Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  More praise for

  Last Man Out

  “Few, like Jim Parker, saw the second Indochina War from start to finish. And few are qualified to conclude that ‘even though we lost, we did the right thing by coming here to fight.’ For those who did, that’s the war’s lasting legacy.”

  —COL. HARRY G. SUMMERS JR.

  Editor, Vietnam magazine

  “An enlightening story … Few others shared Parker’s perspective on the war, and none has reported it quite the same way.”

  —Library Journal

  “James E. Parker Jr. has written a thoroughly honest and compelling memoir.… Last Man Out is his unpretentious account of an American everyman’s extraordinary service to his country throughout the Vietnam War, a tale told with humility and humor and packed with history and heroism. Refreshingly free of cynicism, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement, Parker’s candid account of the human dimension of combat belongs on your bookshelf next to Moore and Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”

  —COL. JOSEPH T. COX

  Author of The Written Wars: America’s War Prose Through the Civil War

  “Parker is no run-of-the-mill war memoirist but a skilled storyteller with a knack for weaving quick tales with revealing punch lines. He introduces a memorable cast of supporting characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1996 by James E. Parker Jr.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in a slightly different form by John Culler & Sons in 1996.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-190008

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48697-4

  v3.1

  We all went to Gettysburg, the summer of ’63:

  Some of us came back from there

  And that’s all,

  Except the details.

  —Capt. Praxiteles Swan, Confederate Army,

  Complete Account of the Battle of Gettysburg

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map

  1 Army Recruit

  2 Command Training

  3 Marshaling for War

  4 Sea Voyage

  5 First Firefight

  6 Shadow War

  7 At Home in the Jungle

  8 Tunnel to Hell

  9 Phoenix and Fate

  10 Lavender Hill

  11 War Is War

  12 Minh Thanh Road

  13 Heading Home

  14 The Best Job in the World

  15 Nothing Could Be Finer

  16 Holding the Line in Laos

  17 CIA Work in Vietnam

  18 My Bodyguard

  19 The Light at the End of the Tunnel

  20 Promises and Confrontations

  21 KIP Collection

  22 Broken Promises

  23 Air America to the Rescue

  24 Farewell Vietnam

  Epilogue

  Photo Inserts

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  ONE

  Army Recruit

  Cottonpicker didn’t think it was a big deal. This was Christmas 1963, and I was home from college. We were sitting on his back porch drinking beer.

  “You don’t die if you quit college,” he said. “We ain’t talking about the future of the world here.”

  Donald Lawrence, dubbed “Cottonpicker” by my father several years before, was my best friend while I was growing up. A big, brawny redhead, he was a paratrooper sergeant in the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg Army Base near my hometown of Southern Pines, North Carolina, and lived with his wife and children in an apartment behind my house. During my early teen years, we had spent many late afternoon hours tinkering with his old car under a nearby magnolia tree. On weekends, we had hunted and fished deep in the woods of the Fort Bragg reservation. He taught me how to stalk deer and gig frogs and light a cigarette in the wind and cuss like a soldier. He had always done most of the talking when we were together. “I’m da Chief and you da Indian,” was his way of putting it. I was used to taking his advice, so I listened carefully.

  “You’re what now, twenty-one? If you want to quit college and raise hell, well that’s all right, I reckon. It’s your life. Just don’t go feeling guilty about it. Tell people, ‘I ain’t getting nothing out of college and what I want to do is get out there and holler, so get outa my way.’ ” He paused. “But, you know, you might want to have some plans, Jimmy. ‘I just want to raise hell’ don’t feed the dog.”

  He looked at me and smiled in that lopsided fashion of his.

  “The Army ain’t bad. Been good by me.”

  My father had suggested that I stay in college while I was making up my mind about my future because it was a better environment for decision making—more educated counselors, better choices. I had already dropped out once for a semester.

  “If you drop out again,” he reasoned, “you’ll never go back. You are the family namesake. You have an obligation here.”

  When I returned to the University of North Carolina (UNC) after Christmas, I tried to study, but I just wasn’t interested. And I felt alone. My friends had dropped out. That left me, along with maybe twenty thousand strangers at Chapel Hill, reading The Organization Man and in danger of becoming one.

  I would sit at my desk in the dorm, a book open in front of me, and stare out the window, bored. I had always been more restless than my friends. As a kid, I’d stop and watch a train go by—or even a Greyhound bus—wanting to be on it, “getting on down the road.” The journey had seemed as important as the destination.

  My home was on the western edge of Fort Bragg. From a big tree in my front yard, I used to watch U.S. Air Force planes in the distance and daydream about flying those planes or jumping out of them. Cottonpicker had taught me the eight jump commands. Standing on a lower limb of the tree, I would recite, “Get ready. Stand up. Hook up. Check equipment. Check buddy’s equipment. Sound off for equipment check. Stand in the door. Go!” I would jump to the ground and do the parachute landing fall (PLF), just as Cottonpicker had taught me. I’d climb back up the tree and fantasize about life as a soldier or a world traveler.

  Those thoughts might have passed in time and I might have had a more normal adolescence and a less troubling college experience if I hadn’t taken a trip during the summer of 1957, between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, that forever changed my life. My parents had sent me to Mars Hill College, my father’s alma mater, to take college-level summer courses in hopes of jump-starting my interest in academics. Instead, I made friends there with a rowdy group of college sophomores. Two were from Cuba, one from Lake Wales, Florida, and one from Wilson, North Carolina. At the end of summer school, we developed an elaborate ruse to excuse my absence from home for a few days. My friend from Wilson and I then thumbed to Florida and went to Havana, Cuba. Three days and two nights there in the tenderloin area near the harbor—neon lights flickering off a Cuban bar at three o’clock in the morning, rumba music coursing the air, cigar smoke, fights, whores, rum were exactly what I had dreamed about in that tree in my front yard. I hated to leave, but we ran out of money. With a revolution going on in the hills, there were restrictions on just hanging around.

  My parents were happy
to see me when I arrived home, but in short order they sent me to a military school. That was a radical decision for them. They had grown up on farms in North Carolina and thought that only uncontrollably spoiled kids in California went to private military schools. They found it hard to believe that their son, raised in the rural heartland of the South, required special education, but they saw that unusual glint in my eye, the Cottonpicker influence, my total lack of interest in their goals, my trip to Cuba. I needed an attitude adjustment.

  The structured environment of Oak Ridge Military Institute was not a bad situation, the instructors were more engaging and challenging than those I had known in public school. Also, there were some real characters in the cadet corps, and living like a soldier had a certain attraction.

  I fell in love with an old 1903 Springfield rifle that I was issued for the drill team. We practiced almost every weekday afternoon, and I looked forward to getting into the armory and taking my rifle gently out of its place in the rack and twirling it in my hands. It was a handsome, no-nonsense war piece. I imagined that it had served our country in some previous war and had been retired to duty in a North Carolina military school. I had great respect for that rifle, and felt an uncommon rapport with it. In all the turns and twists required of us as the drill team marched along, that rifle never failed me. It was a solid weapon with a natural balance—a war tool.

  After graduating from Oak Ridge, I enrolled in UNC. During my sophomore year, a couple of friends and I dropped out of school and drove a beat-up 1950 Willys Jeep through Central America to Nicaragua. We were looking for jobs there when we ran afoul of what would become the Sandinistas, and we had to get out. We flew to Miami, where I worked on the beach until the next semester of college began at Chapel Hill.

  I still dreamed about “getting out there,” living in faraway places. Hell, knocking around was a family tradition—my father should realize that, I thought. His father had never settled down. Grandpa had been a rural mail carrier but somewhat irregular in his work habits. Once during World War I, he was supposed to be on his delivery route but was holed up, drinking moonshine. Someone bet him that he couldn’t drive his Harley motorbike up a nearby tree that was half bent over. He got up most of the way before he fell off. The motorbike was torn up pretty bad, plus the mail blew away and he lost his job. He and the family went back to Grandma’s place and he tried to farm the forty acres they were given, but he just wasn’t cut out to be a farmer. Every once in a while he left the farm and traveled around. He worked at odd jobs, once selling Fuller brushes in the eastern part of the state. Living in rooming houses and sometimes under bridges, he was different from all the rest but happy in his own way.

  That’s my heritage, I thought. I had heard genius skipped a generation, and I figured that held true as well for wanderlust. Maybe, like Grandpa, I was meant to be out there knocking around. It was my destiny.

  I shook my head to clear away those thoughts, looked down at my book, and tried to study. Then I thought about Cuba again—that fight when two drunk sailors slammed into one another, knocking out teeth, breaking each other’s nose, throwing blood over a group of whores standing nearby. The girls screamed and moved farther back, but no one tried to break up the fight. I looked back at my open, unread sociology book and yawned.

  I didn’t take many of my finals that January 1964. Midway through the exam period I packed all my clothes, left without saying good-bye to anyone, and drove my old junker station wagon back toward Southern Pines. In Sanford, I stopped at the Army recruiting office and signed up for three years in the infantry.

  At home, I went into the kitchen and told Mother what I had done. When Daddy came in from the office, he stood in the doorway and smiled. Then he caught Mother’s dour look and his smile froze. “I’ve joined the Army, Dad.” I tried to sound upbeat, but my voice broke.

  Dad walked over and slumped into his chair. The last rays of sunlight coming through the half-drawn blinds did little to brighten the gloom. Finally he said, “That’s dumb.” After a pause, he said, “Dealing with you is like trying to push a rope.” Then he just stared out the window as if a great calamity had befallen the family.

  On February 4, 1964, Mother and Daddy took me to Little’s Gulf service station on the edge of town and we waited in the car for a bus to take me to the induction center in Raleigh, the state capital. They both cried. I told them everything was going to be okay, wondering as I said it why the bus was taking so long.

  It finally arrived, coming to a stop in front of our car with a hiss of its air brakes. I kissed Mother on the cheek and reached over the seat and shook Daddy’s hand. After boarding the bus, I looked out the window and saw the car parked off to the side of the service station. Mother was in the front and Daddy in the back, a sad, out of the ordinary sight. As the bus pulled out, Mother waved good-bye and I could see her smile. Daddy had his head down.

  Grandpa’s departures were probably just as melancholy.

  The boys and young men sitting around the U.S. Army induction center in Raleigh looked like they belonged in the lost and found. I spent the afternoon mindlessly leafing through crumpled sports magazines that lay on tables by the worn Naugahyde couches. Eventually I was called to a desk where I signed my official enlistment papers. Later, everyone went into another room. An Air Force captain with a tired voice asked us to raise our right hand and officially swore us into military service. He then wished us good luck and added that he thought most of us would need it.

  The next morning we went by train and bus to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where we were processed into the Army. On the morning of the tenth day there—sheared to the skull, tested, vaccinated, wearing new ill-fitting fatigues, scared—my group fell into formation in front of the barracks with our duffel bags and boarded Army buses for basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. No longer “INductees,” as we had been called at the processing center, we were off to become “boots.”

  At Fort Gordon the bus convoy pulled in front of our training company headquarters. “Company C” was painted on a brick-and-concrete sign out front. The doors to the bus opened, and I saw a “Smokey Bear” drill sergeant hat above a square-jawed black face rise over the two boys in the front row. Standing almost at attention beside the bus driver, the man slowly moved his eyes over the interior of the bus. Outside we heard the shrill shouts of other noncommissioned officers (NCOs) as they rushed recruits off the buses. There was a tense pause as the sergeant continued to look around. Finally he spoke in a low, smooth, and slow southern voice, “Welcome to Fort Gordon, Georgia, boys and girls. Ma name is Staff Sergeant Willie O. McGee. I am ya drill instructor. I’m going to make ya soldiers or ya’ll find ya ugly asses run clean into this red Georgia dirt. Everyone stand up.”

  Everyone tried to push things aside and get to their feet. “Stand up, goddammit!” The voice suddenly became loud and frightfully mean. “Stand ya worthless civilian asses up, get off dis fucking bus, and form four ranks in da company street.”

  The recruits in front tried to get off quickly, but Sergeant McGee was blocking their way as he climbed slowly off the bus. As he moved aside, we fought one another to get out and into formation.

  Standing before us, Staff Sergeant McGee was an impressive figure. Ramrod straight and deathly still, he moved only his eyes. His voice carried easily to the back ranks. He advised us to respond quickly as he “learned” us how to soldier. The Army “weren’t” patient, didn’t cater to individuals. The “onliest” way to act was to do exactly what he told us to—no more, no less. He picked one of the largest men, by the name of McDiarmid, to be the recruit platoon leader and four other large men to be squad leaders, and positioned them to the right.

  He said he would not attempt anything silly yet, like trying to make us march or even fall out of formation in a military manner. He said, “Pick up ya duffel bags and go into da barracks behind ya, squads one and two on one side, squads three and four on da other and try to do hit without falling down.”<
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  Sergeant McGee followed us inside and paced the aisle while we claimed either a top or bottom bunk bed. Calling us to line up at attention at the end of our bunks, he walked by and corrected the stances of most of us. I stared off into the distance when he stopped briefly in front of me.

  Finished, he told us that he graduated the best soldiers in the company, possibly in the whole training command. “Nobody skates,” he said, “not no greasy Puerto Ricans,” as he bent down close to one of the Puerto Ricans, “not no angry Negroes,” as he put his nose close to the face of a very large black man, and “not no educated molly-wolly shithead,” as he moved farther down the line past me and bent in close to a skinny country boy from Tennessee.

  “I think I have made myself clear about what I expect, but I knows from experience dat some of ya ain’t understood me, gonn’a be slow, won’t follow orders, gonn’a want’a fall out. But listen here. Dis is my platoon. I own ya ass. You’ll learn to do it right or I will get rid of ya.” He turned to leave and then turned back. “Oh, and one more thing. I do not like ya, any of ya, and I don’t want ya for a friend, any of ya. Don’t try to be nice to me. Stay away. Do not talk with me. Do not come close to me unless ya have to. I do not want to know ya first names. I do not want to know about’sa dog or ya Momma or dat ya girlfriend’s pregnant. Stay away from me. See the chaplain if ya want to talk with someone nice. I am Drill Sergeant Willie O. McGee. Stay da fuck away.”

  The recruit across from me made eye contact and bounced his eyebrows as Sergeant McGee left. I did not acknowledge him but turned to the task of making my bed.

  Throughout that day and the next, McGee was with us constantly. Up and down the lines, shouting, cussing, correcting us in our dress and our drill. I stayed in the middle of the platoon, safely out of his way.

  The second night, I was brushing my teeth in the latrine when the recruit who bunked across the aisle, the one who had bounced his eyebrows at me, came up to the next sink and started washing his face. “McGee is a rather persuasive fellow,” he said. “Direct. I like that in a man.”