MSG. Carl D. Beck

Family and friends are invited to gather for visitation on Friday, September 18, 2015 at Clairmont Presbyterian Church, 1994 Clairmont Road, Decatur, GA 30033, from 10 a.m. until 12 noon, where funeral service will begin at 12 noon. Burial will immediately follow with full military honors in Floral Hills Memory Gardens, 3000 Lawrenceville Highway, Tucker, GA 30084. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in his memory to: Clairmont Presbyterian Church.

Master Sergeant Carl D. Beck, Retired

Brief Biography from Hearing Him Tell it to So Many for So Long

H Company, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division

D-day

By Christian Stevens, his friend, executor to his estate, and power of attorney

I met Carl Beck at the Atlanta Skydiving Center in the Fall of 1993 where I went to learn how to skydive at my own expense. My Army ROTC (Georgia State University) chain of command had given my airborne school slot to another cadet. I was AWOL for all intents and purposes when I met my hero who I often referred to as my surrogate grandfather. I had already received an assignment to be an Airborne Infantry Rifle Platoon Leader at the famed 82nd Airborne Division when I introduced myself to the oldest guy at the drop zone who sat at a picnic table by himself with nobody to talk to. When I noticed the 82nd Airborne ring on his finger, I inquired. That ring was given to him by one of his Army buddies who’d died years before. He was there to train for his 2nd jump into Normandy. My inquisition opened a living history book that I learned from until his last day on 13 SEP 2015.

Carl was born in 1925 in Avondale, Missouri. He enlisted in the Army at 17 years old after his parents signed off on it. He signed up to be a paratrooper when he learned that they got paid extra money (jump pay).

Carl attended Airborne training at Camp Toccoa in Toccoa, Georgia, where the new idea of parachuting from aircraft into combat behind enemy lines was the special forces of its day. It was ballsy and dangerous even if you never encountered the enemy. “Band of Brothers” was a movie series about life at Camp Toccoa. There were others.

He was deployed to England with Hotel Company, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment and waited there for Eisenhower and Churchill to pull the trigger on the invasion into Normandy. The weather wasn’t good, but it was the best it’d been in a few days and they pulled the trigger on 5 Jun 1944 due to concerns of losing the element of surprise.

Carl and his stick bailed out of a burning C-47 over the town of Baupte, France. That was not the intended DZ, but the plane was taking lots of flack that Carl recounts as “having your head in a bucket while people pound on it with a hammer”. They got out on the bell, which only paratroopers will understand the significance of. “Getting Out on the Bell” means get out of the plane or die. He lost his equipment bundle on exit and he is “still looking for it, in case anybody has seen one” laying someplace in France.

He and his assistant gunner linked up, but they found no other fellow paratroopers. A few citizens of Baupte found him and his buddy and hid them in what is now know as “Beck’s Barn”. The town was occupied by Germans, who would have reflexively executed the citizens had they been caught supporting the resistance by hiding Carl and his buddy. They were hidden in the barn and were offered sustenance for 3 days before they could hear the 82nd Airborne Division (they didn’t know who they were at the time) advancing on the bridge into Baupte. They needed the bridge intact so follow on units could use it to move men and supplies across Europe.

Upon hearing the troops of the 82nd moving towards them, they went into action taking a German machine gun on the opposite side of the bridge but on the same side of the river as the German troops that were preparing to defend Baupte and destroy the bridge. They were able to kill several of the enemy by firing deliberate ricochets (Carl referred to them as Irish troops; Rick O’Shea’s) off the bridge trusses and into the German positions. It was for this action that French President Jacques Chirac awarded Carl and his AG (Assistant Gunner) the French Legion of Honor (French equivalent to our own Medal of Honor) in France in 2004.

He and his AG would fight for several more days alongside the paratroopers they met from the 82nd Airborne Division. It would be awhile before they could link back up with members of H Co. 501st PIR.

We’ve all seen the movie “Saving Private Ryan” produced by Steven Spielberg. It was a very accurate portrayal of the D-day invasion and some of the combat that occurred within a few days and weeks thereafter, but it was not perfectly historically accurate. Private Ryan was not a real person. Steven Spielberg will tell you that Private Ryan was a Hollywood impression of a paratrooper named Fritz Niland. Fritz Niland was also in H Co., 501st PIR with Carl Beck.

Carl would later jump into combat, again, as a part of Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, some of which was portrayed in the movie “A Bridge too Far”.

He also fought hard in the Battle of the Bulge and after just one night of fierce fighting there, they counted 72 dead Nazis in front of his machine gun position. It’s hard for him to talk about that battle because he felt so bad for the replacement troops who usually didn’t live more than a few days after arriving to his unit because they were inexperienced fighters. After meeting several and watching them die, he refused to build true relationships with the replacements because it hurt too badly to watch them die.

He always cries a tear when he talks about one of them who had just joined his unit in the Battle of the Bulge and had only been in the foxhole with him for a few hours before making a fatal mistake. He said he heard the sonic crack of a sniper’s round come in and heard the sound of it hitting the replacement’s helmet and piercing his skull. Carl recounts that he didn’t even turn his head to look at him or make any attempt to render aid to him. He knew from the sound, alone, that his newest fellow paratrooper was dead and gone.

Carl fought on with the 501st PIR and would catch some shrapnel in his buttocks at some point that would take him out of the fight for just 5 days. It wasn’t until they reached the Eagle’s Nest that he’d heard that the Purple Heart he was awarded for that piece of shrapnel was enough to give him the “points” needed to return home. He’d seen enough battle and jumped at the opportunity to return home, but the fighting was over by then, anyway.

Carl would leave the Army after the war and would soon realize that civilian life was not for him. He reentered the army and would serve during the Korean War, too, and finished out his career in the same platoon that I would lead 50 years later at the 82nd Airborne Division; 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division.

Carl and his generation of paratroopers established a legacy that all paratroopers after them would perpetually strive to live up to. They were the greatest generation and he is one of the greatest of them. No paratroopers since his generation has lived up to their legacy and they likely never will.

I came close when my partner and I almost won the Army’s Best Ranger Competition in 2001. My partner and I earned 2nd place with the smallest margin of victory in the history of the event when the only Marine to ever win it won. Carl was there to see it and he was genuinely proud.

Carl is famous for having jumped into Normandy on 3 different 6th’s of June: 6 JUN 1944, 6 JUN 1994 for the D-day +50 years celebration, and 6 JUN 2004 for the D-day +60 years celebration. He had planned on jumping, again, on 6 Jun 2014 in tandem with me, but maintains that “tandems are for candy asses”.

Carl Beck is a card-carrying certified American Bad Ass and I write this in English today because he and many like him destroyed the imperialists that would have us speaking German or Japanese by now. Few pay him the respects I think he deserves here at home.

My wife, Angel, has Crohn’s Disease and we’d had to cancel our trip to join him in Normandy in June of 2004 due to the insertion of a feeding tube. When we saw Carl on CNN a few days before 6 JUN, we decided to violate her doctor’s orders and hop a plane to Paris to see Carl. When my wife and I were checking in at the Paris Hilton in June of 2004 to watch him make his 3rd jump into Normandy, Carl Beck’s picture was on the front page of the Paris newspaper on the stand at the front desk. We couldn’t read the paper, but it was nice to pick up the paper and show the hotel receptionist when she asked why we were checking into the hotel. While getting settled, we saw Carl on a Parisian news channel in some seats behind President George W. Bush. We lived out of the rental car for a couple days as we drove all over Normandy trying to find Carl. It was hard until we came to realize that everybody in Normandy knew who Carl was.

We searched for almost 2 solid days all over Normandy for Carl when we found a young man outside his house washing his car. We were lost and asked the young man how to get to an address on an invitation we had to a party that Carl holds for the people of Baupte whenever he goes back to France. It was written in English on one side and French on the other. The kid said in broken English “Oh, Carl Beck. I know Mr. Beck”. The kid immediately turned off the water, stopped what he was doing, and led us in his car to where Carl was. It was at least 35 miles from where we found the kid washing his car. He led us to LaFierre where we found Carl completely surrounded by a crowd of paparazzi that even Madonna would be envious of. I’ve never seen anything like it before and hope one day to see him and those like him get that kind of attention in our own country. God knows they deserve that kind of fanfare. They are heroes.

Carl Beck was born in Avondale, Missouri on 21 November 1925. He joined the Army when he was 17 and made history. He left the Army as a Master Sergeant and his last assignment was as cadre at the Army ROTC department at Wofford College. He hadn’t been on jump status for a while due to injuries sustained from a “cigarette roll” on a training jump in Texas a few years before that badly broke both of his ankles. He then worked for the City of Atlanta as a traffic engineer and retired from there, as well. He then worked as the night security guard at the library at Agnes Scott College just to avert boredom and I think he did that job for about 10 years. He and his wife Virginia had no children and she died the day after Valentine’s Day about 25 years ago. I never met her, but he loved her and spoke of her often. We made it a point to get together every 15 FEB just to boost his morale. He was preceded in death by his brother. His closest relative is a niece in Independence, Missouri.

Carl had one goal that he never attained. He always said with a glass of Kendall Jackson chardonnay in the air that he hoped I lived to be a hundred and that he lived long enough to piss on my grave. I miss Carl Beck.