Donald Malarkey, who with fellow members of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, parachuted into Normandy on D-Day then fought onward through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, has died at age 96.

An Oregon native, Malarkey was awarded the Bronze Star and the French Legion of Honor Medal, among many other honors, for his WWII service.

With other members of his unit, Malarkey was a key contributor to Band of Brothers, Museum cofounder Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 account of Easy Company’s WWII journey from Camp Toccoa, Georgia, to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

In Band of Brothers, Ambrose let Malarkey describe the bond that was forged among the men of Easy Company during the war—a spirit that was later captured in the HBO miniseries of the same title, executive produced by Museum champions Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks:

Forty-nine years after Toccoa, Pvt. Don Malarkey of Oregon wrote of the summer of 1942, “So this was the beginning of the most momentous experience of my life, as a member of E Company. There is not a day that has passed since that I do not thank Adolf Hitler for allowing me to be associated with the most talented and inspiring group of men that I have ever known.”

In an email interview, actor Scott Grimes, who portrayed Malarkey in Band of Brothers, said he frequently conferred with Malarkey during the making of the miniseries.

“Don Malarkey was a very private man, as were most of the men,” Grimes said. “For the first year I knew him, he hardly wanted to talk at all, and when he did he would get emotional. I believe it was because he was alive and some of his best friends died in front of him, and why would you want to talk about that?

“I would call Donald when I got each script to make sure that everything was accurate—like was he really a smoker, things like that.”

Grimes said Malarkey voiced a mild objection to the script for the ninth episode of the miniseries, in which Easy Company encounters the Kaufering concentration camp.