In the summer of 1944, Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was still in Normandy, recovering from the brutal fighting around Carentan and the assault on Brecourt Manor. The front lines had dissolved into a landscape of hedgerows, isolated positions, and shifting patrols, where a man could rarely be certain who was moving in the next field. It was in that confusion that two American paratroopers, Buck Compton and Joe Liebgott, found themselves at the center of one of the war’s darkest and least-discussed episodes: a friendly fire incident that killed two of their own. In his memoir, “Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers,” Compton described what happened.
He and Liebgott were on patrol along a series of field fortifications at dusk. Across the field, roughly fifty yards away, they saw two soldiers moving slowly along another defensive position. Both men were wearing German camouflage raincoats. One of them carried a German hunting rifle, which Compton recognized by the silver disk on the side of the stock where the sling attached.
To him, the evidence was conclusive. They were Germans. He called out to Liebgott, who came back, and they raised their weapons and opened fire. When they reached the bodies, they turned them over.
They looked at their faces and checked their identification tags. The two men were Americans. They had killed two of their own comrades. Compton would later write that words could not express the horror they felt in that moment.
He acknowledged that the dead soldiers had taken a serious risk by moving about in German equipment, wearing enemy raincoats and carrying enemy weapons. There was no way to confirm their identity at a distance, and running up to challenge armed men was not a realistic option. He made clear that he was not offering this as an excuse. The guilt stayed with him long after the war.
He described the burden of having made mistakes and the deeper guilt of having survived when others did not. He reflected on the randomness of death and survival: a mortar shell landing near him on a road left him unharmed while a random piece of shrapnel killed a man lying protected in a trench. He admitted that he had long since stopped trying to understand any of it. American popular memory of World War II often focuses on what was depicted in the television series “Band of Brothers,” which told the story of Easy Company in vivid detail.
The series did show a friendly fire incident in Holland, when a nervous soldier shot Captain Frederick “Moose” Heyliger as he approached an outpost during a patrol with Captain Dick Winters, then the battalion executive officer. Heyliger had forgotten the password, and Lieutenant Harry Welsh had failed to notify the outpost of their arrival. Heyliger survived a wound to his right shoulder and a more serious wound to his left leg, which Winters described as looking as though it had been virtually severed. He underwent multiple surgeries, including skin and nerve grafts, and spent two and a half years in the hospital.
But the earlier incident involving Compton and Liebgott was never included in the series. It happened shortly after the Brecourt Manor assault, while Easy Company was still in Normandy in June 1944. Compton himself chose not to retell the story in his own words out of respect for the two men involved. Instead, the account in his memoir stands as a painful first-person testimony of what occurred.
The psychological weight of that incident did not end with the war. During the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne, Winters twice had Joe Liebgott removed from combat duty because of the stress of fighting. The series did not depict this either. There is little doubt that the horror of the friendly fire episode added to that strain.
In the weeks that followed in Bastogne, Buck Compton broke down after watching his friends Joe Toye and Bill Garner wounded. Compton himself stated that he felt intense anger and frustration because Lieutenant Dike, a company officer, had disappeared again. After the war, Joe Liebgott returned home and vanished for two years. His family did not know where he was.
They assumed he had struggled to adjust to civilian life. But the implication embedded in the account is deeper: it is hard to blame a man for struggling to return from such an experience, hard to expect anyone to act as though the burns of war did not still hurt, inside and out. The final episode of “Band of Brothers,” titled “Points,” contains a scene that speaks to this truth. In Austria, shortly after the war ended, Shifty Powers was given a ticket home.
Before leaving, he visited Major Dick Winters and struggled to speak about something weighing on him. In Virginia, he said, he did not know how to explain everything. He began to tell Winters what he had seen, but the words failed him. Winters responded simply: “You’re a fine soldier, Shifty.
That’s all that needs to be said. ” Shifty looked up at him, said “Thank you, sir,” and the two exchanged salutes. He turned and left. The scene was not invented to satisfy dramatic needs; it captured a fundamental truth about the men of Easy Company.
No one who had not been through the same combat could fully understand what they carried. They carried the war with them for the rest of their lives. Not just the heroic moments that made for a celebrated television series, but the accidents, the regrets, the mistakes, and the snap decisions that were made in the fog of battle, some right, some wrong. They carried more than any human being should have to bear, all of it in service of the freedoms that those who came after them would continue to enjoy.
The friendly fire incident involving Compton and Liebgott remained one of the deepest, most guarded scars of the war. Compton himself wrote that secrets have power over us, and only when they are revealed can the truth be known and freedom achieved. His decision to record the event in his memoir was an act of that conviction. He stated plainly that he was not justifying what happened, merely acknowledging the reality of such accidents in combat.
The guilt, he wrote, would always be with him. The mystery of why he survived while others did not would never be answered. And in his own words, he had long ago despaired of ever understanding it.