Sisk, Wayne Aubrey “Skinny” born 04-03-1922, in Herndon, West Virginia, 
to Henry Sisk and Nettie Monk Sisk, Wayne had several siblings.The oldest was Lumer, who when Skinny was born was about 20 years older than him. After that the rest were (from second oldest to younger): Boyd, Virginia Pearlie, Gretchen, Eloise, Roy, Delcie, Lannie, Raymond. When he was only 7 or 8, his father died on 05-04-1930. Somewhere along that time, Skinny was not living with his mother, only Pearlie and Dewaine were. I do not know where he went during that time, but he and Pearlie were living with his mother by 1940. At first glance Wayne wouldn’t have looked too much like a tough paratrooper. He might have been 5′ 7″ at the most, and rightfully deserved the nickname “Skinny.” But his growing up years in the hills of West Virginia had toughened him. He had two older brothers who loved to pick on him and his only means of survival was to make himself as tough as they were. As he grew he got to the point where he could hold his own not only with his brothers but with anyone else in his community. His hot temper and lengthening list of guys he had whipped gained him a reputation as a tough guy, and he sometimes got into fights just because someone wanted to see if he was as bad as people said he was.
Sisk enlisted and volunteered for paratroopers and was sent to Toccoa, Camp Toccoa
was a training camp for United States Army paratroopers during World War II. In 1938, plans were made to build the camp, located five miles west of Toccoa, Georgia. The camp was officially put into use on 14-12-1940. Initially it was used by the National Guard, but from 1942 by the army. It was then named “Camp General Robert Toombs”, 
a General of the Confederacy. Robert Augustus Toombs (02-07-1810 – 15-12-1885, age 75.) was an American politician from Georgia, who was an important figure in the formation of the Confederacy. From a privileged background as a wealthy planter and slaveholder, Toombs embarked on a political career marked by effective oratory, although he also acquired a reputation for hard living, disheveled appearance, and irascibility. He was identified with Alexander H. Stephens’s 
libertarian wing of secessionist opinion, and in contradistinction to the nationalist Jefferson Finis Davis 
, Toombs believed a Civil War to be neither inevitable or winnable by the South.
Skinny 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. Skinny was one of the original 140 Toccoa men of Easy Company.
Training was intense, even brutal. Two thirds of the hand-picked enlisted men washed out, as they were put through a regimen of physical training that kept them constantly exhausted. It was far more demanding than any professional football player or boxer would experience in their training camps today. The men crawled on their bellies on ground covered with hog entrails while live machine gun ammo buzzed over their heads. Their commanding officer, Herbert Maxwel Sobel, 
combined fanaticism and tyranny, with a good measure of sadism. The result was that Easy Company became one of the best conditioned companies in the entire army, united in their desire to show what they could do and in their hatred of their commander. Some even talked about shooting him once they got into combat, but fortunately for him and them, Sobel was transferred before they saw combat.
Sisk was portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers by Philip Barantini. 
Sisk 
enlisted and volunteered for paratroopers and was sent to Toccoa,
Georgia for training, then assigned to Easy Company. Sisk, along with Frank Perconte, 
Herman “Hank” Hanson 
and Clifford Carwood “The Man”. Lipton,
were the four first soldiers in Easy Company. Frank Perconte died 24-10-2013, aged 96 in Joliet, Will County, Illinois and Herman “Hank” Hanson died 15-05-1971, aged 53 , in Illinois,
Sisk made his first combat jump into Normandy on D-Day, 
on Private Walter “Smokey” Gordon’s 
plane. Gordon died 19-04-1997, aged 77, in Biloxi, Mississippi Skinny brought laughter and broke the tension on the plane by calling out “Does anybody here want to buy a good watch?” 
Sisk also fought with his unit in Operation Market Garden. Wayne landed safely and soon heard a fellow paratrooper calling out to him. He had been severely injured by his fall and could not move. Wayne put together a hasty home-made stretcher using parachute silk and spent the next couple of days dragging him to safety and medical help. (Over fifty years later, when Wayne attended the 1998 reunion, the two met again. His aged buddy expressed his appreciation, saying, “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.”
In the Battle of the Bulge, the latter where he sustained shrapnel wounds to a leg during shelling by German forces. Sisk’s wounds 
were treated and he eventually reunited with his unit. Thus began for Wayne Sisk and Easy Company nearly a year of some of the most intense fighting seen in World War II. As a crack paratrooper outfit, they were put in situations where they were frequently outnumbered, outgunned, and sometimes ended up completely surrounded. Perhaps their most miserable and trying engagement was at the Belgian town of Bastogne. The siege of Bastogne was an engagement in December 1944 between American and German forces at the Belgian town of Bastogne, as part of the larger Battle of the Bulge. The goal of the German offensive was the harbor at Antwerp. In order to reach it before the Allies could regroup and bring their superior air power to bear, German mechanized forces had to seize the roadways through eastern Belgium. Because all seven main roads in the densely wooded Ardennes highlands converged on Bastogne, just a few miles away from the border with neighboring Luxembourg, control of its crossroads was vital to the German attack.
The German offensive began on 16 December. Although outnumbered, the regiments of the 28th Infantry Division 
under command of Major General Norman Daniel “Dutch” Cota, 
delayed the German advance towards Bastogne allowing American units, including the 101st Airborne Division, to reach Bastogne before the German forces surrounded the town and isolated it on 20 December. Until 23 December, the weather prevented Allied aircraft from attempting to resupply Bastogne or from performing ground attack missions against German forces. The siege was lifted on 26 December, when a spearhead of the 4th Armored Division 
under command of Major General John Shirley Wood 
and other elements of General “Old Blood and Guts” George Smith Patton‘s 
Third Army 
opened a corridor to Bastogne.
While on occupation duty in Kaprun, Captain Ronald Speirs 
ordered First Sergeant Lynch to take Sisk, Don Moone 
and Joseph Liebgott 
to find and to kill a Nazi officer hiding in a farm nearby. The Nazi was found and shot twice by Liebgott, but was not killed. After Moone refused to shoot, Sisk shot the Nazi dead. Sisk told later that he gave the man five minutes to get right with God before his execution. Wayne was no Christian at this point, but he apparently knew enough to know we need God before we leave this world. The General laughed and said there was no God, only Hitler. Wayne shot and killed him on the spot. Lieutenant Speirs died 11-04-2007, aged 86, in Saint Marie, Valley County, Montana, Liebgott didn’t talk about his war years, nor did he attend any reunions. He died on 28-06-1992 at the age of 77.in San Bernardino, Californië,
After Wayne returned to the U.S. he found he could not adjust to civilian life. He described his life in those days as “trying to drink away the truckload of Krauts that I stopped in Holland and the die-hard Nazi that I went up into the Bavarian Alps and killed.” One of his paratrooper buddies had told him that eventually all the killings that he did were going to jump into the bed with him, and he turned out to be prophetic.Sisk had nightmares as he slept and flashbacks during the days. He tried to ease his torment by drinking but found little relief. He was so unbearable his family could hardly stand him. Sisk was said to be the ‘most foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, hard-living reprobate ever to enlist in Easy Company’.
Sis, here on a 101 AB reunion in 1947 
, lived in Raleigh and Wyoming counties all his life. By the time the war was over Wayne Sisk had seen war at its ugliest. He had been wounded multiple times, and he had killed many men. At times he had killed them one at a time with his M-1 rifle, and at other times he mowed them down in groups with a machine gun. Wayne became a building contractor in brick and stone masonry.Wayne suffered from flashbacks of the war and developed a drinking problem. His drinking problem was solved after having a conversation with his four-year-old niece.
Death and burial ground of Sisk, Wayne Aubrey “Skinny”
During the war, Sisk promised God that if he survived the war, he would become a reverend. In 1949, he was ordained to become a Baptist minister. Sisk was a member of the Beckley Conference of Freewill Baptists and the West Virginia State Association of Freewill Baptists and attended the Skelton Freewill Baptist Church. In 1999 it was God’s time for Wayne to make the final jump (to put it in paratrooper language). His daughter, Delcie, who loved her father dearly, described the scene through her tears. She told how, after being so weak he could not raise his arm to grab her by the hand, he suddenly lifted his arms toward heaven. The old soldier began to quote Scriptures and to pray the 23rd Psalm. After a while he put his hands down and was gone. He had come through his last battle and had prevailed. He had fought the good fight and kept the faith. Skinny died 13-07-1999, aged 77, in Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia, and is buried at the Miller Cemetery Rock Creek, Raleigh County, West Virginia,
Leave a Reply