Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  We trotted out to one of the rifle ranges along a dusty tank trail. The dust became more of a problem as time went on. As we approached the rifle ranges, the candidate singing cadence fell back into ranks because we expected to take a break when we arrived. There were endurance runs, and there were death marches.

  Several Tac officers, however, were standing poised in the assembly area of the rifle ranges. An ambulance was parked in the shade next to a couple of deuce-and-a-half (two-and-a-half-ton) trucks. It did not look good. “Damn if it don’t look like an execution squad,” I told Pete. “Them trucks for the dead bodies, you reckon?”

  The Tac leading us fell out. Lieutenant Taylor took the lead and told the guidon bearer to follow him. He made a big circle on the rifle range, then headed the company back toward our barracks, almost seven miles away.

  Taylor came back to the middle of the company file and told us that we were not to kill ourselves. An ambulance was right behind us, and the deuce-and-a-halfs would take the dropouts back to the company. “No problem,” he said. “If you can’t go on, stop. No problem.” And he smiled at me. “I’m talking to you, Parker. Drop out, it’ll be okay.”

  The formation began to break down. Some of the older candidates fell back as the young bucks moved to the front. Pete and I kept our places.

  By the time we had run ten miles—seven out and three back—we were back on pavement again and the dust ceased being a problem, but we were thirsty and becoming more and more leg weary. “Keep going,” Pete said. “We’re almost home, more than half finished.” Behind us, members of the company stretched out into the distance.

  Taylor turned us off on a side road and then off onto a firebreak, and we started shuffling up a long, bumpy hill. Pete and I began to fall back—save our strength, we told ourselves. We didn’t have to finish first.

  As we made the hill, Taylor and some of the candidates pulled ahead, and we stumbled down the other side. Then we climbed another hill—and another and another—until we were on the paved road again. Taylor was five city blocks ahead of us.

  Pete and I kept repeating that we could make it. We could see the barracks. We could make it. We were not going to be paneled. We were going to make it.

  When Taylor reached the company assembly area, he dropped out and fresh Tacs led the first of the candidates around the barracks and out toward a PT field in the distance.

  We were not stopping at the company. We were not almost finished. My feet suddenly felt ten pounds heavier. Pete cursed under his breath. I glanced at him. He looked like death—filthy, sweaty, bloodshot eyes, face contorted in fatigue, mouth open with dirt crusted around the edges. He started repeating, “We ain’t quitting, we ain’t quitting.” I began to say it, but it took precious breath, so I stopped.

  We stumbled through the company area to the PT field and around the quarter-mile track and then back to the company area, where the run mercifully ended. Pete and I fell out on the grass and gasped for breath. We came up on our elbows and smiled at each other. A deuce-and-a-half pulled up with the woebegone candidates who had fallen out.

  After retreat the following day, two Tac officers took their platoons off to the side of the company assembly area and read out the names of the candidates being paneled the next morning. Two other Tacs posted names on the walls in the individual platoon areas.

  Lieutenant Hailey, our Tac officer, wasn’t around, and we found nothing posted in our area.

  During supper, word circulated about the “panelees”: it was a massacre. Half of the 2d, 3d, and 6th Platoons were going and almost all of the young guys in the 5th Platoon. I looked around the mess hall and could easily spot them. They ate with their heads down or were not eating at all, just looking straight ahead. No one talked with them. Those of us from the two platoons who hadn’t heard anything were afraid to offer condolences because that would challenge fate. Didn’t want to get too close to the panelees—bad luck. They were untouchables.

  Pete and I finished our meal and went to our room. As we had always done, in order to protect the shine of the floor in the center of our room, we took one step in and then stepped onto my bed. Pete continued around the room by stepping on the desks and down to his bunk against the far wall without setting foot on the floor. Lying on our bunks, we stared at the ceiling and made wild comments ranging from dark and negative to confident and optimistic. We remembered Hailey’s admonition that first day, that few would graduate, and agreed that we had to have an attitude about what was going on, something to cling to until we heard who was going.

  “It’s for the best, whatever happens, it’s for the best, that’s going to be our policy,” Pete said.

  At one point we were convinced that one or the other of us wouldn’t make it, so we resolved that whoever stayed in OCS would not say he was sorry to the other. If both of us got paneled, we’d be out of the place that weekend and could get some girls, have some fun. It wouldn’t be so bad. Cottonpicker would have said that the world wasn’t coming to an end. Some mighty good people from the other platoons were paneled. We would be in good company.

  Pete’s bunk faced the door. Suddenly he yelled, “Attention!” He was unusually frantic in getting to his feet, and I followed quickly, wide-eyed.

  Lieutenant Taylor stood in the doorway with the right corner of his mouth turned up in a humorless, mean half-smile. He looked me in the eye, turned, and left.

  I did not say anything for several minutes. My stomach hurt. Pete told me to lie back down, that it was nothing to worry about.

  “Hailey makes up the list,” he said. “This guy is just trying to make your life miserable. Forget him.”

  I wasn’t listening. I was thinking that it was all I could do to keep myself upbeat about the panel thing anyway, and Taylor shows up. He probably knew who was going from our platoon, and his smile, his “I’ve got the last laugh,” made it pretty clear to me that I was on the list.

  When the bell sounded for mandatory study, Pete and I got up and sat at our desks, but we continued to talk. Where was Hailey?

  We heard someone come in through the swinging doors off the stairwell and walk slowly down the hallway of the platoon area. Our door was open. We thought we recognized Hailey’s casual walk, but we did not look up. He walked down to the end of the hall and back toward our door. We heard him address one of the hardest working but least personable of the candidates in our platoon and softly ask him to come down to the first floor. Hailey walked to the stairwell, opened the swinging doors, and was gone. We looked up when the dejected candidate walked by our door. He was gone for what seemed a long time, but probably no more than five minutes. When he returned, he walked slowly down the hall to the room next to ours, told a candidate there that Hailey wanted to see him, and then walked heavily to his own room. Next, we watched our neighbor make his way slowly past our door, and the process continued.

  Thirty-three men were in our platoon when Hailey called out the first man that night. Pete and I agreed that the first ten men to go downstairs—all upstanding young men—probably were relatively low in the platoon ranking. The eleventh man to be called I had always placed toward the top of my bayonet sheet. Surely, I thought, he ranked higher than I did. If he’s gone now, I must be next. A third of the platoon is gone. I’m next.

  When he came back, he was crying. He walked quickly down the hall to a room near the end, and his voice broke as he called out the name of another candidate.

  Pete’s face immediately contorted in pain. That guy, also from the Midwest, was a friend of his. They had known each other before OCS, and Pete thought they stacked up somewhat equally.

  Pete and I sucked in our breath when we heard the swinging door open five minutes later. The candidate walked slowly. Pete noted, in a tense voice, that he was walking on our side of the hall. We looked at each other without moving. The candidate stopped before he got to our room. He didn’t call for anyone, but just stopped. Then he started walking again, came up to our door, and stopped ag
ain. He was looking in at us.

  “Pete,” he said, sadly.

  But Pete was not paneled. His friend had stopped to say that he had tried as hard as he could and had no regrets.

  We went on to graduate, Pete and I. In fact, not long after the eleventh week panel most of the hazing subsided and we focused more on field tactics. South Vietnam and guerrilla warfare were mentioned more and more, though our training was never tailored to nonconventional combat. Only when we received training in patrolling did we get a firsthand account of what was going on in Vietnam. Our instructor had recently returned from a tour as adviser to a South Vietnamese Ranger battalion. He told war stories, both in the classroom and during breaks, and said that the army did not train its troops to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia—he didn’t know why.

  A few days after patrol training we had the opportunity to put in for additional schools after OCS. Thinking of Cottonpicker, I asked for paratrooper training.

  Our assignments were posted on a bulletin board the week of graduation. I got jump school and an eventual assignment to the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. Pete was also assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, or as it was more commonly called, The Big Red One, because of its storied tradition as a bloodied combat unit.

  Pete and I danced a jig. We were together, going to a tough line outfit. Others around us suggested that we get married.

  Mother, Daddy, and my little sister Kathy came down for graduation. Maj. Gen. John Heintges gave the commencement address. He congratulated us on our commissions and went on to say something to this effect: “You have been specifically, individually selected to protect our Constitution and the dignity of our country against all enemies. You do this—you are charged with doing this, expected to do this—without any reservation. You must be willing to die to do your job. Your commission has no meaning without that commitment.”

  As excited as I was, trying to keep up with everything going on that day, I heard the general’s words clearly, as if he were speaking directly to me. I was oblivious to the hundreds of people in that auditorium. No one else was there—only General Heintges on the stage, and me sitting alone in the middle of all the seats when he said, “You have been selected to protect the dignity of the United States. If necessary, die fighting … You … You.”

  Sitting in the auditorium as if I were alone, I thought, “Yeap, I’m your man. I’ll take the risks. I’ll do the job.”

  Later, Dad pinned second-lieutenant bars on my shoulders. The words of General Heintges still ringing in my ears, I stood tall and felt a tremendous sense of self-worth and dedication.

  As a graduation present, Daddy and Mother gave me two thousand dollars. When I returned to Southern Pines on two weeks’ home leave before jump training, I went out in search of a 190SL Mercedes convertible. Pete was a sports car enthusiast, had an Alfa Romeo, and had made the case a thousand times that dollar for dollar, pound for pound, the 190SL was the best sports car on the road.

  So I looked for a 190SL. A used-car dealer in Raleigh had heard of one on a small lot in South Carolina, and I drove down in one of Daddy’s trucks that afternoon.

  I came around a curve on the country road. There on the edge of a field ahead was a 1957 190SL Mercedes convertible. It was love at first sight. Graceful, continental—what was it doing on a South Carolina dirt farm? The farmer/dealer said he had bought it at an auction and did not know its history. I bought it for fifteen hundred dollars, pulled it back to Southern Pines that afternoon, and was racing along country roads near home late that night with the top down and a beer between my legs.

  I went out most nights during my leave and usually didn’t return home until early in the morning, sometime after the sun had come up, but I hung around Mom and Dad and my sisters during the day. I took Mom shopping in the Mercedes. She squealed as we scooted along the streets and occasionally waved at the townspeople.

  Returning to Fort Benning for jump training, I checked into the bachelor officers quarters (BOQ) at the school and played poker that night with some of the newly commissioned officers from my OCS company. We were now making the unheard-of amount of $242.42 per month. Some of the new officers lost a whole month’s pay in the poker game. The following morning when we started airborne PT training, my former classmates and I realized that we were in better shape than anyone else. We ran the last leg of an endurance run backward and the jump instructors criticized us, but we found it was hard to be humble and intimidated after a half year of OCS training.

  We did become humble, however, when we started tower training prior to our first airborne jump. We became even more humble the first time out of a plane. I was in the middle of the “stick” of men along one side of the plane for my first jump. I ran out the door and do not remember anything until my chute opened, jerking me back to my senses. The ground came up so quickly that I froze and landed with a bone-jarring thud. The next time out I had a sense of doom as I jumped. I felt little relief when my canopy opened, because I knew that I still had the thud ahead.

  The third time, unfortunately, I was the stick leader. As we neared the drop zone, the jump master went through the jump commands. When he reached “Stand in the door,” I stood with my hands outside the door frame, helmet hitched tight, loaded with parachute main and reserve plus combat gear, one foot slightly in front of the other, head up to watch the red light under the wing outside, ready to jump when it turned green, and I waited and waited. I looked down and the sky was filled with chutes as jumpers from other planes were descending to the ground, and then I looked back to the light, but it stayed red and the jump master yelled that we were too far over the jump zone and had to come around again. I stood in the door as we flew over trees and a lone country blacktop road and some houses. My legs, tense from standing at the ready, began to ache and then started to shake, so I relaxed them and continued to look down. I began to lose the feeling that anything could stop me from falling out of the door to the ground below, and I suddenly lost all enthusiasm for jumping. I stood there paralyzed with fear and the drop zone came into view and the jump master yelled for me to get ready, but my grip on the door remained loose and I swayed back and forth. The light turned green, the jump master yelled “Go!” and I just stood there, and the jump master yelled again “Go! Go!” and something hit me squarely on the butt. I was out the door, tumbling, then jerked up when the canopy opened, and the ground rushed up and I landed with the most jarring thud yet. I hit so hard that my teeth hurt. Mercifully, no one ever mentioned my hesitation. Cottonpicker would not have been proud.

  The Saturday after our third jump I was at the bar in the main officers club when President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a speech to the nation. Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, he began by saying, “My fellow Americans, we have been called on to stem the tide of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. I have today ordered the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, to Vietnam.”

  Some officers in the bar cheered. A colonel bought a round of drinks, and the bar buzzed with excitement. Men came in from the dining room and were told the news. Some scurried out to make telephone calls; others, especially those from the 1st Cavalry (Cav), left for their units.

  I tried to call Pete at Fort Riley to find out if the 1st Infantry Division was on alert, but couldn’t get through. The next day Fort Benning was alive with troop movements. Tanks moved through areas they had never been in before. Truck convoys clogged the streets.

  Monday started our last week at jump school. We had two more jumps to make, one at night, but they were anticlimactic. The real interest was in the buildup of the 1st Cav for deployment to South Vietnam. The base was on a war footing. There was a sense of breathless anticipation.

  We made the last two jumps. Neither of mine was noted for artistic performance. Both hurt when I landed. I was proud to get my wings, but I was sure that I had developed a fear of heights and had no interest in making future jumps. Graduation was on a Friday afternoo
n. By nightfall I was on my way to Fort Riley and assignment to the 1st Infantry Division.

  I went over again and again what I planned to say to the men of my platoon at our first meeting. Though we had had numbing hours of lectures on leadership at OCS, I thought back to conversations with Dad and Cottonpicker, and remembered lines I had heard in movies and read at college. As I developed phrases that seemed appropriately firm and yet reasonable, I remembered General Heintges’s comments at OCS graduation and felt a sense of destiny.

  I drove with the top down most of the way and the radio turned up. Occasionally I would just howl with joy and pump my fist at the moon.

  Arriving at Fort Riley late Saturday night, I got Pete’s BOQ room number from the post locator and woke him up. We went to a seedy after-hours beer joint in nearby Junction City, Kansas, and talked. Pete said that the entire division was on alert, although most of the able-bodied men had been grouped into the 2d Brigade, which was being readied as the first for deployment to Vietnam. Pete was in the 1st Brigade and had asked an old enlisted friend who worked in division personnel to have me assigned to his battalion.

  Early Monday morning I was not surprised to learn at 1st Division headquarters that I had, in fact, been assigned to Pete’s battalion, and by mid-morning I was checking in with battalion Sgt. Maj. William (Bill) G. Bainbridge. Friendly but firm, his look clearly said, “Second lieutenants do not outrank me, so mind your manners.” Respectfully, I asked him for a platoon beside Pete. The sergeant major looked at me for a long moment, shrugged, nodded his head yes, and within minutes I was walking down to Company A, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division—Capt. John (Jack) E. Woolley, Commanding.

  The buildings in the company area were built during World War II. Four barracks, two stories each, on the right of the company street, orderly room and mess hall on the left. An old oak tree provided shade for the orderly room. Woolley was behind his desk when I walked into his office and saluted. He greeted me warmly and said that I had the 3d Platoon, Peterson had the 4th, Joseph L. Duckett the 1st, and Ray A. Ernst the 2d.