by Doug Stanton
“You a LRRP from Germany?” Koontz asked Parker.
“I was,” said Stan, “but I want—”
“This way, step forward.”
Private First Class Stan Parker stepped forward and waited as Koontz continued through the crowd, calling out more soldiers. Sergeant Westerman approached a lanky fellow named Private First Class Al Dove, whom he found goofing off around the bus door, with a buddy.
Westerman asked them, “You want to volunteer for dangerous duty?” Always calm, possessed of a lively sense of humor sharpened by hard battle, Westerman, age twenty-eight, was already on his second tour. He was all business as he addressed Dove.
Dove said that he sure would like to volunteer. His friend wasn’t so certain. “You’re going to get me killed!” he half joked to Dove, who nonetheless yanked him into the volunteers’ line.
Dove had been happily drafted into the Army, which had allowed him to escape a home life in Hawaii dominated by an alcoholic father. Dove had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and cruised the beaches, surfing, and occasionally stole food to help keep his family fed. He couldn’t read and signed his enlistment by placing an X on the paper, his illiteracy being a secret he kept hidden from all others, and which fueled, along with his dislike of his father, a fierce temper. Street smart, mechanically minded, he knew that if he stayed in school he’d continue fooling everyone but himself, and that he’d graduate unable to read his own high school diploma. He was glad to be volunteering for the dangerous mission of the platoon.
After an hour of this recruiting, Koontz and Westerman had assembled some twenty-eight young men, including Stan’s buddies Dwight Lane, Brian Riley, and several other LRRPs he’d met in Germany. From places as varied as Texas, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio, Connecticut, the Michigan farm, the Chicago street, and the California beach, they had entered the army out of a combined sense of duty, adventure, and family tradition. In varying ways, they understood they were being sent to fight something called communism. Many were following their father’s or grandfather’s example of military service, and some assumed—and their perceptions would dramatically change when the fighting started—that their combat experience in Vietnam would resemble their fathers’ in World War II.
Specialist Michael Bradshaw, tall and deep-voiced, from the central valley of California, had left Fresno to escape a suffocating home in which he couldn’t listen to rock music and was lorded over by parents who were social workers and college teachers. His senior year, he’d moved to a ranch to earn his room and board, reveling in a newfound adult freedom to listen to the Beatles and come and go as he pleased. During his airborne training, he conjured up a name for a confederation of his trainees—Jerry Austin, Tim Anderson, Tom Soals, Al Dove, Dennis Tinkle—which he felt communicated the mystique of their new Army life. They would be known as Los Recondeleros.
Medic Paul Sudano, from Oregon, had entered the war to try to make his father proud, a man he worshipped for his bravery in charging Iwo Jima’s beaches in World War II. When Sudano met a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier in his senior year, he decided he wanted to be a Green Beret. He was crushed when he learned that at age nineteen, he was two years too young to enter the training. When he joined the Recon Platoon, he felt he was sure to be tested to his limits and then some.
Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Tony Beke, one of four sons of working parents in an extended family of veterans, ran a neighborhood paper route and a morning trapline in nearby woods and streams. After high school, he’d begun work at U.S. Steel, which afforded him a much-coveted draft deferment. Beke, however, felt he hadn’t a right to sit out a war while others were fighting, and quit his job to enlist in the Army, following the example of his father, who’d enlisted during World War II.
Tim Anderson’s classmates in Tacoma, Washington, had signed his senior yearbook, “Never lose your sense of humor, man!” Tall, blond, the proverbial class clown, Anderson had run track and played football and gone to work after graduation making manhole covers in a local foundry. He had not been unhappy when his draft notice arrived. Escape, he thought. I’m getting out of Tacoma! He volunteered to be a paratrooper to earn an extra $55 per month in jump pay, to be added to his monthly $87 paycheck (he’d also collect a whopping $65 in monthly combat pay). By joining Recon, Anderson figured he’d have it made. He’d be with the best troops, and enjoy the best chance of survival.
He’d completed basic training with a like-minded and athletically gifted Californian, Tom Soals, the son of a much-respected Navy submariner. Soals, upon graduation, had dreamed of either being a mountaineer or scientist. As a Boy Scout, he’d begun climbing peaks and glaciers in the West, but he now chose to study science in college. After a year, though, he made the decision to quit and relinquish his draft deferment. Like Beke, and others in the platoon, Soals didn’t like feeling he was sitting on a sideline while others his age were fighting in Vietnam. He wanted to take part in something out there. When he heard Sergeant Koontz’s pitch to join Recon, he welcomed the idea that he was entering an elite brotherhood.
• • •
Koontz explained to his gathered volunteers that they were now members of Recon Platoon, belonging to Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment. He told them that Echo Company, in addition to Recon, also consisted of a Mortar Platoon and a Radar Surveillance Platoon, and that it would support four companies of infantry soldiers.
Koontz told them not to let this “support role” fool them. A Recon soldier, he said, is a seeker of violence in a violent world, operating behind enemy lines, ambushing and attacking, shooting, and surviving. The platoon’s job would be to move from hot zone to hot zone, acting as the roving eyes and ears of the battalion’s four line companies, offering fire support and intel on enemy movements. A Recon soldier’s home is what he carries in his rucksack. His platoon is his world; his squad is his closest family. His Huey helicopter is his ride into battle and back to life in the relative safety of camp. He might land on two to five different LZs in one day, most of them “hot,” under fire. The pace would be dizzying, sleepless. Among soldiers in Vietnam and in a war known for its surreal qualities, men in Recon were to be feared and held in awe. The young men of Recon, he told them, were hunters who might become the hunted at the snap of a twig.
Since this sounded something like what he’d trained to do with the LRRP in Germany, Stan was pretty sure that this new life was the job for him. Except in this new life, he figured he’d actually get to do some real fighting.
Each of the battalion’s four line companies, Alpha through Delta, had its own platoons and squads and served as the battalion’s main force infantry on the front line. These soldiers called themselves “Line Doggies.” Stan and his group called themselves simply “Recon.”
The Recon Platoon would be divided into three squads, with the headquarters section commanded by First Lieutenant John Gay, a handsome blond West Point graduate. Staff Sergeant Freddie Westerman, as the platoon’s sergeant, would act as its train conductor and martinet. Specialists Thomas Soals and Tim Anderson were the platoon’s RTOs, or radio/telephone operators, and would follow Lieutenant Gay wherever he went. All orders for the platoon would come from him, handed down from the battalion level. Echo Company was commanded by Captain Donald R. Taylor and run by First Sergeant Koontz.
The headquarters’ medics were Specialists Troy Fulton, from Pennsylvania; Paul Sudano; Daniel Bagley; and Charlie Fowler, from California. Fulton was a survivor of the 1st Calvary’s 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley and looked like a throwback to old GIs in black-and-white photos of World War II. Charlie Fowler, nineteen, was a happy-go-lucky kid from Napa who liked reading science fiction and mystery novels. His mother had been working as a waitress when she met his father, a Greyhound bus driver, and Charlie had had little contact with his father as a young man and had struggled in school. He’d excelled at sports, especially football, and joined the Army thinking that he might, as his mother’s s
even brothers had told him, “become a man.”
Over the next week, as the platoon’s original ranks filled, 1st Squad would be commanded by Staff Sergeant Lee Bruce, from Massachusetts, assisted by Sergeant Larry Kass, from Ohio, and M-60 machine gunner Specialist Dwight Lane.
The squad’s remaining nine members were Sergeant Tony Beke, New Jersey; Specialist Marvin Acker, Wisconsin; Specialist Roy Cloer, Georgia; Private First Class Harold Holt, Maryland; Specialist Douglas Fleming, Mississippi; Private First Class Warren Jewell, Indiana; Specialist Clifton Naylor, Georgia; Specialist John Payne, Illinois; Specialist Charlie Pyle, Texas.
Second Squad was led by Staff Sergeant Lindsey Kinney from Hawaii and Sergeant Ronald Kleckler from Maryland, with Al Dove as the squad M-60 machine gunner. The other nine platoon members were Sergeant Michael Corcoran; Specialist Donald Curtner, Texas; Specialist Terry Hinote, Florida; Specialist Dennis Kilbury, Washington; Specialist Brian Lewis, Arizona; Private First Class Charles Mansell; Specialist Stanley Parker; Specialist Angel Rivera, New York; Specialist Guido Russo, Illinois; Specialist Francis Wongus, Connecticut.
Third Squad was led by Staff Sergeant Diogenes Misola, from the Philippines; assistant squad leaders Sergeant Tony Ramirez and Sergeant John Lucas, from Michigan (who would leave the platoon in early 1968); and machine gunner Specialist Olen Queen, from West Virginia. The remaining six squad members were Specialist John Arnold; Specialist Jerry Austin, California; Specialist Michael Bradshaw; Specialist Robert Cromer, Georgia; Specialist Brian Riley, Maryland; Specialist Dennis Tinkle, Arkansas; Specialist David Watts Jr., Indiana.
The Recon Platoon was accompanied by forward observers from Echo Company’s Mortar Platoon: Sergeant Andrew Obeso, California; Specialist Ron Kuvik, Missouri; Specialist David Williams, Michigan; and Specialist Marvin Penry, Indiana.
Forty-six young men in total, all of them white, except for four African American troopers, Arnold, Holt, Jewell, and Wongus.
• • •
Their four months of training had made them expert at land navigation, fire and maneuver, hand-to-hand combat, night ambushes, helicopter assaults, and airborne jumps. Living so closely together, they had no choice but to grow close. Stan, Francis Wongus, Guido Russo, and Californian Jerry Austin shared cramped quarters with four metal bunk beds; the barrack’s roof was made of tin that drummed in the heavy autumn rains. Stan felt that Wongus knew he’d have his back in any fight, including with white troopers who might not be used to living alongside an African American.
They blew off steam by sitting on their footlockers, listening to records—Eric Burdon, the Stones, and the Mamas & the Papas were favorites—smoking cigarettes, and playing air guitar using their M-16s as instruments. As Christmas approached, Stan dressed up as Santa Claus—they called him “Stan-ta Claus”—and reached into a laundry bag and pulled out a new rucksack for Al Dove, who received it with his hat cocked sideways, and a wide, aw-shucks-you-shouldn’t-have grin. When Jerry Austin sat on Stan’s lap and asked what Santa had brought, Stan handed him a rifle and said that this year he was getting an all-expense paid vacation to a far-off country, compliments of Uncle Sam. They were excited about their coming deployment, and the word going around was that they’d be leaving sometime just before Christmas, just several weeks away.
When they had permission to leave the post, they piled into a cab and drank in the bars in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, or in the strip clubs and bars outside the guard gates. They often wound up in fights, usually with regular soldiers whom the Airborne troopers called, dismissively, “legs.” They were proud of the Screaming Eagle patch they wore on the shoulder of their uniforms, which, by tradition, they had sewn on their combat uniforms themselves.
One of the platoon’s senior noncommissioned officers, who was an excellent boxer, got drunk one night in a bar and beat up three soldiers, then offered to take on anyone else willing to step up. When he saw someone run out of the bar, he took after him. The fleeing man managed to get to a car, and as he tried to speed away, the Recon NCO jumped on the hood and hung on with his left hand while he reared back and punched through the windshield and hit the soldier in the face, knocking him out. His foot came off the gas and the car came to a stop as the attacking soldier tried to pull his hand back through the hole he’d made. His arm was stuck and horribly lacerated. Stan ran up and had to crush the glass so that his platoon-mate could escape. They limped back up the street and caught a car back to the post. Stan thought that this guy had to be one of the toughest soldiers he’d ever met and made a note to stay close to him once they got to Vietnam.
Always hovering around the edge of their consciousness was the wider world and its own conflagrations, the growing civil unrest in their own home states.
During the summer of 1967, not only was war brewing in Southeast Asia; America was erupting as well. Riots and civil unrest seemed to be everywhere, largely because the fight for civil rights was everywhere, and Martin Luther King Jr. had begun speaking out against the Vietnam War.
That summer, President Johnson had ordered five thousand federal troops to Detroit, including members of the 101st and 82nd Airborne, after the city erupted in a race riot. (Also deployed were eight thousand Michigan National Guardsmen and thousands of local and state police officers.) On July 22, Detroit cops had busted into an illegal drinking establishment and discovered eighty-two African Americans celebrating the return home from Vietnam of two soldiers. The arrest of dozens of bar patrons flipped a switch, and long-simmering tensions burst into the open. Fires were burning throughout the city, and people could be seen driving up and down Woodward Avenue, a main thoroughfare, with rifles sticking out their car windows. The 101st Airborne had arrived to restore order, Sergeant Tony Beke among them. Beke was quickly uncomfortable with the idea that he’d been sent to Detroit “to settle things down” during the city’s riots. He found the experience of pointing weapons at fellow citizens disturbing—“an ugly scene all the way around,” he would later say. In a very real way, and to many men in the platoon, America seemed to be at war both in the United States and in Vietnam.
In October, Norman Mailer and other writers, alongside thousands of protesters, had staged an “exorcism” of the Pentagon, led by poet Allen Ginsberg, yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, and Fugs band member Ed Sanders. First, the protesters declared they were going to levitate the Pentagon in a display of “mass mental unity.” The building’s exorcism went like this, in a text written by Sanders: “In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus . . . in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma.”
Stan found newspaper stories about the war protests confusing. He knew what he should think about the protests—to his thinking, these were the efforts of unpatriotic Americans. But still he was aware that this war, and perhaps any war, was not a clear-cut event like a high school football game.
Americans were simultaneously confused, angered, and emboldened when boxer Muhammad Ali, a man who beat people unconscious for a living, refused to register for the draft and faced a five-year prison sentence (which he avoided). He defiantly told America, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” This prompted Stan to wonder what beef he had with the VC. He was unsure, except he did know that he felt a duty to answer his country’s call.
• • •
On December 13, 1967, after three months of training, sixteen days before Stan Parker’s twentieth birthday, the men of Recon Platoon along with 10,500 other paratroopers leave for Vietnam.
On their way, they fly from Fort Campbell to Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco, and refuel again at Wake Island, a remote Air Force base 3,867 miles east of Vietnam in the Pacific Ocean. Landing on this famous World War II battlefield feels like a pilgrimage for many of the 101st Airborne soldiers, whose fathers ha
d fought the Japanese here twenty-six years earlier.
Tom Soals gets off the plane and stretches his legs by walking down to the beach and diving into its emerald water. Paul Sudano, who’d marveled at his father’s stories about Pacific warfare, is shocked at the island’s size, measuring just less than three square miles. As they walk around the island, Stan, an avid reader of military history, provides a running commentary for the platoon about World War II Marines defending the beach under Japanese fire. The reality is that the Wake Island beachhead looks small and placid. How could so many people have died here, Stan wonders, in such a peaceful place? After several hours, they leave Wake and refuel in the Philippine Islands, at Clark Air Base, and touch down in Vietnam.
They land at Bien Hoa Air Base, about sixteen miles northeast of Saigon, a spinning hive of thousands of Army troops, F-4 fighter bombers, Huey and Chinook helicopters, Jeeps, tanks, and a constant stream of incoming and outgoing men. It’s the heartbeat of America’s war in the country.
The ramp of the enormous C-141 Starlifter drops to the tarmac, and waves of humid heat rush into the plane’s interior, nearly flattening the tired soldiers inside. Stan smells sweet wood smoke, jet exhaust, cooking oil. His first look at Vietnam is intoxicating. Looking out the back of the plane, he sees a woman standing knee-deep in a rice paddy, her hands plunged to the elbows as she tucks new plants into the rich soil.
• • •
The 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne has been fighting in Vietnam since 1965, and now, with the addition of the 2nd and 3rd Brigades, these ten thousand paratroopers are to help clear parts of the country’s northern highlands and arid plateaus, areas infiltrated by NVA and VC fighters. Operation Eagle Thrust is to be quick and decisive.
Stan and the rest of his platoon file into the hangar past a thicket of microphones during a news conference, where the 101st Airborne’s commander, Major General Olinto Mark Barsanti, is holding court with reporters. A military band strikes up, and Barsanti presents the famous Screaming Eagles to General William Westmoreland, Commander, MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam). “The 101st is ready for combat,” Barsanti tells Westmoreland, a prior commander of the 101st Airborne Division and Fort Campbell, from 1956 to 1960. (Westmoreland also served in World War II and Korea.)
