Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  I looked up old friends. The person I wanted to see most of all, Cottonpicker, was himself in Vietnam, assigned to the 173d Airborne Regiment. He had influenced much of what I had done in Vietnam, and I wanted to report to him, to get his approval.

  Most of my other boyhood friends did not know what questions to ask about my experiences, and I did not volunteer much. Public energies during this war were spent on moral hand-wringing. There was little understanding about what was going on in the jungle of Indochina. American soldiers were not the war’s heroes. Actually, they played a minor role in everyday reporting. The principal characters in this country were the politicians and media opinion-makers.

  The media were a powerful influence in the war. Comments from everyday Americans tended to be reframed television and newspaper reports. Each day, the media people rearranged their words to deliver the same message: “bad war.” The TV video clips of the fighting were not balanced. They were impersonal, catastrophic, horrible imagery of a losing army—intentionally cast that way, it seemed to me. My memories of our Army in Vietnam were of dedicated men doing dangerous work.

  I stopped reading the papers, and at home we did not watch the evening news.

  After two weeks of home leave, I flew to Lincoln and picked up my car for the drive to Fort Ord. Pete’s parents met me at the airport and listened carefully to my version of the stories about Pete and the action on the day he was wounded. Mrs. Peterson held my hand in the car as we talked and said how fortunate that we came out of that chaos alive.

  We went down to the filling station where my Mercedes was garaged. As we drove up I saw it parked off to the side, cleaned up and serviced for my arrival. How handsome it looked. I thought about the day I saw it sitting on the edge of the farmer’s lot. It still looked as good a year later. They also serve who sit and wait—that car had soul. I had the feeling that it was glad to see me, too, as it jumped away from the service station—like a young kid, I thought, happy to be on the road again.

  Though winter was setting in, I put the top down, turned the radio up loud, and streaked across the wheat lands. I felt great. “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina, in the morn … ing.”

  I passed through Cheyenne, Wyoming, where we had stopped for a rest during our train move to Oakland en route to Vietnam. I’m lapping the world, I thought. Small place.

  FOURTEEN

  The Best Job in the World

  Pete was asleep in his BOQ room when I arrived in Fort Ord. We embraced, but Pete said that was generally frowned on between two men alone in a BOQ room. I had brought along a six-pack of beer, and we sat talking, laughing.

  Though late, we decided to visit Bob and his bride Linda, who lived in a Monterey apartment. We bought a bottle of champagne on the way and jumped over the back fence of the apartment house. The sliding glass door was unlocked, and we barged in, catching Bob in his shorts. I said that only six weeks out of the combat zone and already Dunn had dropped his guard. He promised to sandbag the patio over the weekend and post Linda guard. She said, “I can do that. Got my broom and my hair spray, they’ll never take us alive.”

  We liked Linda right away. Perky, bright, personable, and attractive, she filled out the group. We sat around their living room and out by the pool of the apartment house that evening. Finally everybody had to show their battle scars. Pete’s shoulder looked terrible, with lacerated, pink skin stretched over what looked like the end of a coat hanger. Bob had been wounded in so many places, we tried to count all the scars, marking them with a ballpoint pen. For me, Pete and Dunn held me down and pulled my pants to my knees. There isn’t much honor in getting your butt shot in war, although Linda said, “Well, Jimmy, at least you weren’t facing the other direction.”

  I officially signed in at Fort Ord the next morning. Within the month I was officer in charge (OIC) of the 6th Army Area Drill Sergeant School, the boot camp for drill sergeants in the Northwest. Sergeant Vick was the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC). There were seventeen senior NCOs on my faculty, all impressive soldiers. Each carried a riding crop, the symbol of authority of a drill sergeant school instructor.

  The school was a showcase for the post commander when VIPs toured, and the staff and I were called on almost weekly to conduct 6th Army Area award and retirement ceremonies. As the OIC, I sat on NCO promotion panels, prosecuted summary courts-martial, and was a mainstay on OCS review boards.

  I taught two classes, conducted Saturday morning inspections of the drill sergeant candidates, and had the final word on who graduated.

  It was the best job in the Army, at one of the most sought after posts, and my closest friends were nearby. Pete and I roomed in the same BOQ. He was assigned to a line unit that went to a field garrison every Monday through Friday. On the weekends we spent time with Bob and Linda, playing bridge and doing the Monterey Peninsula. Carmel and Big Sur were incredibly beautiful and we were particularly enthralled with the area in between—the Carmel Highlands—where we could drive to scrub-lined vistas high in the hills and look out over the rocky coast littered with rafts of seal otters and herds of sea lions far out into the Pacific where migrating gray whales passed. Late one afternoon, Pete and I, with dates, were on an overlook when a storm came in from the north. Under the threatening sky the waves broke angrily on the rocks and lightning flashed in the distance. The old evergreen trees in the Highland swayed in the wind. There was salt in the air, the smell of nature.

  “This is what we were fighting for, this is America,” I said.

  “Boy,” Pete said, “how times change. We used to say America was those people back in that honky-tonk bar in Junction City, Kansas. Remember?”

  “Aug,” I mused, “fuck ’em, I hadn’t seen this yet.”

  My sister Judy, married with a couple of kids, lived in the San Francisco area. Pete and I occasionally drove up to the Bay Area on the weekends and hung out, at Judy’s and in the Fisherman’s Wharf area.

  Pete Javit, another OCS graduate and Vietnam vet, told us the ins and outs of off-post housing. We applied, got preapproved for a substantial allowance, and started looking for a place—with what we would be given, the three of us could live almost anywhere on the peninsula. I was for something along Cannery Row in Monterey because I was a John Steinbeck fan. Javit wanted something near Pebble Beach.

  Pete, however, found the best place—a furnished three-bedroom house in the Carmel Highlands owned by a local professor on a year’s sabbatical somewhere. To reach it we had to turn off the ocean highway and climb a winding road halfway to the top of a hill and then down a small one-lane road behind an Episcopal bishop’s house. Our house faced the ocean and jutted out over a ledge so that standing in one of the front bedrooms there was nothing but ocean to the front. Below, the distance of five or six football fields, was the rocky coast where seals and otters and sea lions played. The sound of waves crashing on the rocks was a pleasant background to the noise of birds in the trees behind the house. It was as near a perfect setting as three boys in their mid-twenties could hope for. On the weekends it became “party central” to all levels of the local community, although there was a tendency toward Vietnam veterans and zingy, hippie girls. One-on-one, the braless wonders of northern California got along with the short-haired GIs of Fort Ord, especially when they found out some of us had war wounds. Linda Dunn did not approve of most of the girls who hung around the house, however.

  “Jimmy Parker, and over there, you, Larry Peterson, you both are bad. Bad. And Bob Dunn, you listen to me, you are never, ever allowed up here without me.”

  Kim Novak lived two houses down from us. Everyone I knew had seen her in Picnic with William Holden. She lived by the ocean in a compound with a gate. Almost every day we stood on our terrace, looked down toward her house, and quoted William Holden’s lines to her. Sometimes at night before going to bed, we went outside and said, “Good night, Kim.”

  Our mailbox was near the cutoff by the bishop’s house. The mailbox for the ho
use across the street hung on the same board. The woman who lived there often worked in her garden, and she would wave at me. Occasionally we met at the mailbox or in the local supermarket. One day I was coming in from the drill sergeant school in my dress uniform. She hailed me from her yard as I checked the mail.

  She was in her late forties or early fifties and looked bookish, like a New Englander, I thought. Obviously she had been working in her garden for some time that day; she was dirty and rumpled. After she asked me about the plumage on my uniform and I explained it briefly, she told me that she was having a garden party that weekend and wondered if I would be able to come. Possibly the other men in my house would also attend. I said I couldn’t speak for them, but I’d be there. She asked if I would wear my uniform because, she said, I looked so handsome in it.

  Pete and Javit had no interest in garden parties. Bob and Linda said they would go with me, but then something came up and I went by myself, still dressed immaculately from Saturday morning inspection at the drill sergeant school. About thirty people were gathered in the side garden. A bar stood under a small tent in the rear.

  The Episcopal bishop was standing near the lattice entrance portal, and we spoke. He did not seem as warm and engaging as the ministers I remembered in North Carolina, but rather of the arty sort. Beyond him I saw several people moving in our direction, drawn, I was sure, by my uniform.

  “These medals,” one woman said to me, “what do they mean? What did you do to receive them?”

  I began explaining the campaign medals, and the bishop asked to be excused. As he was breaking through the crowd around me, he looked back in my direction and nodded, smiling sweetly.

  “Tell me about this ribbon,” said a woman. “What did you do, personally?” She wasn’t friendly. Her tone was hard, her gaze steady and accusing. I looked around, surprised to see that the other people were glaring at me.

  “Did you kill any women and children for that?” someone asked.

  “Be quiet, Helen,” said the first woman, turning quickly to the new questioner. “I have him first. He answers to me first. What did you do that got you that medal?”

  I scanned the crowd again for one friendly face. Finally, I looked at a man standing behind some women on my right. He had a round, happy face and looked a little drunk. I continued to look at him until he spoke.

  “Did you carry a bayonet?” he asked with a slight lisp.

  Where was Duckett when I needed him? They wouldn’t attack a black man like this.

  I talked about some of the personalities I knew—Pete, Dunn, Woolley, Bratcher, Spencer. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. One woman told me that she had heard we gassed whole villages, the Air Force bombed populated areas with napalm, and we had body count quotas on operations.

  Smiling at her, I said the public perception of the war in Vietnam was distorted because it had been sensationalized by the media. They had an attitude when it came to coverage—get as much blood in the frame as possible—and they always ended with the message that it’s a bad war. It seemed to me that they never ever had a feel for the GI. One reason, I guessed, was the men doing the reporting could not relate to the poor and the black from our society who were doing the fighting and the dying over there. I also guessed that no one present knew anyone fighting on the ground in Vietnam. No one they knew, knew my war.

  “War,” a scrawny little man said, “corrupts the human experience. Failures in statesmanship lead to war. It is an enormous waste.”

  “It is disconcerting,” a woman close to me said, “your contention that there is a separation between us and the soldiers over there. That’s what happened with the Nazis. No one knew what the soldiers were doing in Treblinka. It’s a government gone mad. Leads to things like the Holocaust where mass murder was sanctioned. Body-count murder in Vietnam is very similar, it seems to me.”

  I looked around. My way out of the gate was blocked. Perhaps they sensed that I might try to make a break for it. I stood there, like a bear in a bear baiting, nodding to the people who were talking, but it was hard to focus on one person. So many were talking in a breathless frenzy.

  Finally noticing a path open toward the bar, I excused myself and made my way to the rear of the garden.

  “Very mean scene, man,” said the smiling young bartender. “They were on you like a mob. Like they were waiting for you. Why did you wear your uniform, for Christ sake?”

  “She asked me,” I said, looking at the guy with eyes wide, “the hostess asked me to wear my fucking uniform. Jesus, I didn’t know that she was an antiwar piranha.”

  I took a deep breath and asked the boy for a beer. Someone walked up beside me. A woman. I could smell her. She placed her arms on the counter. I looked at her wrist to see if there was anything I recognized about her jewelry to tie her to the women behind me. Nothing was familiar, but I decided not to make eye contact so as to avoid any further confrontation. The woman asked for wine. She had a soft, cultured voice, not harsh and raspy like the voices in the crowd by the gate. I fingered the rings of water on the bar and debated whether to look at her. Acting on a sudden impulse, I turned my head at the same time that the woman turned hers. We were no more than ten inches apart.

  Kim Novak.

  Honest to God, Kim Novak. I looked at her eyelids, at the pores of her cheek, at her full lips. She smiled, warm and friendly, and said softly, “Hello.”

  Kim Novak.

  My mind froze. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t even think about thinking about something to say.

  Kim Novak.

  We were so close that I couldn’t even tell if she was beautiful. I looked at the forehead and the eyes and the nose and the lips, but I didn’t know what the whole face looked like.

  Except for my eyes, my body was rock still. Saliva collected in my mouth, and a little drained out and ran down my chin. Kim lowered her gaze but continued to smile. She looked up at the bartender when he handed her the glass of wine, thanked him, turned to look back at me quickly, and then walked away.

  I stood there in shock, my head still turned to where she had been. First the screaming liberals and then Kim Novak. Get me outa here, I said to myself. I turned, walked through the house, passed the hostess without comment, and went out the front door and down the road to my house.

  That night, I told Javit and Pete about the party and meeting Kim Novak, but I did not tell them that I had been frozen speechless. I said that we had a little chat, and she was nice, very soft, very different from the other hard cases there. I told them I thought I had made an impression. She knew where we lived, and I wouldn’t doubt that she might someday just pop in for a drink. Or invite us down. Whatever.

  Several nights later, Javit and I were at the Matador Bar in Carmel. We were sitting at a table for two against the wall, near the front. Javit looked up and said that Kim Novak had just walked in.

  I said, “Yeah, sure. I bet she’ll come over and hug my neck when she sees I’m here.” Shortly afterward I was walking near the row of bar stools on the way to the men’s room. A woman swung around as if to leave. I was close, and she looked at me.

  Kim Novak.

  Veering off to the left away from her, I walked right into a table and spilled all of the drinks on it. Fortunately, apologizing and righting people’s drinks gave me something to do, so that I didn’t have to turn back to Kim. No one at the table understood how I could have “accidentally” walked into their table—it wasn’t like they were in the middle of the aisle.

  Kim Novak notwithstanding, it was a very good year. In March 1967 a representative from the Army’s Personnel Section at the Pentagon visited Fort Ord and told an assembly of company-grade officers that most of us would be going to Vietnam after our Fort Ord tour. We were infantry officers, and the Army needed infantry officers in Vietnam. Pete put in for helicopter school. Dunn said he was getting out.

  Lenore wanted to visit the Monterey Peninsula. I told her that if I got out of the service, she co
uld fly out and we’d drive back across the States together. A grand idea, she said.

  But I told her I hadn’t decided to get out yet. I’d let her know.

  I wavered for days.

  I did not want to go back to Vietnam as a replacement. If I had been offered a proposition to take my drill sergeant school staff to Vietnam, I would have gone. If I could have gone back and taken over my old platoon with Bratcher and Spencer and Rome and Manuel and Ayers and Castro and Lyons, I would have gone. Neither was a possibility.

  I also considered the soldiers who had been in that Quonset when I left. And the news. It was not a very good war. The United States was not winning on anyone’s scorecard and, more important to me, did not appear intent on winning. There was no groundswell of public support for the fighting GI.

  Plus, Dunn said there were bullets with our names on them over there. As long as we stayed here, we were out of range. Dunn knew I felt an unusually strong sense of duty—I told him in Vietnam about the personal way I took the OCS graduation address, how I accepted responsibility to protect the dignity of the United States for all of time. Bob’s comments at the time had been, “It was just gas. You were excited, all pumped up, Momma and Daddy and your little sister in the audience. Had some champagne I bet. Just gas. It does that … distorts your thinking. Besides, Parker, like Pete and I have told you often, you are one of the most unashamedly self-serving individuals we have ever known. You are not one to go into the priesthood, or to be believed about dedicating your life to some principle, other than ‘Jimmy first.’ So I don’t know where all this comes from. Forget it. Do what’s expected. That’s enough.”