Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  But, to my mind, that young man who was dragging the American flag went beyond hip Age of Aquarius free expression. To me, the red of that flag represents the blood shed by my friends in Vietnam. That kid dragging it on the street denigrated their noble sacrifices. Ahead of him other students were cheering “Ho Chi Minh.” Without thinking I yelled out, “Hey Shithead!” and the boy turned in my direction. He had a smirk on his face.

  I dropped my books and charged after him. He bolted away, collecting the flag as he went. I followed him, but he was too far ahead. I lost him in the crowd. Standing in the middle of the demonstration, with my fists balled up, wearing my old fatigue jacket, angry—indistinguishable from those around me—I shouted profanities, which added to the hue and cry of the crowd. People near me were supportive until they saw the look in my eyes, and then they moved away. When I stopped yelling and walked back to my books, the crowd was quieter than before.

  Later, in a speech class, I try to articulate my thoughts. I pointed out that the war is being fought on our side by people too stupid to stay out of the Army and, once in the Army, too stupid to get out of the infantry. They smell bad and have rotten teeth, tattoos, bad grammar, and no future to speak of. They are on the point out there, doing their duty, and if we appreciate the traditions of our country, then those American soldiers deserve our respect. They are the most honorable people on our side of the war—those young men in harm’s way, in that foreign jungle. They answered their country’s call, and in the years ahead they will take great pride in that. It will give them sustenance. I had been there, I know those men love their country, respect its laws and traditions in a way all Americans should. No one should drag around the American flag.

  A glib senior from New York dissented, respectfully, presenting a sophistical argument against the war based on the premise that all people are well-intending. He proposed that we give world peace a chance. It was a far more noble thing to do, he intoned, for our government to seek peace rather than war.

  My final comment was that peace is a good idea—in concept—but the Communists won’t buy it until they get what they want.

  By a voice vote the class decided that the peace position was stronger, and I lost the argument.

  The Carolina basketball season began with the Blue/White game on Thanksgiving. Bill Bunting, Rusty Clark, and Charlie Scott, among other notables, played for the Tar Heels. On the night of every home game I met Brenda at her office and we walked downtown to Zoom-Zooms, a pizza/steak house. We ordered “The Special,” a strip steak served on a sizzling platter with a mountain of fries and all the iced tea you could drink for under three dollars each. Most of the customers were also going to the game, and there was always electricity in the air. Carolina basketball generates excitement.

  Brenda and I walked across campus and took our seats in the student section long before the junior varsity game began. We liked all the young Carolina freshman players, every single one, and we knew all their names. They were good at the game and usually beat the opposition, sometimes doubling the score, often reaching a hundred points. Carmichael Auditorium was small; no matter where we sat we had good seats, close to the floor, in the middle of the noise and the action. We were enthusiastic about the freshman games, lopsided as they often were, because of the players’ high spirits and promise. The varsity games, however, were more serious entertainment. ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) basketball is high drama. At that time Lefty Driesell was coaching for Maryland, Bones McKinney for Wake Forest, and Vic Bubbas for Duke. We believed them to be evil people with their lanky, towheaded, awkward players. And the Carolina team, Bunting and Scott and the others, seemed so clean-looking—they had a certain sweetness about them. And they were very good, especially when they played in Carmichael.

  In one game, Bunting slapped the ball away from a Duke player, grabbed it in the same motion, and threw it over his head downcourt in front of Scott, who had broken toward the other end. Chased by Duke players amid the deafening roar in the auditorium, Scott came to the top of the key and stopped. Running hard on the fast break, he stopped dead. And jumped in the air to shoot the ball. Out in the open. He didn’t want to go in for a layup, maybe, because he would be lost behind the backboard. He wanted it out there, in the middle of the noise, at the top of the key—sure of himself. The ball arched perfectly and swished cleanly through the net, without hitting the rim. With his fingers sticking forward like chicken feet in his follow-through, his white Carolina uniform so perfect on his dark skin, his feet landing lightly back on the floor, the Duke players running by him, he was framed in our minds for all time as the perfect Carolina athlete. We adored him. Charlie Scott. Gave up a sure layup and shot it from the top of the key. How audaciously grand. Jumping into the air and pumping our fists, we felt pure joy. “Nothing could be finer than to be at Carolina.…”

  I continued with my political science major throughout the year, went to summer school the following summer, and was taking extra courses the following fall so I could graduate in January 1970, a year and a half after returning to school. Although I toyed with the idea of going to law school, I had turned twenty-seven that fall and was anxious to get into the workforce. I was interviewed by several firms that offered me jobs, but I turned them down. Making paper boxes or selling baby products didn’t seem right for me.

  To kill time before picking up Brenda one afternoon, I went by the student placement office to see what companies were interviewing. I had a chance encounter with a recruiter from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who was on campus despite the student demonstrations. The recruiter said that the protesters notwithstanding, many people expressed interest in working for the CIA, but very few were hired. It was actually a small organization, he said, and employment standards were high; however, he indicated that my combat experience was a positive factor if I was interested in paramilitary work. The agency had openings in its Special Operations Group.

  He gave me an application. I filled it out and sent it in within the week. I tried not to be excited about the possibility of working for the CIA, but it seemed so perfectly suited to my interests. Also, I had just happened on that recruiter. “Destiny is involved here,” I told Brenda.

  Within a short time I received notice that the CIA had my application and that the next step would be a battery of tests at the Carolina testing center. A couple of months after I took the tests, the CIA invited me to Washington, D.C., for more testing and an interview.

  I came away from my trip to Washington with a good feeling that I would be hired. The interviewer said my application looked solid. Back in Chapel Hill, I stopped looking for jobs. I’m going to work for the CIA, I told people. Sure you are, they said. The CIA was not a common employer in North Carolina.

  Then Brenda said she didn’t think I was supposed to tell people that I was going to work for the CIA if, in fact, I had planned to do so. So I told people that I was going to work in the government, maybe the State Department. Sure you are, they said. I was not known for having a diplomatic style.

  I graduated from the University of North Carolina in January 1970 with a bachelor of arts in political science. Another Vietnam vet, Dennis Myers, graduated at the same time. He liked the idea of the CIA, but getting a law degree, he reasoned, was like putting money in the bank, so he decided to go to law school at UNC in the fall. We sought gainful employment together. Our first idea was “Myers and Associates, Private Investigators and Bodyguards.”

  That didn’t work. No one responded to our ads. Mighty safe state, we assumed.

  We heard that volunteers were needed for experiments at Duke Hospital. We did not particularly want to work for Duke, the evil empire, Carolina’s archenemy, but the pay was good, something like four dollars an hour. Dennis and I signed up. My first session was a Pavlovian-based drill that tested concentration. A technician taped little wires to the ends of my fingers and told me to indicate the different colors projected on the wall.

  “Okay,” I sa
id. “What are these little wires taped to my fingers?”

  “Oh,” said the technician, “if you make a mistake you get a little shock. Just a tiny, little shock.”

  This was not good. They knew I had gone to Carolina. We were in the basement of Duke Hospital, and a Duke Blue Devil was strapping me to a chair—big, no-nonsense straps—and the chair had wires running to it, and the Duke devil was saying I was liable to get a “tiny, little shock.” I imagined cadavers upstairs, other Carolina graduates who had received the same shocks.

  It was the longest hour in my memory. I was shocked every minute for a total of four dollars.

  That was enough for me. I quit but Dennis continued. He obviously had a higher pain threshold. This was found most often, I told him, among primates. Sensitive people avoid situations where they regularly receive electric shocks.

  I got a job at a garment mill in Sanford through the help of the assistant manager, Don Harding, an old friend. Sam was king in the washing/drying room where I was assigned. He had been working in the mill since before there were blueberries, he said, and before there was sin. Teg was another member of the washing/drying room gang. They said that no one with a high school education, as far as either of them knew, had ever worked in the room, much less a white man who had just graduated from college. The job was simple. Trolleys delivered yarn dripping wet to the back room from the dying vats. We grabbed handfuls of yarn and loaded first the large washers and then the dryers with the clean yarn. The dried yarn went into clean trolleys that we pushed into the processing room.

  Teg and Sam sang, laughed, and danced all day. Most of the others in the room, about eight people altogether, were quiet. Teg and Sam were often moved by the spirits, especially when they knew the words to the songs coming from the radio that sat on a high windowsill. It was a hot, wet, happy, and honest workplace.

  The workers brought me documents occasionally that I read and, if they asked, made recommendations on. They were mostly tax forms, alimony payment requests, voter registration forms, and the like. Once, Sam received a personal letter from a union representative in New Jersey who asked him to meet another representative who would visit the area to contact people willing to form a union of the mill workers. I told him that was risky business, and it wouldn’t make their lives much happier either. It would cause a lot of confrontation, and something like that ought to be left to people who liked confrontation.

  A garble of our conversation reached the front office. Later Don called me outside. He said word was circulating that I was talking with Sam about unionizing the mill. The mill manager was so angry he couldn’t talk; he was just standing in his office and mumbling. Don said he was on the block for hiring some college fellow and putting him in the back to stir up union sentiments. I finally convinced him that he had bad information, but the front office was never completely convinced. Everyone in the front office stopped talking and just looked at me when I walked in. Management personnel in garment mills in the South had a paralyzing fear of unions. I finally just kept to the back room. Front-office people had different priorities from us in the back. They weren’t nearly as much fun either.

  In March 1970, I went back to Washington for more tests, including a polygraph examination and another personal interview.

  On the drive back to Chapel Hill my thoughts raced over a thousand scenarios of how my application would work out, and what I would be doing if hired. I had become more aware of agency news items and noted that it was well-represented in all provinces in South Vietnam, and worked with the South Vietnamese intelligence service, the police, and the military in a variety of jobs. The agency was also running a “secret war” in Laos, but there was little reporting on how they were doing that. The rules of engagement in Laos did not allow for U.S. ground troops, so maybe the agency put civilians like myself in the mountains to work with the hill tribes. The agency liked men with “hang,” a CIA interviewer had said. I assumed that meant men who could “hang in” when things were tough out in the wilderness.

  I also worried about the polygraph examination I had taken. What a terrible, intrusive test. Was it exact? Could it misread reactions? There were so many shades of meanings to things I had done in my life. The examiner had asked if I had ever been involved in a felony. Growing up I had been rowdy and done a number of things. Had any of those “things” been against the law? Well, maybe, yes, a little bit. Were they felonies? I didn’t know. The obvious answer that they wanted was, “No, I haven’t committed any felonies.” So that’s what I said, and then I worried about my answer during the rest of the test. Did the fact that I worried indicate on the polygraph machine that I was lying? Please no, I prayed. It was out of my hands now. Please, Lord, let these things pass. Let them find out quickly that I am a good, God-fearing patriot, that I would make a good employee.

  In mid-June I received a telephone call. The CIA offered me a job starting 2 August 1970. I hung up and yelled, pumped my fist in the air, and then started jumping around. I jumped up and down, up and down and up and down—through the kitchen, down the hall, into the bedroom. Jumping and yelling. In the bedroom I calmed down, stood still for a minute to regain my composure, and walked casually back into the kitchen to call Brenda.

  We quit our jobs, sold the trailer, and packed our few remaining items in the back of the smallest rental trailer available. With Harry riding at Brenda’s feet and the back seat of the car loaded with houseplants from Brenda’s mother, we left North Carolina in late July. Shortly after our arrival in Washington we found a small, unfurnished two-bedroom suburban townhouse, rented some furniture, and moved in. Two days later I reported to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

  SIXTEEN

  Holding the Line in Laos

  I had been hired on contract to work in the CIA’s Special Operations Group (SOG), the section that had given the American people the Bay of Pigs and the U-2 program. Most of my compatriots were former military people with Vietnam combat experience. There was an innate feeling among them that they belonged in the CIA. They exuded self-confidence.

  In September 1971, after a year of intelligence and paramilitary training, I received my first assignment, as a case officer in the Lao program, the CIA’s largest covert operation.

  During the late 1950s, Laos, a small, indolent, landlocked country, was on the verge of a civil war that could have brought about a confrontation between the world’s superpowers. The ragtag forces of the pro-West government of Souvanna Phouma were opposed in the countryside by the Pathet Lao, a Communist group supported by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. In 1962, to defuse the situation, a senior U.S. State Department official, William Sullivan, helped structure the Geneva Accords, which prohibited foreign forces from fighting in Laos. The intent of the accords was to get the North Vietnamese out of the country so the Lao could determine their own fate. The North Vietnamese signed the accords but did not leave. A “tacit agreement” ensued. The North Vietnamese would remain in Laos to help the Pathet Lao; the United States would support Souvanna Phouma but would not commit ground troops. The United States subscribed to this agreement because the CIA had contact with Vang Pao, leader of the Lao hill people (Hmong), and U.S. policy makers were confident that he could carry the fight to the Communists. With CIA support, Vang Pao’s forces fought and died bravely during the mid-1960s as the war in Vietnam took shape, and they quietly contained the North Vietnamese in the mountains, away from the Laotian capital of Vientiane. By the late 1960s, however, Vang Pao’s forces were exhausted and there was some question about their ability to continue the fight. Paid volunteers from Thailand were brought in to shore up the Hmong. In 1971, as I prepared for my Lao assignment, the North Vietnamese were deploying two divisions to destroy the CIA’s combined Hmong/Thai paramilitary force encamped on a high mountain plateau—the Plain of Jars—in an effort to move on the capital and bring Laos into the North Vietnamese sphere of influence. The future of the country was in doubt.


  The rear headquarters of the CIA’s Lao program was at a U.S./Thai Air Force base in Udorn, Thailand. Brenda and I arrived there in mid-November 1971. CIA intelligence indicated that the North Vietnamese would probably launch their offensive before Christmas. I was anxious to get to the field and learn the lay of the land before the North Vietnamese attacked, but I was assigned to a desk in Udorn instead. While I was busy with paperwork and briefings, my friends were bracing the Hmong and the Thai mercenaries up-country for the battle ahead. Unhappily, I was on the sidelines as the game was being decided.

  Early one morning in mid-December 1971, the first day of the smoky season, when haze from slash-and-burn farming in South China enveloped the mountains, the North Vietnamese attacked the CIA forces on the Plain of Jars with human waves of infantry supported by deadly, railroad-car-size 130mm artillery. The Hmong and Thais fell back several ridgelines before consolidating on a ridge called Skyline. The North Vietnamese pursued them and, on New Year’s Eve, 1971, started an advance up Skyline as dozens of 130mm rounds landed on the ridgeline and in the Long Tieng valley beyond, where the CIA had its up-country base camp.

  The CIA forces held Skyline on New Year’s Eve and inflicted heavy casualties on the North Vietnamese. The next day the North Vietnamese attacked again, and the day after, and the day after that, but the Thais and Hmong did not break. The North Vietnamese pulled back, regrouped, and started to attack again—they had been ordered to take the ridgeline at all costs. On 14 January 1972, every newspaper in Hanoi announced that Skyline had been overrun and the CIA forces in Laos destroyed.