Walter Gordon (soldier, born 1920)
American military personnel (1920-1997)
Walter Scott Gordon Jr. (15 April 1920 – 19 April 1997) was a non-commissioned officer with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army during World War II.
Gordon was portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers by Ben Caplan. He was featured in the 2010 book A Company of Heroes: Personal Memories about the Real Band of Brothers and the Legacy They Left Us.
Youth
Walter Scott "Smokey" Gordon was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He enrolled at Millsaps College around 1940, attending there for 2 years.
Due to colorblindness and flat feet, the Marines and the Navy had rejected him, so he joined the Army. Gordon enlisted on 10 August 1942 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as his father told him that 'if you enlist down south, you will train up north and vice versa'. He faked his way through the eye test and successfully enlisted.
Military service
Gordon's basic training was at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. His airborne training began in August 1942 at Camp Toccoa, Georgia under Herbert Sobel.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walter Gordon (soldier, born 1920)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.