Books / Easy Company Soldier

 

Full name: Easy Company Soldier: The Legendary Battles of a Sergeant from World War II’s “Band of Brothers.”

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Released: May, 2008.

ISBN: 0-312-37849-1

Ranking: No. 1 in the world among Amazon.com book’s on  History/WWII/Western Front, February, 2009.



Click for sample

from Welch’s book

on Malarkey

"The guys of Easy 506th have been writing a lot of books lately, and I have them all. But this one

beats them all.”

— Amazon.com review

“One shot. That’s all it would take. One shot from my pistol and I could be rid of this frozen hell that Easy Company had been imprisoned in for weeks ... .”


So begins Bob Welch’s gripping story of Sgt. Don Malarkey’s World War II years, told in the ex-soldier’s own words for the first time. It's more than a story of battles, strategy and weapons. It’s a story of men, courage, and fear. Of friendships gained, friendships lost and cemeteries visited. Of one man, Don Malarkey, and how war became the defining — and damning — moment of his life.


Of the men in “Easy Company” of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, none served more consecutive days in combat than Malarkey. The story of Malarkey, prominently featured in the Emmy Award-winning HBO series directed by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, is the story of a roughhewn Oregonian who emerges as a rebel with a cause, a soldier with a score to settle, and a man with a heart to mend. Malarkey was played by Scott (TV’s “E.R.”) Grimes in the “Band of Brothers” miniseries that added to the national acclaim of the best known military fighting unit in American history.


In this must-read for every devotee of
Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and of the subsequent HBO miniseries, Malarkey takes us not only into the battles fought from Normandy to Germany, but into the heart and mind of a solider who spent more consecutive days in combat than any other man in “Easy Company.” This is not yet another hasty compilation of scattered war memories. This is a story, written by a World War II author whose previous book on this war, American Nightingale, was featured on Good Morning America, praised by the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Greenberg and WWII author James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers) and compared to Saving Private Ryan (Book Babes). In a literary world filled with “battles-only” books about World War II, Malark goes well beyond. To the bonds that drew the Band of Brothers together. To the deaths that tore them apart, including the death of a friend whom he considered “closer than my own brother.” To the nuances of character that are missing in so many first-person stories; for example, that Malarkey is touched with a sense of conceit and thought some soldiers, such as David Kenyon Webster, didn’t necessarily  “walk the talk” in their memoirs. And to the unseen scars of war that didn’t go away when Malarkey was discharged, particularly
after the loss of Don’s closest friend, Skip Muck. (With Don, left.) (“ ... and every time I’d bring that glass of scotch to my lips, I’d be back in Bastogne, seeing my friends lying in the snow that was splotched with their blood ... .)


If the Band of Brothers book drew a nation to a group of unsung heroes, Malark offers a deeper, often more honest and more soulful version that delves more deeply into relationships — both at home and amongst the Band. And, above all, fortified by a gut-level realness that suggests even our heroes are human.






 

Malarkey, left, with Burr Smith in Austria near war’s end.

An uncle, Bob Malarkey, died after being gassed in World War I