne." "Good luck and God be with each of you." "The Germans had started to surrender." "They still had their arms but as you're going down the autobahn there was almost a solid line of German troops coming north." "And our job is to get to the end and get to the heart of it." "Berchtesgaden, that's the end of the line." "It's the retreat that Hitler had for himself." "And he built his Eagle's Nest his penthouse on top of the Alp to, I'm sure, relax and confer with his staff because they all followed him to Berchtesgaden." "This was their final retreat." "Of course, this is where they had their loot as well." "This was the goal of the French, who were on our right flank." "This was the goal of the British." "And this is the place to capture." "This is the one everybody wanted." "Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat burned by SS troops in the war's last days." "The chalet from which he hoped to rule the world now lies in ruins." "American Air Force's pictures show the gutted rooms and the great window through which the führer gazed out on the Alps." "We took Berchtesgaden May the 5th, no fighting, no shooting." "The only thing I seen of Berchtesgaden was a couple dead SS troopers laying on the road as we were going up." "It was beautiful country." "He knew how to pick out a good spot for a house." "We took over his house and liberated it, you might say." "There was, obviously, loot of all kinds that the men were looking for, such as guns..." "There was money that they were looting." "I was a pack rat anyway." "I picked up a lot of German items including some post cards and envelopes addressed to Hitler." "Come to find out, that place was full of big art Rembrandt and all those people hanging on the wall." "Old soldiers like us, we don't recognize a painting when we see it." "The 101st Airborne Division uncovers Hermann Goering's art collection hidden in a subterranean chamber." "Twelve hundred artworks worth millions are included." "The treasures will go back to rightful owners in pillaged nations." "We found a warehouse full of gin and vodka and stuff like that." "Wasn't much whiskey." "Those people don't like it." "And we took it all and set up a bar." "Had seven truckloads of champagne and cognac out of the wine cellars out of the Eagle's Nest." "So we stayed pretty well oiled for a while." "Oh, that champagne was good." "Oh, that was good." "I started drinking it one day, and I drank until about midnight that night." "I went to the back and went to sleep." "I didn't wake up the next day." "I made a two-day thing out of it." "It didn't taste like it would hurt you." "It tasted like ginger ale." "That was the only time I remember, when I was in service that the company fell out in their underwear." "We didn't even have to dress, you know." "Everybody was looped, and so we fell out in line formation in our underwear." "They're enjoying themselves." "They're at peace with the world." "They have a big, happy, satisfied grin on their face." "It was a paradise for a soldier to move into." "I had no problem with the looting, because I came down through Germany." "And I had seen the Holocaust." "And I had seen what the Germans had done to the Jewish race." "And I had seen what they had done to the displaced persons and what they had done in their occupation of France." "And what they had done to their occupation in Holland, Belgium." "So that by taking over their homes for a few nights to bed down my men..." "And if they picked up a few trinkets, I had no problem." "Nobody has ever taken their time to tell you how to handle a surrender." "We'll talk about it when we get there." "Here we are." "How do you handle this?" "The German army was a well-disciplined army." "Those prisoners that come down out of the Alps they came down in formation." "They marched down." "They didn't drag down or nothing like that." "They came down as defeated soldiers." "We thought the Germans were the evilest people in the world but as the war went along, we found out also, it wasn't the Germans per se, it was the SS and the special troops." "They were the ones that could kill their own people and the regular German soldier was not that way." "One of those prisoners handed me this little book and it was a Catholic prayer book for the Mass." "And I realized, "Hey, I haven't got Nazis here. I've got some Catholics. "" "And I've got a Catholic good enough to stick one of these in his pocket." "I've thought we might've been friends." "We might've had a lot in common." "We might've liked to fish." "He might've liked to hunt." "You never know." "They did what they were supposed to, and I did what I was supposed to." "But under different circumstances, we might've been good friends." "I have a great deal of respect for them as soldiers." "They were very good soldiers." "But they're still enemy so they must be controlled as prisoners." "When it reached the level of surrender for company and smaller units I was assigned this major and when he walked in he presented me this pistol and offered his personal surrender which, naturally, I accepted gratefully." "So that would be the end of the war for his men and this is basically the end of the war for my men." "And the significance is it wasn't until later, after he gave me his pistol and I had a chance to look at it carefully, that I realized this pistol had never been fired." "There was no blood on it." "That's the way all wars should end with an agreement with no blood on it." "And I assure you, this pistol has never, never been fired since I've had it, and it will not be fired." "We didn't come home and flout ourselves." "I didn't come home and say I was a war hero." "I came home and went back to it like we did before war." "Just go to work and live our life." "I think it was difficult for most fellows coming back." "They didn't know what they were going to do when they got out. i didn't." "Went to work for a coal company." "Did some bartendering and ran a pool hall." "Took up a course in ornamental horticulture." "It didn't pay very much, but I met a lot of nice people." "I went to work where l was working before the war." "It was Caterpillar Tractor Company." "I became an industrial arts and social studies teacher." "The spring of '46, I took a boat to Ketchikan, Alaska." "I went to work for the government, a letter carrier for 37 years." "I built homes. I was in construction." "I went into hard work, tedious work." "I'd done everything." "You name it, I done it." "I ended up working on the waterfront." "I went with the ClA in Washington." "Got my degree in 1948." "After the war, I taught for almost 30 years." "Got a job working for Nixon Nitration Works." "I was making $ 75 a week." "We've never become wealthy in life but we have a lot of other wealth that means more than that." "Everyone done well, I done well too, thank God." "I want to welcome you to our banquet tonight to celebrate the ending of a fine reunion." "Thank you all for coming." "I want to extend the best wishes to all the men from company E506." "I love you, God bless you all." "Thank you." "The purpose the reunions serve is to give us a chance to get together and talk to each other." "We relive some of the Army experiences." "But we have great respect and, you might say, affection for each other." "The type of affection you get when you've lived through many dangerous situations together and have learned that you can rely on each other." "If you see them today, that bond's there." "The bond you can't explain." "Soon as you see them, you're thinking of battles, thinking of it to yourself." "The men stand out amongst each other." "There's an intimacy develops and like nothing that I've ever experienced not in college, not with any other group of people." "We're a strange bunch of dudes, as far as I'm concerned." "To be this close after all these years, that's the thing that gets me is we're like brothers." "I'm back in my youth now." "When I get to these guys, I'm back when I went in the service." "It's fantastic." "I'd like to make 20 more reunions." "We had a lot of real good times in there." "Those are the times you really remember, you know?" "A lot of those is what we kid each other about at these reunions a lot." "And then you had a lot of bad times." "My family didn't know anything about it and I just didn't tell them." "I just, you know, figured it was something that didn't need talking about." "It was done, over with." "We didn't know Shifty the way the men knew Shifty, you know." "He started talking about it just in the last five or six years." "Last five, I'd say." "It was like he..." "That was another life, you know." "He was another person, and we weren't aware of the stuff he went through things he had seen." "It didn't even dawn on me that he had killed people." "I really admire my dad, my daddy." "He's a good guy." "He's a real strong guy." "We travel a lot, and we've been to France and to that cemetery." "It's incredible." "There's crosses upon crosses lined up perfectly as far as the eye can see, and then there's a cliff and the ocean." "These weren't just anonymous statistics." "These were people I knew, and I told my daughter, I said:" ""This guy here died at age 19 or 20. "" "A whole life never lived." "No family nothing." "No children no opportunity to have satisfaction in building a life, nothing." "When I went there, I said, "Dad, my gosh, you were so lucky. "" "He looked at me and said, "Yeah, I'm very lucky. "" "And he started crying." "These guys have been together in the absolute base experiences of human existence." "They were there with each other thinking you're gonna die or seeing people dying all around you." "And there they went day after day and I admire that and held my father, even on his tombstone as Sgt. Joe Toye." "506 pir 101 st Airborne Division." "That's what he wanted on his tombstone. lt meant that much to him." "How it happened that those various individuals ended up in E Company, I don't know." "But as you know, every Army unit thinks it's the best but we knew we were the best." "I think about the guys more than anything." "I think about most of them every day." "It's something that's etched in your memory, I guess." "It'll never leave either." "Am I proud of having served in that outfit?" "You bet your life." "I wore that eagle on my right shoulder for 18 years." "Probably the proudest thing in my whole life was having been in Easy Company 506." "The heroes had crosses over their heads the ones that are buried in the cemeteries." "Those are the true heroes, not us." "We're just part of the works." "And we thank God we got back alive." "That's all." "How would you like to be a mother or a father to a son never come back?" "The son and the mother and the father are the heroes of World War ll not the guys that come home." "Let me say this I believe there's very, very few heroes that came back from the war." "They're still over there." "Do you remember the letter that Mike Ranney wrote me?" "Do you remember how he ended it?" ""l cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said:" "'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?" "'" "Grandpa said, 'No but I served in a company of heroes.' "" "Joe Toye." "Oh, there was a big mick." "And we used to have a few beers at night, and I'd sing." "Guarnere would come over and sing." "He'd say to Guarnere:" ""Guarnere, you're Italian, you don't know this song. "" "Guarnere could sing it better than he did." ""Bridget O'Flynn. "" "How's it go?" "Now, that's the song Toye liked, and that's what we sang." "You only needed a sisal of beer." "Two beers you were drunk because you were in great physical condition." "You were too piqued, you know and two beers you were as high as Georgia pine, you know."