by Doug Stanton
She looks at him a moment and says, “Oh,” and reaches down and grabs his arm with her hands and squeezes and says, “Does that feel better?”
Stan can’t respond; he’s speechless. “Just don’t let go,” he says. “Just don’t let go.” Her touch. Stan is lying in bed, against a white sheet, which smells like bleach, and feeling the young woman’s touch on his arm.
He already knows he will have no way of describing this to the guys back in the field.
1962–66
Minot, North Dakota, to Gary, Indiana
How long has he been gone from Indiana? What day of the week was it when he boarded the bus in Gary for Fort Leonard Wood? The past is receding. It was a warm Thursday in August 1966, yes. He can count the days that’ve passed too: 559 of them, but these seem hardly able to contain what he has seen, heard, tasted, and done. His childhood now belongs to another man entirely, yet each step he takes in combat feels to him an affirmation of his father’s and mother’s instructions about how to live bravely. He feels he’s been brave; he hopes he’s been honorable.
• • •
In Minot, North Dakota, when his family moved there during his freshman high school year, Stan mustered enough courage at the homecoming to dance with girls he felt (and he was ashamed of this) were better than him. Nonetheless, he’d asked them, and they seemed to enjoy themselves. His father was building nuclear missile silos, and townspeople typically, and derisively, called a boy like Stan Parker a “missile kid.” Stan had no inkling of the transgression he’d committed by asking the girls to dance.
At a subsequent football practice, the coach said he had a special kind of training for Stan. He told him to warm up by taking a lap around the football field. As he ran, he saw the entire football team lined up on the sideline, about fifty players in all. The coach waved Stan over.
The coach pointed at the players. He said that it should be no problem at all for Stan to run the entire length of the field while keeping hold of the football as the team rushed at him. If he dropped the football, he would have to start over again.
The coach added, “This shouldn’t be a problem, Parker, if you just show us some of the fancy footwork that you had at the school dance.”
A light went on inside Stan’s brain. He was being set up by the coach, an adult, whom he had assumed would have his interests at heart. The coach gave him a pat on the helmet. “Get going,” he said.
Stan started running, focused solely on the end zone. As he got to about the twenty-yard line, he saw the players peeling off from the side. They launched themselves at him, aiming for the football, trying to dislodge it so he’d have to start all over again.
He gripped tight and kept churning. He wasn’t big, and he wasn’t an experienced ballplayer. In fact, he’d been put in only a handful of times by the coach at the tight-end position. One by one, the players crashed into him.
The body strikes by the bigger players knocked his breath away. Some of the hits flattened him to the ground, and he struggled getting back up. The big linebackers reached down and pulled him to his feet, and then they shoved him toward the next oncoming player, ready to knock him down. At the end of the field, he couldn’t see the end zone itself but another kind of place. A place he had to reach.
He would not stop.
He was hit by a player he didn’t see coming. The impact made him black out a moment. He opened his eyes and saw the players circled around him and looking down. He struggled back to his feet. And started running again.
He ran a few more yards and was knocked down again. This time he woke up under the goalpost. And then he saw he’d made it. He hadn’t dropped the ball. The players gathered around again, this time grumbling. A hand extended itself through the blurry cloud of faces, and Stan saw that this was the coach and that he was smiling. Maybe he had proven something after all, Stan thought. He grabbed the hand, and the coach pulled him up. He ached, but he hadn’t stopped running.
• • •
In 1964, when Stan was a junior in high school, his parents worried that he and his brothers, approaching adulthood, needed a place they could call home for longer than several months at a stretch. When John James found work building the Bethlehem Steel Works in Gary, Indiana, they towed a new mobile home to a large lot in a new trailer development called Black Oaks, several miles from the Gary lakeshore, and set up housekeeping. The Parker family would spend the next two years at Black Oak, a community filled with union-organized steel and construction workers. By now, at age sixteen, Stan had attended twenty-three schools and lived in forty-three states.
That winter of 1965, he saw his first AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle, in a gun store. The AR-15 was cousin to the government-issue M-16, which, he’d heard on the news, soldiers were carrying in a place called Vietnam. Stan hadn’t heard much about the place. He did like the looks of the AR-15, though. Snow was falling outside the gun store window as he stood and stared at the gun. The attraction to the shape of the rifle was nearly physical. And then when the store clerk handed him the weapon, there was something incredibly exciting in holding it. The gun seemed capable of transporting him to a new life. But when he handed the gun back to the clerk, he returned to what interested him most for the coming senior year: meeting girls. Witty and charming, he nonetheless hadn’t had much luck with them at Calumet High.
The summer between his junior and senior year he toyed with the idea of dating three girls at once. Anna Runion was a neighbor in the Black Oaks trailer development and two years younger than him. Her father was a union pipefitter, and she too had seen the world from the rear window of the family’s work truck. When Stan found out that Anna already had a boyfriend, this doubled his resolve to win her heart. At the same time, he started doting on another classmate, Carol Hamilton, a friend from art class. If things with Anna didn’t work out, he figured he’d date Carol. Beyond that, and not ready to limit his affections, he started flirting with a sophomore, Maureen Bell, who attended Lew Wallace, a rival high school. Stan called her Mo.
Years later, all Mo could remember about meeting Stan Parker was that he’d appeared at her side as she was shopping with her girlfriend at a local clothing store and that he wouldn’t stop talking—about everything. It seemed he’d been everywhere in the United States. Throughout Stan’s senior year, he and Mo went to movies and afterward drank Cokes and malts at the Blue Top Drive-In. All the while, Stan was considering his life after graduation. What was he going to do? Work like his father as an ironworker at Bethlehem Steel? Join the military?
His older brother, Dub, had just graduated from high school and was at Fort Bragg in North Carolina with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne. Shouldn’t I join too? wondered Stan. He felt he had a duty to join, and, increasingly, it seemed that his country, and the Vietnamese people, would need guys like him. At school during lunch, he couldn’t believe it when he heard some of the guys talking about getting married just to get out of going to Vietnam. By the end of his senior year, he had decided to join up.
He didn’t want to be drafted and get an assignment he didn’t like. “If I’m going to join the Army,” he told his mother, “I’m going to do one thing: fight.”
When he told his mother about his plan, she objected mightily, as did Maureen. His mother made him promise that he would not, under any circumstance, join the U.S. Army, and Stan promised that he would honor her wish. Reluctantly. Stan felt that this didn’t leave many options for him. Gary was an increasingly dangerous city in a year that was turning more violent. Some of his classmates would be killed—drug deals, muggings, murders—before they could graduate. Steel bars lined the windows of some of the homes and businesses along the main street. You didn’t linger at stoplights. The country was coming apart at the same time some of its people were coming together. Martin Luther King Jr. was saying his thing, and the Black Panthers were holding up weapons at rallies. The country was simmering.
The news that night, that month, that year, was not good, but th
e color images were perfect. You could see someone get shot, as if it were happening in your living room, as you looked up from your TV dinner. For the first time in history, America was watching a war as it was fought, in near real time.
Dub wrote to Stan from Fort Bragg and told him he was trying to get orders to deploy to Vietnam. Every month the 82nd Airborne Division was sending paratroopers as replacements to the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, or to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Dub said he hoped to leave soon. The two brothers agreed to keep this news from their dad and their mom. Dub told Stan that their mom would go nuts if he joined the Army too.
• • •
When he thought about joining the Army against his mother’s wishes, he decided he’d rather ask her forgiveness than approach her again for her approval. He didn’t mention his decision to his father; he didn’t want to place him in the middle. At the same time, he felt that secretly his father approved of what he was doing.
Back at home, after signing up at the Army recruiter’s office, Stan couldn’t wait to tell Dub about what he’d done. Dub was home on leave, thinking every day about the fact that soon he’d probably be fighting in Vietnam. Stan admired how simultaneously calm and ready for adventure his brother always seemed. Dub was sitting on the couch, watching TV, when Stan walked into the living room and said, “So, guess what I did today.”
Dub, looking up from the TV, said he just had no idea.
“How about, ‘I joined the Army!’ ”
Dub sat up. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“I’m going to be a paratrooper—and I’m going to Vietnam.”
Dub thought for moment, the news sinking in. “Wow,” he said. And then, “Congratulations.” Stan could tell his older brother was proud of him. But Stan suddenly saw a worried look on his face. “Have you told Mom?” his brother asked.
“No, but I’m going to. At dinner.”
“She’s going to be mad.”
“Now don’t you tell her—let me do that.”
Dub didn’t say anything.
That night at the dinner table, as their mother and father were passing around the food, Dub blurted, “Hey, does anybody know what Stan did today?”
His mother paused, a hot dish of food stopped in midair.
“No. What?” she asked.
His dad said, “What’d you do today, Stanley?”
Both Parker parents were used to their second eldest son getting into mischief. But Stan knew they wouldn’t be prepared for the news he had for them.
“Ah, well,” Stan began, “me and Gervais and a few others, we were just messing around today—”
Dub interrupted. “He went and joined the Army!”
Stan couldn’t tell if his brother was angry at him for joining or just giving him a hard time. Maybe he was being driven by a fear that he’d be hurt in Vietnam. Stan told himself again that nothing bad would happen to him in the war.
Stan waited for his mother’s reaction. She was looking at him, hard. She seemed about to cry, which pained him.
His dad nodded at him. “Congratulations,” he said. “You remembered what I said about draft dodgers?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
His mother said, “I don’t want to talk about this.”
And then she said, “I can’t believe you did this without talking with me!”
“I did talk with you,” said Stan, “and you said I couldn’t join.”
“I told you not to join. And you shouldn’t have!”
“Well, I did,” Stan shot back.
She looked over the table and gave his father a stare, a look that said, Stan could see: This is all your fault. You and your teaching him to fight at such a young age.
Stan crossed his arms and sat at the table, waiting for whatever happened next. His mother was mad. He knew that. Perhaps madder than he’d ever seen her.
She got up and took the dishes to the sink and began washing. She didn’t speak to him for a week. It was going to be a long summer, waiting for basic training to begin.
• • •
After enlisting that spring in 1966, Stan and Gervais drove around Gary, feeling different about themselves, older. They pulled up to Mac and Ed’s, a burger joint where Stan had worked his junior year, hoping that someone might ask what they were up to so they could say they’d just joined the Army. They tried to imagine what kind of new life they would have. Overhead, the drive-in’s speakers played a discordant mix these days: Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” The music drifted down from the eaves on Stan and Gervais and the boys, and they peeled out of the lot, singing.
February 26, 1968
Hai Lang, Vietnam
After seven days, on February 26, Stan is released back into the field. Or, rather, he lies about the pain he’s in and talks the nurse into releasing him early from the hospital. She doesn’t want to, telling him his ribs and leg haven’t healed. “I have to get back to the guys,” he says. “I just have to.”
She relents. “You take care of yourself. I don’t want to see you back here again,” and he says, “You won’t, I promise.” A few hours later, he lands in a rice paddy and hops off the Huey, feeling sore but elated to be back. It’s as if the charging of the bunker never happened; well, it happened, but it’s in the past and he’s sure it’s no prediction of what the future will bring.
He heads out on another mission, this time with Delta Company, and the news is the LZ’s going to be hot—they’ll be shot at as they land.
They’re flying, and it’s fun to dip and glide over the trees, feeling the cooler wind coming though the cabin door as the blue sky slips by in panels.
Russo’s standing on the skid of the Huey, facing backward, talking with Stan, who is standing inside the chopper and facing forward. They start taking fire from the tree line, and Stan can see the pilot’s getting ready to land, so he tells Russo to turn around. Russo keeps standing there, both feet on the narrow skid, one in front of the other, like a man walking on a beam. The chopper drops to a near hover, still moving forward, over a rice paddy, heading for a dry patch at the edge of the paddy to land. Then the pilot yanks the stick and the chopper jerks, and Russo gets a look on his face, like, Oh, no. His feet go out from under him, and he drops suddenly on the skids, right on his gonads. He hangs there, sits a moment, and then slowly tips over like a top-heavy toy and plummets straight down, headfirst, into the rice paddy, twenty feet below. Much of him disappears except for his legs. He’s stuck headfirst in the mud.
Now the shooting from the tree line grows fiercer. Stan looks down, thinking, Oh my god, Russo, and all he sees are Russo’s legs kicking back and forth like a cartoon, the rest of his body swallowed by the paddy. He figures Russo’s got thirty seconds, a minute, before he drowns. The pilot lands and Stan and the rest jump off and start wading into the paddy to rescue Russo. The gunfire is increasing by the minute, and Stan finds it amazing that no one’s been hit. He looks up and sees a second chopper coming in. He hadn’t seen it before; it’d been trailing them. The pilot, Stan realizes, has to be one vigilant individual. He wheels around and starts steaming for Russo, who is still stuck in the mud, his legs still kicking, though not as fast. The pilot drops the nose of the chopper and the craft is tipped to such a severe degree that its rotors are digging into the paddy ahead as it rushes forward, throwing up a tremendous fan of water, which begins to glisten like a rainbow.
Stan looks up and sees that the chopper’s blades are headed right toward them and he thinks the rainbow fan is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He says, “Hey, fellas, check this out. You want to see this before we get killed.” He thinks the blades are going to slice them up like bologna. It’s the most impressive, glorious sight he’s ever seen. Just before the chopper gets to them, the pilot pulls up over Russo, and a long nylon strap is dropped out of the cabin door.
They lasso Russo’s ankles and cinch it tight and do that thing with their hands, “All clear,” and step back. The chopper’s engine begins to whine and the strap tightens around Russo’s ankles. Stan can look up and see the chopper rising and Russo’s legs seem to stretch and, finally, Russo pops free.
He comes flying up out of the mud, straight up, headed right for the bottom of the helicopter, and he nearly hits it, all of that pent-up tension on the strap being released as the chopper itself suddenly rises with Russo dangling at the end of the strap, spitting mud, swinging back and forth.
He’s waving his arms, sputtering things Stan and the others can’t understand. The chopper drops down so that Russo’s hanging about eight feet above the water and an arm comes out of the cabin with a knife and cuts the nylon strap. Russo is set free, and he flops outward in a spread-eagle position, faceup. He’s staring at the belly of the helicopter and falling away from it, when he lands on his back in the paddy, whack, and sinks from view. Stan and the crew run over and lift him up and start dragging him from the water as the bullets whiz past. Stan thinks it’s still amazing that no one’s been hit. They get to a safe place and slap Russo on the back. Soon he’s coughed up all of the mud and water, and they start laughing. It is sure good to see him, and then they’re returning fire, fighting again.
• • •
One day in Recon Platoon, a member of the platoon shoots himself in the foot with his M-16 to get out of the war. Puts the muzzle against his boot and pulls the trigger. The bullet enters, and when it comes out the other side, it takes the soldier with him, clean out of Vietnam and back home to Kansas. Good-bye, friend.
That’s one way to get out of this mess.
The other way is to fight, live, and get home.