Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  On 11 September, I bummed a ride to Saigon. I checked into the Out-processing Administration Section on the following afternoon. I had dinner alone at the local officers club and was back in my assigned Quonset hut by early evening. A group of soldiers, who had just arrived in-country, had gathered in a corner. They were talking loudly while a tape recorder played at high volume. Two of them were playing cards and sharing a strange-looking and strange-smelling cigarette. After complaints about their noise, an officer asked them to turn down the tape recorder, but none of them looked up or moved. The officer was unable to determine who owned the recorder, and he left. The soldiers gleefully went through a hand-slapping, elbow-knocking, chest-thumping routine. Their raucous behavior continued until a group of MPs arrived and threatened them with the brig unless they knocked off the noise.

  I watched it all, propped up on my elbow, and thought, Good I’m getting out now—different cast of characters coming in. Different standards and attitudes that I wasn’t sure I knew how to deal with.

  Around 0200 the next morning I was awakened by a familiar voice in the bunk below me. Bratcher. Drunk.

  “1st Battalion of the fucking 28th Infantry Regiment is the best fucking battalion in the whole fucking country. Last operation we killed them son’bitches by the hundreds. Hundreds, goddammit. Had ’em piled up. Crispy critters. You know how we did it? We did it because we had a goddamned good battalion, that’s how. You talk to anyone, anyone, anyone, anywhere who served in the field in Vietnam and you goddammit won’t find a better fucking battalion. Most of the shits in the battalion were wounded at least once. Every man I knew had killed a gook. Lions of Cantigny. Goddamned Lions of Cantigny. Lions of Cu Chi and Phuoc Vinh and Minh Thanh. Best fucking fighting unit in the whole fucking country, the whole fucking Army.”

  I jumped off the bunk and smiled at Bratcher. Unbelievably, he seemed lost for words, but just for a moment.

  “I’ll be a son’bitch,” he said. “Where’d you come from?” He stood up and laughed.

  From down the Quonset hut, one of the black replacements said, “Shut the fuck up.”

  Bratcher turned around quickly and swayed in place as he tried to locate the person in the half-light of the Quonset hut. He had a disbelieving look on his face, as if it was not possible that someone was talking to him that way. The old lanky sergeant from Tennessee stumbled down the line of bunks, came up to one bunk, and turned it over. He kicked the man inside as he fell to the floor. There was viciousness in Bratcher’s actions that was unlike normal garrison scuffles, probably unlike anything that young man had ever experienced before.

  “Don’t you tell me to shut up, you chickenshit asshole. I’ll break your skinny black ass.”

  Getting to his feet, the boy yelled, “It wasn’t me, man, I didn’t do nothing.”

  Bratcher pushed him in the chest. “Don’t you fucking say anything to me, asshole.” I came up beside him and grabbed his arm. “Let it go,” I said. “I want a cigarette. Let’s go outside.”

  The black boy said, “Hey man, you’re crazy, you know that.”

  I turned to the black boy and took a step so that I was inches from his face. “Crazy? After a year in Vietnam? Crazy, yeah, crazy, so don’t fuck with us ’cause we’ll show you crazy,” and I dragged out the words, “like … you … ain’t … ever … seen. Want some? Say something.”

  We stared at each other in the half-light of the barracks. I felt unusually fearless and calm. Never before in my life and never since have I felt the way I did then. I was ready to kill him, anxious for the fight—adrenaline pumping, elbows protruding slightly from my sides, my weight moving forward toward the balls of my feet—angry, quick, and strong. Without looking away from his eyes, I took the measure of his neck and groin. I waited for something to trigger my reaction—a movement, or a word.

  He did not move. After a moment, I relaxed. Only after Bratcher and I went outside did we hear his low mumbling.

  Bratcher said, “Last night, shit, go out fighting, that’s all right. Wanta go back in there and whip his black ass?”

  “No,” I said. “What do we have to prove? Time to go home. Plus, you got the wrong guy in the first place. I think that kid was just lying there, minding his own business. It was some other guy lipping off.” And we laughed.

  We talked about our first meeting in Fort Riley, about the different men in our platoon, Trost, Woolley, the last operation, small, recent stuff. People inside probably heard us. I suggested that it was all over for us, we’d done our duty, so we could sit back and smile.

  “Naw,” he said, “this war will be around for a long time. We’ll be back.”

  “Not me,” I said. “Back to school when my tour’s up.”

  “You’ll be back,” he said. “You like the action.”

  He and I had sat side by side so often. The fact that it was our last night—that we had Vietnam almost behind us—didn’t make much difference. I had been afraid of him early on—afraid that he would take the platoon from me—but it had worked out. Luck plays a big part in war. I had been very lucky that Staff Sergeant Cecil Bratcher had been assigned to my platoon, that we had gone to Vietnam together. I slapped him on the knee, got up, and went to bed.

  He was still sleeping in the morning when I woke up to catch my flight to Thailand.

  I was in Bangkok that night. Joe arrived the following night, and I showed him some of the places I had found. They compared with the Tu Do bars of Saigon and the harbor area of Hong Kong and Havana. For me, there was much to like about Bangkok.

  The next morning we boarded Air Force One, a C-141, for New Delhi. Our overnight in the Indian capital was memorable for the filth, the cows, the people living on the streets, and the smells.

  We stopped at Kabul, Afghanistan, and Athens, Greece, the next day, and landed finally at Torrejón Air Base near Madrid, Spain. We went to a BOQ when we arrived and slept for ten hours. The next morning we ordered a rental Volkswagen convertible from a base concessionaire for drop-off in Germany, picked up the car, and drove into Madrid. We got lost and ended up in the old town, where we rented a room in a hotel near several bars that featured flamenco dancers. The next day we went to the bullfights. Several horses were gored and several bulls were killed, but we missed the point. Too ethnic, we decided. We bought some playbill posters and called it a day.

  The following morning we loaded our convertible and made Barcelona, Spain, by nightfall, then on to Nice, France, the following day. There, we checked into a pension and had a late sidewalk-cafe dinner with a couple of carafes of wine. Very continental. We felt conspicuous, however, often looking up to see French men and women looking at us.

  “Salt and pepper,” Joe said. “They’re not used to us blacks and you whites being so—so familiar.”

  “Yes, they are,” I disagreed. “They had colonies all over Africa. There shouldn’t be anything strange about us sitting here. Maybe it’s the way we’re dressed? Or because we’re so tall.”

  “Okay,” he said, “if it isn’t the black-white thing, then it’s the eyes. They’re looking at my eyes. You’ve never noticed them, have you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I haven’t ever really looked into your eyes, Joe. What about them?”

  “The ladies,” he said, “like them very much.”

  “How come so many men are looking at you, then?”

  “Ah, the French. Quiem sa ba?”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “French. Means ‘Who knows?’ ”

  “No, it don’t. You don’t know French. Sounds like Spanish anyway.”

  “The French would know it means ‘Who knows.’ ”

  Later, in a smoky bar not far from the beach, we were nursing beers when a group of locals came in. In the middle of the group was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was tall and buxom, with blond hair and a deep tan. Her white blouse was tied under her bust to show off a flat, tan stomach above the red skintight toreador pants that encased sculp
tured legs. And her face—strong yet soft, exotic, sexy. In the half-light of the bar haze she appeared to be perfect. She looked at us as her group walked toward tables in the rear.

  “Oh, my God, Joe, I’m in love,” I said, my mouth agape.

  The chattering from the group continued as they walked along, punctured occasionally by laughs. The woman held our gaze as she walked, quietly distant from her friends.

  Turning on my stool, I saw her sit down so that she faced back toward us at the bar. The others fell into chairs around her. She lit a cigarette and when she inhaled the glow lit her face, her hair shining in the dark.

  “She is absolutely the most gorgeous woman in the world. The sexiest. She is a goddess sitting over there. I have to meet her. I have to have her.”

  “Not your type,” Joe said.

  “I know what my type is, my friend. And that lady, that wench is what I’ve been looking for all my life. Oh, my God, she’s coming this way.”

  She came up and slid between Joe and me on our bar stools and said something to the bartender in French. Her perfume was musky. She turned to look at me—her eyes wanton, smoldering, intense, like an animal’s. Her breast rubbed against my arm.

  “HellohowyoudoingWhatsyourname?” I mumbled as I slicked my short hair back with my hand.

  She didn’t respond but examined my face closely. Then suddenly, she looked into my eyes.

  Those eyes! I could not get over them—they had no shame. They were predator’s eyes.

  Finished with me, she turned and looked at Joe.

  “Bon jure, madomessel,” Joe said in fractured French. I couldn’t see his face because the woman was between us. All I could see was the back of her beautiful head.

  She put one arm around Joe’s neck and turned his face and body toward her with the other hand. Then, with both arms around his neck, she leaned in and kissed him.

  For “bon jure” he gets this?

  Had to be something more than “bon jure.”

  Later, Joe said it was his eyes.

  We went on to Monte Carlo. The first night there we put on our tailor-made clothes and went to the casino. Because we didn’t have much money and didn’t know how to play any of the games except blackjack (but we weren’t so sure how to play it in French) we decided just to get some chips, say a hundred dollars’ worth each, and walk around the gaming tables and look smart. After much dickering with the French bank teller, we managed to get the two $100 chips that he initially offered us broken down into ten $20 chips. We wanted something we could shuffle together as we walked about looking smart. It was such a simple transaction, we thought, and we became frustrated when the Frenchman didn’t cooperate. Plus a long line collected behind us. Finally with our five chips each, we walked into the gaming room.

  Jingling the chips in a way we hoped looked practiced, we walked over to a baccarat table where a guy had a paddle. We stood behind a velvet rope and watched, but we had no idea what was going on. When people looked at us, we smiled knowingly. The club was not unlike the Tropicana in Havana, but it was more reserved, cleaner, and quieter. The women were dressed the same, but the men were whiter, more haughty than I remembered from Havana. There were more sideways glances, more appraising looks.

  We were having drinks at the bar and looking over the crowd when a woman at my left asked, “Are you a spy?”

  “Pardon me?” I asked.

  “I Spy,” she said and smiled.

  Duckett and I looked down at her. Maybe this is the way they talk in Monte Carlo—in catchphrases that everyone but us knew.

  “You look like the characters in a U.S. television program,” she explained, “I Spy. You are Americans, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “And you know about the program, I Spy, don’t you? It began last fall.”

  “No ma’am. We’re just coming back from Vietnam. We haven’t watched much television lately.”

  “Oh, this is almost as good. We thought you were associated with the program I Spy, but Vietnam veterans, that is something. Will there be many of you coming back this way?”

  “I don’t know. What is the program I Spy about?”

  “Two Americans, a black man and a white man, traveling around the continent, spying for the U.S. A very dashing pair. Like the two of you.”

  My first reaction was to say, “Ah, go on now,” but then I thought that was not quite right for someone who had been taken for a movie star playing an international spy in the Monte Carlo Casino.

  “Do say,” I said.

  We met the woman again the following morning while we were eating breakfast at a sidewalk cafe. In her early sixties, she was a well-to-do widow who spent half the year on the Riviera and the rest at her home in the United States.

  She said that the French did not approve of our involvement in Vietnam, but in fact, the French did not approve of much that the Americans did. But she was curious about how it was over there. Joe and I told her it wasn’t bad, we would prevail, we had more stuff. We were the U.S. of A.

  Refusing to believe it was so simple, she said that more complex forces of good and evil were at work. The war, she said, will not be won on the battlefield. Attrition was an insignificant variable in the long run, and it was going to be a long war. She wished us well and thanked us for serving our country so well.

  That afternoon we drove into Italy. Then we headed back into France and arrived in Paris three days later. We picked up college-age Americans when we saw them thumbing and learned that they were against the war in principle, although not against us personally. They expressed outrage easily and sometimes asked naive, leading questions in the hope of uncovering our involvement in mass murder. Joe especially enjoyed responding to their queries. He unashamedly altered his accounts from session to session to fit the audience. He told me that a black man can use his blackness sometimes if he wants to. Liberals will not challenge a black man on anything, especially an articulate black man. Plus, he reasoned, no matter what he said, these college kids would hear what they wanted. “That’s the problem with the morally outraged youth of today,” he said, “selective understanding.”

  Our money was running low when we reached Paris, so we looked at a tour map and decided on the one place, above all else, that we wanted to see there. Not the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower, but the Crazy Horse Saloon with its topless chorus line. We went there, drove around town later, and headed for Germany.

  The most pleasant part of our trip through Europe was just driving along with the top down, the two of us sometimes talking, sometimes with the radio on, one of us sometimes snoozing. We drove through clean and beautiful villages, along vineyards in the country, along the Mediterranean, in the mountains—sometimes with hitchhikers onboard. Laughing, lying, looking up at the sun and feeling its warmth. After the hardships of Vietnam, Europe was heaven. For some reason the words “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina, in the morn … ing” got caught on the end of my tongue and I sang the song off and on all across Europe. We talked about what awaited us in the States. Joe said we would not have had a chance of true friendship there.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We come from two cultures. The American culture and the Negro culture. If you are a Negro, you can only play white. Black stands out on a white background.”

  “Get off that black-white shit, Joe.”

  “Hard to, Jimmy,” he said. “I will always be a black man in a white man’s society. We are friends here, but you’re from North Carolina. You won’t want me to date your sister, would you?”

  “You know my sister?” I asked.

  In Frankfurt we turned in the car and changed into our dress uniforms with our medals. We were more decorated than anyone else we saw. Singing “Nothing could be finer …” we marched into the terminal and got first priority standby tickets to the States. Within an hour we were on our way to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.

  There, on 30 September, Joe and I said
good-bye. We didn’t have much money left. He took a bus to Philly, and I took a bus to New York City to see an old girlfriend.

  No one noticed me in the bus terminal. Everyone seemed busy with their own lives. I took a seat toward the back of the bus and felt insignificant, lost.

  The urban New Jersey countryside appeared dirty and in disrepair. The weather was chilly, especially to someone coming back from a year in the tropics. The bus rattled through the bumper-to-bumper traffic and crossed the George Washington Bridge into New York City, where I knew one person.

  I took a taxi from the bus terminal in New York City to the apartment house of my friend. It was mid-afternoon of a weekday and she was working. I didn’t have her office telephone number, so I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building and wondered what to do. When the bellman asked if I was waiting for someone, I told him that I was but had timed my arrival a couple hours too early.

  “Lenore Mills [alias],” he said. “You’re the soldier boy Lenore Mills talks about. I thought you were kilted once.”

  “Wounded maybe,” I said, glad to find someone to talk to in this city of millions. “Is Lenore’s roommate around or someone who can let me in?”

  “I’ll let you in. Lenore would want me to. Come on, follow me.”

  He showed me up to Lenore’s door, opened it, and told me to relax. She should be in around six. I sat down on her couch and fell asleep. She was kneeling beside me and crying when I woke.

  The next afternoon I left on the train for Southern Pines, North Carolina. When the train hissed to a stop at the train depot in downtown Southern Pines, I saw Mom, Dad, and my youngest sister Kathy and the Lylands, a couple from the church, waiting on the platform.

  It is a special time for a young man when he comes home from war. The anticipation, the explosion of emotion, the touching, the feeling, the crying, the stories, the old news, the new news, and then the comfortable regular routine. My Bronze Star had arrived in the mail. After dinner, my mother pinned it on my tunic and then ran her trembling fingers across my lips. Daddy read the citation aloud. Kathy applauded. My other two sisters, Judy and Joan, came in the next day and we held hands as Daddy said grace at supper. He thanked the Lord for looking after me and returning me home.