The Odyssey of Echo Company

by Doug Stanton

  “What’s up there in the tree line?” someone in the platoon asks. “Did anyone just see something?”

  Charlie Pyle, walking on point, has gotten ahead of the main force of the platoon, with Tim Anderson struggling to keep up. Behind Anderson, Michael Bradshaw is also slogging ahead, feeling increasingly that they should’ve chosen a route that would’ve taken them closer along a nearby tree line. He and Charlie are close friends; they met eighteen months earlier in jump training. He wants to keep up with Charlie in case any shooting starts so they can defend each other. Tim Anderson doesn’t like the terrain either, and he wishes that Pyle would stay close in formation. But that’s Pyle, he thinks. Always gung-ho.

  The heavy rice plants are nearly waist high and whisper as the men pass through them. Bradshaw looks up from his position and sees two NVA soldiers jump up and run along the tree line. They’re running, he guesses, to get in position to fire off a better shot as the squad walks ahead. One of the Recon guys gets spooked and starts shooting ahead of the rest of the platoon as it moves forward, and he hits two of his own platoon-mates in the back; they have to be medevaced out. Their advance into the hamlet is turning into a problem pretty quickly, and the shooter is sent to the rear of the line.

  The main part of the platoon has just about entered a hamlet when the firing starts. The NVA open up, and Charlie Pyle goes down. He disappears in the rice. In the chaotic firefight, ten other members of the platoon are wounded: Marvin Acker, Ronald Bard, Tony Beke, Warren Jewell, Dennis Kilbury, Richard Lapa, Brian Lewis, Guido Russo, Francis Wongus, and Luis Zendejas.

  Dwight Lane, Mike Bradshaw, and Tim Anderson conclude at the same time that Charlie’s been hit. The experience is so personal that both Dwight Lane and Tim Anderson will wonder, years later, if they weren’t alone, all by themselves, when they found Pyle. Bradshaw is crushed when he sees Charlie fall. He starts crawling through the rice, looking for his friend.

  Dwight Lane is about twenty feet away when Charlie drops, and he crawls up first, just in time to watch him die. Charlie’s blue eyes are still open. Dwight can’t stand this and he reaches over and tries closing them with his fingertips. He can’t make them close. He thinks of all the movies he saw as a kid, when the gunfighter reached over and did this for his newly dead buddy. Dwight thinks, This don’t work like it does in the movies. He won’t remember later how long he sat there with Charlie, hours or minutes. Time had stopped. When he removes his hand and looks at Charlie’s face again, he begins to cry, and in doing so, he dooms himself to a life of remembering. He hears somebody yelling—it’s Warren Jewell, and he’s yelling that he’s hit and needs help. Dwight starts crawling on his belly toward his screaming friend.

  After he leaves, Tim Anderson crawls up and finds Charlie alone, and he figures that he’s the first to discover him. Tim had been sitting with Tom Soals and Sergeant Westerman, in the rear, about 150 yards away, when he heard the shooting and realized that Charlie, walking point, might be under fire. He told Sergeant Westerman that he was going to see what had happened. Tom Soals, Westerman’s radio operator, said he wanted to leave too. Westerman ordered them both to stay put, but Tim took off in a fast crouch.

  When Tim finds Charlie, he sees that he’s dead and that his eyes are spookily open, and he decides he’d better close them, but they won’t stay shut. To prevent Charlie from being hit by more enemy fire, he decides to drag him over the two-foot-high dike that separates them. He radios Westerman for help, but Westerman says that he and Soals are pinned down by fire. Every few minutes, Soals holds his radio in front of him as protection from the bullets, knowing, at the same time, that it’s futile.

  Anderson reaches over the dike and grabs Charlie’s arms and pulls them out straight and eases the tall, thin body over the dike and it slumps back to the ground, next to him. He drags Charlie another thirty or forty feet to a place where he hopes the enemy won’t see him if they come looking.

  After he leaves, Dwight Lane returns, having bandaged up Jewell. He’s confused why Charlie is gone, but he doesn’t have much time to consider this. They’re taking heavy fire from the tree line. He picks up Charlie’s radio and calls Tom Soals to call in an artillery strike. Soals relays this to Westerman. Dwight can see a cement building nestled in some trees and he guesses that’s where the enemy is sitting.

  Westerman comes back on the radio. “That’s awfully close to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that’s where they’re at.”

  Westerman tells him to duck.

  The artillery strike arrives like a thunderclap. The ground explodes about fifty yards ahead of Dwight, and shrapnel buzzes past his head. Something slams his helmet. The impact knocks him over and he lays on the ground, blinking, collecting himself. He sits up and finds a four-inch-long, one-inch-wide piece of smoking metal—shrapnel. He figures that if it had hit his helmet point-end, he’d be dead. As it is, he feels like he’s been bludgeoned with a rock. He picks up Charlie’s grenade launcher and sets the butt-end on the ground and starts dumping one grenade after another at the tree line. He thinks, I’m not gonna make it through this night, but I’m gonna try. When it’s dark, he will crawl ahead and find Tim Anderson and Michael Bradshaw sitting with Charlie’s body. They will drag him a bit farther into the shadows, out of possible enemy fire, and then in the stillness of the night, creep back to Westerman’s position.

  • • •

  Like Anderson, Bradshaw, and Lane, Al Dove starts looking for Charlie as soon as he realizes he’s been shot. As he crawls ahead, though, Al hears someone else calling out in the tall rice plants that he’s fallen in, and he decides to detour to see if he can offer help. Al can’t see him and doesn’t know who he is, but he follows the sound of his voice, saying “Keep on talking!” in an effort to keep the man engaged and alert. He’s got his .45 pistol out and ten grenades in a pouch at the ready.

  “Where are you at?” he yells.

  “I’m over here, over here!”

  And finally Al finds the man lying in a bloody, smooshed-down place in the rice plants. It’s a guy named Lapa whom Al knows, but not well.

  He is hurt bad in the leg. In fact, Al can see Lapa’s femur shining through the hole in his thigh—gunshot, through and through. Lapa’s not bleeding a lot, but he can’t walk and Al’s got to move him. Somebody, positioned not far away, is throwing grenades, and they’re exploding close by. Al can’t figure out if it’s friendly fire or not—maybe the rice plants are crawling with other soldiers, enemy and friendly.

  Al takes off his long web belt, wraps it around Lapa’s chest, and then fastens the belt in a makeshift harness, which he places around his neck. With the belt straining against his windpipe, he starts crawling and dragging Lapa behind him. He’s more tired than he’s ever remembered being in his life, but this has been his perpetual state for weeks. He’s pretty sure he can’t keep crawling, but he does.

  An explosion goes off very close, and Al feels something burning the back of his neck. He can hear a sizzle sound. At first he thinks one of his own grenades has gone off, but no; he’d be mangled and dead if that had happened. He panics and says to Lapa, “I can’t take you. I got to get ahead and see what’s up there.” He feels they’re vulnerable stuck together like this, literally belted together. He takes the belt from around his neck, moves up through the rice paddy, and pulls out one of his grenades, and his neck starts burning again. He reaches back and pulls out a piece of shrapnel and pitches it aside, and sits and waits, but there’s no enemy out there waiting to kill them. He makes his way back to Lapa, rehitches himself, and continues dragging him. Lapa cries out in pain but is mostly silent, and Al tries to maneuver in such a way that he’s not dragging Lapa’s left leg through the dirt, where the gaping hole is in his thigh, until they reach the safety of the tree line.

  • • •

  The next morning, Jerry Austin and Tom Soals move forward and find Charlie and prepare him to be taken out by chopper. Jerry bends down and hoists Charlie acro
ss his shoulders and they move quickly back through the rice plants. Jerry lays him carefully on the ground and Soals moves the body onto a poncho and checks for wounds. Tom can’t see any blood on his uniform. He feels along Charlie’s shoulders and ribs and spies a small hole under his right arm. Tom guesses that the bullet had entered there and continued through Pyle’s heart, which must’ve stopped instantly, and which would explain the lack of bleeding. Pyle, they surmise, had likely died instantly.

  In the hours since his death, rigor mortis has set in and Tom tries to position his body so it will fit on the poncho. Tom has to bend the stiff arms back over Charlie’s head and place them at his sides. He finishes with the second arm and steps back and looks at Charlie, thinking, He’s a thing now, he’s not a person. He’s not Charlie Pyle anymore, but I will never forget him.

  The platoon gathers around and they load Charlie onto a chopper. The chopper lifts away and he is gone. His departure happens so quickly that no one really has time to think that they are really saying good-bye. They stand looking at the place in the sky where Charlie and the helicopter used to be. They never see him again.

  • • •

  Now, at the end of March, so much of the world seems so far away that to remember it is to perform an act of conjuring, a trick of the mind. “How can they send us here without telling us what it would be like?” Stan wonders. “We have become animals, living in the dirt.”

  If Stan sees that a platoon member does not have any mail, he, or any of the others, will leaf through their own, and suddenly, as if surprised, say, “Jeez, here you go, Beke. Looks like this one’s for you.” And Beke will reach up for the envelope and take it and read the address and then say, “No, there’s some mistake there; it’s not for me,” and Stan might say, “No, I think that one’s got your name on it.” This is part of the ritual, the offering and the refusal. And the boy, Al Dove or Tom Soals or Tim Anderson or Dwight Lane or Jerry Austin or Tony Beke will begin reading the letter, taking in the other man’s news as if it’s his own. He can sit back afterward, tapping the envelope against his knee and looking off at the green hills, nodding, as if everything he’s read really had happened to him, that in some wonderful way he really did have a sister who’d just gotten into Middlebury, that his father had been promoted, that his girlfriend will love him forever.

  Not all the news is good, though. Stan gets a letter from his beloved Mo—she’s now a senior at Lew Wallace High School—and she writes that she’s dating another boy. This spirals Stan into a funk, and the platoon has to intervene and remind him to get his mind back into the war or he’s going to get himself killed. But when he tells the platoon that he’s so distraught that he’s going to rip up Mo’s junior and senior pictures, the other guys swiftly veto this action. They tell him they want to be able to look at her photograph, and just because she’s not Stan’s girlfriend any longer, she’s still a young woman, a person with sweet eyes, a nice smile. Her photo possesses totemic value, endowed with rich powers. The other guys tell Stan that he can’t destroy Maureen’s pictures because this might endanger them all. Her photographs, they tell him, as well as the ones he’s carrying of Anna and Carol, are the reasons they’ve been spared. There’s a feeling among some of them that to go into the next firefight without them in Stan’s shirt pocket might get them killed. He doesn’t destroy the pictures.

  One day Stan is walking down the trail on the way to an ambush and says, “Riley, do you realize right now there are women walking down a street in America who are going about their business and they don’t know we’re here?”

  “I know it.”

  And then he asks the question that is always on their minds: “Do you even remember what a woman looks like?” Some of the guys keep their girlfriend’s perfumed letters in the plastic bags that their radio batteries are shipped in. They take them out at night and pass them around. Somebody will say, “Gimme a hit of that,” and the guy will stick his nose in and breathe deep. It seems impossible to them that there is something so sweet left in the world.

  • • •

  Rain falls all day and all night as they walk. Nothing is ever dry, and nothing ever changes, and yet nothing ever is the same.

  Stan and Riley sit down to rest. It’s then that they realize the rain has stopped falling after days of steady downpour.

  “Riley, you hear that?”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “It’s stopped.”

  “God, you’re right.”

  “Oh, god, Riley, it feels so good.”

  Finally, Riley says, “Do you still have those pictures in your pocket?”

  Stan carries five: two Mo had given him; two from Anna, on whom he’s long had a crush; and one from his art class buddy, Carol. Anna had written to him once: “Do you sleep in a barracks building over there?” There is so much he wants to tell her now to set her straight. These pictures remind Stan that there is another world to which he might return, if he can survive. When he looks at them, he thinks, This is what home looks like. Home. He is certain they are a link to sanity.

  “I still got those pictures,” he tells Riley, “right next to my heart.” He taps his shirt pocket.

  “You mind if I look at them again?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “And you won’t mind if I say whatever I want to?”

  “I won’t.”

  Stan pulls out the dog-eared pictures, and Riley holds them up against the blue sky and looks at them. And then he begins talking to them, saying things like, “You are so pretty,” and so on. He says to Stan, “You know what’s the first thing I’d do?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d drop my rucksack.”

  “Hell, that’d be the second thing I’d do,” Stan says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t even bother with that.”

  “You’re right about that,” says Riley, handing the photos back. “You won’t ever tell ’em if you see ’em, right?”

  “I won’t tell them, Riley. I promise.”

  • • •

  On March 31, five days after Stan returns to the platoon from the hospital, President Lyndon Johnson sits down before the American public on national TV and reports on the apparent success of U.S. forces repelling North Vietnam’s surprise Tet attack.

  The attack, he says, “did not collapse the elected government of South Vietnam or shatter its army.”

  “It did not produce,” he says, “a ‘general uprising’ among the people of the cities as they had predicted.”

  “The Communists,” he explains, “were unable to maintain control of any of the more than thirty cities that they attacked. And they took very heavy casualties.”

  And then, at end of his speech, the president delivers a shocking announcement: “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  When the platoon hears this news over Armed Services radio, they think Johnson’s throwing in the towel, that he’s giving up on them. The boys feel they’re winning.

  They feel they have the enemy on the run. They feel they’re killing so many enemy soldiers that surely Uncle Ho in Hanoi is about to give up—but not them. Dammit—why give up?

  News reports in general have been getting depressing too.I Saying that Tet has changed Americans’ perception about the war. Saying we can’t be winning if these little bastards can do this: attack an entire country in just one night!

  MAP LOCATIONS AND HELICOPTER FLIGHTS

  A.

  LZ Sally

  B.

  SP/4 Stan Parker WIA second time, March 14, punji stake

  C.

  SP/4 Tom Soals WIA, March 14, and PFC Allen Lawrence WIA, March 16

  D.

  2LT David Lewis WIA, March 20, and SP/4 Olen Queen, SP/4 Charlie Fowler, and SP/4 Charlie Pyle all WIA, March 21

  E.

  SP/4 Charlie Pyle KIA, March 22, and 10 WIA: SP/4 Marvin Acker, SGT Tony Beke, PFC Richard Lapa, SP/4 Luis Zendejas, SP/4 Guido
Russo, SP/4 Francis Wongus, SP/4 Dennis Kilbury, SP/4 Brian Lewis, SP/4 Ronald Bard, and PFC Warren Jewell

  F.

  SSG Freddie Westerman and SSG Lindsey Kinney WIA, March 23

  G.

  PFC Daryl Lintner KIA and SP/4 Joe Weise and SP/4 Ronald Kuvik WIA, April 20

  H.

  SP/4 Clifton Naylor WIA close to this location, March 7. Second Squad night ambush, March 9, where an oversize platoon of NVA blundered into ambush

  I.

  Combat assault on hot LZ, Recon and Companies A and D, also OH-6A LOH (light observation helicopter) shot down. Shredded rotary blades flew over the heads of Dove, Riley, and Parker. Three-day battle by Companies A and D and Recon

  J.

  SP/4 Stan Parker WIA third time, April 29, hand-to-hand bayonet fighting with wounded NVA soldier; stabbed NVA to death

  K.

  SP/4 Marvin Penry KIA, March 29, and 5 Recon WIA after combat assault on hot LZ: SP/4 Marvin Acker, SP/4 Jerry Austin, SP/4 Douglas Fleming, SGT Tony Beke, and SSG Lee Bruce

  L.

  An Loe Bridge QL (Hwy) 1, aka “Street Without Joy,” over Song Bo River, a vital secure position for supplies moving from Hue–Phu Bai area up to Quang Tri City. PFC David Bain WIA, April 9

  M.

  SP/4 Dwight Lane, SP/4 Ronald Bard, SP/4 Luis Zendejas, and PFC Eddie Johnson WIA, April 2

  * * *

  Date M = March  Date A = April

  CA = combat assault

  6M:

  CA with Company A. Cold LZ, south of LZ Sally at foothills, base of mountains. Night ambush established and contact made.

  7M:

  Extraction back to LZ Sally, with late-afternoon two-mile movement on foot to ambush position along Song Bo River.