On December 17, 1967, Master Sergeant Albert Blithe died in the intensive care unit of an Army hospital in Germany, and the official letter that reached his wife Kay described an efficient and highly dedicated professional soldier, a man liked by everyone who had the opportunity to meet or work with him. His death, the letter said, came as a great shock to all of us who knew him. The letter was accurate, as far as it went. But years later, Albert’s own son Gordon would look at those polished words and say plainly: I don’t doubt that’s all true, but what’s in that letter is mostly polite talk.

My dad drank himself to death. That’s how it really happened. It was a brutal end for a man whose war story had already been badly mangled. Millions of viewers had watched Private First Class Albert Blithe take a mortal wound to the neck near the French town of Carentan in the HBO series Band of Brothers, and were told at the end of the episode that he succumbed to that injury in 1948.

None of it was true. Albert Blithe survived World War II, healed from his wounds, fought again in Korea, and served in the Army until his death in 1967. The question was why Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg had altered his story and killed him off on screen. The answer lay in a chain of confusion that began with a mistaken funeral twenty years earlier.

Albert Blithe was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 25, 1923. His father drove a delivery truck for UPS, and his mother worked in the Garment District. Albert grew up on the rough side of the tracks and, by his own son’s account, ran with a bad crowd. My dad was a thug, Gordon said in Marcus Brotherton’s book A Company of Heroes.

There’s no other way to say it. After high school, Albert took a short-lived job at a Westinghouse Electric plant, but he decided he had to get out of Philadelphia and away from the friends who were pulling him down. Looking for a fresh start, he volunteered for the paratroopers on August 18, 1942. He was sent to Camp Toccoa, Georgia, to join Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, where he trained under the strict control of Captain Herbert Sobel.

Blithe became a rifleman in Easy Company’s first platoon and earned his jump wings at Fort Benning. On June 6, 1944, he jumped into Normandy with Easy Company as part of the airborne component of the D-Day invasion. He landed far from his drop zone, disoriented in the darkness. Exhausted and possibly affected by the air sickness medication the men had been given, he collapsed into a ditch and fell asleep.

After an unknown time he was found by other paratroopers who had also missed their targets, and together they managed to locate Easy Company at Saint-Marie-du-Mont. It was there that the famous photograph was taken of paratroopers holding a captured German flag, and Albert Blithe can be seen on the far right. After resting while waiting for orders, Blithe took part in the attack on the rural town of Carentan on June 12. It was Easy Company’s first major engagement, and during the fighting Blithe suffered what was then called hysterical blindness.

The immense psychological stress of the chaos of battle produced a real physical effect. He couldn’t see. He was that scared that he blanked out, said Dick Winters. Such high stress can genuinely cause physical symptoms—impaired hearing, paralysis, seizures, and blindness.

Like the series showed, Blithe was taken to the aid station. Lieutenant Dick Winters came there himself to have a ricocheted bullet pulled out of his leg after the men had taken the village, and he spoke to Private Blithe to see how he was doing. I can’t see, sir. I can’t see, Blithe said.

Winters told him to take it easy, relax, that he would be ticketed out of there and sent back to England, that he would be okay. As Winters began to walk away, Blithe suddenly started to get up. I can see, I can see, sir, I can see you. According to Winters, all Blithe apparently needed was somebody to talk to him and reassure him.

It seemed to snap him out of it, and he was all right. Never saw anything like it, Winters recalled. This kid just completely could not see, and all he needed was somebody to talk to him for a minute and calm him down. Blithe rejoined the company and stayed in the fight.

Moving through the field heading out of Carentan, encouraged by the other men, he overcame his fears and began firing at the German soldiers on the enemy lines. One of his bullets struck and killed a German paratrooper. After the 2nd Armored Division fought off the German tanks, Albert walked over to the enemy lines and knelt beside the man he had shot. He took the white edelweiss flower from the man’s jacket and put it on his own.

The flower was a symbol of courage, growing only at higher elevations, meaning a soldier who wore it would have had to climb significant heights to obtain it. Finally, Albert had accepted his role in the war. Finally, he had found the courage that had been eluding him. On his 21st birthday, June 25, 1944, Albert Blithe volunteered for a patrol outside Carentan to determine the strength of the German infantry opposite Easy Company’s position.

Blithe, Bill Garnier, and several other men moved along hedgerows for concealment. When they came to within about twenty-five yards of a farmhouse thought to be a German command post, a sniper hiding in a tree shot Blithe in the collarbone. Easy Company veteran Joe Lesniewski, in Marcus Brotherton’s book We Who Are Alive and Remain, described what happened next. The bullet that struck Albert caused a piece of his collarbone to come out.

Lesniewski took out a spare shirt from his pocket, turned Blithe over onto his front because the hole was so big in the back of his upper right shoulder, and stuffed the shirt into the wound to stop the blood flow. We took turns carrying him back to the hedgerow where the medics were ready to take him out, Lesniewski said. While we were carrying him, the Krauts were still shooting at us. We could feel the bullets go by our ears, but nobody got hit.

The Band of Brothers episode inaccurately depicted Blithe as shot in the neck. When author Stephen Ambrose interviewed Easy Company veterans for his book, the last thing they could remember about Blithe was that he had been seriously wounded in the neck area near Carentan. In real life, Blithe’s June 1944 World War II hospital admission card states he was shot in the clavicle—the collarbone—resulting in a compound fracture that was repaired and closed. He was discharged from a hospital in England in October 1944 and sent home, where he recovered further in an Army hospital.

He was finally released from the hospital on October 8, 1945, after the war had ended. He fully recovered from the injury, apart from some pain when he raised his arm too high. The series’ claim that Blithe never recovered from a neck wound and died in 1948 was entirely wrong. Ambrose reportedly heard the story from Easy Company veterans and took it as gospel, as he had done in other cases.

In reality, none of the veterans knew exactly what had happened to Blithe after he was injured and returned to the States. He had attended only the very first 101st Airborne Division reunion after the war, and it is unclear who from Easy Company he encountered there. The false death claim appears to have originated with Easy Company veterans Edward “Babe” Heffron and Bill Garnier. In 1948, they attended the funeral of a soldier from Pennsylvania named Albert Blithe, mistakenly believing it was their old war buddy.

It was not the same man. After the series aired, the Blithe family refuted the death claim and received an apology from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. The inaccuracy resulted in corrections to subsequent editions of Ambrose’s book. The series itself was never revised for its DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming releases, and it still displays the false death claim.

Even the corrected book edition still incorrectly states that a German sniper put a bullet into his neck, though the wound to his collarbone was the real injury. For that wound in Normandy, Albert Blithe was awarded the Purple Heart. His heroism did not end with World War II. After being released from the hospital in the States in the fall of 1945, he waived the partial disability payments he had been receiving for the past year so he could return to the Army.

He served in the Korean War with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team—the same regiment in which Ronald Speirs, another former Easy Company man, also served. During one mission in Korea, Blithe jumped behind enemy lines and ended up right in the middle of a Chinese division. For that mission he was awarded the Silver Star, and he also received the Bronze Star. Dick Winters, reflecting on the way Blithe’s story was presented in Band of Brothers, considered it unfair to the man.

Falsely depicting him as mortally wounded in World War II and dying from those injuries after the war dishonored his service in both wars and his lifelong military career. Discussing the breadth of Blithe’s service, Winters said that Blithe receiving the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, and the Bronze Star is not too shabby. It speaks for itself. When the hostilities in Korea ended, Albert Blithe was assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Taiwan.

He rose to the rank of master sergeant and was by then a master parachutist with more than six hundred jumps to his name. In June 1967, he was stationed in Germany as part of the 8th Supply and Transport Battalion of the 8th Infantry Division. Albert had married twice. His first marriage, to Flora May, ended in divorce around 1951; they had a daughter named Barbara, born in 1948.

In 1957 he married his second wife, Sadie, who went by Kay. She brought two daughters from a previous marriage into the family, and Albert and Kay had a son named Gordon in 1959. Combat had taken its toll. According to Gordon, his father was a chronic alcoholic, probably due to the war.

But he was a good-time Charlie, too. He was always fun to be with. Gordon’s mother told him several times: you just don’t know how badly the war messed up your dad’s mind. When Gordon was seven, he asked his father: did you kill anybody in the war?

Albert nodded slowly in affirmation but said nothing more. Gordon then asked: were you scared? Yeah, of course I was scared, Albert replied. In December 1967, Albert traveled from his station in Germany to Bastogne, Belgium, for a weekend ceremony commemorating Easy Company’s role in the Battle of the Bulge.

He felt nauseated on December 10. When he returned to Germany on December 11, he was taken to Wiesbaden Air Force Hospital, where doctors diagnosed a perforated ulcer. He underwent emergency surgery on December 12, but complications from the procedure led to kidney failure. Master Sergeant Albert Blithe died in the intensive care unit on December 17, 1967, at just forty-four years old.

His body was sent back to the United States, and he was buried on December 28 at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. The description of how he died was included in the letter to his wife Kay from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne H. Stokes. Albert and Kay had split up a couple of years before his death.

In the letter, Stokes wrote that Blithe was an efficient and highly dedicated professional soldier. Albert was liked by everyone who had the opportunity to meet or work with him. His death came as a great shock to all of us who knew him. Gordon Blithe commented on the letter years later: I don’t doubt that’s all true, but I will say that what’s in that letter is mostly polite talk.

My dad drank himself to death. That’s how it really happened. Gordon described how his father drank every day after work, going to the NCO Club and staying until it closed at two in the morning, then coming home with a couple of bottles of Seagram’s 7, his favorite. While his parents were still together, Gordon said, they were drinking buddies who loved to go out dancing, and most times they drank until five in the morning.

I’ve never seen a man drink as much as my father. He could drink enormous quantities of alcohol. At least he was a happy drunk—that was about the only good thing about his addiction. In her later years, Gordon’s mother said the happiest she had ever been was when she was with his father.

Those years encompass my best memories of him, too. It’s good that I have some good memories, because the rest of my father’s life became pretty ugly. Albert’s alcoholism and gambling were among several factors that led to his split with Kay in the years before his death. His story was all too familiar—another soldier who returned from physical battles on the front lines only to face lifelong psychological ones.

Many turned to alcohol to cope with the effects of the war, and families were often destroyed in the wake of such addiction. Albert’s wife recalled that the poor man went through hell during the war and loved the army so much. No other person alive loved the Army and being a paratrooper more than Albert did. His son echoed the same.

He was proud of his military career. It meant the world to him. He was a true American paratrooper who put his life on the line for this country and thousands of other people in this world. He fought for people he didn’t even know.

I’m proud of him. So proud. That’s how I want people to remember Albert Blithe.