Band of Brothers

He has recently been operated on for cancer. "My wife, daughter and I have just moved into a new house. It may seem strange for a seventy-year-old to be buying a house, but our family motto is, 'It's never too late.' "

Sgt. Rod Bain graduated from Western Washington College (now University) in 1950, married that year, had four children, and spent twenty-five years as a teacher and administrator in Anchorage, Alaska. He spends his summers "as a drift gillnetter, chasing the elusive Sockeye Salmon."

Ed Tipper sums it up with a question: "Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers! Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions."

Pvt. Bradford Freeman went back to the farm. In 1990 Winters wrote him, saying that he often came South to see Walter Gordon and would like to stop by sometime to see Freeman's farm. Freeman replied: "It would be a great honor for you to come to see us in Mississippi. We have a good shade to sit in in the Summer and have a good heater for Winter. About all that I do is garden and cut hay for cows in summer and feed in Winter. Fish and hunt the rest of the time. We have the Tombigbee water way close and I watch the barges go up and down the river. Sending you a picture of the house and cows. I have a good place on the front porch to sit. Here's hoping that you will come down sometime."

Winters did. They had a good visit. He asked Freeman to write an account of what he did after the war, for this book. Freeman concluded: "What I wrote don't look like much but I have had a real good time and wouldn't trade with no one."

Maj. Richard Winters also wrote an account of his life after the war: "On separation from the service on November 29, 1945, Lewis Nixon invited me to come to New York City and meet his parents. His father offered me a job and I became perso

"I married Ethel Estoppey in 1948. We have two children. Tim has an M.A. in English from Pe

"I was recalled to the army for the Korean War. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, I was put on the staff as regimental plans and training officer. After discharge, I returned to Pe

This is typical Winters understatement. He lives modestly, on his farm and in a small town house in Hershey, but he is a wealthy man who achieved success by creating and marketing a new, revolutionary cattle food and other animal food products.

He is also the gentlest of men. In July 1990, when he finished telling me about practically wiping out an entire German rifle company on the dike in Holland on October 5, 1944, we went for a walk down to his pond. A flock of perhaps thirty Canadian geese took off; one goose stayed behind, honking plaintively at the others. Winters explained that the bird had a broken wing.

I remarked that he ought to get out a rifle and shoot the goose before a fox got her. "Freeze her up for Thanksgiving di

He gave me an astonished glance. "I couldn't do that!" he said, horrified at the thought.

He is incapable of a violent action, he never raises his voice, he is contemptuous of exaggeration, self-puffery, or posturing. He has achieved exactly what he wanted in life, that peace and quiet he promised himself as he lay down to catch some sleep on the night of June 6-7, 1944, and the continuing love and respect of the men he commanded in Easy Company in World War II.

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ra

PHOTOGRAPHS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

In the fall of 1988, the veterans from Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, held a reunion in New Orleans. Along with my assistant director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ron Drez, I went to their hotel to tape-record a group interview with them about their D-Day experience, as a part of the Center's D-Day Project of collecting oral histories from the men of D-Day. The interview with Easy Company was especially good because the company had carried out a daring and successful attack on a German battery near Utah Beach.

When Maj. Richard Winters, an original member of the company, later company C.O., finally C.O. of 2nd Battalion, read the transcript from the interview, he was upset by some inaccurate and exaggerated statements in it. He wanted to set the record straight. In February 1990, Winters, Forrest Guth, and Carwood Lipton came to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to visit Walter Gordon. I live in the village of Bay St. Louis, across the bay from Pass Christian, so Gordon is my neighbor. He called to ask if the Easy Company veterans could do a follow-up interview. Of course, I said, and invited them to our home for a meeting and di

They had all read my book Pegasus Bridge, which the Eisenhower Center gives to every veteran who does an interview for us. Winters suggested that a history of Easy Company might make a good subject for a book.

At that time I was working on the third and final volume of a biography of Richard Nixon. Winters' idea appealed to me for a number of reasons. When I finished Nixon, I wanted to go back to military history. I intended to do a book on D-Day, but did not want to begin the writing until 1992 with the intention of publishing it on the 50th a

A history of E Company fit perfectly. I knew the story of the British 6th Airborne Division on the far left flank on D-Day thanks to my research and interviewing for the Pegasus Bridge book. Getting to know the story of one company of the 101st on the far right flank was tempting.

There was an even more appealing factor. There was a closeness among the four veterans sitting at our di