The truck hit the other vehicle head-on, and Shifty Powers’ body went flying over the top of the cab and slammed into the pavement. He had survived months in Normandy, Holland, and the frozen Ardennes without a scratch, one of the few men in Easy Company who had never been wounded in combat. Now, on the road to Munich, heading home at last, he broke his pelvis, broke his wrist, and suffered a bad concussion. Another soldier in the truck, a man who had also won a ticket home in the lottery, was killed in the crash.

Shifty spent his recovery in an overseas hospital and did not reach the United States until after the rest of Easy Company had already returned. The officers had agreed beforehand that Shifty’s number would be the only one in the helmet. They wanted him to get the furlough home because he was well-liked by the men, and his skill as a sniper, his eye for detail, had saved the lives of many soldiers. It turned out to be a curse.

Before enlisting, Shifty had trained as a machinist and worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia. When he finally came home, he picked slate at a local coal mine before going back to work as a machinist for various companies. He married a woman named Dorothy, and they had two children, a son named Wayne and a daughter named Margot. They were together for sixty years when he died.

In retirement, he fished, hunted, worked in his garden, and shot rifles at targets from his porch. “Throughout my lifetime, I’ve never given a thought to having piles of money or being rich or doing anything like that,” Shifty said in Marcus Brotherton’s book *We Who Are Alive and Remain*. “Now, I worked hard, and if I wanted something, I like being able to afford it. But to me, success is those happy times with family, being able to go fishing and hunting, and just getting out in the woods and enjoying yourself.

Looking at trees or watching water go across rocks in a trout stream, things like that. That’s always what really mattered to me. My life has been good all the way back. I’ve always enjoyed it.

”

Darryl “Shifty” Powers died of lung cancer on June 17, 2009. Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, fought from the drop into Normandy on D-Day through Holland, Bastogne, and the capture of Hitler’s Eagles Nest in Berchtesgaden. The men came home to different lives than the ones they had left. Some found peace, some never did, and a few of the stories told about them in the years afterward were simply wrong.

One of the most persistent errors concerned Joseph Lesniewski, known through the series as Joseph Liebgott. At the end of *Band of Brothers*, the viewer is told that Liebgott returned to San Francisco and drove a cab after the war. That is not what happened. Liebgott had driven a taxi for a brief time in San Francisco before the war, then went to barber college.

He was working as a barber when he enlisted in the army at age twenty-six, and he went back to barbering after the war ended. When he first returned home, Liebgott disappeared for two years. His family later found out he was living near Yuma, California. They believed he had a hard time readjusting to civilian life at first.

He met a woman named Peggy Bentley, and they married in 1949. It was his second marriage; he had been married and divorced before enlisting. Joe and Peggy had eight children together. In 1969, after twenty years of marriage, they divorced, but Liebgott always stayed close to his family and his children.

He never remarried. His family noted that, unlike what was shown in *Band of Brothers*, Liebgott was not Jewish. He was a German Roman Catholic. In 1992, he developed a tumor in his neck and died that summer.

Bill Guarnere lost his leg at Bastogne. He returned home to Philadelphia and married his girlfriend, Frances Pecia, before the war ended in April 1945. They had two sons, Eugene, born in March 1946, and Billy Jr. , born in August 1949.

Eugene was not named after Eugene “Doc” Roe, despite the praise Guarnere heaped on the medic who he credited with saving his life at Bastogne. According to Bill’s granddaughter, the Guarnere brothers had made a bet, and the three who lost the bet each named their son Eugene. There were three Eugene Guarneres around the same age, she noted. To provide for his family, Guarnere initially worked odd jobs and wore a wooden prosthetic leg.

“Very few people were going to hire an amputee,” he wrote in his memoir. “They were afraid you could fall. ” Realizing that being confined to a desk job was not for him, he began working in construction, building houses, and he worked in construction for twenty years. By 1967, his leg was flaring up so badly that it had caused his other leg to flare up as well.

Finally, the doctors removed the prosthetic limb, and he had to learn to live on crutches, which he used for the rest of his life. Without the same freedom to use his arms, he did mostly desk work after that, but he said he would still climb scaffolding and do brick and concrete work. Guarnere was instrumental in organizing the Easy Company reunions. He even tried to reach out to Captain Herbert Sobel, a man many of the men had disliked.

Sobel never came to any of the reunions, but Guarnere paid Sobel’s dues for him. In 2007, Guarnere published a book with his best friend and fellow Easy Company veteran, Edward “Babe” Heffron, titled *Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends*, which chronicled not only their wartime experiences but also their lives before and after the war. Bill Guarnere died of a ruptured aneurysm on March 8, 2014, at the age of ninety. Don Malarkey served more time on the front lines than any other member of Easy Company.

He is not present in the final scene of the series because his character was not there. Like in the series, he had been informed by Major Dick Winters that division had selected him to be a technical adviser to an airborne display in Paris. It was their way of telling him he had given enough. After returning home, Malarkey resumed his studies at the University of Oregon, where he met his wife, Irene.

They married on June 19, 1948, the same day the rest of his class was at their graduation ceremony. After working as a car salesman in Astoria for a number of years, they moved to Portland, where he became involved in commercial real estate. They had four children, a son and three daughters. Like so many soldiers, Malarkey spent decades struggling with the effects of the war.

“Just when I thought I had put everything behind me and thought I was home free, I turn and see the wave building over my shoulder,” he wrote in his memoir. “I don’t know how Irene took it. My waking up in the middle of the night with the nightmares, going into my midwinter funks, thinking of guys who’d be missing yet another Christmas with their families. ” He credited the love of his wife with helping him quiet the echoes of his past, which could at times be deafening.

Around age sixty, he cut back on his drinking, gave up smoking, and began to reach out to the men he had served with in Easy Company. Talking to the other men helped him face what he had long buried. Malarkey lived to see *Band of Brothers* turned into a miniseries, and he attended a number of the related events with Irene. Tech Sergeant Don Malarkey died of age-related causes in 2017 at age ninety-six.

Lewis Nixon had some tough times after the war, as Dick Winters told it. His problems with alcohol continued as he went back to work for the family business, Nixon Nitration Works. He had been through two divorces before meeting a woman named Grace Umezawa, whom he married in 1969. With Grace, Lou finally found true love and happiness.

They traveled the world together and shared a love of animals, including Anubis the cat, Nicholas the one-eyed dog, and Peter the rabbit. Lou remained good friends with Dick Winters until his death from diabetes complications in 1995. Dick Winters accepted Lewis Nixon’s job offer and went to work at Nixon Nitration Works in New Jersey after the war, where he was employed as personnel manager. It was while working there that he met his wife, Ethel, while waiting for his train to work.

They married after dating for just a few months. Winters left Nixon Nitration Works after being called up for Korea. He trained officers in Rangers, but when given the choice on the eve of shipping out, he ultimately decided not to go to Korea. He had had enough of war.

He purchased a small farm in Pennsylvania, and that was where he and Ethel raised their two children, Tim and Jill. It was there that he found the peace he had promised himself on D-Day. He also found success starting his own livestock feed business. Dick Winters died from Parkinson’s disease in 2011 at age ninety-two.

Carwood Lipton is one of the most understated members of Easy Company. As depicted in *Band of Brothers*, Lipton consistently watched over the men, keeping their spirits high and stepping in to lead them when necessary, including when Easy Company was under the command of First Lieutenant Norman Dike, who lacked strong leadership skills. Winters described Lipton as the glue that held Easy Company together. Lipton’s sense of responsibility for others began when he was still a boy.

At age ten, his father was killed in an automobile accident that left his mother injured. As the oldest son, his mother told Carwood he was now the man of the family. His mother continued to operate the family’s interior decorating business and rented out rooms in their home for extra money. Carwood worked odd jobs as a teenager and then attended Marshall College, now Marshall University, in West Virginia.

He left school after one year due to his mother’s deteriorating health and took a job at a defense plant to help support his family. The job was considered essential to the war effort. He could have remained there, but he instead chose to enlist in the army. Lipton was one of the few married paratroopers, having met his wife Joanne on a double date just before the war.

They were not with each other on the date; they were each with the other person. Still, they hit it off and took a liking to one another. They married in 1943, prior to Carwood shipping out for England. After the war, Lipton returned to Marshall College on the GI Bill to complete his final three years of school.

He majored in physics with a minor in industrial engineering. After college, he worked in the glass industry for Owens-Illinois and eventually became an executive overseeing operations in both America and overseas. His time overseas included seven years in Spain, several years in London, several months in South Africa, and the last twelve years of his career in Switzerland. It was while in Switzerland that his wife Joanne died of a heart attack in 1975 at just fifty years old.

They had three sons, all grown at the time. He remarried in 1976 to a widow named Marie, whose late husband had been one of Carwood’s close friends. He retired in the 1980s and eventually relocated to the small town of Southern Pines, North Carolina, a place he had visited while Easy Company was training at Camp McCall and decided that someday he would live there. Steven Ambrose interviewed Carwood Lipton during his research, and it was Carwood who suggested the title *Band of Brothers*, drawing from a line in Shakespeare’s *Henry V*, when King Henry speaks to his soldiers before the Battle of Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.

” Carwood Lipton died of pulmonary fibrosis on December 16, 2001, at age eighty-one. A considerable amount of Ronald Speirs’ story is left out of *Band of Brothers*. Speirs met and fell in love with an English woman named Edwina Griffiths. They married two weeks before D-Day in Aldbourne, England, on May 21, 1944.

They saw each other little during the war, but their union led to the birth of a son named Robert. By the war’s end, Speirs was eager to get back to Edwina and their baby. Then came the shock: Edwina’s former sweetheart, a British lieutenant named Robert Goddards, who was believed to have been killed in action, returned home alive after spending four years in a POW camp. Edwina was torn between the man she had promised herself to years earlier and her new husband.

She also did not want to leave England and her family. Speirs and Edwina made the decision to divorce, and he returned home alone with a broken heart. As a testament to his character, Speirs remained good friends with Edwina and visited England as often as he could to spend time with his son. As noted in the *Band of Brothers* epilogue, Speirs stayed in the army.

He served in Korea, and in 1958 he returned to Germany as governor of Spandau Prison in Berlin. Speirs married several more times and retired a lieutenant colonel. When his son Robert grew up and had children of his own, Robert often brought his family to America to visit his father. Speirs said his grandchildren were his pride and joy.

Edwina passed away in 1987. Several years later, Speirs wrote to Dick Winters, “I loved her and still do. ” He said she was a wonderful person. Ronald Speirs died in a Phoenix nursing home in April 2007.

In the third episode of *Band of Brothers*, titled “Carentan,” Private Albert Blithe is depicted as a coward who is afraid to fight. Shortly after finding the courage to engage the enemy, he receives a mortal wound to his neck when he is shot by a sniper. The end of the episode tells the viewer he died from this injury in 1948. Nearly all of this is incorrect.

It is true that during the intensity of battle, Blithe had a moment of hysterical blindness and blacked out, but the series significantly exaggerated his fear to turn it into a storyline. The biggest insult to the man was the claim that he died in 1948. In reality, Albert Blithe was shot in the collarbone, not the neck. Not only did he recover from the wound, he went on to fight in Korea, serving in Ronald Speirs’ regiment.

Speirs did not want to be involved in the book or the series, but if he had been, he likely would have caught the error. The blame ultimately falls on Steven Ambrose, who made the error in the book on which the series is based. The real Albert Blithe made a career of the military and rose to the rank of master sergeant. He had been married and divorced twice and had two biological children, a daughter named Barbara and a son named Gordon.

He struggled with PTSD for much of his life and became a chronic alcoholic. He died in December 1967 while stationed in Germany after suffering complications during a surgical procedure to repair a perforated ulcer. According to his son Gordon, his father drank himself to death. No correction has ever been made to the series regarding Albert Blithe.

Dick Winters said that Bull Randleman was one of the best soldiers he ever had, a good man who was one of the finest non-coms in Easy Company. Winters noted that Bull was loved by the men and extremely dependable. “No matter what kind of job you gave him, he got it done,” Winters said. The men nicknamed him Bull because of his large build and husky voice.

The series says Bull went into the earth-moving business in Arkansas after the war. That description is not entirely correct. After the war, Bull went to trade school and eventually became a service manager for J. A.

Riggs Tractor Company, a Caterpillar equipment dealer. Bull then found success as a businessman and was superintendent of a construction contractor in Louisiana. He married his wife Vera in 1947, and they had two children, Rebecca, born in 1956, and Eric, born the following year. Of his time with Easy Company, Bull commented, “Aside from my wife and children, it’s probably the most important thing that I’ll ever do in my life.

”

Bull lived his final years in Texarkana, Arkansas. In May 2003, he entered a nursing home to recover from surgery to place an AV graft in his arm in anticipation of a need for dialysis. The nursing home staff allegedly did not properly monitor the wound, and an infection gradually set in that turned septic. By the time Bull went to see his doctor for his scheduled post-surgical evaluation, it was too late.

Bull Randleman died on June 26, 2003, at age eighty-two. Frank Perconte was wounded during the assault on Foy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. In the series, he is shot as he tries to crouch down for cover while returning fire. In Steven Ambrose’s book, he is hit while trying to take cover behind a tree too small for him, leaving his buttocks exposed.

According to Frank, he was shot while trying to pull himself up over a fence that was basically just a mound of dirt. The bullet passed through his buttocks and out the front of his right thigh. “They all started yelling, ‘Perconte got shot in the ass, Perconte got shot in the ass,’” he said of his buddies in Easy Company. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was a disabled veteran and got a pension. ” He joked that it was a million-dollar wound that didn’t keep him out for good. He rejoined Easy Company before the end of the war, in time to explore Hitler’s Eagles Nest in Berchtesgaden and celebrate VE Day with the men. While Easy Company was still training in the States, Frank Perconte met and married a woman named Evelyn.

His son Richard was born in October 1943, the month after Easy Company shipped out for England. Frank would not meet his son until after the war ended in September 1945, when Richard was twenty-three months old. The series tells us that after World War II, Frank Perconte returned to Chicago and worked a postal route as a mailman. To be more specific, his mail route was in his hometown of Joliet, Illinois, an area he had known well from his youth.

He worked that route for thirty-three years. Like many veterans, he never brought up his service, and the people on his route did not know they had a war hero delivering their mail each day. In his later years, when his wife Evelyn went into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease, Frank was there every day, all day, noted his grandson. His visits included combing her hair and taking home her laundry to do.

Evelyn passed away in 2003. Frank Perconte lived to be ninety-six. He died on October 24, 2013. Buck Compton had been a standout catcher for UCLA’s baseball team before entering the war, playing alongside Jackie Robinson.

He was also a guard on the football team and played in the Rose Bowl prior to enlisting. While instructing flight classes at Fort Benning, he played on the regiment’s baseball team. He was eager to get overseas, but the regiment did not want to lose its star player. Signing up for the paratroopers was one of the only ways a player could be transferred out of the regiment.

Like in the series, he joined Easy Company in Aldbourne, England, as they made final preparations before D-Day. After the war, Buck planned to go back to school to finish his last year at UCLA. He married his old sweetheart, Jerry Starr, who had ended things with a letter in the months prior to D-Day. The marriage did not last long, and they divorced after several months.

Buck turned down an offer to play minor league baseball and soon embarked on a career in law. He attended law school at Loyola University on the GI Bill. While attending law school, Buck became a plainclothes police officer with the LAPD in 1947 and eventually a detective. He had been encouraged to join the force by an old friend who wanted him to play on the LAPD’s baseball team.

Around that time, Buck met a girl named Donna Newman, who he described as having an infectious sense of humor, a strong sense of morals, and a love for children. They married in October 1947. They struggled to have children and decided to adopt, adopting their first daughter, Cindy, in 1955, and their second, Tracy, in 1956. Though he was making good money with the LAPD, Buck decided to put his law degree to use.

He became a deputy district attorney in 1951 and chief deputy district attorney in 1968. As noted at the end of *Band of Brothers*, he prosecuted Sirhan Sirhan in the murder of Robert Kennedy. In 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan appointed Buck an associate justice of the California Courts of Appeal. He retired from that position after twenty years in 1990 and lived out the remainder of his life in the state of Washington.

Buck Compton died of a heart attack in 2012. He was preceded in death by his wife Donna and survived by his two daughters, Cindy and Tracy, and four grandchildren. Eugene “Doc” Roe was the only medic to serve with Easy Company from their days at Camp Toccoa through to the end of the war. Fellow soldiers recalled his bravery and his ability to reach wounded soldiers in incredibly difficult situations, at times defying what seemed possible.

Years later, it was not uncommon for them to refer to him as an angel. For his service, he received the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and the Medal of Valor. While *Band of Brothers* depicts him meeting a real-life Belgian nurse named Renée Lemaire and developing a friendship with her, there is no evidence the two ever met in real life. Like in the series, the real Renée died during a German air raid.

What is not shown in the series is that Doc Roe met and fell in love with a striking English woman named Vera Hunt while Easy Company was stationed in Aldbourne, England. She initially told him her name was Maxine, as it was not uncommon for British girls to not reveal their real names to Yanks. As noted in Marcus Brotherton’s book *A Company of Heroes*, they scheduled their wedding for a beautiful weekend in early June 1944. They set the date for June 6, 1944, which unbeknownst to them would be the date of the D-Day invasion.

Vera showed up at the church in her wedding dress, but Doc Roe was nowhere to be found. He had not been able to get word to her after learning that June 6th was the day he would jump into combat. They decided to wait to set a new date until after the war in Europe was over. Doc Roe and Vera tied the knot in July 1945 and had three children together, two girls, Maxine and Marlene, and a boy, Eugene Jr.

The name Maxine was chosen in honor of the fake name Vera had jokingly given Doc Roe when they met. Doc Roe and Vera were together for twenty-seven years before the marriage ended in divorce. He remarried about five years later, but Vera never did. As indicated at the end of *Band of Brothers*, Doc Roe ran a construction business from several acres of land he owned.

His grandchildren recalled playing on the backhoe, bulldozers, and tractors that lay around his yard and getting filthy in the dirt pits. Doc Roe died from lung cancer on December 30, 1998. One of George Luz’s most memorable moments in *Band of Brothers* happens when Easy Company is training in England. George mimics Major Oliver Horton’s voice and tricks Captain Herbert Sobel into cutting a farmer’s barbed-wire fence, causing the farmer’s cows to get out and Sobel to receive an ear beating from Colonel Strayer.

The incident did happen in real life, albeit at night, and like in the series, George Luz was never caught. According to Dick Winters, George Luz had a wonderful sense of humor and possessed a fierce loyalty to Company E that was second to none. The series says George Luz became a handyman in Providence, Rhode Island, after the war. His real-life work as a handyman included a brief stint at a used furniture store before working as a painter.

He then did an apprenticeship as a lace weaver in the textile industry and took a job in a mill. He married his childhood friend Tony’s younger sister, a woman named Delvina. George and Delvina had three children, two boys, Steve and George Jr. , and a daughter named Lana.

George served his community as a volunteer fireman and belonged to various associations. After his employment in the textile industry, he worked as a machine mechanic for the state of Rhode Island and then for a maintenance company called Little Rhodie, doing preventative maintenance on pumps and motors. In the 1970s, he decided to go back to school to get his GED, to make up for having to drop out of high school his junior year to help support his family during the Great Depression. What *Band of Brothers* does not tell you in the epilogue is that George Luz died in a tragic workplace accident on October 15, 1998, when a large industrial clothes dryer fell on him.

He had been working part-time as a mechanic. The dryer weighed about 7,200 pounds and slipped off its supports. It killed him instantly. George Luz was seventy-seven.

As stated in the series, 1,600 people attended his funeral, a testament to his character and how loved he was by the community. “Everybody who knew my dad loved him,” stated his son George Luz Jr. in Marcus Brotherton’s book *We Who Are Alive and Remain*. “Our dad would do anything for anybody.

He was sincere, kind, and caring. A behind-the-scenes man who shunned attention. He did things solely because they were the right things. And when he did someone a favor, he expected nothing in return.

”

In the *Band of Brothers* epilogue, we are told that Private David Kenyon Webster became a writer for the *Saturday Evening Post* and *Wall Street Journal* and later wrote a book about sharks. Author Steven Ambrose said of the Harvard-educated Webster that he was an intellectual, as much an observer and chronicler of the phenomenon of soldiering as a practitioner. Therefore, he never had an interest in promotion and was the only original Toccoa man who never became an NCO. Still, Ambrose noted that Webster never let a buddy down in combat.

Webster married an artist named Barbara Stossel in 1951. She was the sister of Walter J. Stossel Jr. , who later became the ambassador to Poland, the Soviet Union, and West Germany.

They had three children, Joan, David Jr. , and Elizabeth. In the fall of 1961, a thirty-nine-year-old David Kenyon Webster was working as a technical writer for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, a computer software company. On the morning of September 9, 1961, he left in an 11-foot sailboat to go shark fishing off the coast of California.

He was alone and planned to return in the afternoon. When he did not come back, the Coast Guard began to look for him. The next morning, commercial fishermen came across his boat five nautical miles offshore. One oar and the tiller were missing, and there was no sign of Webster.

His wife told the media that he would go shark fishing in the boat and that he never used a life preserver. His remains were never found. David Kenyon Webster was the first Easy Company veteran to have his wartime experiences published in a book. However, it did not happen until three decades after his death.

Other than a few short stories in magazines like the *Saturday Evening Post*, the bulk of Webster’s wartime writings went unpublished while he was living, as he never had any luck getting the manuscript of his memoirs turned into a book. Back then, publishers wanted war novels heavily dramatized with sex and plenty of action, not authentic memoirs. When Steven Ambrose read Webster’s writings decades later, he encouraged Webster’s widow Barbara to submit them to the LSU Press to be compiled into a book. She agreed, and in 1994 his writings were published as *Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper’s Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich*.

The book is considered the most authentic of all the Easy Company memoirs, largely because Webster’s recollections were still fresh when he recorded them. Much of the book is based on letters written during the war and on recollections recorded right after it. His book and the Dick Winters book *Hang Tough*, which contains a compilation of Winters’ World War II letters home, are two of the most genuine accounts of wartime life as part of Easy Company. Many Easy Company men never made it home from the war, men whose lives were cut short far too soon, who never got to hold the children and grandchildren they never had, and whose families back home had to face unimaginable grief and find a way to move on.

To those men, the country owes a thanks that can never be repaid. The most that can be done is to strive to live lives worthy of their sacrifice.