Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  He asked, “Where did you work here in Ponca City?” And I told him. He then said, “You come back here in the morning.”

  When I came back the following day he said, “Jake, I would like to hire you but I am a little scared. You don’t have too rosy a reputation. You’ve been in and out of that jail a hundred times for fighting and brawling. You would be working under some of the roughest and meanest men in the company. They have a regular knock-down and drag-out affair once a week somewhere. They work under conditions with the heat and danger. Four men on a scaffold one foot wide swinging them picks, jerking coke that is glowing red hot. Of course it will get in someone’s boot or shirt and the battle is on.”

  I told him, “Fred, do me a favor. Before you say no, call Kenneth Long. He is the fire chief over here. I have worked longer with Kenny than any other place that I’ve been. Ask Kenny if I have ever had any problems on the job with any other person. I get along good with people. I have been in and out of jail because about all we had to do around here for recreation was get drunk and fight. I have never had any problem anywhere that I worked.”

  So he said, “Come on back the next day.” I did and he said, “Jake, I get a bit of a different story from Kenneth Long than I have heard everywhere else. I kind of believe that you are telling the truth. I am going to put you to work down here. But the first time that you get out there and start a brawl, you’re out the gate.”

  So I went to work as a coke knocker and worked down there for about six months until they had a company-wide layoff. Well, I was the newest man in the refinery. They laid off by seniority and importance of job. I was the first guy out of the gate.

  This was late in November or December and the Christmas mail was beginning to pick up at the post office. They always hired forty or fifty extra people during the month of December. I went up and applied for this temporary employment. They put me to work. In January when they were getting ready to let all of us go, the postal department decided that they would issue a civil service examination to hire new full-time postal employees. They needed eight people in Ponca City. The post office had not hired anybody since the war. Of the hundred and twenty-five who took the examination down at the American Legion building, I made the eighth highest score. So I saw that and thought, “Boy, this sure will be no sweat.”

  They finally called me down to the office. The postal inspector asked, “Is everything you’ve got on this application true?”

  I said, “Yeah, sure is.”

  He said, “You’ve listed a lot of places where you have been arrested. I have been checking and it all turns out to be good but it seems like you forgot one of them.”

  I thought that I had listed everything on it except that deal out in Tulare, California, at which I felt that I had not violated any law other than just getting drunk. But the police report had listed it and this postal inspector had found out about it. I said, “I don’t feel guilty about the affair in Tulare. I was not raising hell or anything. I was just drunk.”

  He said, “I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We are going to put you on probation for six months while we check everything out.”

  I said, “That’s fine and dandy with me.”

  So I went to work for the post office in the early part of 1950 and worked twenty-seven and a half years until I retired. I had three years and five months military service which also counted toward any civil service retirement. So I walked out of there when I was fifty-eight years old.

  I was married to Rosita for three years until she died of cancer. I then met Martha Louise Beam-Wonders near the end of 1952. Her husband had also died within a week of Rosita. We married on September 4, 1953. She had a fifteen-month-old son. I raised him and Rosita’s daughter. Martha and I had two children of our own; Rebecca, born in 1956, and Hugh, born in 1959.

  After I married Rosita, I became a very serious Christian. Because of the way that I had lived, it has made me appreciate very much my relationship with God and the kind of guy that He is. When the Lord forgives something, He remembers it no more.

  KEEPING IN TOUCH

  After settling down, there were a few of the guys I wanted to get in touch with. Rosita’s family was from Brooklyn, New York. When we went up to visit them I looked up Vick Utz, who had lost his arm at Bastogne. Someone had told me he worked for Johnson and Johnson. I called the company and they gave me his address and phone number. We visited and began to keep in touch.

  I remembered where many of the others had lived before the war. I knew the Marquez brothers lived in El Paso. I also got in touch with Jack Agnew and Herb Pierce. In spite of having threatened to kill each other, Herb and I became good friends.

  Herb was the only one of those young kids to make it. When he came home he got messed up with the military in some way and got shipped out to Korea during the war. He told me, “Jake, you don’t know how lucky we were in airborne units. Boy, those American soldiers don’t have any idea what a war is. I never saw so much disorganization in my life.” He was wounded pretty bad in a village and they sent him back to the hospital where they operated on him. When they took the bullet out of him, it was a forty-five slug. He was hit by his own men.

  Tom Young was one guy I really wanted to meet. His brother had been killed with the 82nd in Normandy. He and I were so much alike in many respects that Tom took to me as his brother. I went through Austin, Texas, a dozen times after the war but could not find him. In 1954 he and his wife were driving north and passed through Ponca City. They stopped for gas and he said, “Jake lives here. I’ll look him up and call him.” Martha answered the phone. He told her who he was. She told him I was out fishing and would be back soon so he should come on over to visit. I did not get back for three hours and there he was after all my searching, sitting with Martha at my table.

  We have kept in close touch ever since. Tom became a rancher. He picked up a spread down in the hill country that lacked thirty acres of containing four square miles. All of his children became professional people.

  I remembered Bobby Reeves lived in Cleveland, Ohio. He had served on outpost duty with me up in Holland. In 1955 Martha and I passed through one night. Fortunately there were only two Reeves in the phone book. Bob had become an upper manager in a chocolate factory.

  Trigger Gann became a total alcoholic for a number of years after he was released from the prison camp. He must have called me half a dozen times. He would be somewhere and needed some money for him or his family or something. I had sent him money three different times and would always get another call. I thought, “This is not helping him. It is hurting him.” So I told him, “Trigger, I wouldn’t give you a penny, son, not a dollar. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you would come here to Ponca City, I will get you employed and give you all the help I can, but you have to give up that stump juice.”

  I never gave him any more money and lost all track of the trooper. One of the boys came to a “get-together” many years later and told me Trigger went back into the airborne. During the 1950s the army froze all promotions for NCOs. Trigger was the only one that received a promotion to command sergeant major during that four-year period. He also received all kinds of awards for good discipline. He came out of the army smelling like a rose.

  In the late seventies, Keith Carpenter sent me a Christmas card. I then started corresponding with him. I visited his home two or three times and he always had some little company that sold things like janitorial supplies. He had made a lot of money. Anyway, he asked me if I knew Steve Kovacs lived in Oklahoma City. Steve had been wounded during that bombing in Eindhoven. I said, “No.” So I went down and started visiting with him. Steve was surprised to see me. He told me he thought that I was killed up in Holland when those Messerschmitts bombed us.

  CLOSURE

  One day I received a call from a woman asking if I was the Jake McNiece who served with Frenchy Baribeau. I asked, “How did you locate me?” She said, “My grandmother, Frenchy’s wife, died about three months
ago and we were going through his personal effects. He had a cigar box. It had his cap and insignia, ‘Screaming Eagle’ patch,5 the folded flag, and little ole things like that. In there was a newspaper clipping dated December 4, 1944. It had a caption on it, ‘The Story of the Filthy 13 Can Now Be Released.’ It was not a very complete description but it named about eight other men and their hometowns.” She said, “We have been calling all those towns trying to locate those people who had served with him. We haven’t found anybody. So I said, ‘We’ll try Jake McNiece of Ponca City.’”

  I said, “There’s not much need of you wasting all your money on this information. All those guys are dead. There’s not a lot of them left.” Baribeau may have been on the bottom of the stack of paratroopers we buried over there in Normandy. But his family talked with me and we had a real good visit.

  I got inquiries like this quite often. I received a letter from a lady [Laura Erikson] up in McLean, Virginia. She wrote, “Dear Mister McNiece, If you are the McNiece that was in a demolition platoon in Europe, I am curious to know if you have ever known a Lieutenant Mellen? Call me collect if you are the one. I know that there was a Jake McNiece with the company.”

  I called back. She had a recorder on and I told her, “I am the Jake McNiece who fought with Lt. Mellen.” I gave her my phone number and told her to return my call. Boy it was not two hours until she was on that phone. She said that her uncle was about twenty years older than she. They knew that he was killed in action there at Normandy but they did not know any of the details.

  I told her, “He was killed that night. He never saw the sun come up. He went out of the front of the plane and I took out the last section. I never saw him after I got out of the plane. Other boys saw him. He was hit at least two or three times and kept going. I did not know anything personal about him other than he was just my lieutenant. He was a good officer. I’ll give you the name of six or seven officers who are still alive and if you’ll contact them they will give you all the information you could possibly want.”

  I helped resolve questions in their mind. The families were always very curious about the details.

  TOP KICK

  One Sunday evening back in 1979 I had been having problems with my back. The phone rang and Martha answered it. She said, “Jake, you’ve got a long distance call.”

  I said, “Let me go back and get me a cigarette.”

  She said, “It’s long distance.”

  I said, “That does not have anything to do with it. Whoever is calling long distance, if they do not have enough money for me to have a cigarette, they shouldn’t be calling long distance.” I asked, “Who is it?”

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  I lit me a cigarette and picked up the phone, “McNiece speaking.”

  A voice asked, “Did you blow up any barracks today?”

  I said, “No.”

  He asked, “Did you steal a freight train and bring it back to camp?”

  His voice was familiar but I could not recognize it. I said, “No I didn’t.” I asked, “Who is this speaking?” I knew it had to be someone who had been in the outfit pretty early on to know of these incidents.

  He said, “This is A. H. Miller.”

  I asked, “Do you mean this is Top Kick Albert Miller?”

  He said, “Yeah.”

  I said, “Well, you idiot. What do you mean calling me? Albert, I had no idea that you were still alive.” I had not heard from him since the war.

  He said, “Jake, I’ve thought of you a million times since the war. I have often wanted to contact you but I was afraid that I might find out a whole bunch of stuff that I did not want to know. You wasn’t a very promising prospect to be revitalized back into society.”

  It was June 5, the anniversary of our jump into Normandy. He said, “Today has been D-Day all day to me. I have thought of you a hundred times today. I finally told my wife awhile ago that I’m going to call you and talk to you.”

  Miller was a deputy sheriff in Atlanta, Georgia. He said, “The county sheriff had a couple of prisoners here from Kay County. They were wanted back in Oklahoma and the sheriff department sent a couple of deputies over here from Kay County. I got to talking with them and so forth. I finally asked them if they knew you. They said, ‘Oh yeah, we know Jake.’ Then I asked, ‘And how’s he doing?’ They said, ‘He’s one of the outstanding citizens in Ponca City. He’s a church member and he is the nicest guy. He has no problem with anybody. He’s killed a dog or two that were running loose and dangerous to the neighborhood children and things like that. But he faces no criminal charges for that or anything else.’ I talked to them for a while and I thought, ‘Well I’m going to call him.’”

  Top Kick had been hit the moment he got on the ground so he knew very little about what happened to my guys. He wanted to know all about them and this and that. He kept asking questions and I answered them. Finally Martha came into the bedroom and pointed at her watch.

  I said, “Top Kick, we’ve been talking for about forty-five minutes. I’ll tell you what. I don’t have all the answers right in mind to answer you on a bunch of this stuff. I need to think some of it over. We’ve been talking for over forty-five minutes and it will cost you a river bottom farm down there to pay for this call.” So I told him, “I’ll hang up. Then I’ll put this down in a written form and send it to you.”

  He said, “Don’t you hang up. I want to ask you a question.”

  I said, “All right.”

  He asked, “Jake, how long were you in the army?”

  I said, “I was in there three years, five months and twenty-six days, seven hours, fifteen minutes and four seconds.”

  He said, “That’s what I thought.” Then he asked, “Did you ever make PFC?”

  I said, “Top, that’s really a tough yes or no answer. I had all the confirmations and recommendations and parlevouzed with a bunch of officers, but no I never did make PFC.”

  He said, “Now that is what I thought. Now let me tell you something. Did you know that I was first sergeant when you came in down there?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He asked, “Did you know that I was a first sergeant when you left?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “I stayed in for a full career to retire and I was still a first sergeant. Now here is the way you’ve got to deduce this pretty quick. I had you outranked when you came in and I had you outranked when you left and I’ve got you outranked now. When you get ready to hang up, I’ll tell you!” We talked forty-five more minutes!

  The 101st Airborne Division Association was having a national reunion over in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that year. I asked, “Are you going to go to that, Albert?”

  He said, “Yeah, I believe I will.”

  I told him, “I never have been to one. I really don’t think I would enjoy them but if you’re going to be there, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll be down on Lake Texoma that week and I’ll call Tom Young and Marge down in Texas. They can come up to Lake Texoma and meet Martha and I and we’ll come over and visit with you.”

  He said, “Okay, that would be the best gift I have had in my life.”

  So Tom and Marge drove up from Texas and we took off for Hot Springs. After we arrived, Tom and I went in. We got to looking around there and they were holding some kind of memorial service. Those national reunions always have a memorial service, then an award service. They are scheduled and regulated just like the damned army. We walked around looking at those boys until we finally saw Top Kick way back in the back sitting by himself. He had a table there with his cane laying across his leg. So Tom and I just marched right back to his table. When we got near, Top Kick looked up and saw us coming. Boy, he jumped up, grabbed that cane and was pushing himself up from the table. Top Kick was a big man. Tom and him grabbed one another and hugged. Tears were running down their cheeks and we were having a real good “get-together.” Suddenly Palys, who was also in the room, saw that commotion and recognized
the three of us. He came over. So did Sergeant Smith. When they got in the huddle with us, I said, “Hey, we’re causing a pretty big disturbance here. Let’s get out of here and I’ll buy you some dinner. Then we can talk and visit as long as we want to.”

  So we went out and ate a big meal and talked. It was just like seeing a long lost brother. After we came home, I started thinking about it. I told Martha, “I think I’m going to get these guys together, just the survivors of the original Regimental Headquarters Company.” I had probably ten or fifteen addresses that I knew were good.

  Martha said, “It won’t work, Jake. You can’t get those people together after thirty years.”

  I said, “Yeah, these are a different breed of cats. All I’ve got to do is get the word out to them.”

  She said, “Well, I’ll type any communication you want but it won’t work.”

  I sent everyone of the guys I knew an invitation to attend a Regimental Headquarters Company reunion in conjunction with the annual 101st Airborne Reunion at Nashville, Tennessee, that next year. I sent them a roster of everyone I had already notified. I sent them a form and asked them if they knew someone whom they could contact or else have them call me. Before this thing was over that phone started ringing off the hook.

  Epilogue

  THE MORAL OF THE STORY

  Jake McNiece had picked the 1980 101st Airborne Division Reunion in Nashville, Tennessee, for the first reunion of Regimental Headquarters Company. Using the 506th Regiment’s membership roster, Jake wrote all the veterans on the west half of the United States while Jack Agnew wrote those on the east. In their letters they asked the recipients to forward an invitation to anyone not on the list. Most of the men had kept in touch with a war buddy and in this manner Jake and Jack contacted just about everyone.

  When Gene Brown received his invitation, he turned to his wife and said that they were going. Although he had never had interest in attending any of the previous 101st reunions or any other veterans organization, he said if Jake was behind the planning of this, it would have to be a party. He would never miss another company reunion while he was alive.