Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  “Hey, shut up,” I said over the din of the firing. “You’re all right. Just keep your head down. You’ll be okay.”

  He continued to yell, and I dived out beside him.

  That encouraged the VC, and they began firing again—at me.

  There wasn’t enough room behind the anthill for both of us, so I rolled to my left behind another anthill. I brought my knees up to my chest as rounds began to hit the ground on either side. Then fire from an automatic rifle began to saw down the anthill gradually. As chunks of the rocklike structure were shot off, pieces fell on my helmet. When I looked up I saw the top of the anthill coming down.

  “Shoot that son of a bitch with the machine gun! Shoot him!” I yelled to my men.

  More VC rounds came in and hit the ground on either side of me. The top of the anthill was getting lower and lower. Trying to roll myself into a smaller ball, I looked back at the wood line where my men were firing past me.

  I had a clear thought: if I were to get out of that alive, I’d never worry about the small stuff of life again. Then I had another clear thought: I hope no one in my platoon shoots me.

  Firing continued back and forth, but we were gaining the edge in volume. Finally, the gun that was cutting down my anthill stopped as the VC pulled back and disengaged. I slowly got to my feet. The medic was treating the point man as other members of the platoon moved around the clearing to chase the VC.

  Later I told Bratcher about my promise to myself not to worry about the small stuff if I survived the anthill attack. “Naw,” he said, “you’ll forget about it.”

  Back in the battalion area after the operation, Sp4. Burke, Colonel Haldane’s radio operator, sought me out and told me the colonel wanted to see me. Strange—this had never happened before. Maybe, I thought, a court-martial order had come through from the division aid station. I could take the heat, I thought, because I had no guilt about the aid-station problems.

  Dunn also had been summoned and was waiting outside the colonel’s tent for me. We went in together and saluted the battalion commander, who was sitting behind his desk. He told us we were good officers, good platoon leaders, and that we were lucky. Of the twelve line platoon leaders in the battalion who had arrived in-country, only five remained. New replacements were coming in, and the colonel had decided to rotate some of the staff officers at battalion headquarters into platoon slots. He asked if Dunn and I would like to leave our platoons and join Major Panton in battalion operations.

  Without hesitation, Dunn and I said together, “Yes, sir.”

  I would be replacing 1st Lt. Paul Trost in operations. Dunn was replacing a man who had left because he had finished his commission commitment.

  Smiling, I asked Haldane if he thought he could live with Dunn and me underfoot all the time.

  He did not smile. “Yes. Can you live with me?” he asked.

  Colonel Haldane was best known for his quiet confidence—he always seemed to know what to do. Even if he didn’t, he never showed indecision. He was the boss and he was right; Dunn and I were going to have to mind our manners in our new jobs. The relationship between the colonel and us would be straightforward—friendly but professional.

  I found Trost packing his things inside the operations tent. A serious, studious man, he said that our exchange of duties was fair although he had mixed feelings about taking my platoon.

  “Bratcher is a well-known, popular personality in the battalion. He’s used to working with you,” he said as we walked toward his tent, which he shared with Moubry. “Will he turn surly if I do things differently? Plus it’s going to be hard to replace someone who is still on the scene.”

  “Don’t worry. Just don’t feel the need to assert yourself,” I suggested. “Things will take care of themselves.”

  After Trost gathered up his few things, we walked to Alpha Company. On the way, he said, “Okay, I’ll not try to get out ahead of Bratcher, and you resist the temptation to judge how I’m doing with your old platoon. It’s mine now.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  I went down to the platoon area and gathered together Bratcher, Spencer, and the squad leaders to tell them I was changing places with Trost. For the most part they shrugged, but their faces indicated to me that they were wondering how this change would affect them. I said I appreciated working with them. They were the best men in the world. I walked through the platoon and shook hands—Ayers, Castro, Beck, King, Lyons, De Leon, Manuel, Taylor, Spencer, Bratcher. They were tough combat veterans. We had been together for less than a year, but it was as if I had known them all my life. They were so familiar, so dependable. If, instead of saying good-bye, I had told them that we were going on a dangerous patrol, they would have turned to their equipment and put it on without question. Spencer would have bitched, Beck would have told him to shut up, and Ayers would have been first out the tent. No one would have wanted to be left behind.

  Outside, I told Bratcher to work with Trost, bring him along.

  “Ain’t no sweat, Lieutenant,” Bratcher said as the muscles in his neck tightened. “You always thought overly highly of yourself. Trost’ll do all right.”

  “Don’t be a wise-ass, Bratcher,” I said. “I’m telling you, Sergeant—listen to me, look at me—don’t let that man get blown away or get someone else blown away. You hear me?”

  Bratcher was a born leader. All through his Army career his biggest problem was serving under less talented, less experienced officers, especially young lieutenants. Actually, the best situation was to let Bratcher handle the platoon by himself—he didn’t need Lieutenant Trost or any lieutenant, for that matter. But that’s the way that war was managed; there was a constant rotation of the chain of command in the field, and the combat efficiency of the U.S. Army suffered.

  I said good-bye to Woolley, packed my personal equipment, and walked back to Moubry’s tent. Dunn, already there, was surveying the accommodations. Moubry had built up one end of the medium-size tent with sandbags. He had a metal hospital bed and a thick mattress; a desk with a Bible open in the center; a wall locker; and three lights—one over the desk, one over the bed, and one over the middle of his area. Moubry’s area was neater and more comfortable than a dorm room at UNC. Behind it, a step below Moubry’s lovely sandbag floor, was the area for Dunn and myself. It was marshy, with a layer of mud from side to side. A shipping pallet was near the cot where Trost had slept so that he wouldn’t have to step out of bed directly into the mud. A duffel bag suspended from one of the inside guy wires served as a dresser.

  “Now, what’s wrong with this picture?” Dunn asked as he motioned first to our muddy end and then to Moubry’s neat, dry end.

  Moubry came in about that time and said gaily, “Hi, guys.”

  “Moubry,” I said, “I don’t like my accommodations here. I had a bar in the other area and the same sleeping stuff that everyone else had. I want a metal bed and a wall locker and a desk, and I want lights and a sandbag floor.”

  “But you people are out on operations all the time. What’s the use?”

  “The use, Moubry, is that you’ll be our friend. And if you don’t, we’ll kill you. We want a nice bed and a nice desk just like yours. We don’t want a packing crate and a duffel bag and a cot on a muddy floor. You’re the supply officer. And our friend.”

  “Well, put in a requisition. I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”

  When Moubry left, Bob turned to me and expressed his doubts about the man’s sincerity and general character.

  Sp4. Burke came in through the back door. “Welcome to Headquarters Company. Nice place you’ve got here. You guys like it muddy? I am, as you know, Sp4. Burke, and you will be seeing me off and on. You will not see me when you are looking for someone to help you clean this mud up or, say, when you need money or when there is make-work to do. You will see me, you lucky devils, when Colonel Haldane or the sergeant major ask you to do something and you don’t know what they’re talking about. Because I do. And I will tell you, but
I remember, and after a while you owe me. Big time.”

  “Okay, Burke,” Bob said with a big smile. “Tell me how we get some equipment here, a bed and a wall locker and a desk.”

  “You go downtown and you buy it or you get someone in one of the other battalions who knows the supply officer to get some stuff for you.”

  “But we live with the supply officer here.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “So?” Dunn asked.

  “As far as anyone knows, he hasn’t done anything for anyone since he’s been here. Except the colonel. And the sergeant major. You have to respect him for that. You can’t threaten him or coerce him, or intimidate him, or blackmail him, and it’s very difficult to steal from him. He thinks if you don’t get it, the world’s a better place. It’s part of his religion, I think. You can’t beat him. Hell, even I can’t beat him, and I am good. He is the quintessential support officer.”

  “I’ll break his scrawny neck,” Dunn said.

  “Not bad thinking, Lieutenant. I think I am going to enjoy working with you,” Burke said. “Good to have you aboard.”

  “Right, Burke,” Dunn said. “You got a first name?”

  “Nope, not in this job. I’m Burke, or as the colonel likes to call me, ‘Hey you,’ or when he’s in a hurry it’s ‘You.’ And that ain’t bad. Makes me everyman. I’m ‘You.’ ”

  Two days later, Dunn and I accompanied Colonel Haldane to division headquarters, where we received orders for “Operation Birmingham.” Like Operation Crimp to clear Cu Chi, the next field exercise was a heliborne assault into a VC area close to the Cambodian border. Also, like Crimp, we were going in force.

  Preparing for our first operation as liaison officers, Dunn and I studied all of the maps for the battalion and memorized the radio frequencies for medevacs, artillery, Air Force, division, brigade. (We didn’t have to, we learned later—this was the battalion RTOs’ responsibility.) We plotted objectives and routes of advance, known enemy locations, villages, and depths of rivers. The comedian Burke helped tremendously, as he had said he would. He knew everything. He also carried the colonel’s radio.

  The battalion was airlifted to an air base west of Saigon by C-130 transports. On the day of the operation we were standing by the airstrip there in groups of eight. I was to travel in the helicopter with Colonel Haldane, and Dunn would be with Major Panton in the helicopter behind us.

  The helicopters arrived in flights of ten, a swarm of giant mosquitoes. As we boarded, I saw two choppers behind us descend toward the airstrip. Still twenty or thirty feet off the ground, they were swaying as the pilots brought them down and then they came too close to each other. Their rotor blades collided first and the impact jerked the helicopters around in strange new directions. One chopper dropped out of the sky straight down. The other, with the pilot fighting to gain control, veered off to the side and then began to pinwheel toward the ground. It landed with a thud near some men who were running to get out of the way.

  The incident occurred within the few seconds that it took our chopper to gain altitude. We changed directions and the scene was lost from view.

  I was watching the dozens of helicopters flying around us and thinking how much they reminded me of pictures I had seen of Allied planes on bombing missions during World War II when Burke hit me on the shoulder and handed me a radio handset. He said the colonel wanted me to monitor the Air Force net.

  Over the battey-de-battey of our helicopter, I heard the cryptic conversations of the Air Force jet pilots who were prepping the LZ. This wasn’t so bad—I felt like a spectator. I looked out to our front and tried to see the jets working the area, but it was hard to associate what I was hearing with the streaking planes ahead.

  One pilot said he was receiving small-arms fire, and I asked Burke to relay that information to the colonel. “Yep,” he said, “it’s a hot LZ.”

  We landed in waist-high grass. After helping to off-load the chopper, I picked up the maps and fell in behind the colonel. We made our way to a line of trees extending out into the field, and Panton said we would set up headquarters there. Dunn was on duty first to monitor the radios and plot the maps. I went out to ensure that the men with the heavy mortars knew where we were and that the Headquarters Company guard element was in place to protect our western flank.

  Later, I was sitting on commo equipment near Dunn when reports started to come in about contact with the VC, who were all around us and staying to fight. A couple of times Dunn was reminded to get the “body count.”

  The heavy 4.2-inch mortars came on line and began firing over us in support of a unit across the field. Nearby, to the west, a machine gun began firing, then two, then three or more. They were so close that we all ducked. The guns did not sound like our M-60s; their sound was deeper, more throaty.

  Panton yelled at Dunn, “What unit is that? Who’s over there?”

  Burke, leaning over a map, yelled back, “Alpha Company.”

  My old unit.

  The firing increased. Some rounds zinged over our heads. The colonel asked Dunn to find out what was happening. Panton got on another radio and told the mortars to support Alpha.

  Dunn got Woolley on the radio, while Burke turned to a frequency that brought up the platoon in contact with the VC. Bratcher was talking. He said that the platoon was ambushed. They had taken casualties, both killed and wounded.

  “Press on,” Haldane said in an even voice. Then louder, “Tell Woolley to have his men press on. Attack. We’ll get someone out to look after his wounded. We’re close by.”

  Picking up my M-16, I trotted by the heavy mortars that were being moved around 180 degrees to support the A Company engagement. I came up beside the guard unit digging in and told the sergeant in charge to come with me. We moved through the trees to the back edge of the field. Down the tree line I saw Beck leading a party of men in my direction. At the end of the field behind him, tracers were coming from the jungle. There was some return fire from the field, but not much. Then the mortars behind me began firing and rounds swooshed overhead, followed by the poof from the tubes, and then the crash in front as the round exploded in the trees. Ahead, small-arms firing continued.

  Beck was followed by Ayers and Castro, both of whom were carrying men in a fireman’s carry. Behind them were other 3d Platoon stragglers. I motioned for everyone to get into the woods. A medic came up and we made our way down to the group. Beck, Ayers, and Castro all had flesh wounds. PFC James A. Livingston and Staff Sgt. Julian Willoughby, both recent replacements, were dead.

  Castro said that when they came to the edge of the field, Ayers started to go around it inside the wood line. The lieutenant told him no, to go straight ahead, that they had to get to a rally point. They were caught in the middle of the field with no place to hide. Everyone in the front was killed or wounded.

  Goddamned Bratcher, I thought angrily, why did he let the new man send the platoon out into the field? Trying to get to a rally point? What was that, hurrying to a rally point?

  More men came from the guard unit. Some body bags appeared, and I helped put Livingston and Willoughby away.

  When I got back to battalion headquarters area the colonel was at the center of activity. To his right Dunn and Burke were busy taking his orders and relaying them on the radio. Panton, on his left, was plotting a map. I was sitting on the commo box when the wounded men from my old platoon came in with the two body bags. I told Bob that we needed a dust-off. Burke looked over and gave me a thumbs-up. Soon Bob told me to take some purple smoke and go out into the field near where we had landed. A medevac helicopter was on the way.

  I led the group out, threw smoke, and stood aside as the chopper landed and the men boarded. Castro and Beck waved from the helicopter as it lifted off, bent its nose down, and gained altitude. Both would be back in a couple of days.

  Ayers’s wounds were light, and he stayed. I sent him to join the battalion guard unit until we linked up with Alpha Company again. I slapped him on h
is broad back as he walked away.

  The various units of the attacking force maneuvered in the area for three days and then moved out into separate tactical areas. The division killed 119 VC and wounded many more, in addition to capturing five hundred tons of rice, one hundred tons of salt, mortars, bombs, and mines. We were becoming better at our jobs, but at a price. Even very good units have casualties in war.

  On the fourth day my old platoon came by the battalion area. Trost stopped in to see Panton. Ayers was leading the column and I nodded to him as he passed. Bratcher was midway down the column. I made eye contact but did not smile. I blamed him for letting the platoon walk out into that field. He dropped out and came to stand in front of me, his neck tightening occasionally.

  “Goddammit, you told me to let the man alone.”

  “You dumb fucking asshole. Don’t come over here with any fucking excuses. You don’t let people walk out in an open field like that.”

  “We were told the other side was secure.”

  “Who said that, Sergeant? Goddammit, all the time we were together, we didn’t trust anyone else. We took nothing for granted. Someone says the other side’s secure? Fucking show me.” I paused. “You don’t go putting your people at risk trying to get to some fucking staff officer’s rally point on time.”

  Trost walked by and I looked away. Bratcher turned and followed him.

  That afternoon we received mail, cold beer, and hot food. I had a letter from Pete, who was convalescing in a hospital near his home of Lincoln. He was in the same ward with Ray Ernst and they both sent their regards. Pete said being wounded wasn’t all bad. Some of the nurses loved wounded GIs.

  As usual, that evening a duty roster was drawn up to monitor the battalion’s radios throughout the night. Each man had two hours. I had 0200 to 0400. Dunn had 0400 to 0600.

  At 2300 the mortar platoon fired a short round that landed in the area where Company B was dug in. Several men were wounded. The battalion surgeon, another of the staff officers ordered into the field that day, worked to keep them alive. He said they had to get to a hospital soon or they would not make the night.