By Sarah Moore

Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise

Courtesy of Associated Press

 

BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) — Victor Lee Mackool’s life has swung a wide arc from the World War II European Theater — where he survived savage fighting and witnessed the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp — to big band singing and a successful career in business.
 

The 87-year-old veteran, who now lives in Beaumont, Texas, was recently thanked for his military service with a Beaumont City Council proclamation presented in a room packed with friends and admirers.
 

The Brooklyn, N.Y., native of Lebanese descent still had three months of high school left in Brooklyn and a football scholarship to the University of Florida waiting when he got a letter from Uncle Sam.
 

His high school principal managed to get him deferred long enough to complete his senior year and graduate, but after that, it was off to U.S. Army basic training.
 

Mackool admitted his military career hit a snag early on when he decked an officer who cursed him for obeying an order from his superior officer. He was thrown in the brig and the officer demanded a court-martial, but all was smoothed over, Mackool said.
 

Mackool soon became a sergeant in the motor pool, but would later sign up with the 101st Airborne Division — mainly because the pay was better by $100 per month. Big money in those days.
 

“What the hell is the matter with you, are you crazy?” he remembers thinking later of his decision to take on the hazardous business of parachuting.
 

Mackool said he was 19 when he was dropped into Normandy during an operation in which 29,000 American soldiers lost their lives.
 

The 101st Airborne’s job was to go behind enemy lines and clear the way for the Allied troops. They were successful, eventually. But first, they endured several days of hard fighting against the German forces.
 

“From there on, after we took out those machine gun nests, our troops just walked on in,” Mackool said.
 

The smallest of his “band of brothers,” Mackool said he carried the heaviest machine gun.
 

He said he later shattered sections of his leg and ruptured a spinal disc in a jump burdened by the .50-caliber weapon.
 

The 101st Airborne — nicknamed the Screaming Eagles for the bald eagle insignia they wore — went on after Normandy to fight on the frozen battlefields of the Battle of the Bulge.
 

Mackool and his unit were subsequently surrounded by German troops in Bastogne, Belgium, where they refused to surrender and held out until the 4th Armored Division, headed by Gen. George Patton, came to their aid.

“If it wasn’t for Patton, I wouldn’t be here,” he said.
 

His unit also was involved in the liberation of Kaufering IV concentration camp, part of the Dachau complex in the Landsberg region of Germany. The soldiers had no idea what was in store for them, but they got a whiff it was bad a good way off.
 

The stench of rotting human flesh could be smelled from 50 miles away, according to Mackool.
 

None of his war experience marked him as much as seeing firsthand the horrors of Nazi atrocities.
 

“I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he said of his feelings upon entering the camp. “It was so, so pathetic. Even the war wasn’t that bad. That’s how bad it was.”