Lewis Nixon carried a flask of VAT 69 wherever he went, and by the time Easy Company reached the Bulge, his best friend Richard Winters had learned to accept it. Winters did not drink, but he tolerated Nixon’s steady slide into intoxication because Nixon remained, in his words, his finest combat officer. Yet the portrait of Nixon that emerged in Band of Brothers, where his drinking appears as an almost harmless personality quirk, was considerably softer than the reality remembered by the men who served beside him. Nixon came to war already an alcoholic.
He was born into extraordinary wealth, the grandson of a shipbuilder who founded Nixon Nitration Works, and his family had a long history with alcohol. His father, Stanhope Nixon, had been a heavy drinker at Yale, where he once assaulted a telephone company engineer so badly he nearly killed the man. Stanhope claimed he had been too drunk to remember the attack. The judge, himself a Yale graduate, fined him and blamed the university for giving students too much freedom.
The following year, Stanhope was arrested for robbery, and his lawyers argued that his monthly allowance from his own father exceeded the value of the stolen goods. Lewis Nixon grew up in that shadow, enjoying the fruits of his grandfather’s fortune and partying hard long before he ever put on a uniform. By the time he enlisted, Winters later wrote, Nixon was already a hard drinker, a free spirit who enjoyed the wild life and partied with the best of them. The war compounded what was already there.
Nixon served as an intelligence officer, and despite his drinking, he carried out his duties remarkably well. But some of the men who worked closest with him told a harsher story. Ed Shames, who was assigned as Nixon’s assistant in England, described him as the worst drunk there’s ever been in the history of the United States military. Shames recalled that Nixon had rented a private home in Aldbourne rather than staying in the officer’s quarters, and the first instruction he gave his new assistant was that Shames’ main job was to wake him up in the morning.
The place was a total mess with empty bottles everywhere. Shames said he had to scrape Nixon off the floor on several occasions. After picking him up three or four times, Shames decided his mother had not raised him to be a nursemaid to a drunk. He went to his battalion commander to request a transfer and was thrown out of the office.
He then went directly to Colonel Robert Sink, who, annoyed by the request, made Shames the leader of the patrol platoon. Shames was grateful for the departure from Nixon. In his later biography, he wrote that he believed Sink had assigned him to Nixon in the first place precisely because the captain was clearly struggling with chronic alcohol abuse. Colonel Sink himself had reached a breaking point.
Toward the end of March 1945, he visited Winters with a problem. Nixon was drunk all the time. Sink admitted he enjoyed a drink or two himself after going off duty, but with Nixon it was constant, and he could not get any work out of him. Sink asked Winters if he could use Nixon back at battalion.
Winters answered quickly that yes, he could use him. Sink agreed, noting that every time he needed Nixon, the man was with Winters anyway. The conversation was entirely absent from Band of Brothers. In the series, the news of Nixon’s demotion arrives through Winters, who finds Nixon holding a glass of VAT 69 shortly after Nixon narrowly survived a combat jump when his plane was shot down.
Winters asks if the drinking is a problem up at regiment, and Nixon shrugs off the transfer almost as though it were a positive development. Buck Compton, the former UCLA all-American who had played baseball and football before the war, clashed with Nixon. Nixon was a Yale man who prided himself on his intellect and had no particular fondness for jocks. Compton said Nixon let him know this directly.
In Compton’s blunt assessment, Nixon was not just a drinker, he was a prick, a solemn, highbrow Yale man who was not a likable guy. Compton rarely commented further on the drinking itself. Don Malarkey, in his memoir, described Nixon as Winters’ closest pal and the resident lush, a full-blown alcoholic. But Malarkey also kept a balanced view.
When Nixon won a lottery during the Bastogne siege for a thirty-day furlough, he gave it up and stayed with the men. Malarkey acknowledged that took guts. At a reunion after the war, Nixon once launched into Buck Compton, calling him a coward. Malarkey, who had served beside Compton and witnessed his bravery, shot back, Is that right?
And how many Silver Stars do you have? The comment shut Nixon up. Compton, hearing about the incident later, cut Nixon some slack, saying the men would sometimes have one drink too many. Not everyone saw the worst of it.
Clancy Lyall, who joined Easy Company in August 1944, insisted that Nixon drank a lot but not in combat. He was not a drunk as they wanted to depict him, Lyall said, but a real fine intelligence officer. Lyall had less contact with Nixon than some of the others, since Nixon was already serving at battalion level, and he was known as a good-hearted man who tried to see the best in everyone. Bill Guarnere also spoke well of Nixon, listing him among the best officers he served with.
Another veteran, Babe Hefron, recalled that at the former Nazi resort of Berchtesgaden, the one who really took advantage of the booze was Lewis Nixon. Winters was the most biased source, but he also knew Nixon best. The two had become friends at Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, where Nixon hid his VAT 69 in Winters’ footlocker under the tray holding his socks and underwear. Winters observed Nixon’s drinking up close for years.
At one point, he casually told Nixon that the stuff was going to kill him one day. Nixon held up his flask in a mock toast and replied, Here’s to that day, before taking a slug. During the miserable days in the Netherlands, Winters recalled hunkering down among the trees and noticing Nixon beside him finishing off a bottle of schnapps, clearly drunk. Winters fully realized he would not take that kind of behavior from any other man, and he was not sure why he tolerated it from Nixon.
He overlooked much of it because of their friendship and because Nixon could do the job when real work was needed. At the end of the war, Winters arrived at Berchtesgaden and found a stash of roughly ten thousand bottles of the world’s finest liquor in the basement of Hermann Göring’s officers’ club. Having no use for it himself, he planned to surprise his best friend, but insisted Nixon sober up first. It was then that Winters admitted, My only problem with Nixon was keeping him sober.
He immediately prefaced that with a compliment, calling Nixon always his finest combat officer. In a letter to a friend during the war, Winters was more candid: Captain Nixon is the biggest drunk I’ve ever seen, known, or hoped to see. He’s worth a small fortune, never will have to work a lick in his life, but absolutely the most reliable man I’ve ever known. In another letter, he seemed to contradict himself, calling Nixon the most undependable man you’d ever want to find.
After the war, Winters accepted a job at Nixon Nitration Works, though he had initially put little stock in Nixon’s offer, precisely because he considered Nixon so unreliable. The postwar years were tough. Nixon and Winters remained good friends, but the bond came from the war. To visit Nixon was to sit and watch him get drunk.
Winters would sit there until he grew tired, then get up and go to bed. It was, he said, the only thing he could do. The Band of Brothers portrayal of Nixon’s drinking was not entirely inaccurate, but it erred through omission. The series treated his heavy drinking as a personality trait and a coping mechanism for the trauma of war, when in reality it was a serious problem that affected his performance and the men around him.
Veterans like Ed Shames remembered a man who had to be scraped off the floor, an officer so incapacitated that his own commander tried to move him out of the regiment. What the series also left out was the fuller picture of the man. Despite his wealth, Nixon could likely have received a deferment from military service. His family’s business, Nixon Nitration Works, was considered essential to the war effort.
Instead, he volunteered for the army and then for the paratroopers. By the end of the war, he held the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and three combat jump stars, a distinction earned by only a few men in the 101st Airborne. And when he won that lottery for a thirty-day leave during the freezing ordeal at Bastogne, he gave it away and stayed with his men.
His alcoholism took a heavier toll than the television series ever showed, but Lewis Nixon still stepped up to serve his country.