![]() Both paratrooper hopefuls enjoyed a good laugh, good music, and talking about their girlfriends. It was at Toccoa that Malarkey met his soon-to-be best friend, Warren “Skip” Muck, from upstate New York. Malarkey quickly befriended Muck and later struggled with Muck’s death. Young recruits Warren “Skip” Muck, Joe Toye, and Don Malarkey at Camp MacKall, North Carolina. Malarkey grew to hate Sobel, wanting to tie him to a pine tree and “use him for slingshot practice,” but by the end of the war he credited Sobel for keeping him and other Toccoa veterans alive. Sobel worked Malarkey and the rest of the company hard, leading them on runs up and down a local mountain named Currahee at all hours of the day and night. Sent to Toccoa, Georgia, he joined Captain Herbert Sobel’s Easy Company. Although the Marine Corps rejected him, the Army drafted him and he immediately volunteered for the paratroops. He was attending the University of Oregon when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and left after his freshman year to work at a machine shop in Portland. In high school he bussed tables at the Liberty Grill, blended flour at a mill to make money for college, and dated his sweetheart Bernice Franetovich. At the age of 12, he made his first parachute jump, leaping off the roof of his parents’ house clutching an umbrella. He was raised on stories of his two uncles who fought and died in World War I and who, he had been told, had never given up. He spent his youth playing marbles, swinging from trees, swimming in the Nehalem River, diving for crawfish, and hunting birds with a bow and arrow in cottonwood forests that smelled of blackberries. Little Donnie Malarkey grew up in Astoria, Oregon, the son of Leo and Helen, one of four children. Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, and the 2001 HBO miniseries of the same name. Don Malarkey passed away on September 30, 2017, in Salem, Oregon, at the age of 96.įrom the hedgerows and villages of Normandy to the bridges and dikes of the Netherlands, from the frozen foxholes around Bastogne, Belgium, to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, Don Malarkey took everything the Germans could throw at him and survived World War II without serious injury, but the mental scars of seeing his buddies wounded and killed haunted him for the rest of his life. ![]() In a unit filled with nicknames-Skip, Shifty, One-Lung, and Gonorrhea-he was simply known as Malark. The paratrooper from Oregon fought with Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division across France, the Netherlands, and Belgium and into the heart of Germany. (Historic photo restored in color by Johnny Sirlande.) Lieutenant Lynne “Buck” Compton thought him “a staunch patriot who truly understands the principles for which we fought.” Major Richard “Dick” Winters called him “an outstanding soldier in combat” and “an esteemed friend.” Don Malarkey served in Easy Company through the entire European Campaign. Staff Sergeant William “Wild Bill” Guarnere considered him his hero. Donald Malarkey’s comrades thought highly of him as a warrior and as a man.
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