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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  The Recon Platoon in Vietnam, December 1967–December 1968

  Invocation

  PART I

  THE GIRL WITH THE PEACHES

  PART II

  WANDERING

  PART III

  HOMECOMING

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  About the Author

  Bibliography and Suggested Reading

  For the men and their families of Recon Platoon, Echo Company, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 501st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, in honor of their service to their families, neighbors, and country

  And for those still coming home, body and soul

  For when the rambler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings not a handful of earth, which would explain nothing to anyone, but instead some hard-won word he has gained, pure and simple.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events recounted in this book are based on dozens of interviews with U.S. soldiers and civilians, as well as those living in Vietnam during the war. These interviews, some of which were in-depth and stretched over a series of days—and, in some cases, years—took place in the United States and Vietnam. Most dwelled on the subjects’ firsthand recollections of events related in this book. In addition, the author traveled to the region described in these pages. The author’s research also included examination of personal journals, previously published media accounts, contemporaneous photography, and official U.S. military logs and histories.

  Many of the events described here transpired under traumatic circumstances. For this reason, and perhaps because memory is often imperfect, the recollections of some of the participants conflicted at times. While the author has made every attempt to present an accurate portrait of the events involved, he has related the version that seemed most consistent with other accounts.

  THE RECON PLATOON IN VIETNAM, DECEMBER 1967–DECEMBER 1968

  ECHO COMPANY, 1ST BATTALION (AIRBORNE), 501ST INFANTRY REGIMENT, 2ND BRIGADE, 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, U.S. ARMY

  Of Recon Platoon’s original forty-six members—listed in bold—including forward observers in the Mortar Platoon, three were killed in action, twenty-three were wounded in action once, four were wounded twice, and four were wounded three times, totaling a 74 percent casualty rate.

  Recon Platoon Headquarters

  First Lieutenant John W. Gay, platoon leader, reassigned to Division LRRPs in late February, WIA May 23, 1969

  Second Lieutenant David Lewis, platoon leader, assigned late February, WIA March 20, 1968

  Staff Sergeant Freddie E. Westerman, platoon sergeant, WIA March 23, 1968

  Specialist/4 Timothy R. Anderson, rifleman/RTO

  SP/4 Thomas A. Soals, rifleman/RTO, WIA March 14, 1968

  Medics from Headquarters & Headquarters Company 1/501

  SP/5 Troy Fulton

  SP/5 Paul Sudano, WIA September 17, 1968

  SP/4 Daniel Bagley, WIA May 7, 1968

  SP/4 Charles Fowler, WIA March 21, 1968

  1st Squad

  SSG Lee W. Bruce, squad leader, WIA March 29, 1968

  Sergeant Anthony F. Beke, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22 and 29, 1968, and May 17, 1968

  SGT Jimmy Benefjedo, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA May 6, 1968

  SGT Larry Kass, assistant squad leader, KIA February 17, 1968

  SP/4 Marvin S. Acker, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22 and 26, 1968

  SP/4 Roy L. Cloer, M-60/rifleman/scout

  SP/4 Douglas Fleming, rifleman/scout, WIA March 29, 1968

  SP/4 Dwight D. Lane, M-60 machine gunner, WIA April 2, 1968

  SP/4 Clifton G. Naylor, rifleman/scout, WIA March 7, 1968

  SP/4 John W. Payne, rifleman/scout, WIA January 15, 1968

  SP/4 Charles Pyle, rifleman/scout, WIA March 21, 1968, KIA March 22, 1968

  SP/4 Luis Zendejas, rifleman/scout, February/March replacement, WIA March 22 and April 2, 1968

  Private First Class Phillip Anthony, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA April 14, 1968

  PFC David Bain, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA April 9 and 14, 1968

  PFC Sam Cooper, rifleman/scout, late-February replacement, WIA March 20, 1968

  PFC Harold Holt, rifleman/scout/RTO

  PFC Warren R. Jewell, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22, 1968

  PFC Eddie Johnson, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA April 2, 1968

  PFC Richard Lapa, rifleman/scout, February/March replacement, WIA March 22, 1968

  PFC Allen Lawrence, rifleman/scout, late-February replacement, WIA March 16, 1968

  2nd Squad

  SSG Lindsey F. Kinney, squad leader, WIA February 18 and March 23, 1968

  SGT Ronald W. Kleckler, assistant squad leader, WIA February 16, February 18, and July 26, 1968

  SGT Michael A. Corcoran, rifleman/scout, WIA December 1968

  SP/4 Ronald L. Bard, rifleman/scout, late-February replacement, WIA March 22 and April 2, 1968

  SP/4 Donald F. Curtner, rifleman/scout, WIA September 17, 1968

  SP/4 Albert W. Dove, M-60 machine gunner, WIA February 18, 1968

  SP/4 John E. (Mickey) Evans, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA September 17, 1968

  SP/4 Terry G. Hinote, rifleman/scout, WIA February 18, 1968

  SP/4 Dennis P. Kilbury, assistant gunner, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22, 1968

  SP/4 Brian H. Lewis, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22, 1968

  SP/4 John S. (Stan) Parker, assistant gunner, rifleman/scout, WIA February 18, March 14, and April 29, 1968

  SP/4 Angel L Rivera, rifleman/scout, WIA February 18, 1968

  SP/4 Guido D. Russo, rifleman/RTO, WIA February 18 and March 22, 1968

  SP/4 Albert L. Smyth, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA July 7, 1968

  SP/4 Joe Weise, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA April 20, 1968

  SP/4 Francis O. Wongus, rifleman/scout, WIA March 22, 1968

  PFC Jerry W. Boutwell, March replacement

  PFC Darryl Lintner, March 8 replacement, KIA April 20, 1968

  PFC Charles R. Mansell, rifleman/scout, WIA June 8, 1968

  3rd Squad

  SSG Diogenes F. Misola, squad leader

  SGT James Brown, assistant squad leader, late-February replacement, WIA March 20, 1968

  SGT Tony Ramirez, assistant squad leader

  SGT John A. Lucas, assistant squad leader, ETS early 1968

  SP/4 John H. Arnold, rifleman/scout/RTO

  SP/4 Jerry R. Austin, rifleman/scout, WIA March 29 and July 12, 1968, and May 12, 1969

  SP/4 Michael D. Bradshaw, rifleman/scout

  SP/4 Robert A. Cromer, rifleman/scout

  SP/4 Ronald Darb, rifleman/scout, April replacement, WIA June, 8, 1968

  SP/4 Jackie Foster, rifleman/scout, February/March replacement, WIA March 27, 1968

  SP/4 Olen R. Queen, M-60 machine gunner, WIA March 21, 1968

  SP/4 Brian D. Riley, rifleman/scout

  SP/4 Dennis A. Tinkle, rifleman/scout, WIA February 18, 1968

  SP/4 David S. Watts Jr., assist
ant gunner, rifleman/scout, WIA October 4, 1968

  PFC John Geren, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA April 29, 1968

  PFC Ricky Brooks, rifleman/scout, March replacement, WIA May 8, 1968

  4.2-Inch Mortar Platoon Forward Observers (FO) from E Company to Recon Platoon

  SGT Andrew M. Obeso, forward observer

  SP/4 Ronald L. Kuvik, forward observer, WIA April 20 and June 8, 1968

  SP/4 Marvin Penry, forward observer, KIA March 29, 1968

  SP/4 David Williams, forward observer, WIA June 8, 1968

  INVOCATION

  January 31, 1968

  Landing Zone Jane, Northern I Corps near Hai Lang, South Vietnam

  It’s 4:00 a.m. when they attack.

  Stan lifts himself up from the puddle, whiskered face dripping wet. He’s been sleeping in cold water, trying to pull an imaginary blanket over his aching shoulders, water filling his nose, his ears . . . He hears whistles. Shrill whistles, like a referee’s, the same sound he’d heard in high school when he was about to pin a wrestling opponent. But now soldiers are running past him. What’s happening?

  He feels a blow to the head and he’s knocked dizzy.

  He tries standing, but he can’t. He can’t move. His cold bed made of muddy water has left him numb. He’s scared. He’s so utterly embarrassed and ashamed about this. Who’s watching? he wonders. Who will know I can’t move? He sees an enemy soldier running in his direction. A sweaty face. Lit by flashes as it gallops toward him, coming into focus. Stan freezes. He sees the soldier’s silver bayonet riding toward him, the sharp point swinging back and forth in the damp air, hunting him, when the soldier pitches forward and the bayonet falls past Stan’s face, just missing. The enemy soldier crashes down on Stan.

  He looks up and sees another soldier, an American, an older seasoned trooper, jerking his own bayonet from the attacking soldier’s back. The trooper yells, urging him to get up.

  The dead soldier is dressed in khaki pants and shirt, the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army. He’s young, maybe Stan’s age, nineteen or twenty. Stan’s never been this close to or touched a dead person before, except when he said good-bye to his mother at her funeral a few months back. He pushes the body away and jumps up.

  And he starts running.

  He runs toward the concertina wire at the rim of the hill where the landing zone (LZ Jane) is situated. Stan knows the 101st Airborne soldiers have to hold the wire—but how? Artillery is blasting now, long shells crunching over Stan’s head, sailing into the dark. The ground is shaking. Illumination flares throw gray shadows against the trees, making enormous apparitions that crawl through the branches, limb to limb.

  Stan looks down the hill and sees hundreds of NVA soldiers pouring up the scrubby draw at him. He’s afraid of dying. He drops to one knee and starts firing his M-16. And then he sees something even more amazing.

  The enemy soldiers start pole-vaulting over the wire.

  They run up the hill, bamboo poles bouncing on their shoulders, plant the poles, swing up into the night, illuminated by the flares, hang there, captured at this apex as if in a photograph . . . and fall back to earth on the other side of the wire. Others who leap across the sky disappear in red mist or an expanding cloud of bone as the machine gunners pour fire into them. The heavy rounds eat the men right out of the air.

  The surviving pole vaulters run past Stan, headed toward the center of the LZ, clutching canvas pouches.

  Stan hears someone yell, “Sappers!”

  In the pouches are explosives. The sappers are headed on suicide missions to the command bunker.

  Everyone in the platoon fires at these running men. When hit, the men detonate with a mighty force. Stan looks up—it’s begun to rain. He tastes blood.

  It’s raining men, exploded men.

  And then something flashes in him, some loom is unfolded in him, and the loom’s shuttle commences back and forth, across the soft treasure of who he is. Shuttle, whisper, weave; shuttle. Back in high school, he heard stories of nights like these, of U.S. soldiers overrun in their camp by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong soldiers. Around him, the long barrels of machine guns start to glow red. An NVA soldier, ten feet away, raises his rifle to fire—Stan shoots him. He lunges with his bayonet into another man as he rushes past him.

  Stan catches a quick movement—something lands on his shoulder, light as a bird.

  He turns and sees two detached fingers perched on his uniform, trembling as he breathes. Pointed upward, they grow still. He lifts his eyes.

  The sky, the sky. Who is watching this? Who?

  PART I

  THE GIRL WITH THE PEACHES

  April 20, 2005

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  I first met Stan Parker in May 2005 when I was climbing into a Chinook helicopter on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. I was trying to get to a U.S. Army Special Forces camp in Khost, on the Pakistani border. Wearing wraparound shades and a keffiyeh, Stan was older by at least twenty years than many of the soldiers I saw walking around the airstrip. He was in charge of air operations at Bagram Air Base, and this meant that he had charge of me. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating, and we weren’t flying anywhere. But fortunately for me, Stan Parker started telling stories while we waited.

  Short, sandy-haired, broad-chested, Stan had an easy smile and talked a lot like Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove. He was wearing body armor, with an M-4 carbine slung across his chest. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. After thirty-five years of military service, he told me, he was finally thinking of “getting ready for retirement.”

  His had been quite a career. In 1993, he’d been in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia. He’d been part of the Special Forces operation in Honduras, the Philippines, Korea, and Eritrea, Africa. He’d been in gun battles in Afghanistan. When I asked Stan how many firefights he’d been in, he could not come up with an answer—hundreds, perhaps. He had achieved the rank of sergeant major and had been assigned to U.S. Special Operations Command, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida. He was one of the Army’s senior elite soldiers, and, on top of this, he was deeply wired into America’s counterterrorism fight across the globe. He knew things. He’d seen things, he told me, “beyond a civilized person’s comprehension.”

  Yet when I’d asked him to name the scariest part of his military career, he said, “Coming home from Vietnam.”

  And on the day we met, that’s what Stan Parker really wanted to talk about: what had happened to him thirty-seven years earlier when he was twenty, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

  Vietnam. 1968. January.

  Stan had read my book In Harm’s Way, and this had given him an idea. He’d seen that story about World War II, and the sinking of a Navy ship and the ordeal of its crew, as a survival story.

  Stan wanted to know if I would ever write about how he and his buddies had survived the Tet Offensive, when his forty-six-man Reconnaissance Platoon attacked and was attacked by well-trained North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong fighters. Stan’s odyssey had lasted ninety days, until he was wounded for a third time and forced to leave the intense brotherhood of his unit. A soldier awarded three Purple Hearts had no choice but to be shipped home. In order to stay in Vietnam, he’d refused the third award. (He was subsequently assigned to another unit.)

  I took Stan’s suggestion about writing this story and filed it under “Maybe.” I didn’t think America was ready to hear that story while in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the country never would be ready. Part of this had to do with the age of the men who’d fought in Vietnam. Now in their late fifties and early sixties, they weren’t old enough to want to talk, not just yet.

  In September 2012, seven years later, I gave a lecture to cadets and command staff at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and I remembered that Stan Parker, now retired, lived nearby. We hadn’t spoken in several years, and I called him.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,�
�� he said, surprising me. “I’ve told my buddies about you. We’re ready. We want to talk about Vietnam.”

  The truth was that I’d never forgotten meeting Sergeant Major Stan Parker on that helicopter in Afghanistan. I still remembered the sunlight coming in through the green helo’s rear ramp as this old soldier asked me to write about something that had happened to him and his Recon buddies years earlier, something that had affected them deeply and that they didn’t understand.

  Tom Brokaw, he’d said then, was the only civilian who’d ever looked at his Combat Infantryman Badge with star and recognized that he’d served in Vietnam. Stan had met Brokaw a few months earlier on a helicopter in Afghanistan when he was reporting an NBC News special. Stan had been tasked as his bodyguard. He proudly showed me a photo of their meeting. Back in the late 1990s, Brokaw had discovered the willingness of World War II veterans to unpack their secrets about their war as they turned seventy and felt perhaps that it was time to unburden themselves.

  Maybe, just maybe, I wondered, the same might now be true of the more than 2.7 million Americans who had deployed in Vietnam, 1.6 million of whom experienced combat or the threat of attack. Their average ages now ranged from sixty-five to sixty-nine.

  That’s a lot of people, I thought, a lot of untold stories. It seemed time for them to come home.

  • • •

  Even before he retired, Stan wanted to track down his former Recon 1/501 platoon-mates and ask them what they remembered. Some of them he found on the Internet didn’t want to be reminded of the past and hung up when we called. He spent a surreal dinner with a former Recon member who made the nervous admission that he’d never told his wife that he’d served in Vietnam. He pulled Stan aside and begged him not to tell his family. Stan made up a fib that they once worked together many years earlier.

  This pattern of evasion troubled him. He wondered what it meant when a person couldn’t admit that a major chapter of his life, perhaps its most potent and transformative moment, had ever taken place.