‘But Even If I’ve Played The What-if Game Often I Know Deep Down That You Can Never Win At It.’ - Blog Posts

The first time I saw Skip Muck’s grave at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial, I just stood there and felt numb. I was with Dick Winters and Carwood Lipton, on a trip led by Stephen Ambrose. It was 1991. No tears. In fact, there’s a photo of three of us old vets standing at his grave and we’re all looking resolute. Soldiers, you know, posing for a picture taken by a historian who admired the hell out of us. I returned there in 2004 and remembered how when Roe asked if I wanted to see Skip, I’d said no. And when Winters asked if I wanted a break, I’d said no. I realized that since those moments, I’d grieved for everybody I’d lost except for one man, the man whose death I’d tried for decades to run away from, the man whose loss had hit me harder than all the rest. How many times had I looked at that 1942 photo of all of us at Toccoa, the one I’d written all the KIAs and SWAs on for those killed and seriously wounded, and thought, Why not me? Why no initials on my chest? Why not at Brécourt Manor, when I’d stupidly gone after what I thought was a Luger on that dead soldier? Or at Hell’s Corner, when German soldiers had our patrol outnumbered eight to three but wrongly assumed we had more firepower and surrendered to us? Or at Bastogne? If Winters hadn’t split Skip and me up, that would probably have been me, not Penkala, in that foxhole with Skip on January 9, 1944. But even if I’ve played the what-if game often, I know, deep down, that you can never win at it. Better to remember that, for whatever reason—God or fate or reading a Reader’s Digest article about paratroopers on a Greyhound bus heading for Astoria—I was privileged to serve with a company of men who would make me far more than I would have been without them. And that losing one of those men had hurt so badly that I’d buried the thought of him, thinking that somehow that would help me avoid the pain. Better, I’ve since learned, to turn into those waves and dive. So on that day in 2004 when I visited the cemetery where Skip is buried, I looked at that white marble cross and that name—Sgt. Warren H. Muck—and thought of the kid who swam the Niagara. The march to Atlanta. The smile. I knelt, placed flowers at the base of that cross. Prayed. All the things I’d done before when I’d come to see his grave. Only this time I did something different, long overdue, and hard but freeing. I cried sixty years’ worth of tears.

~ Don Malarkey