Last Man Out (33 page)

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 could 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.”

When I told him in Monterey that I was thinking about getting out, but felt guilty about forsaking my duty, abandoning my obligation to country at a time of war, he said, “Listen, my friend, you have served one tour in Vietnam. That’s enough. You wanta die, go back. You wanta live, get out. Remember when Haldane ordered us to battalion operations from our platoons? Remember? Did you say, no, my duty is to my men? Of course not. You said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Went with the flow, right? Plus you ain’t got your college degree, because you’re stupid. You stay in the military, you’ll get to about captain and they’ll say, okay, go stand over there, you ain’t going to get promoted again because you’re stupid and don’t have a college degree. That’s the way it works. There is no question in my mind about this. Get out and go home.”

I agreed with him for the most part. But there was in me a compelling notion about the flag, about duty to country. So I wavered, feeling guilty. Then Lenore said she really wanted to come out, and I said, okay, I’m getting out.

It came down to that. Bigger decisions have been made for lesser reasons. Plus the lease was up on our house, so if I stayed
we’d have to find a new place. So I went with the flow. I put in my discharge papers.

I went through the giveaway, throwaway, and send-away selection of personal stuff and was down to a suitcase when Lenore arrived.

On my last day in the Army, 2 May 1967, I cleaned out my desk at the drill sergeant school. Vick had the seventeen staff NCOs standing at attention when I was ready to leave.

A very fine honor guard for my leave-taking, I said. As I stood in front of them, I remembered when I had joined the Army, three and one-half years before—just a faceless “INductee,” shaven-headed, in an ill-fitting new uniform, scared out of my wits.

It had worked out altogether better than I could ever have imagined. I was fortunate to have served in Vietnam when I did and to have led 1st Division soldiers in combat. And I ended up in charge of the seventeen NCOs standing in front of me—among the best in the Army. I would have liked to work with them for the rest of my life. I told them that I had learned most about life from my father, who grew up on a North Carolina farm. But I had also learned from Cottonpicker and Willie O. McGee and Bratcher—all three of them Army sergeants—and I had learned from that staff. I saluted them, wished them the best, and left.

Unfortunately I forgot my hat. Couldn’t very well go back and get it, however. Last impressions are important in benchmark events like this. I left it and drove off base as a civilian.

I said good-bye to Pete and Bob and Linda that night. Nothing would ever be the same with us again; we were on different tracks. There would be new situations, new friends, new places. We told each other that we were thankful that our lives had crossed and that we had spent some time together when we were young and full of energy, hope, and humor. Bob, Pete, and I had fought a war together.

We were all over the place with our comments that night trying to say it all. It was as if we were back on the top deck of the USNS
Mann
trying to figure out where we were going based on where we’d been.

Bob finally said, “Be happy, nothing else matters much. That’s
what I’ve learned. One little word is the key to a successful life. And it’s, ‘Be happy.’ ”

Pete, drunk, said, “Pardon me. Pardon me, please. But, ah, ain’t ‘be happy’ two words?”

Three weeks later I reported to work for Dad at a North Carolina timber mill he had just bought that had turn-of-the-century equipment. Despite our best efforts and the long hours of our thirty-man workforce, we had trouble competing with new, high-tech mills that were also suppliers to the North Carolina furniture industry.

I started work for a hundred dollars a week, enough to pay for room and board in the small town of Sanford, where the mill was located, but not much else. I worked ten to twelve hours a day, first manhandling logs in the yard, then behind the lathes, and finally in the splicing and grading room.

At Christmas we were down to a few weeks’ worth of orders. Money was slow coming in. We stopped buying logs so Daddy could give each man in the mill a Christmas bonus. In our efforts to keep up with the lower prices offered by the modernized mills, we were not meeting cost.

I drove up to New York City to spend the holidays with Lenore. Bravely she introduced me to her friends at a neighborhood restaurant and at a party in her apartment house, but she was obviously uncomfortable when I told people I managed a veneer mill in Sanford, North Carolina. The New Yorkers invariably asked, “VAneer?” and I said “VEneer” and nodded. It seemed to me everyone was very opinionated and loud. Different cultures, Lenore said, different ways of interacting.

Our time alone was pleasant. Briefly I forgot about Sanford and the problems with the mill, but after a couple of days I was ready to leave. I was out of place.

Lenore was not surprised when I said I was going back home before Christmas. She said she understood. Our parting was tender and final.

  FIFTEEN