A couple of real STUDS in my book! Grumpy
Category: Real men
Forced to dig his own grave in Iraq, Fabrizio Quattrocchi answered his killers with one final act of raw defiance. This is a hard look at death, faith, courage, and the Italian who refused to die quietly.
Death, Faith, and the Question Fabrizio Quattrocchi Forces Us to Face
Today, we are going to talk about some pretty dark stuff. Death rightfully makes people uncomfortable. It is the innately unknowable nature of the thing that leaves folks so predictably discomfited. We all have theories. However, by definition, if somebody is talking about it, they’ve not yet actually given it a whirl themselves.
Any proper discussion of death touches upon issues of faith. As anyone who has read my work for more than a week will appreciate, I have strongly-held opinions on that subject. I am an unabashedly evangelical Christian. I wear Jesus on my sleeve. My faith informs everything about how I approach both my life and my inevitable demise.
My conclusions are drawn from some fairly extensive life experience. I have come face-to-face with my own mortality a couple of times and found peace waiting for me there. I have also attended a fair number of deaths professionally. Here are two representative examples.
Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes: Death in Trauma 1
Patient 1 was a gladiator. He rolled into the inner city ER where I worked, having been shot in the right chest some fifteen minutes earlier by a fellow thug armed with a .380ACP handgun. He was fit, muscular, and covered in gang tats. He was also coming absolutely unglued.
This desperate young man shouted, screamed, and flailed. It took five of us to restrain him long enough to get him situated on the bed in Trauma 1. And then the most amazing thing happened.
Over the next few minutes, his entire demeanor changed. He went from fighting us to begging us. “Please don’t let me die!” was a common refrain. And then he gradually acted like we weren’t even there.
As the blood steadily filled his chest, this horrified kid began praying with every fiber of his being. He shouted, “Please, Jesus, don’t let me die!” over and over and over. Then he arched his back, blood poured out of his mouth and nose, and he died. We did everything we could, but it all just happened too fast.
A Peace That Passes All Understanding: A Veteran’s Final Hours
I met Patient 2 in the VA. He was a Korean War veteran. In his prime, this man had been a hellraiser. He abused drugs, alcohol, and women at every opportunity. Then he found Jesus.
This gentleman was a Messianic Jew, and his Christian conversion changed absolutely everything about him. He walked away from alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs in an afternoon. Then he successfully resurrected his family. When I met him, he was dying of a squamous cell carcinoma of his sinuses that had metastasized to his lungs. The horrible treatments for his ghastly disease had stolen his sense of sight, smell, and taste, and rendered him nearly deaf. Now his lung mets were drowning him slowly, one drop at a time. Despite the horrors of this man’s sordid state, he was inexplicably happy. This guy was about to meet Jesus face to face, and he was like a kid on Christmas Eve.
I did the best I could to make him comfortable, but the poor man was both blind and dying. There were only so many options at my disposal. For a medicine man, these cases bring their own unique challenges.
On our second day together, he spontaneously took my arm and pulled me close. I assumed he wanted to tell me something or other that he needed. He then inexplicably pulled his oxygen mask off and immediately began turning blue. With his dying breath, this unimaginably miserable guy actually prayed for me.
He prayed for my family and me and my ministry in the hospital. He prayed that I might find the same peace and joy in Christ that he had found. This amazing dude prayed until he literally could no longer speak. As you might imagine, this experience moved me. I replaced his oxygen mask, thanked him sincerely, and left for home with quite a lot to think about.
The following morning, with my arm around his wife’s shoulders, I watched this extraordinary man die. I had known him all of three days. He met his end with dignity, peace, and hope. Attending his death was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Draw your own conclusions.
The Incredibly Intrepid Italian: Who Was Fabrizio Quattrocchi?
Fabrizio Quattrocchi was born on 9 MAY 1968 in Catania, Italy. He trained as a baker before eventually finding work as a security contractor in Iraq. In 2004, Iraq was an absolute hellhole. However, in chaos, there is profit. There was money to be made in this space. Quattrocchi was an old-school mercenary.
Iraq, Captivity, and a Hole in the Earth
Operating in a war zone is the most dangerous of human pursuits. That’s why the money is so good. With so many heavily armed folks running about with deeply held political and theological agendas, people invariably get hurt. Quattrocchi, along with three fellow Italian soldiers-for-hire named Umberto Cupertino, Maurizio Agliana, and Salvatore Stefio were captured by a lunatic mob called the Green Brigade of the Prophet.
Quattrocchi and his buddies were working for DTS Security LLC. DTS was incorporated in Nevada and run by a former Italian Marine/French Foreign Legionnaire named Paolo Simeone and Italian lawyer Valeria Castellini. They tried to get their guys back, but DTS was a company, not a nation-state. It takes some serious resources to recruit, train, equip, and employ SEAL Team 6. For a time, at least, these four poor guys were on their own.
The Green Brigade of the Prophet felt they needed to make an example to ensure they were being taken seriously. As a result, they forced Fabrizio Quattrocchi to dig his own grave. These homicidal losers then placed a hood over his head and made him kneel in the soft earth next to his hole. Like all professional nut job psychopaths, they had also set up video recording equipment to preserve the moment in all its gory glory. It really is tough for me to visualize raw, unfettered hate on this scale.
I’ll Show You How an Italian Dies: Quattrocchi’s Final Defiance
Quattrocchi knew exactly what was about to happen. He had, after all, just dug the hole. He was in a place that would rightly terrify all sensible people everywhere. Quattrocchi was about to face his own mortality, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it.
Tragically, lots of folks have been there before. Some beg for their lives, imploring their captors for mercy. Others spit venom from the precipice of the abyss. Quattrocchi, for his part, clawed at his hood so he could see the men who were about to take his life and shouted, “Vi faccio vedere come muore un Italiano!” This translates to, “I’ll show you how an Italian dies!” One of the terrorists then stepped forward and shot him through the back of the neck. At least it was quick. Quattrocchi was 35 years old at the time of his death.
The Rest of the Story: Rescue, Honor, and Controversy
American forces later raided the safehouse where they were being held and rescued the three remaining Italian security contractors along with a Pole named Jerzy Kos. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi personally approved the mission in advance.
Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi awarded Fabrizio Quattrocchi a posthumous Gold Medal for Civil Valour. This award demands a specific documented act of bravery to be eligible. Quattrocchi’s defiance towards the men who murdered him seemed more than adequate.
Curiously, not everyone in Italy felt this way. Almost all Italians rightfully reviled Saddam Hussein and Muslim fundamentalist terrorists in general. However, most Italians also disapproved of their country’s involvement in the Iraq War. Then, as now, much of the civilized world would sooner ignore such problems in hopes that they would just go away.
Quite a few Italians had lost their lives amidst the tumultuous fighting in the Middle East. Folks from across the Italian political spectrum griped that their particular people had not been afforded comparable accolades. Whatever. Fabrizio Quattrocchi was a freaking animal, no matter the metric.
Ruminations: What Fabrizio Quattrocchi Left Behind
There are some cruel jokes levied at our brothers in France and Italy.
Fabrizio Quattrocchi: How an Italian Dies
in Will Dabbs
What is the world’s shortest list? A compilation of contemporary Italian war heroes. Such stuff stems from a deplorable tendency by much of modern Europe to eschew the manly arts.
Nowadays, good old-fashioned patriotism is denigrated as nationalism, something to be avoided no matter the cost. Europe looks at the monsters in the gates (I’m talking to you, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian theocrats) and fails to take action because they have convinced themselves over decades that what they have is no longer worth defending.
The Union Jack is arguably the most compelling national standard on Planet Earth, yet many modern Britons hate it because they have been conditioned to view their own flag as a symbol of oppression. Such national self-flagellation will not take them to a good place in a world so liberally populated with hate-fueled psychos like the Green Brigade of the Prophet.
Fabrizio Quattrocchi was a proper man to the end. He faced his death and those who were killing him with poise, power, and defiance. The scumbags who murdered him are rightfully gone and forgotten. The world is objectively way better off without them. As we corn-fed Americans wax introspective regarding how to comport ourselves when faced with uncertainty and violence both at home and abroad, might I recommend we actually take hints from a certain brass-balled Italian baker? Fabrizio Quattrocchi showed us all how to die well.
A Japanese sword took LT George Cairns’ arm on a Burmese hilltop. He seized that same blade, kept fighting, and earned a place among Britain’s most savage Victoria Cross legends.
Mankind has been consumed with war since our very beginnings. Ever since Cain knocked his brother Abel’s brains out with a rock, we have been a species of scrappers. We venerate warriors and celebrate their wars. Along the way, we have somehow lost touch with just how ghastly real war actually is.
Everybody dies. That’s obviously a given. However, that war takes young people in their prime is what makes it so utterly repugnant. Were that not so, I’m sure we would be doing even more of it.
War Never Changes: How George Cairns Reached Burma
The development of weapons brought us such stuff as GPS, microwave ovens, and the Internet. Jet engines, digital cameras, synthetic materials, and EpiPens all had their origins in military technologies as well. However, at the end of the day, whether it is a HIMARS rocket, a ship-mounted laser, or a 16th-century Scottish Claymore broadsword, the ultimate objective is still simply to tear the very life out of our enemies. No matter how much seems to change, the unfortunate end goal nonetheless remains the same.
Modern battlefields are truly horrible things. JDAM smart bombs, shaped charges, thermobaric weapons, and depleted uranium projectiles all conspire to make a proper mess of human flesh. However, war in eras past was hardly all unicorns and butterflies. Hacking some poor schmuck limb from limb was also fairly untidy. It turns out that this propensity toward vivisection extends up into the last century as well.
George Cairns Before the Victoria Cross: Banker, Husband, Soldier
George Albert Cairns was born in December 1913 in London. He attended the Sir Henry Compton School in Fulham from 1923 through 1930. He subsequently took a job in a bank in Kent, where he met his future wife, Ena. The two were married in 1940. The following year, George answered his nation’s call and went off to war.
Cairns was a dedicated natural leader. He earned a commission and was appointed to the Somerset Light Infantry (Prince Albert’s). He was subsequently attached to the South Staffordshire Regiment and deployed to Burma. The South Staffordshire was a Chindit battalion subordinate to the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade commanded by the legendary Brigadier Michael Calvert.
By March of 1944, Cairns was 30 years old. That seems pretty young to me. However, in soldier years, he was veritably ancient.
Soldiering is a young man’s game. I look back with fondness on my time in uniform. However, I do recall being tired and sore a lot. Deprivation, hunger, and misery are integral parts of the life of any proper combat soldier in the field. Cairns and his mates found that in abundance in the fetid jungles of Burma.
Pagoda Hill Explodes: The Chindits Meet the Japanese
On 16 March 1944, Cairns and the South Staffords dug in near a place called the White City. The Japanese were rabid to stop the British advance. The Brits, for their part, were disinclined to comply. The end result was a most ferocious fight.
Near the South Staffords’ fighting positions was a pagoda on a prominent hilltop. As near as anyone could tell, neither force had bothered to take that place just yet. Both sides had actually dug formidable fighting positions within earshot of the other, apparently without either unit being the wiser. That all changed when an unsuspecting Japanese patrol wandered across the abandoned pagoda in search of something or other. At around 11 am, everything came unglued.
Brigadier Calvert led the attack himself. He later wrote, “On the top of Pagoda Hill, not much bigger than two tennis courts, an amazing scene developed. The small white Pagoda was in the centre of the hill. Between that and the slopes which came up was a mêlée of South Staffords and Japanese bayonetting, fighting with each other, with some Japanese just throwing grenades from the flanks…There, at the top of the hill, about fifty yards square, an extraordinary mêlée took place, everyone shooting, bayoneting, kicking at everyone else, rather like an officers’ guest night.”
Amidst all of that mayhem, LT Cairns strived mightily to hold the defensive line intact. While coordinating this vigorous defense, Cairns looked up just in time to spot a Japanese officer charging toward him at a dead run, waving a sword. There was no time to react properly. In the face of imminent death, Albert Cairns did what any normal person might do–he reflexively raised his left arm. The maniacal Japanese officer slashed with his weapon and all but took LT Cairns’ left arm off.
One Arm Gone, Sword in Hand: Cairns Refuses to Die Quietly
At this point, LT Cairns had a decision to make. If some screaming nutjob hacked my arm off with a big honking sword, I’m fairly certain I would just take my toys and go home. Not so, LT Cairns. Cairns shot and killed the Japanese officer who had taken his arm before snatching up the dead soldier’s blade and going to town on the rest of his maniacal buddies.
LT Norman Durant was a machine gun platoon leader assigned to the same unit. His vantage with his support weapons afforded him a fairly decent view of the battlefield. This is what he had to say about LT Cairns: “The first thing I saw on reaching the path was a horrible hand-to-hand struggle going on further up the hill. George Cairns and a Jap were struggling and choking on the ground, and as I picked up a Jap rifle and climbed up towards them, I saw George break free and, picking up a rifle bayonet, stab the Jap again and again like a madman. It was only when I got near that I saw he himself had already been bayoneted twice through the side and that his left arm was hanging on by a few strips of muscle. How he had found the strength to fight was a miracle, but the effort had been too much and he died the next morning.”
So, this brass-balled young British infantry officer had been ventilated twice with bayonets before having his left arm quite literally chopped off. Despite these extraordinary wounds, Cairns unleashed his inner monster on the attacking Japanese.
Using the dead Japanese officer’s sword, this one-armed lunatic launched himself into the remaining Japanese troops like a Dervish. When the dust settled, survivors counted 42 Japanese dead in and around the hilltop that housed the pagoda. Nobody knew who got whom. However, Cairns did most of his serious killing with the same sword that had been used to, moments before, lop off his own left arm.
The Victoria Cross Fight That Nearly Vanished With Wingate
Once the dust settled, LT Cairns understandably ran out of gas. His words were, “’Have we won sir? Was it all right? Did we do our stuff? Don’t worry about me.” The following day, this remarkable young man died.
Stripping a sword from an adversary and then using it to obliterate an attacking unit after having your own arm chopped off seemed like Victoria Cross material, no matter how you sliced it. The VC is Great Britain’s highest award for gallantry in action. It is the Limey equivalent of our Medal of Honor.
One of Cairns’ officers duly put in the work, and the award recommendation made its way up to General Orde Wingate, the commanding general of the Chindits. Wingate was a weird duck. A committed Christian Zionist, Wingate cut his teeth fighting the Arabs in British-occupied Palestine. He once attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the neck while under the depressing effects of atabrine for his malaria.
By the time he commanded the Chindits, Wingate was habitually munching on raw onions to help ward off disease and made a habit of greeting visitors in the nude. On 24 March 1944, Wingate climbed aboard an American B25 Mitchell bomber along with two British war correspondents. The pilot objected that the airplane was grossly overloaded, but Wingate insisted. The plane subsequently crashed into the jungle in India, killing all aboard. LT Cairns’ VC recommendation was on Wingate’s person at the time.
George Cairns’ Victoria Cross Citation: Valor Beyond Belief
A 1949 article in The Times revived the process. By then, two of the three required witnesses had been killed in action. Eventually, thanks to the tireless efforts of his widow Ena Cairns, George’s Victoria Cross was approved. This is the citation:
“On 12 March 1944, columns from the South Staffordshire Regiment and 3/6 Gurkha Rifles established a road and rail block across the Japanese lines of communication at Henu Block.
The Japanese counter-attacked this position heavily in the early morning of 13 March 1944, and the South Staffordshire Regiment was ordered to attack a hill-top which formed the basis of the Japanese attack.
During this action, in which Lieutenant CAIRNS took a foremost part, he was attacked by a Japanese officer, who, with his sword, hacked off Lieutenant CAIRNS’s left arm. Lieutenant CAIRNS killed this Officer; picked up the sword and continued to lead his men in the attack, and, slashing left and right with the captured sword, killed and wounded several Japanese before he himself fell to the ground.
Lieutenant CAIRNS subsequently died from his wounds. His action so inspired all his comrades that, later, the Japanese were completely routed, a very rare occurrence at that time.”
LT George Cairns Went Down Fighting and Became a Legend
We have explored a great many remarkable tales of daring and elan in this space in the past. I can’t recall ever writing about some lunatic guy who kept on fighting with the sword his attacker had only recently used to relieve him of his arm. LT George Cairns was indeed a hero of the highest order.
Will is still trying to figure out what he really wants to be when he grows up. However, shooting guns and claiming it was work seemed like a pretty sweet hustle. As a result, Will serendipitously transformed an avocation into a vocation.
Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Will flew UH1H, OH58A/C, CH47D and AH1S helicopters operationally as an Army Aviator. He is SCUBA-qualified and has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o’clock in the morning. Will has summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times…always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains.
Will has delivered sixty babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. He is married to his high school sweetheart and has three awesome adult children. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal and the movie “Aliens.”
www.word-monkey.com
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It most of been real “fun” to tell this guys about how their MOS had been changed! Grumpy
The Italian officers thought the old Greek was obsessed with his tomatoes.He was mapping their positions.
Kostas Papadimitriou was 67 years old in 1941 when the Axis occupation of Greece began and soldiers from three nations moved through Thessaloniki like weather — loud, consuming, inevitable. He was a retired postal clerk with a bad hip who grew vegetables on a narrow terraced lot at the edge of the city, overlooking the port and the lower military district.
He was, by every observable measure, a man running out of time peacefully.
His wife had died in 1938. His son was somewhere on the Albanian front and had stopped writing. He had no telephone. He attended church on Sundays and the market on Tuesdays and spoke to almost no one at length because there was almost no one left to speak to.
The occupying soldiers, when they noticed him at all, saw an old man with dirt under his fingernails who moved slowly and talked about the weather.
They were not wrong about any of that.
They were entirely wrong about what it meant.
Kostas had spent thirty-one years as a postal clerk. People tended to underestimate what that meant. A postal clerk in a port city reads the rhythm of a place the way a doctor reads a pulse — the volume of mail, its origin and destination, the patterns of what moved and when. He had processed military correspondence, commercial freight manifests, civilian letters during two wars and four governments. He understood, at an almost physical level, how large systems communicated with themselves.
And he understood that occupying armies were large systems that communicated constantly.
They sent supply convoys through the port. They billeted troops in requisitioned buildings whose addresses he knew by heart from thirty years of deliveries. They requisitioned fuel and food according to schedules that, once you had seen two or three repetitions, revealed their own logic.
From his terraced garden, with a clear view of the lower harbor road, Kostas watched.
He had always been a gardener. This was not a cover he constructed — it was simply what he did, and he continued doing it, which meant he had a natural reason to be outside at all hours, in all weather, moving slowly around a hillside plot with his eyes nominally on the soil.
He began keeping a second notebook.
His first notebook was what it appeared to be: a gardening journal. Planting dates. Soil observations. Notes on yield. He had kept one for fifteen years and the Italian officers who searched his house twice found it and were satisfied.
The second notebook was thinner and written in a compressed personal shorthand he had developed across decades of postal notation — abbreviations and symbols that looked, to anyone else, like the private record-keeping of an obsessive old man who had perhaps worked in paperwork too long.
He recorded convoy schedules. Troop movements through the lower district. The timing of harbor patrol changes. Which requisitioned buildings showed light after curfew, suggesting planning activity. Which roads saw unusual vehicle traffic before operations that became apparent only days later.
He didn’t know, at first, who would receive this.
He collected it because a man who spent thirty-one years not wasting information could not simply stop.
The connection came through the church.
A younger man named Stavros, who helped with the Sunday collection and occasionally brought Kostas vegetables from the market when the old man’s hip was bad, turned out to be carrying messages for a resistance cell operating out of the Jewish quarter of the city — a community that was, at that precise moment, beginning to understand the particular danger it faced.
Stavros didn’t ask Kostas directly. He mentioned, carefully, that certain people were trying to understand the port schedule.
Kostas went inside and came back with six weeks of notebook entries.
Stavros stared at the pages for a long moment.
“Can you explain this?” he asked.
Kostas explained it. The abbreviations, the symbols, the cross-referencing system.
Stavros listened. Then he said he needed to show it to someone.
He showed it to a former army signals officer who was coordinating intelligence for several resistance cells across northern Greece. The officer spent an evening with the notebooks and sent back a single written response.
Ask the old man if he can continue. Ask him if he needs anything.
Kostas sent back his own response.
Tell him I need a better pencil. The thin ones break.
The network sent him six pencils.
He continued for two years.
What made him effective was not bravery in any dramatic sense — it was precision and patience, the same qualities that had made him a good postal clerk. He did not speculate. He recorded only what he observed directly. He noted when something was unclear and marked it accordingly.
The signals officer, who had worked with resistance informants across three countries, later said that Kostas was the most methodologically reliable source he had encountered — not because he was trained, but because he had spent a career understanding that a misdelivered letter was worse than no letter at all.
The information he passed was used in several ways. Resistance cells adjusted movement patterns around convoy schedules he had documented. Jewish families were warned before roundup operations whose preparatory logistics he had noticed days in advance — unusual troop concentrations, supply requisitions inconsistent with routine garrison needs. He could not always interpret what he was seeing, but he recorded it accurately, and people who could interpret it did.
In March 1943, he observed something that took him several days to understand.
An unusual volume of rail traffic through the lower yards. Requisitioned civilian facilities near the station. A particular pattern of military police deployment he had not seen before, concentrated around the Jewish quarter.
He passed his notes to Stavros on a Tuesday.
On Friday, German forces began the systematic deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jewish population to Auschwitz.
He had seen it coming but had not known what he was seeing until it was already happening.
This was the fact he could never entirely make peace with.
He had the pieces. He had passed them on. Others had received them. And still over 45,000 people were taken.
He sat in his garden for three days and did not write anything.
Then he picked up the pencil and continued.
Because stopping would not undo what had happened, and the occupation had not ended, and there were still people in the city who could use what he could see from a hillside with tomatoes growing around his feet.
He was never arrested.
The Italian and then German authorities searched his house on four occasions across the occupation and found an old man’s gardening notebooks, a worn Bible, a photograph of his wife, and — on the final search — a letter from his son, who had survived the Albanian campaign and was in hiding somewhere in the mountains.
The letter was three years old.
The officer who conducted the final search handed it back to him without comment.
When liberation came in October 1944, Kostas was 70 years old with a worse hip and six pencils worn to stubs.
The resistance cell formally documented his contribution in a report submitted to the Greek government in exile. The report described him as a civilian intelligence asset whose sustained observation had provided operational intelligence across a 26-month period.
He received a letter of recognition that arrived two years after the war ended, delayed by the chaos of the civil war that followed.
He put it in the gardening notebook.
He continued gardening until 1951, when the hip finally made the terraced lot impossible.
He moved to a ground-floor apartment and grew herbs in pots on the windowsill and, by several accounts, remained extremely particular about his tomatoes until his death in 1957.
The signals officer who had received his notebooks wrote about him once, in a postwar memoir published in a small Athens edition that was never widely distributed.
He described finding the notebooks initially bewildering — pages of symbols and abbreviations from a man with no military training, no tradecraft, no apparent understanding of intelligence methodology.
Then he described realizing that the system wasn’t military.
It was postal.
Kostas had simply applied the logic of a man who spent his career making sure things arrived at the right place, at the right time, without being lost or misdelivered.
He had treated information about the enemy the way he had treated letters for thirty-one years.
Carefully. Accurately. Reliably.
Without wasting a single observation.
Editor’s Note: Today’s article is about Sgt. Darrell Powers, a World War II hero who served with the 101st Airborne Division. Nicknamed “Shifty”, Powers saw action in the American airborne landings in Normandy, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. Powers was more than “just” a soldier — he was also a gun guy. Ayoob shares the full story here.
Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book “Band of Brothers” was said to have done as much as Tom Hanks’ 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan” to remind later American generations of the heroism of our servicemen’s sacrifices for freedom in World War II.
The book was based on the recollections of individual paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, known as the “Screaming Eagles,” and particularly Easy Company. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg made it into a compelling HBO TV series that debuted in 2001. America felt it got to know those brave soldiers.
One of them was Sergeant Darrell “Shifty” Powers. His nickname didn’t carry the word’s usual meaning: he earned it in high school for his fast moves on the basketball court. Tall and athletic, he was also one of us: a “gun guy.” He was a hunter, a marksman and, in later life, an outspoken Second Amendment advocate and a daily concealed carrier for whom shooting was a beloved hobby until his passing at age 86.
A Hunter’s Eye
Powers was born and grew up in the hollows of rural Virginia, spending as much time as he could hunting on a mountain on his family’s property. He shot his first squirrel when he was a little boy. His father taught him to be alert to his surroundings in all ways: a subtle sound, an unexpected silence, and more. It was a skill that would save his life and other lives in combat.
In “Band of Brothers” Ambrose wrote of the day, December 29, 1944, when Easy Company was fighting its way out of the Battle of the Bulge, and Shifty noticed a distant tree that hadn’t been there the day before. Based on his observation, the Americans recognized a newly installed and camouflaged German artillery battery and called in American artillery on it, eliminating the threat.
The Guns of Shifty Powers
In his authorized biography by Marcus Brotherton, “Shifty’s War”, Powers mentioned that as a paratrooper he was issued a 1911 .45 auto with a shoulder holster and wore ten eight-round en-bloc clips of .30-06 on his belt to feed his M1 Garand. Shifty said, “Lot of guys used the carbine, you know, and some guys used Thompsons, but I always liked the M1 Garand best.”
It was a preference that remained throughout his life, even into his eighties when he was suffering macular degeneration and being treated for cancer. He told Brotherton, “Those treatments made me real weak. I liked to get out on the deck and shoot my rifle, you know. Nobody lived very close around our house, so it was okay. I couldn’t see to hit a target very well anymore, but I knew where they were. I didn’t hit them all the time, but I’d fire the gun and smell the smoke, so I’d enjoy that.”
“My M1 was my favorite rifle, but it got hard to lift, you know, and I told (my wife) Dorothy, ‘You know, that doggone rifle has gotten fatter since the war.’ Ammunition for M1’s was hard to come by, but my friends would bring me clips. I had a .22 with a scope, which helped me see the targets, so I’d shoot that every so often. Then I had a Lugar (sic) that I’d shoot, and a .22 pistol that I’d like to shoot. As a last resort I had a BB gun, and I’d take that out on the deck.”
The M1 he used in combat was not entirely stock. Shifty had filed the sear to achieve what he called a hair trigger. It was the rifle he used for his most famous shot of the war. Alas, it didn’t follow him all the way through the war. Stephen Ambrose explains in “Band of Brothers,” “Shifty Powers got a new M1. That was a mixed blessing. He had been using one issued to him in the States. He loved that old rifle. ‘It seemed like I could just point it, and it would hit what I’d pointed it at. The best shooting rifle I ever owned. But every time we’d have an inspection, I’d get gigged because it had a pit in it, in the barrel. You can’t get those pits out of those barrels, you know…’ He got tired of being gigged, turned it in and got a new M1. ‘And I declare, I couldn’t hit a barn with that rifle. Awful’est shooting thing there ever was.’”
“Shifty’s Shot”
That famous shot happened in January of 1945. Fighting their way out of the Battle of the Bulge, Shifty’s unit found themselves in the strategically placed town of Foy in Belgium. (Factoid: while Yanks pronounce that town’s name like it sounds, rhyming with “toy,” those who live there reportedly pronounce it “Fwah.”)
A fellow member of the Band of Brothers, Carwood Lipton, told the story this way: “One of the men in the 3rd platoon of E Company, 506th had excellent eyesight, and he was also an outstanding marksman with a rifle. He was Darrell C. ‘Shifty’ Powers, a tall part-Indian, from Clinchco, Virginia.”
“Shifty’s marksmanship paid off for us on January 13 when E company received orders to attack and clear the town of Foy. We moved around to the south of the town and attacked to the north into it. The Germans defended it strongly, and we had a number of men hit. At one point, several of us, including Shifty, Popeye Wynn (Shifty’s closest buddy), Bob Mann, R.B. Smith, and I were pinned down by a sniper that we just couldn’t locate. R. B. Smith caught a bullet in the leg. Then Shifty yelled, ‘I see ‘im.’ And there was a rifle shot. We weren’t pinned down any more so we continued the attack.”
“When things had cleared up later that day I went back to see where that sniper had been. When I found him, Popeye had already found him. We stood there looking down at the dead German and at the bullet hole centered in the middle of his forehead. Popeye looked over at me and said, ‘You know, it just doesn’t pay to be shootin’ at Shifty when he’s got a rifle.’”
The buildings the German and Shifty each fired from still stand. One researcher later determined the distance to be 66 meters.
Powers’ own memory of shooting a sniper in Foy differs somewhat. From the “Shifty’s War” book:
“More shots rang out. I glanced up then down again. The other man along the side of the building froze. The sniper kept firing. Our other guy didn’t stand a chance unless we could get that sniper. I ducked up again to get a bead on where the sniper fired from. He was about sixty feet away, shooting from around the corner of a brick building. I ducked down again and propped my M1 up on the window ledge. Seven rounds were left in my clip. I didn’t have time to properly aim. I fired from instinct, seeing in my mind the corner of that building where I guessed the German’s head to be. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. The dust flew off the brick at the corner of the building. I fired all seven rounds. No sound came from where the German sniper was. Our man found his feet again and checked the other man on the ground. The first man was dead. But the other was just fine. ‘Okay,’ I said with a nod. I thought maybe I saved that man’s life. It felt good.”
In the heat of infantry combat, when a soldier fires at an enemy and sees him go down, he will often never know whether his target was killed, wounded, or merely ducked. In his later years, writes Brotherton, “Shifty told his son-in-law, Seldon Johnson, that he had killed the specific number of eight men during the war. The specific line Seldon remembers was, ‘I know I killed eight men. It could have been more, but I don’t know for sure. People think they know what killing’s like, but they don’t.’”
Ironic Injury
Powers’ keen observation skills and superb marksmanship helped to make him one of the few men in the unit to get from D-Day almost all the way through the campaign without sustaining a single wound. The day came when he won a lottery to be sent home, and missing his family greatly, he used his prize.
He was in a truck taking him and other soldiers back from the front lines when a drunk driver crashed into the vehicle, killing one trooper and sidelining Shifty with a smashed pelvis and other severe injuries that left him hospitalized for almost a year.
A Vet of the Greatest Generation on 2A
Like many WWII vets, Darrell Powers returned home a staunch advocate of the right to keep and bear arms. While stationed in England prior to the D-Day invasion he had been horrified to see Brits drilling with picks and shovels to fight heavily armed German infantry should they invade, because so few of them privately owned firearms. (Indeed, Americans donated many of their personal guns for use by the British home guard.)
Says his biographer Marcus Brotherton, “Shifty recounted orally on several occasions his memory of seeing the people in Aldbourne practice defending themselves with only garden implements. During some of his public talks after the war, he made a strong case for maintaining the legality of privatized gun ownership in the United States. This issue was about the only time he ever made a public political statement. Shifty believed that citizens had a right to own guns to defend themselves … .”
The battle-hardened vet practiced what he preached when he came home, not only keeping but bearing arms. Shifty told Brotherton that he always carried a .25 auto on his ankle, just in case.
Cancer did what the Nazis could not and took Sergeant Darrell Powers in 2009 at the age of 86. Like so many of The Greatest Generation, this American hero left a legacy of the value of skill at arms and the importance of fighting for freedom.