Toccoa celebrates its paratrooping past this weekend

Ed Pepping left California for this? For this little Georgia town, so far from home? And the mud!

But home it was, at least until the Army decided he was qualified to jump from an airplane. And so Pepping, 19 when he enlisted, joined thousands of other young men in Toccoa, where they trained for one of the greatest military operations of all time, D-Day.

Pepping, now 92, is back in the Stephens County town made famous in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers." He is a guest of honor this weekend for the Currahee Military Weekend. The gathering is the 14th annual reunion of those long-ago young men who landed behind enemy lines in France in early June 1944.

The weekend begins Friday night with a 1940s-theme dance, but really doesn’t get going full-tilt until Saturday, with a parade, exhibits and an evening dinner. It concludes Sunday morning with a service at the foot of Currahee Mountain. The mountain, as any “Band of Brothers” fan knows, is the peak that trainees ran, relentlessly, as they readied for deployment overseas.

“We ran up that mountain every morning before breakfast, you know,” said Pepping, speaking earlier this week from his home in Whittier, Calif.

Pepping was assigned to E Company, the outfit highlighted in the 2001 miniseries, and was among the first to tumble out of a C-47 in the pre-dawn hours of D-Day.

Seventy years later, he still recalls the flight, the fright of jumping into territory controlled by Nazi Germany.

“We were supposed to jump out at 95 miles per hour from 700 feet,” he recalled. “We jumped at 160 miles an hour — from 300 feet!”

His parachute, Pepping said, barely slowed his descent to whatever waited below.

Pepping injured a knee in the early days of the invasion, and was shipped back to England. The Army never let him rejoin his Toccoa buddies as they fought across Europe. It kept him in England, where he put his medic training to use patching wounded servicemen fresh from the carnage on the other side of the English Channel.

But he never forgot Toccoa.

‘An honor’

The stories veterans tell are one reason John Cork visits Toccoa, 95 miles northeast of Atlanta. Cork, a Hoschton businessman, became aware of the role the town played in the war while spending time at his vacation home in Lake Hartwell. The lake, on the Georgia-South Carolina line, is close to Toccoa; he and his wife, Sandra, decided to visit the town’s Currahee Military Museum.

As they looked at old photos and other artifacts from Camp Toccoa, Cork overheard a clerk talking on the phone. He realized she was talking to a veteran who'd trained there. The clerk told the veteran that yes, the town was having a military weekend; and, no, the museum didn't have the money to help defray the transportation costs for any old paratroopers who wanted to return.

Cork couldn’t keep quiet. “I said, ‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but …’”

That was several years ago. Since then, Cork has arranged for a couple of veterans, including Pepping, to come back to Toccoa. He also knows time with them is dwindling: More than 500 World War II veterans die every day.

“It’s an honor for me to spend a few minutes with them,” said Cork, 71.

Toccoa is honored to host the veterans, said Brenda Carlan, director of the Currahee Military Museum. She credits the miniseries with luring visitors off the interstate.

“If it takes Hollywood to get them here, that’s OK,” she said.

The museum wants to acquire a block building, once part of Camp Toccoa, to help showcase the town’s military past. It’s near the foot of Currahee, on former camp land that became an industrial site after the war ended. Saving the building, Carlan said, is important: It’s a reminder that a small Georgia town played a big role in a global conflict. Four regiments trained in Toccoa.

Pepping doesn’t need to be reminded. Currahee looms as large in his memory now as it did when he puffed up its slopes.

“I’m looking forward to coming back!” said Pepping, who tends to speak with exclamation marks.

He’s also looking forward to the flight — especially the moment when the plane’s wheels touch the Earth. It’s a sensation any former paratrooper can appreciate.

“The first 21 flights I took,” he said, “I never landed! I never landed in an airplane until I came home!”