The Odyssey of Echo Company

by Doug Stanton

  • • •

  Michael Bradshaw comes home to California one afternoon and knocks on his parents’ front door and discovers that his mother and father have changed too in his absence. His father opens the door dressed in a bathrobe, his now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail, rock music playing somewhere in the house. His mother walks up smiling and wearing a tie-dyed caftan and invites him inside. Were these the parents who wouldn’t let him listen to the Rolling Stones? What has happened? Over time, Bradshaw will be orphaned twice, first by the war from which he’s borne as a soldier, then by this homecoming: the place he left behind is not there when he returns, even though his parents are glad and welcoming. Over time, Bradshaw, hardworking, a loving father, devoted husband, will hit the road in an RV and fetch up in parks and campgrounds around California, moving with the seasons, working as a land surveyor, a job that keeps him in the woods and on mountaintops, always scouting, always on the move, always coming home, thinking of the men he once knew in the war.

  • • •

  Returning home, Dwight Lane tries to make sense of Charlie Pyle’s death and discovers, as far as he can tell, that there isn’t any. It happened. Charlie died. This is the best he can come up with.

  Dwight had joined the Army to escape Indiana and see the world. Growing up, he often wondered about the scars his father had gotten in World War II, which the old man never talked about. It will be years—on his father’s deathbed, in fact—before his father will tell Dwight what he thinks of that war, marching across Europe, the bodies that will spring up in his field of vision years later, back in Indiana, when he’s just idling along in his life, trying to be Dwight Lane’s father, and sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding.

  But if Dwight had been able, as he knelt in the rice paddy with Charlie Pyle in his arms, Dwight would have chosen, with all of his might, at that moment, to slide forward in time and come to a rest at his father’s deathbed, and he would have bent close to his father’s lips and listened as the old man explained how to understand the death of Charlie Pyle. What would his father have told him? he wonders. Accept it? Move on? Accept death? He doesn’t know what his father would have said. And he knows that he never will.

  The truth is, the platoon loved Pyle in those moments when he was with them alive, and then he was gone. Afterward, after the war, they never look for his family, for his friends. They never look for any sign of him after the war. They remember him, though. They never forget him.

  • • •

  No one looks for Pyle, that is, except for Dwight Lane. Each year, when March 22 rolls around, the anniversary of Pyle’s death, Dwight is antsy, irritable, ill at ease. A certain malaise comes over him, as the world does not seem a right place to live. Each year is the same. His friends notice his mood change, coming on strong like the change of seasons, always coinciding with spring, the bloom of the lilac in the middle of Indiana. As an older man, he lives alone in a nice house filled with cigarette smoke and Clive Cussler paperbacks spread on a kitchen table, the house never quiet because of the TV in the next room, a house by the side of the road. There’s Dwight, sitting at the kitchen table and looking out at the sunlight of the spring day, every year, until finally, in 1990, he decides it’s time and he gets up and walks out to his pickup truck.

  He drives into town and parks in front of the florist shop and waits a minute. He walks in, says hello to the clerk at the counter, and fills out the order form for the floral arrangement with a ballpoint pen. He orders something nice that will last awhile and that people can see from a ways off in the graveyard. “How do you want the card to read?” the clerk wants to know, and Dwight says, “To Charlie: You are not forgotten, and you never will be.”

  He writes it on the card and pays for the order. The clerk picks up the phone and dials the florist in Colleyville, Texas, says a few pleasantries, and this ritual will play itself out year after year for twenty-five years, always the same call, nearly the same banter between the florists on each end of the line, and then the clerk hangs up and says, “Will there be anything else, Dwight?” and he says, “No, I don’t believe so.” He leaves and gets in his truck and drives back home, the oiled dirt roads empty and rolling through oak forests, his boyhood haunts, the Red Rock River low and forever running in the same direction, away from town. Dwight, on days like these, after posting the order for the flowers, wonders what would have happened to his life had he not gone to Vietnam, had Charlie Pyle not been killed. Would Charlie not dying have made any difference in his life, which is like asking whether his life would have been different if there hadn’t been so much sadness. What would have happened had he not gotten a job after the war working in factories, making batteries and shower cabinets and steel gears for diesel trains and earthmovers, thirty-three years, finally, walking on cement floors, lifting steel, breathing that air, that same air? He wonders why he had to come home so angry at the world. He thinks about what would have happened if so many things had not happened, and he can’t know if his life would have been better or worse. His life is what it is, right? The sum total of his experiences.

  Each year, the price of flowers creeps up, but who cares? He imagines the bouquet arranged carefully on Charlie’s grave; imagines it sitting on the grave in the sun and through the dark of night. He’s now on near-total disability from the war—PTSD, bad back, insomnia—and he spends little of his money. After 9/11, there’s little incentive to travel, to see the world, because these days you have to take your shoes off in the airport, and it just seems so much hassle to go anywhere. At night, the visions of Charlie and so many other things come back.

  Each time Dwight orders flowers, he promises himself, “I’m going to go to Texas, and I’m going to see Charlie’s grave, and I’m going to bring flowers myself.” But he doesn’t know if he’ll ever have the courage.

  Then, in 2008, Dwight Lane decides it’s finally time to visit. He finds the cemetery in Texas and walks the rows until he locates the simple marker placed there, a bronze plaque cemented into the ground. He remembers a young man who died so young that he can only recall a boy. Nineteen years old. Charlie Pyle, the sweet handsome boy killed by the war, too young. And the world went on without him.

  • • •

  In Vietnam, after the slaughter of Charlie Company by the NVA, Al Dove had taken pictures of the dead and their half-ruined faces and said, “Somebody is going to pay for this,” meaning he was going to make someone pay. Years later, he knows this was understandable but foolish thinking. What he did in the war and what happened in the war, no one cares, it seems. People don’t talk with him about the war; no one calls him baby killer, rapist, psycho. His service in Vietnam is not an issue with anyone; it’s as if he were never there. America, he thinks, doesn’t think about Vietnam at all, except when it thinks about Afghanistan or Iraq as these wars slink into “quagmire.”

  In 1989, twenty years after coming home, something funny happens that brings his war to life again.

  Late one night in Southern California in his condo, he can’t sleep, so he gets up and turns on the TV and there’s the History Channel. He sits down and watches and, by god, he thinks he catches sight of an old buddy, Brian Lewis. It might be some old footage somebody had; Bob Cromer had a movie camera at one time, and for a while it seemed he was always taking movies. But Al doesn’t really remember what Cromer did and did not do. And he hasn’t seen Lewis in years, can’t remember the last time he saw him, in fact. Was it in Bien Hoa, when they were headed home?

  The truth is, Al can’t remember, but he does know that as he sits on his couch in Southern California, that he’s watching Lewis on the History Channel, back in Vietnam, when they were young. It seems like time travel. Al watches and thinks, He’s still alive. Thank god for that. Then after this, in 1997, a second weird thing happens. Al’s down at the mechanic’s garage near his house where he works restoring cars, and he’s shooting the breeze with a buddy, and he hears a voice and it’s Jerry Austin’s. He swears it
is. Coming at him through the years, as if it’s been launched from another galaxy and had been traveling all this time to intercept him in this garage.

  Al looks up and sees this guy walking away from him, just his back, shaped in a white T-shirt. Is that really Austin, could it be? He’d heard Jerry was dead, he can’t remember. Tom Soals had called him in 1980 or 1981 and said that Austin had died and that he wanted him to know this, and now Al yells out, “Jerry!” and the guy turns around, and it is him. Not dead. Al sees what’s happening before Jerry does, that they’re being reunited. Al looks at Jerry, taking it in. He’s having trouble placing Al’s face, and Al says, “It’s me, Jerry! Al Dove. DOV-UH,” he says, repeating the platoon’s nickname for him, and Jerry’s face turns white. They walk toward each other, and as they get closer, they hold their arms out and they draw each other in and hold on and each of them is crying. They learn they’ve been living near each other for at least a decade.

  It isn’t surprising that Dove thinks Jerry’s been dead these many years. On May 21, 1969, after surviving the Tet, and while most everyone else returns to the States, Jerry extends his tour. During a battle, he’s wounded so badly that he was tagged as dead and put in a body bag. Several hours later, someone at Grave Registration sees the bag move, opens it, and inside is Jerry Austin, alive. Rumors of his death, however, persist and eventually spread among former members of the platoon.

  Seven months and two medical operations later, Jerry is released from a military hospital at Fort Lewis, Washington, and returns to California. Occasionally he bumps into guys he used to know in Vietnam, and often they tell him they thought he’d died over there. He never gets used to hearing of his own demise, but neither does he feel he’s really alive. He’s living in a half-world between what had been his existence in Vietnam and the prospect of creating a life in California.

  When he’d been discharged from the Army, he’d received no debriefing about life after the war, and he has no way of knowing what to do when he meets people on the street who seem to hate him for having been a soldier. He assaults three police officers when they tell him that all Vietnam veterans are alike: troublemakers. He’s charged with felonious assault.

  On the day of his court arraignment, Jerry appears before a judge who happens to have been a World War II veteran, and who had once been in trouble himself twenty-five years earlier for disorderly conduct after his Army discharge. He promises Jerry that if he seeks counseling, he’ll reduce the charges to misdemeanors, with three years of probation. He also threatens Jerry with prison time should he break the law again. Jerry eagerly agrees to this second chance, and over time, like Stan Parker, he finds steady, profitable employment as an iron worker. He leaves behind the backpacking and mountain climbing he enjoyed before the war and takes up sport fishing in a boat he names Geronimo, the word paratroopers sometimes shout when they jump from aircraft. Hardworking, generous to others, he nonetheless keeps largely to himself, preferring the open water to idle conversation.

  He’s in the garage today checking his boat’s engine repair. On many days, Al has seen the boat steam into the harbor with a man at the wheel and looked at him but never thought it was Jerry Austin. On the hull of the boat were these big letters spelling Geronimo. Al had often wondered who in the world would name his boat after a paratrooper’s cry. Austin had. All these years he’d thought Jerry was dead.

  • • •

  After years of thinking about Wongus but never calling him, Stan finally reaches him near Christmas 1996, in Connecticut, where he’s living with his mother, and Stan says, after all this time, “Francis, how you doing?”

  Francis says, “Oh, hi, Parker. It’s great to hear from you.”

  They talk for several minutes and Stan realizes that Wongus doesn’t remember him. But in the next second, he seems coherent. It seems that Francis Wongus is high or stoned. Stan wants to reach out to him, take his hand, hold it, and say to him, “Wongus, buddy, ’member that time in February 1968, when we fired up them VC on ambush and they hit us with mortars?” and Francis Wongus says, “Who am I talking to?” His mother picks up the line and says, “Francis can’t talk anymore,” and she hangs up and Stan is holding the phone to his ear, frozen in place, saying, “Francis.”

  Stan calls him again a year later. A woman answers the phone, and says “Hullo?” and Stan says, “Is Francis there?” and she gets real quiet and says, “No. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Stan Parker.”

  “Oh, you,” she says. “You should have called him again. After you called last, he was agitated. Why didn’t you call him?” and Stan says, “Why? What’s happened?” And she says, “Francis is dead, Mr. Parker. He died.” Stan picks up from the conversation that either drinking or an overdose killed him. They talk a little while, but none of it explains anything. Stan will never really know what happened to Francis after the war, the places he went. He will never know how he died. Yet Francis’s mother made Stan feel that somehow his death was his fault. Why didn’t you call him again and keep him alive? But Stan knows his death was not his fault. Why didn’t you call him again? And it’s a good question, but what she’s saying is: You were one of the few who understood him. Why didn’t you call?

  • • •

  Stan had called Francis Wongus because he missed him, and he missed the Army. The longing had begun years earlier, shortly after he was discharged on August 7, 1969. Set free, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he travels around. He visits a friend in Detroit, returns to Gary, Indiana, and turns south to Louisiana, punching the GTX muscle car along country two-lane blacktop, 90, 100, 135 mph. He knows exactly where he’s headed eventually—back home, and he knows what job he’ll do—he’ll be an ironworker, like his dad. He doesn’t mind this choice; it’s honorable, skilled work. But it’s not combat. It’s not the Army. He feels the old pull of his experience in Vietnam so much that in October, once he’s back in Gary, he tries to reenlist with the 82nd Airborne but, because he’s already completed his hitch, Army policy prevents him from signing up again. He enrolls in an ironworker’s apprenticeship program and turns his energy, his anxiety, toward making a living in civilian life.

  At about this same time, he gets reacquainted with Anna Runion, whose high school picture he had carried in his shirt pocket, beside Mo’s and Carol’s. Whenever he came home on leave, he’d call Anna, but she always seemed busy working in the personnel office at a local company, Inland Steel.

  One day he’s driving in the neighborhood when he sees a woman walking to her mailbox. He spins his GTX around and pulls into the drive, ready to introduce himself. She walks toward his car; she seems to recognize him but he can’t place her face; she’s beautiful. He’s mesmerized. She surprises him by saying, “Hello, Stan, I heard you were back from the Army.”

  Now the pieces fall into place.

  “Anna?”

  “All one hundred percent of me,” she says.

  Stan blurts, “How about a date?”

  “I would. But I have a boyfriend.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Stan. “I’ll take you out after your date. I’ll wait for you anywhere.”

  Anna considers the prospect. She knows Stanley Parker—knows him from the neighborhood, from high school, from the mobile home park where they once both lived and were best friends. She understands in an essential way Stanley Parker’s life, even though she has not seen him for more than three years and doesn’t really know what he’d lived through in Vietnam. She knows he’s just come home, and that a lot of boys coming home are silent and angry. But Stan seems different. He is smiling and talkative, hungry to enjoy himself and make sure others around him feel fine too. She agrees to the date.

  She spends the first several hours of the next evening with her steady boyfriend, then several more after that with Stan, where over dinner they talk for hours. He can’t believe the transformation; six years earlier she’d been a pigtailed sophomore, but now . . .

  He wonders too ho
w he’s changed. He knows the answer, and he can see that she knows too. Yet she talks with him about the war, about his future plans, which soon turns to talking about their plans together. Within a matter of weeks, they’re going steady and by April are engaged. In August 1970, they’re married. They pack up and head for Wyoming the day after the wedding, where Stan has a job waiting.

  Stan refocuses all his energy on home life and learning his trade as an ironworker. But no matter how hard he works at this—and he’s a diligent, excellent worker; a caring father and husband—he can’t resist: a year after he marries, he secretly tries to reenlist, and again he’s told he’s ineligible for service. He decides he won’t tell Anna. He starts following the ironworking circuit, bringing his family with him. His plan is to make a good living and to be the father to his children that his father was to him.

  He finds high-paying work in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, and Nebraska. By the end of 1976, he and Anna have two sons, Wesley, age three, and Jason, eight months old. In April of that year, shortly after Jason is born, and still hearing the call of military life, Stan learns from his brother Dub that, under a new Army program, he can join Special Forces in the U.S. Army Reserves.

  Thinking this is too good to be true, and that the opportunity might somehow be snatched from him, Stan drives four hours to Denver and, without talking with Anna, quickly signs papers to become a member of the Colorado National Guard’s 19th Special Forces Group Airborne. He’ll have to regularly travel from Wyoming to Colorado, where the 5th Special Forces Battalion of the 19th Group is based, for training, but he’ll still live with Anna and the boys and remain steadily employed as an ironworker. At age twenty-eight, after leaving the Army eight years earlier, he’s an American soldier again. He couldn’t be happier. But now he has to tell Anna.