第200页
In 1980, riding an experimental hang-glider, Smith crashed and suffered severe injuries. In operating on his lungs, the doctors discovered a cancer. Rader, who had pulled Smith out of a flooded field on June 6, 1944, visited him in the hospital. They played a name game鈥攐ne would call out the name of a Toccoa man, the other would supply a brief word portrait. Shortly thereafter, Smith died.
Sgt. Amos "Buck" Taylor spent a quarter-century with the CIA, working in the Far East Division of the Covert Operation Directorate, sometimes in Washington, often overseas. He won't say much about what he did, except that "the big threat to our country in that part of the world was Communist China and of course the USSR. That will give you some idea of the focus of my work. So much for that."
When Captain Speirs got back to England in the summer of 1945, he discovered that the English "widow" he had married, and who had borne his son, wasn't a widow at all. Her husband reappeared from a P.O.W. camp. She chose him over Speirs, and the couple kept all the loot Speirs had shipped back from Europe. He decided to stay in the Army. He made a combat jump in Korea and commanded a rifle company on the line in that war. In 1956 he attended a Russian language course in Monterey, California, and then was assigned to Potsdam, East Germany, as liaison officer with the Soviet Army. In 1958 he became the American governor of Spandau Prison, Berlin, where Rudolf Hess was serving his life term. In 1962 he went to Laos with the U.S. mission to the Royal Lao Army.
When old E Company men call him today and open the conversation by saying, "You won't remember me, but we were together during the war," Speirs replies, "Which war?" His son Robert, born in England during the war, is an infantry major in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, the "Green Jackets," and Speirs's "pride and joy."
David Webster could not understand how anyone could stay in the Army. He wanted to be a writer. He moved to California and paid his bills with a variety of odd jobs as he wrote and submitted articles and a book on his wartime experiences. He placed many of the articles, the top being in The Saturday Evening Post, but he could not find a publisher for his book. He became a reporter, first with the Los Angeles Daily News, then with the Wall Street Journal. In 1951 he married Barbara Stoessel, an artist and sister of Walter J. Stoessel, Jr., who became U.S. ambassador to Poland, the Soviet Union, and West Germany.
Webster had always been fascinated by sharks. Barbara writes, "The shark, for him, became a symbol of everything that is mysterious and fierce about the sea. He began gathering material for a book of his own. His research went on for years. He studied sharks first-hand, underwater, swimming among them; and caught many, fishing with a handline from his 11-foot sailing dinghy which he had named Tusitala, which means Teller of Tales.' " He wrote the book and submitted it twenty-nine times, but could not convince a publisher that anyone wanted to read about sharks.