Press

Boston Herald
10 September 2001
By MARISA GUTHERIE

In the company of men: HBO’s “Band of Brothers” pays homage to WWII soldiers

They were dropped from the sky into enemy territory. Lost and alone in a foreign land, bullets whizzing around them, many did not make it through the night.

For the next two years, they subsisted on the rankest gruel. They slept in foxholes. The basest comforts and barest necessities were unavailable to them. They killed their enemies and they watched their friends die.

For this, the paratroopers of E Company of the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne received a bonus of $50 (for enlisted men) or $100 (for officers) a month. They all bear scars, physical and emotional.

For them, HBO’s ” Band of Brothers, ” premiering Sunday and produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks from an adaptation of historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s book, is more than a miniseries. It re-creates the defining moments of their lives. It is an homage. And in many cases, the production itself became an antidote for years of repressed pain.

“I was on the phone with my guy every week, ” says Scott Grimes, who plays Sgt. Donald Malarkey. ” The interesting thing is, a lot of the wives said that it has really got [the veterans] to talk about things they never talked about. It’s really opened up wounds. They never dealt with any of these things.”

Like Grimes, many of the actors spent countless hours getting to know the veterans they would play during the next several months.

Dorchester native and ex-New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg plays Sgt. Carwood Lipton. According to Ambrose’s account, Lipton was instrumental in Easy Company’s victory at Foy, Belgium, in January 1945.

“I was probably the first person [Lipton] really talked to, not just about the facts of the war but how he felt about them, as a man, not just as a soldier, ” Wahlberg says.

Damian Lewis, who as Maj. Richard Winters, the leader of E Company, has the starring role in ” Band of Brothers, ” says getting at the soul of Winters was ” like climbing Mount Everest.”

“I think the way Winters has dealt with his experiences is to militarize his memories, ” Lewis says. ” It’s all about who was where when, who did what well or badly. That control of his emotions made him the incredible soldier that he was.

“It doesn’t mean he’s a cold man. But I don’t think he’s sat around in bars for the last 40 years and used that as his therapy.”

Of those who survived, many feel World War II, for all its brutality, was the best experience of their lives. They developed intense personal bonds that come with a shared near-death experience. And the actors, having suffered through their own boot camp and a grueling production schedule, are drawn to that sense of closeness and camaraderie.

“It’s great to sit at the hotel in the bar and chat with these guys, ” Grimes says. ” They tell these incredible stories, ‘I was walking through this trench, and a German pops his head up. So I cut his head off.’ And they all laugh, ” says Grimes. ” ‘And blood was spurting from his neck.’ They’re laughing and we’re sitting there nauseous and stunned. And some of them will cry at times, but it’s very private. If you try to touch them, to comfort them, they’ll throw your hand off. Immediately you realize that these guys, they love each other. If someone’s complimenting them, they push the compliment on to another guy. They don’t want the glory. They’re very humble.”

As time closes in on the veterans of Easy Company (many of them have died since Ambrose’s book was published in 1992), it is only fitting that their story now reaches prominence.

“I think there’s a process taking place, ” said Wahlberg. ” It’s a very strange thing, war. What do you do? How do you feel? They watched their friends get killed. And at the same time, people died at the hands of most of these men. You can’t embrace either end of the emotional spectrum. It would be too extreme. But what’s happening now, is they’re being recognized and celebrated. We’re acknowledging the difficulty of what they did. We’re recognizing how hard it was to make that decision. This thing covers more than some guys who went into Europe and kicked [butt].”

“I think what a war veteran might say to one of us is, ‘We were ordinary men who did extraordinary things because that’s what was asked of us,’ ” Lewis says. ” But people make choices in those situations and these guys made heroic choices, repeatedly.”