One winter day as a child, Moose was heading outside with his brothers and grabbed his oldest brother’s boots by mistake. The boots were far too big for him, and as the boys walked across the snow, one of the other brothers said, “Hey—look at the moose tracks.” The nickname stuck, and Fred Heyliger was called “Moose” from then on. As a young man he stood six feet tall and weighed about 210 pounds, one of the larger paratroopers.
Moose loved being outdoors. He set muskrat traps as a child and checked them before he went to school. On the spur of the moment, he and his brother Ted decided to go winter camping one weekend. They grabbed sleeping bags and food and hiked to a beach where they spent the night. It was December, freezing. Ted said he was never so cold in all his life. But Moose loved it.
Moose was a military man prior to the war. He spent three years as a private in the National Guard with H Company, the 182nd Infantry. His character was described by military records as “excellent,” and he qualified as a marksman in 1934. His term of service expired, and he was honorably discharged July 24, 1936.
Moose enrolled at the University of Michigan where his older brother, Vic, excelled as a hockey player. Before finishing college, Moose was drafted into the 51st Field Artillery Brigade and trained as a machine gunner at Camp Edwards for a year. In 1942 he completed Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, sent to Camp Chaffee in Portsmouth, and then to the 506th PIR at Toccoa. He was promoted to First Lieutenant in February 1943.
Moose’s first choice, militarily, was always to go into the Air Force, but it never worked out for him. He explained to his sons that he “could get the planes up, but couldn’t land the damn things.” He also tried tanks before becoming a paratrooper, but didn’t like them. He joked about the tank brigade by referring to an old Bill Mauldin cartoon. Two guys look at a tank and say to each other, “There’s something about a moving foxhole that attracts the eye.”
So Moose switched to the Airborne. He described the hike from Toccoa to Atlanta as a “miserable experience,” and added, “If Colonel Sink hadn’t been so drunk when he read that article about the Japanese paratroopers marching, we never woulda had to do it.”
While in the service, he married his first wife, Evelyn. They had a son, Fred Jr., in 1943, born the day Moose sailed overseas on the Samaria. The couple later had one daughter, Diane.
In handwritten notes kept by his second wife, Mary, he described how he parachuted into Normandy and landed in a pasture about 1:30 a.m., June 6, 1944. “It was black as the insides of a cow,” he wrote. He figured himself about three miles off his drop mark and hiked to Utah Beach, arriving there about 7 a.m. He met up with other men and they worked their way north toward Cherbourg. He took over guard duty for some soldiers from the 4th Division, then stayed with the 4th for about a week before rejoining his unit.
In September that year, Moose jumped into Holland for Operation Market-Garden, where he was in charge of the company’s mortar platoon.
During the night of October 22, 1944, he was chosen to head a rescue expedition across the Rhine River with twenty-four E Company men. Using portable boats, Easy Company successfully rescued 138 British 6th Airborne troops, ten Dutch resistance fighters, and five American pilots trapped behind German lines on the other side of the river. Lifeboats were left on the shore of the river, and the next morning, “The Germans blew the boats to smithereens,” he noted.
Reports from Colonel Robert Sink commended Moose for his “gallantry, outstanding planning, and execution of the operation with no injuries.” The men from Easy Company on the patrol were commended for “bravery, aggressive spirit, prompt obedience of orders, and devotion to duty.”
Moose went on patrol Halloween night, 1944, along with Captain Winters. The two men were checking on machine gun positions when Moose forgot the password and was shot twice by one of his own men. The experience is shown in the miniseries. Winters dove into the bushes and wasn’t hit. “I still don’t remember the password,” Moose wrote years later.
“Dad never talked about his injury,” Fred Jr. said. “Not a word. But he had a good-sized scar on his shoulder and the whole calf on the back of his right leg was virtually gone. Dad always wore shorts in the summer, and I remember seeing his scars as a kid. He wore ski boots, the old leather kind that attached into spring bindings. He said the whole bottom of his foot was numb, and that the ski boots were the best sole he could find to make sure that he didn’t step on something and not know it. Plus, the ski boots were heavy and he said, ‘I need the workout.’”
After he was shot, Moose was in a variety of hospitals for the next two and a half years in Scotland, New York, and Atlantic City, until his discharge from the service in 1947.
A Life Outside
After the war, he decided to return to college, this time to the University of Massachusetts. He attended on the GI Bill and graduated in 1950 with a degree in ornamental horticulture.
Moose was employed as a salesman for various landscape and agricultural chemical companies for more than forty years and didn’t retire fully until after his eightieth birthday. At first, he was a warehouse manager for the Eastern States Farmers Exchange, where he sold feed and fertilizer, anything he could get that kept him close to the outdoors, where he always longed to be. Later he worked for the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, then for another company that sold agricultural chemicals and seed to golf courses, cemeteries, and park departments all over eastern New England. He took side jobs landscaping and frequently helped out neighbors with landscaping and gardening projects for free.
“His career goal was pretty basic,” Fred Jr. said. “He wanted to experience the outdoors full-time. He never quite achieved that. Sales was always his primary occupation. The work in horticulture was always on the side.”
“I think he was basically happy with his work,” Jon said. “I took for granted how much knowledge he had. He grew the most amazing gardens and flowerbeds you’d ever seen in front of our house. He had me plant apple trees as a kid, and we grew corn. He was always weeding and watering. As a kid I got to sell some of the stuff we grew.”
Fred Jr. describes his father as a somewhat distant parent, almost unsure how to raise his children. But there were good times, too. When he and his sister were very young, Fred remembers fondly their dad hooking up their Chevy coupe and a one-wheel trailer. The family headed out from their home in Acton, Massachusetts, and set out for Truckee, California, where Easy Company member Bob Brewer lived. The family camped all across the country, there and back.
For years, Moose was a Boy Scout leader and took his pack to the mountains annually for a snowball fight. He was the chairman of the town’s recreation commission and worked to get the town to buy valuable recreational land to set aside for public use. Rare and unusual plants grew on the recreation land, and Moose knew both the common and Latin names of them all.
He was constantly in touch with nature. “He’d get a bunch of neighborhood kids together on a cold day,” Fred Jr., said, “and say, ‘let’s go to Crane’s Beach today, pack a lunch,’ and we’d all suit up in our winter clothes and go to the beach. Dad could tell us all the names of the birds, and where they came from.” He kept plastic bags in the car, because if he found a particularly colorful bird dead along the road, he stopped and picked it up. Whenever he found one, he identified it by name, an indigo bunting, or a cardinal, or a Baltimore oriole, or whatever, and said something like, “Well I know a guy up in Freeport who ties flies, and he can use these orange feathers.”
Moose and his first wife separated in the early 1960s, when Fred Jr. was nineteen, and divorced a short time later. The parents moved about twenty miles apart. Moose married his second wife, Mary, in 1966. She had four children from a previous marriage. Moose had two. Jon was born as the result of the new marriage. Moose was forty-nine when Jon was born.
“He took on a lot,” Jon said. “When he met my mother, she already had four kids, and I’
m sure that’s not an easy thing to walk into. He must have really loved her. He took us many places, like to the Cape in the winter so we could play on the sand dunes, or up skiing, or hiking up to Mount Monadnock. He knew a lot about birds, trees, different plants. He could tell you the constellations. It was nice for a kid to take in all that information. He had a lot to offer.”
One time one of the younger boys found a turtle, boxed it, and took it home. Moose made him take the turtle back and set it free. Another time Jon and a friend were at a sandpit and spotted a couple of birds. The boys thought their mother had abandoned them, so they took them home. Moose made them take the birds back and set them free.
“He was always making us dig somewhere or prune something or clear land,” Jon said, “which seemed like a drag as boys—other kids didn’t have to work on weekends. When my parents bought their house in Shirley, it was just a residential lot with all these thorny trees with humongous spikes everywhere. All told, we must have spent a couple years cleaning up the fields and brush.
“But he could also be very thoughtful at times,” Jon added. “One time we were camping, and my hands were really cold. He boiled some eggs and told me to put them in my pockets to keep my hands warm. It was all practical stuff with him. He never wanted you to have a bad time.”
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 real
ly 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.”30
A Company of Heroes Page 22
