If you have watched Band of Brothers, you know George Luz, the wiry paratrooper from Rhode Island who could do everybody's voice, whose jokes kept Easy Company stitched together when nothing funny was left. He jumped into Normandy at one thirty in the morning on June 6th, into anti-aircraft fire so thick his son says you could have walked on it. He came through Toccoa, Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, and Austria, and he came home. Many of his friends did not. He died in 1998.
His son, my good friend George Luz Jr., was nine years old in 1965 when he first sat among these men at a reunion at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He has kept their company ever since, through nearly sixty years of reunions, letters, phone calls, and visits to graves so that someone would stand over a name and say it out loud. In our webinar he shared what he gathered in all that time: the men of Easy Company in their own voices, on old audio tape, and the only surviving video of his father talking about the war.
You hear a paratrooper crack a joke on the plane minutes before jumping into occupied France, and you laugh, and then you remember where he was. You hear Major Dick Winters describe his parachute opening so hard at the wrong speed that it stripped the gear off his body while a machine gun tracked him down, and what the only weapon he had left was when he hit the trees.
There is a woman doing laundry in England with a stack of clean shirts that belonged to men who were never coming back for them. There is a scene still played in classrooms at West Point, the Citadel, and Fort Benning, and George says it really happened exactly like that. There is a letter from a Green Beret who left Easy Company for a secret war in Laos, written to a daughter who barely knew him, about tigers in the jungle. There are two nurses in Bastogne, a bomb on Christmas Eve, and a coincidence about that aid station I will let George tell himself.
At the very end there is a letter Mike Ranney once wrote, and the answer he gave his grandson when the boy asked if he had been a hero in the war. If you have seen the series you know the line, and it lands differently coming from the son of a man who was there.
George sits on the Heroes' Path Foundation board and has spent his life advocating for veterans. He never set out to write a history. He kept a promise, and for one hour he let the rest of us stand where he has been standing all these years.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/through-my-fathers-eyes