The Odyssey of Echo Company

by Doug Stanton

  And how do you survive something like that?

  Time?

  Does time heal all wounds?

  • • •

  A week later, we are at the village of Trung Hoa, where Stan was wounded on February 18, 1968.

  We’re forty miles northeast of Hue and within the thirty square miles of wooded area and rice paddies where Stan and the Recon Platoon did most of their fighting. This is where their journey began and Stan hopes it’s where it ends now.

  We are driving on a packed clay road, narrow like a cart path, shaded by trees and foliage none of us can name. Bill Ervin is driving and he stops in the middle of the road when Stan says, “Here, right here. I think this is the place.”

  What place?

  The place where it all happened, where a part of Stan Parker died.

  And just as soon as Bill Ervin has shut down the van, Stan opens the driver’s-side door and steps out. I’m right behind him, and he has maybe two or three steps to take before he’s off the side of the road and into the dusty vegetation growing alongside. He passes through this wall of trees, maybe fifteen feet high, and I lose him for a moment.

  I step through the trees into sunlight and find Stan standing frozen in place.

  He’s staring at the ground, or somewhere at a point in the air I can’t locate. He seems lost in thought. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem like a happy time for him.

  What he’s having is, suddenly, a flashback.

  Up ahead I see houses and a farm field, the field being maybe fifty yards long and wide. Stan just stands there and doesn’t move. He’s looking ahead like a man who’s afraid to move his head, as if he’s got a sliver of glass somewhere in his neck that will kill him if he moves too quickly. I can hear the putter of life in the small village, a hamlet, really—the crack of an ax chopping wood, the close of a screen door somewhere, and Stan says to me, “I’m here.”

  Barely a croak of his voice.

  “I’m here,” he says again.

  “Where, Stan? Where are you?”

  “Where it happened.”

  He’s trembling ever so slightly, and I put my hand on his shoulder and then remove it. And I stand next to him, not knowing what to do.

  “This is where it happened,” he says again.

  We are standing, he says, almost exactly where he fell in 1968 when he got grenaded by the NVA soldier: They’d grabbed each other, each of them dazed by the previous minutes’ firefight.

  Stan leads me a few feet to the left and points down at our feet, to a corner in the field, where the two edges of the dike come together, making a foot-high corner. A rice paddy that the farmer has let lie fallow. When Stan was last here forty-six years ago, it had been flooded and he was lying in water covering his face up to his eyes. As he lay there staring at the sky unblinking, the NVA soldier who’d just thrown the grenade at him walked over the edge of the dike and peered down and pointed the barrel of his AK-47 straight at Stan’s face.

  Stan had played dead and looked at the opening of the barrel, which had seemed incredibly tiny and infinite at the same time. So much of the future would be answered or created by what came out of that barrel. He stared at the barrel, his face a mask, until the NVA soldier decided Stan was dead and, distracted, turned and went off.

  • • •

  Now he can’t believe he’s back in this rice paddy. How had this happened so quickly? He had simply stepped out of the van and walked down the slight embankment and through the weeds and trees and into the past, and now he’s standing here, trembling.

  I can hardly believe we’re here, either. So easily.

  Our journey had begun in Colorado, with Stan looking at maps and identifying the villages, using U.S. Army After-Action Reports (AARs) to identify places where the platoon may have fought. Since Stan had spent his adult life reading maps in the Army, he was able to find Trung Hoa and LZ Jane without a lot of trouble. Using the AAR as reference, he decided that Trung Hoa was the place where his attack on the machine-gun position of February 18, 1968, had happened. The idea that he might find the rice paddy this quickly had not occurred to him.

  Now he grows more animated and starts walking around the small ten-by-ten area where he’d dropped down and fired the antitank rocket across the road; the scrim of trees hadn’t been here in 1968. From where Stan had been prone on the ground and fired the rocket, we could hit the van with a quick toss of a stone. Bill Ervin has opened the van’s back hatch, and he and Anh are unpacking a picnic basket and preparing lunch. We’re going to stop right here and eat in the road. That’s how small the village of Trung Hoa is. One hundred people, maybe. Tops.

  I can’t believe how compact everything is, the distance between the place from which he fired the rocket and the target itself. After hearing Stan Parker talk about this rice paddy so many times, in his retelling, in Colorado, as snow fell outside the kitchen window as we drank coffee, and over the phone, or in text messages, the rice paddy had grown in my mind to immense proportions. I had thought it was maybe one hundred yards long at least. Stan had set off running down the rice paddy, charging the machine-gun position at its end. His entire being was focused on reaching this machine gun. As we look through the trees and listen to Bill and Anh talk about what kind of sandwiches to have for lunch, Stan spots something across the road, about fifty feet away.

  “That’s where it was,” he says.

  The machine-gun position.

  He’s found it, or found a place on which, once upon a time, his entire being had been focused, in a kind of ecstasy. He had taken off running at this place, pretty certain he was going to die. We walk back up the embankment and through the trees and cross the road, which is pleasant underfoot, cool and soft yet packed, and it gives off the sense of having been used for centuries. But, in fact, who knows? It may be just as old as Stan himself. We keep walking. Yet we seem to be walking back through time, and in time, and even, somehow, ahead in time, as Stan re-creates himself here at this moment, reintegrating those parts that had so long sat in pieces around the floor of his life.

  “Yep,” Stan says. “Here it is.”

  He reaches up and parts the plants around an object, and we see a concrete obelisk of some sort, a bit taller than a mailbox back in the United States, but what is it? Hard to say. There’s writing in Vietnamese on the obelisk. And since Anh is too far away to ask her to translate, we let it go for the moment. Something else catches Stan’s eye: a house across the road. Its roof is made of metal, and the walls are poured concrete. It’s sturdy, built with care. It sinks in that someone is living here now, that this is a place of pride for someone. Stan realizes that this is the building he’d destroyed by blowing up the machine-gun position, which is now marked by the obelisk. The ammo around the machine gun had exploded, then started cooking off, sending all kinds of shrapnel flying everywhere, flaming pieces of wood, which had whiz-banged through the air and landed on the now-concrete house, and set it on fire. Then, the house had been made of thatch, even the roof, and it crackled and burned rapidly. Stan was lying there in the rice paddy across the road and heard the machine-gun ammo cook as he waited for his buddies to come get him. He was bleeding from the hole on his right side. He was twenty years old and had no idea that he would ever be back in this place, that someday he’d meet me on a helicopter in Afghanistan, and ask me, “Would you write about our journey in Vietnam?”

  • • •

  Stan calls Anh over to translate what’s on the obelisk. It’s a black granite column, about twelve inches across. Anh begins: “In honor of the Vietnamese and American soldiers who died here on February 18, 1968.”

  Anh reads this and Stan and Tom Soals are silent. Stan can’t comprehend that the Vietnamese have erected a monument marking this place that he’d thought of so often and that certainly no one in the United States had heard about. How could they even know of this place since he had told so few people of this firefight? He had told so few people anything about the war. That someone in
Vietnam, particularly his former enemy, had thought to erect this monument gives him a soaring feeling, a sudden feeling of liberation. Who had done this? Who had made the monument? Who had consecrated this place with this gentle and obscure act? Who had been watching?

  His enemy had.

  He then realizes, of course, that the monument isn’t necessarily for him; the people who put it up had lost people in this firefight, and during the longer battle of that day. He’s thought of the dead often. Darryl Lintner’s death still haunts him.

  The death of the little girl too, clutching the can of peaches, has haunted him. He’s thought about the NVA soldiers and Viet Cong he’s killed, but differently now. They were doing a job and he was doing a job, and, well, he’d been more successful at it than any of those he killed. At the same time, he understood just how random the dying had been. One minute a man was there; the next, he was just bone and mist and, then, nothing. A bloody spot on the ground.

  “Come this way,” Stan says, “I want to show you where Tinkle and Hinote got shot.”

  Their wounding is what had precipitated Stan Parker’s charge across this rice paddy, toward the machine gun that had shot them—the place where the obelisk now stood. We step through the dry and stiff stalks of plants and weeds, walking along the edge of the rice paddy and go through people’s yards, past their houses, with me gesturing and asking if it’s okay that we pass through, as they come out of their houses and stand in their doors and look at us and I can see some of them thinking, There goes another American, looking for the past.

  Do they know what had happened here forty-six years earlier? A middle-aged man says he was too young, but sends us to a house at the end of the road. A figure appears on the road, a short, thin man, with a shock of black hair flecked with strands of silver. He’s maybe Stan’s age. He walks up to us without saying a word. He’s looking at us but not looking at us, and he’s having that very universal thought, I think, which is What am I about to get into here? when meeting a stranger in a familiar place. Anh says a few words to him in Vietnamese. Stan and Tom are quiet. All of the time we’ve been in the village, which has been about thirty minutes, Stan has been wondering if he would meet any local Vietnamese who had fought in the war, and who, preferably, had fought in this area during the war. Now with the arrival of this man, Stan’s on high alert. He stands off, maybe six feet away, appraising the situation with Tom Soals. I, the reporter, am leaning close to listen as Anh and the man talk back and forth in Vietnamese, a tongue whose music I can’t fathom. I’m reminded as I look at Stan that maybe he’s standing as he did a long time ago, back in Arkansas, or Texas, on the school yard, when meeting someone new. There’s something innocent and vulnerable in the look on his face, something expectant, in the upturned smile on his face. Still, he looks troubled too, or ready to be troubled. We’re standing on the road in front of the van and the sun is out, and the air smells fragrant, humid. It’s the right kind of day for a picnic, and there’s something peaceful and relaxing about this sudden meeting with this gentleman, who introduces himself as Mr. Sinh, as we prepare to have our picnic. I don’t know how to describe this except to say that everything that’s happening seems like it’s supposed to be happening. At the same time, I realize—and Stan and Tom realize—how weird this is to be in this village and meeting Mr. Sinh. The words that come out of Anh’s mouth next surprise Stan and Tom: “He says he was here.”

  “Here, when?” Stan wants to know.

  Anh says a few more words in Vietnamese and then begins to speak in English, then stops and returns to Mr. Sinh in Vietnamese, her body language saying, “Are you sure?” And Mr. Sinh nods his head yes, and Anh says, “He was here on February 18, 1968. In the big battle with the American soldiers.”

  “Now hold on a minute,” Stan says. “He’s saying he was here fighting against us?” Stan points at the ground, holding the military grid map he’s been carrying on this trip, as we plot our moments. “Here?”

  “Yes,” says Anh.

  “Ask him how old he is.”

  “He says he’s sixty-eight.”

  Stan doesn’t swear much, but the look on his face is, I’ll be damned.

  “Ask him if he remembers”—a thought occurs to Stan—“ask him if he knows what that monument is over there.”

  And Stan points at the obelisk we’d seen earlier.

  “Oh, that’s to mark the battle, the men who died here. Americans and eight Vietnamese.”

  Stan still doesn’t believe that Mr. Sinh was here. He also looks like he’s about to cry. He looks so happy and sad at the same time. He looks like he doesn’t know what to think about himself, his life, or anything.

  “Ask him if he remembers the shoot-down. Ask him if he remembers a helicopter getting shot down.”

  Mr. Sinh says, “Yes,” vigorously. He adds, “About three in the afternoon.”

  Stan says, “You’re kidding me,” because that is, in fact, about the time the helicopter he was in, after picking him up after the grenade attack, was shot down.

  “And it was raining then too,” says Mr. Sinh.

  Stan’s getting more excited by the moment.

  “Have him show me where,” he says, and he hands Anh a pen, who hands it to Mr. Sinh, and now the two men are closer, literally standing closer to each other, and while Stan could have handed Mr. Sinh the pen himself, he didn’t. I think I know why. It didn’t seem appropriate; some rules still needed to be followed. And it’s this rule: that the two men are really finding out if they know each other, if they share something in common, mainly this act of combat, and if they do, they are not strangers, and therefore will instantly share a sense of intimacy that needs not to be created because it’s always existed. That’s the odd thing about war for men and women: after the fighting, they share a sense of personhood with putative enemies, whom they may never meet again but whom they know in a fundamental way by virtue of either having tried to kill each other.

  As Stan looks on, Mr. Sinh opens his hand and lays the palm flat, pointing up at the sky, the hand is small and calloused, the nails bearing garlands of dirt, the badge of someone who works with his hands. I look at the hands and wonder about all the places they’ve been in the world since February 18, 1968: the objects they’ve picked up, the things they’ve done in anger and in friendship. There they are, the hands of the enemy, open now, just before the gaze of Stan Parker. Mr. Sinh begins drawing with ballpoint pen on his opened palm. He starts drawing a map of the village, but mostly of a rice paddy, and a dike, or water source, in the paddy. Before Mr. Sinh gets very far, Stan can already see where the map is going: the palm of his enemy is the center of the map, and the whole world flows from that, beyond the hand’s edges, beyond the village of Trung Hoa, the province of Quang Tri, the country of Vietnam, India, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi, to Colorado, city of Colorado Springs, where Stan Parker’s life has come to rest in its final chapters and where he has spent his time laying out days as one more day to figure out what happened to him as a twenty-year-old from Gary, Indiana. And back now to Mr. Sinh’s hand, the four square inches of his palm, where he has written in ink the site where Stan Parker’s helicopter crashed, all of it right there, literally in the palm of his enemy’s hand. It occurs to me that Mr. Sinh is maybe the only person on the planet who remembers this moment that has haunted Stan with the same level of detail that Stan Parker remembers it. Isn’t that something? Who else is alive who was here that day? What are the odds that Stan and Tom would’ve driven into this village and intersected their journey with Mr. Sinh’s walk down this quiet road?

  Mr. Sinh, we find out, has heard that there were Americans in the village, and he’d left his house to see what was happening. Stan hands him the military map he’s been carrying and watches as Mr. Sinh looks at the map, and then readjusts it, so that the top of the map is north. Stan sees Mr. Sinh do this, and it confirms for Stan that Mr. Sinh is a veteran. It further cements his sense of affinity with Mr. Sinh. T
his simple movement of the map has changed how they relate to each other.

  Stan seems to relax, and Mr. Sinh does too; they are now long-lost friends. Stan hugs Mr. Sinh and Mr. Sinh smiles and hugs him back.

  Stan and Tom invite Mr. Sinh to have lunch with us, and he accepts the invitation. All through the meal, Stan Parker keeps saying, “My god, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe we’re here together.”

  “Please ask him what he did in the war,” Stan tells Anh. Stan wants to know more. He feels he’s onto something here, that the pieces of the puzzle may be falling into place: he knows what happened that day, but he’s never been able to figure out all that happened. And who were the other people on the end of the gun? Who was the enemy?

  Mr. Sinh explains that he’d been fighting for the Viet Cong in February 1968, and on that day, February 18, he and his cadre of guerrilla fighters had been worried that the Americans would come back in force because the day before, they’d killed a lot of American soldiers in an ambush and they’d braced themselves for a counterattack. Mr. Sinh then says that he was the leader of the VC cadre, and this gets Stan’s further attention. He points over at the house, the metal-roofed house that Stan and I had looked at earlier, and says, “That was my command center. My headquarters.” And then he adds, “It burned to the ground.”

  Stan says, “I saw it burn. I set it on fire—I mean . . .” He stops. He wants to back up and start from the beginning.

  Mr. Sinh kind of helps him out here, by saying, “That was my machine gun there.” He points to the obelisk. “My men were manning it.”

  “That was the machine gun I charged,” says Stan, amazed.

  After a moment, Mr. Sinh nods, acknowledging this. This moment completes a circle for Stan, a circle leading home.

  He tells Mr. Sinh, “That was the machine gun that shot my friends, and I took off running and got to about here”—and he points over to the dike in the rice paddy behind us—“and that’s where I fired the rocket from.”