Last Man Out (5 page)

When I was assigned as platoon leader and had to march the platoon to an assembly area on the athletic field, Lieutenant Taylor walked briskly at my side. During most of the march he
yelled obscenities, particularly as I prepared to give commands to the platoon.

Early the following week we had our first written test on leadership. Although it required reading during our study period at night, I had used my time to surreptitiously clean my equipment, that being Lieutenant Taylor’s focus of the week with me. Just before lights out the night before the test, I told Pete I wasn’t ready; I was just going to have to wing it. Ten minutes after lights out I heard a “psssss” by the door to my room. It was Pete. He told me to get the blanket from the foot of my bed and follow him into the latrine. As we huddled under the blanket in the showers, Pete shared his notes.

Because of Pete, I passed the test the next day.

Sometime later that week we made a pledge to help each other get through OCS. There was strength in numbers, we said. Thereafter I made him number one on my bayonet sheet. Pete ran interference for me whenever Lieutenant Taylor was around and tried to distract him. This often cost him push-up punishment. When Pete’s roommate dropped out, I moved in with him.

We worked well together, Pete and I, though we both had a sense of fun and irreverence that was a liability. As the weeks progressed we became more accepting of the traditional OCS hazing and no longer took the constant harassment personally, except with Taylor.

Classroom instruction was interspersed with field exercises, with emphasis on leadership training. According to our instructors, our effectiveness as future infantry officers depended on our ability to motivate and lead men. Respect, fairness, humor, poise, determination, confidence, and empathy were characteristics of good leaders. Vanity, laziness, and sarcasm were not. Smart-asses don’t make good leaders, we were told. Peterson looked at me and shook his head.

Veterans of World War II and the Korean War spoke to us about the demands on a small-unit commander in combat. One old gnarled NCO said personal courage was essential in leading men under fire. A good combat leader had to be a natural risk taker or he had to summon from within the will to get in harm’s way—either way, courage appeared the same. To do their jobs in
war, infantry officers must be courageous, and South Vietnam was our likely testing ground.

“South what?” someone asked.

“South Vietnam,” the veteran said, “is a small jungle country in the Orient and American soldiers are fighting and dying there.”

I had heard Vietnam mentioned occasionally during basic and AIT training, but it was never discussed outside the classrooms that I remember. However, it seemed more relevant now, and we talked about it among ourselves during the next break. Everyone pronounced it differently.

“What are we doing in Vieeet-nammmm, really?” someone asked.

“Killing Commies,” someone else said.

“Okay, that’s legal.”

At the end of the eleventh week at OCS, all candidates faced an evaluation. Those who fell below a certain rating had to go before a panel, ostensibly to defend their records. In fact, candidates who were paneled were usually kicked out of the program or recycled to another company, regardless of what they said. It was the weeding-out process at work.

The panel was scheduled for Friday morning, 29 January 1965.

On Wednesday morning before the panel we fell out for a Physical Training run, although the rumor circulated that it was to test endurance and would have a bearing on those selected for the panel.

Wearing T-shirts, fatigue pants, and boots, we left the company area and shuffled along in formation. A candidate at the side led us in marching songs. It was a warm morning and Pete and I were shuffling along side by side, singing. Occasionally we would windmill our arms. Ah, it was good to be young and in shape. We could take the run.

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 again. 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.”