Other family experiences proved difficult. Diane, the daughter from the first marriage, died in 1977 of a cerebral aneurism. She worked as an exercise jockey at Calder Racetrack in Florida. One day she got off a horse, said, “I don’t feel so good, I’ve got a headache,” and collapsed.
“Dad tended to disappear if ever conflict arose,” Fred Jr. said. “When my sister died, my mom got down there to Florida right away, then called me. I was living in South Bend by then, and I went down right away as well. The EKG showed a flat line, and doctors said we needed to decide whether to keep Diane on life support or not. My mother said, ‘I can’t make this decision by myself.’ So I called my father in Massachusetts; by that time he was remarried. ‘I can’t deal with that,’ he said. ‘You better take care of it.’ So the decision fell to me.”
The Fall Migration
Moose became more involved with Easy Company in his later years. Once, after all the kids were grown-up, he decided to drive from Massachusetts to visit Rod Bain in Alaska. Mary was worried about him driving that far by himself, so Jon went with him. They saw Johnny Martin along the way. Martin lived in Phoenix, but he also had a place in Montana.
Moose visited Dick Winters several times in later years. “Dad liked to go down to Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania and watch the fall migration,” Fred Jr. said, “which wasn’t far from Hershey, Pennsylvania, where Dick lives. I know Dad also stayed in touch with Bob Brewer; we always knew him as Uncle Skim. When Dad retired, his big goal was to have an acre of land in every state, get a trailer, and visit all of them. He wasn’t able to complete the goal, but he enjoyed dreaming about it.”
In the early 1990s, Moose suffered some minor strokes, which made him a bit unsteady. Then in 1995 he slipped while walking into a restaurant, fell, and broke a hip, which put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Being unable to move about on his own affected him a great deal, his sons said, but there were a few bright moments in his later years. “I think he secretly enjoyed the notoriety that the HBO miniseries brought,” Jon said. “He never would have sought out any notoriety, though. He certainly never did when we were growing up. But I think he enjoyed being known as one of the Band of Brothers when he was in the VA hospital in Bedford, where he was at the end.”
Jon speaks fondly of being with his father at the HBO premiere in Normandy. “Mostly, we just sat outside the hotel and smoked cigarettes together,” Jon said. “We toured Paris some, but it was harder for him to get around because of the wheelchair. We met some French kids, and when they found out Dad was a paratrooper and in Normandy, they had all kinds of questions for him. He kept his sense of humor, too. When we were coming back from Utah Beach in a van, all of us were exhausted, but Dad kept cracking jokes in the back of the van. ‘My eyes aren’t mates anymore,’ he said, like, they were so tired they weren’t functioning together.”
The family went to Paris in June 2001. Then, late that October, Moose had another stroke, this one major.
“I came up from New York,” Jon said, “and Dad was in the hospital. They had to keep clearing his lungs because they were filling with fluid. It was pretty brutal for him. He could still talk a bit, but there weren’t any longwinded conversations between us. I knew he was in a lot of pain. I asked if he could see outside. He said yeah. We said things like that. I think it was good just that he knew we were there and made the effort. I was with him one night, and he asked me what was on TV. I said I was watching baseball. That was the last conversation he and I had. I needed to go back to the city to take care of some business. The next day when I got back to the hospital, they said he had taken a turn for the worse during the night. From that point on he never opened his eyes. Then they took him off the ventilator. We waited until he stopped breathing. Then he was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking he’d bounce back.”
His wife Mary remembers him saying, “Hi, love,” when she arrived at the hospital, and that his last word before he died was “home.”
“Just before he died, I whispered in his ear that I loved him and that I was glad he came into our lives,” Mary said. “I don’t imagine he heard me, but I hope he did.”
Remembering Frederick Heyliger
Frederick Heyliger died November 2, 2001. The funeral was simple and short, just family and friends. A minister came and said a few words. His family put his ashes in the ground. “He really wasn’t a religious man,” Jon said, “I never saw him go to church or anything. But I remember him saying to my brother Stephen that there are no atheists in a foxhole, so he had some sort of belief in God, although I never spoke to him about it. What I know is that he lived a good long life and did things most of us couldn’t dream of doing.” Fred Jr. added that his dad went to church Christmas and Easter “whether he needed to or not,”—his dad’s words—and always made sure the parsonage had the lawn mowed and the gardens weeded.
The family held a small ceremony at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, where the ashes were interred. “He’s got a nice view of Author’s Ridge,” Fred Jr. said, where Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott are buried.
The two brothers paid tribute to their dad in different ways. Here are their stories, told in their own words:
Jon:
I try to keep in touch with the people involved with the Easy Company reunions, although I’m not as much a part of the reunions as I’d like to be. I went to a couple after Dad passed away, but without him there, it felt harder to go.
The year right after he passed away, I went to the reunion and decided to leave a day early. I started to drive home. I left in the afternoon and drove into the night, but then decided I had to turn around. I ended up back at the reunion at six in the morning; I just couldn’t walk away yet. There was such a hole, and the only thing I could do was be around the people who really knew him.
When I came back, I met up with a couple of Rod Bain’s daughters and we went hiking together. There was a big dinner that night. His daughters were always really nice to me. Someone gave me some photos of my dad. I dunno—I guess the Easy Company family was just really there for me when I was having such a hard time.
My father’s passing still leaves a big hole in my life. It’s been almost eight years now since he’s gone, but I’m still not over it. I doubt I ever will be fully.
It’s funny, the veterans I’ve met all seem to have this gentleness inside them. Sometimes it’s tough to believe these men were also soldiers and needed to kill people. It’s like the war years are some kind of separate life for them. It’s hard to believe they are the same people. I think it’s sad that Dad’s generation is all passing away now. Folks today don’t realize that people like my dad ever really existed.
Fred Jr.:
What’s one thing I’d want people to know about my father? Well, it sounds kind of cheesy, but I’m sure that he always meant well. He didn’t always do well. But I know he always meant well.
Some years ago I came across his senior yearbook from Lawrence Academy in Groton, where he graduated. The comment in his description was: “You can always find Moose wandering over the Groton hills with a pair of binoculars around his neck and a bird book in his hand.”
I think that describes my father at his best. He was a man who loved the outdoors and cared for all living things. He did his job during the war and was a good leader. He cared for his families the best he knew how.
Picture Moose Heyliger wandering over the Groton hills with binoculars and a bird book. That’s how I’d want people to remember my dad.
19
C. CARWOOD LIPTON
Interview with Mike Lipton, son
A journalist from the
New York Times
wrote an extended obituary about my father just after Dad died on December 16, 2001, at age eighty-one. The miniseries had just come out that year, and the article described him as among the central figures in
Band of Brothers.
My dad is generally considered to have been one of the primary contributors to Stephen Ambrose’s book, even suggesting the title from a line from Shakespeare’s
Henry V.
Donnie Wahlberg portrayed him in the series as “a low-key, dependable member of the company who emerges as a strong leader while a first sergeant in the Battle of Bulge.”
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That statement from the
Times
summed up well my father’s life. He was a good leader, consistently dependable, and later became one of the more recognizable members of the group.
Flamethrowers and Rabbit Hunting
C. Carwood Lipton was born Jan. 30, 1920, in Huntington, West Virginia. There were actually three Clifford Carwood Liptons: my grandfather, my father, and my brother. My grandfather was known as Cliff, and my brother was always known as Cliff, so to distinguish himself, Dad went as Carwood.
My grandfather’s name was actually
Clifton Carlwood Lupton
, but he changed it. Dad said it was because people called him “Mr. Lipton” whenever they saw his signature, which doesn’t explain why he changed his first and middle name, too, but I’m not aware that he changed his name to disguise ethnicity or anything like that. They were Scottish, originally landed in North Carolina, and proud of their heritage.
Dad was a bit of a hell-raiser as a young boy, inquisitive and resourceful. He told us stories about the crazy stuff he and his brother did.
Once they went rabbit hunting. Dad didn’t have a shotgun, but he found a piece of pipe that was just big enough to drop a shotgun shell into. The lip of the shell held it at the pipe’s end. They went out hunting, and Dad hiked around with this piece of pipe on his shoulder with his brother behind him. A shell was loaded in the pipe. His brother carried a block of wood with a nail driven through it. The plan was that whenever they saw a rabbit, the brother would bang the block of wood against the shell, fire it, and shoot the rabbit. Fortunately, rabbits were scarce that day, and they never got a chance to actually fire it—probably would have killed them both.
The heat in their house came from open flames in those old ceramic grates. One winter day, his mother had company over, and the kids were told to make scarce. Dad and his brother went out onto the porch and looked for something to do. They found a piece of metal and pounded the end into a flange. Disconnecting the heating grate outside on the front porch, they hooked up the gas line into their device. Basically, they built themselves a flame thrower. Dad held it, and his brother lit the end. Flames shot all the way across the porch.
Years later, Dad described the experience: “We weren’t sure how to shut it off, so I kept moving this thing around so the house wouldn’t catch fire. I couldn’t let it stay in one place for very long. My brother ran downstairs and turned off the gas main, because that was the only way we knew to stop the gas. Then my brother and I had to sneak around the house and relight all the pilot lights on the heaters. The company was still visiting with my mother, and it was winter. So once the heaters went out, you needed to get them lit again quickly.”
Growing up wasn’t all fun. My grandfather was killed in a car wreck when my dad was ten. Dad was the older brother and wound up as the man of the house. His mother worked. His parents had been interior decorators and had run their own decorating shop in Charleston, or perhaps it was in Huntington. Back in the 1920s they decorated the governor’s mansion in Charleston. So my grandmother continued the decorating business and always kept boarders with rooms she rented out.
Dad continued on with his adventuresome ways. When the war hit, he wanted to join the Army Air Corp to be a fighter pilot—that was his first choice. But right out of high school he had worked at a nickel plant in Huntington and had gotten a chip in [one] eye from a metal lathe, so his eyesight wasn’t good enough to be a pilot. The second most dangerous thing he could think of was being a paratrooper.
Dedicated Soldier
Dad was one of the few married paratroopers. He met my mother, Joanne Eckly, on a double date just before the war. They weren’t with each other on the date, mind you, they were each with the other person. But they liked each other, and began dating after that. They were married in 1943.
Dad had joined the Army in 1942 as a private. He was one of the original Toccoa men, was promoted to company first sergeant within a year, and was one of the noncoms who participated in the mutiny against Captain Sobel in Aldbourne.
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Dad never talked about the incident with Sobel. He mentioned that Sobel had gotten them lost on maneuvers, and that he was concerned about Sobel leading them into battle. That was about it.
He was known as a dedicated leader and jumped into Normandy with his men on D-day. He landed in a walled-in area in the city of Ste. Mère-Église, joined up with some members of the 82nd, and then with Guarnere, Malarkey, Toye, and Wynn, then shortly thereafter with Winters. He fought with the men when they disabled the guns at Brécourt Manor.
Dad didn’t talk a lot about the war and the military when we were growing up. I think it was an experience he wanted to forget, but he wrote two pieces describing two battles he was in. The first, of Brécourt Manor. The second, of Carentan, where he was wounded. Portions of his writings are as follows:
Brécourt Manor
We had two officers, Lt. Winters in command and Lt. Compton; two platoon sergeants, Guarnere and I; and nine men, and we had two machine guns, a 60mm mortar, and our individual weapons.
The entire group was stopped by the sound of German artillery firing from a wooded hedgerow area off to the right of the road that we were on. Lt. Winters was called to Battalion and was ordered to take and destroy those guns with his company. None of us had been in combat before that day.
Winters had no time for a reconnaissance, but from his initial observation he decided that there were several guns, manned and defended by probably at least 60 men, and that the guns were well dug in and camouflaged and that there was probably a network of trenches and foxholes around them. We learned later that he was right in all these estimates, and that the German forces included a number of paratroopers from the German 6th Parachute Regiment.
A frontal attack against those positions by 13 men could not succeed, but Winters confidently outlined to us his plan to deceive and defeat the German forces and to destroy the guns.
His plan was to concentrate a double envelopment attack on one gun, the one on the German left flank, and after capturing it to hit the other guns, one by one, on their open left flanks. He sent Compton and Guarnere around to our left to hit the Germans on the first gun from their right front. He sent Ranney and me around to our right to put fire into the German positions from their left flank. He set up the two machine guns in position to put heavy continuous fire into the German positions from their front. He then organized and led the rest of our men in a direct assault along the hedgerow right into the German positions.
With fire into their positions from both flanks, heavy machine gun fire into their front, and Winters leading an assault right into their defenses the Germans apparently felt that they were being hit by a large force. Those defending the first gun broke and withdrew in disorganization to a far tree line, and that gun was in our hands.
Our attack continued to each gun in turn from its exposed left flank. Winters blew out the breeches of each gun as soon as we had it with blocks of TNT. In all, the Germans lost 15 men, 12 [more] were captured, and many wounded. In E Company we had one man killed and one wounded.