The Odyssey of Echo Company

by Doug Stanton

  Mr. Sinh says they thought they had killed the American soldier four or five different times, but he got up and kept charging them. “You are a lucky man.” Mr. Sinh smiles.

  Anh is quickly translating and keeping up. The information is passing back and forth between Stan and Mr. Sinh, causing a kind of transformation, a transubstantiation, even—the two men communing with each other through the efforts of recounting the tale.

  Mr. Sinh explains that when the machine-gun position blew up, he was blown from his command building. Its roof started to burn and he and his men had to abandon it and dissolve into the woods. Hearing this fills in a part of the story for Stan, and he walks over to Mr. Sinh. Before Mr. Sinh can say much of anything, Stan embraces him in a massive hug. He’s got a few inches on Mr. Sinh, and he hugs him again, and he’s saying, “Oh, man, I can’t believe this is happening!”

  And, “I’m having so much fun!”

  And further, “I’m having more fun here than I ever had in America, coming home.”

  They are holding each other, a few feet from where they last met forty-six years earlier. Mr. Sinh starts smiling too.

  The two of them walk over to the obelisk inscribed with the names of the dead who had died during their fighting.

  “I want to tell you something,” Mr. Sinh says. “I want to tell that I have often thought of that day.”

  He pauses, and his face darkens: “I have never forgotten that day.”

  And here Stan’s face goes very still. His eyes are shining. “I was trying to kill you and you were trying to kill me,” he says.

  “We were enemies,” says Mr. Sinh, “but now we are brothers.”

  They hug each other and will not let go.

  They both start to cry.

  And then they smile.

  EPILOGUE

  Coming home now . . . what now of coming home? Stan Parker is walking home after high school wrestling practice when he spots her. Anna. Sitting on her front steps with her skirt drawn under her knees, she says, Hi, Stan, how are you? I am fine. I hear you’re joining up. I did. When do you leave, Stan? This summer sometime. Sweetheart, where are you? Stan looks around to the rest of the squad and makes the signal to stop. A fist. Clenched. Filthy. His own.

  Stop right now.

  The squad drops, waits.

  The tree line up yonder is so green. And here it comes, as they expected: gunfire.

  Explosions, smoke.

  Tim Anderson says, Ev’ry time we come here something happens! Al Dove opens up on the trees with the M-60, and the bamboo spits yellow fire back at the platoon. And right about then Darryl Lintner gets shot. Jerry Austin sees it, so does Paul Sudano. Lintner falls back on his butt and sits still. The guys wait for him to fall over. But he doesn’t fall over. His rucksack is holding him up. He sits there, dying.

  But in the minds of his friends, Darryl Lintner, age twenty-one, from Perryville, Missouri, is not dying. He will never die. He is falling backward toward the ground, which he will never reach. A man will live forever among the men who love him, who watch over him.

  1 Stan Parker’s second-grade school photo, taken a year after his recovery from polio. As the son of an itinerant ironworker, Stan was used to overt displays of condescension in nearly every town his family moved to. In San Antonio, Texas, his teacher called him “gypsy-carnival trash.”

  2 The four Parker brothers in 1965: Stan, Bruce, Joe, and the eldest, Jim (Dub). Both Stan and Dub would see action in Vietnam.

  3 Stan at a friend’s house in Gary, Indiana, in August 1966, just before leaving for Army basic training. His high school friends nicknamed him “Boots” because of the cowboy boots he usually wore. Stan believed his cowboy get-up let people know he was his own man.

  4 A photo from the local newspaper shows Stan (third from the left) and three high school buddies—John Santos (second from the right), Tom Gervais (second from the left), and Pat Devitt (far left)—all shaking hands with a recruiter after enlistment in the Army on May 22, 1966. Stan did not discuss his decision to enlist with his parents until after the fact.

  5 Stan served as part of the U.S. Army’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) in Germany after his father intervened to keep him from shipping out to Vietnam. Stan nevertheless approached his company commander every week to request a transfer.

  6 Photo taken in early December 1967, Echo Company, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 501st Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a few days prior to Vietnam deployment.

  7 On December 14, 1967, Echo Company was transported to Cu Chi base camp, located south of the Viet Cong stronghold known as the Iron Triangle. On Christmas Day, Stan was reunited in Cu Chi with his older brother, Dub, in-country from the 101st Airborne, stationed with combat duty around the Phan Rang area of Vietnam.

  8 Stan sent letters from Cu Chi to his girlfriend, Maureen, back in Indiana. “We’re going to end this war,” he promised in one. Later, as he saw more action, he wrote letters to her he decided not to send.

  9 Stan carried Maureen’s school picture (above) and that of his friend and neighbor Anna Runion (below) in the top left pocket of his jungle fatigues, right over his heart, for the duration of his tour in Vietnam. Some members of the Recon Platoon would come to believe that the pictures possessed special powers that kept them alive.

  10

  11 After two weeks of filling sandbags, the platoon began patrolling the area around Cu Chi, scouting for VC fighters. From left to right: Brian Lewis, Tom Soals, Lieutenant John Gay, Staff Sergeant Lindsey Kinney, Stan, and Al Dove.

  12 Recon Platoon members Tim Anderson (left), Francis Wongus (center), and Tony Ramirez.

  13 Specialist Dwight Lane (pictured here), Stan, and Brian Riley met each other as LRRPs in Germany and hit it off immediately. All three ended up as members of Recon Platoon in Vietnam.

  14 Smoke in Cu Chi base camp following a rocket attack from the Viet Cong in December 1967. The nationwide surprise attack by the North Vietnamese on the 1968 Tet holiday was only weeks away.

  15 Stan in Cu Chi with an M-60 machine gun, which could fire about six hundred and fifty rounds per minute with an effective range out to twelve hundred yards. “We were itching for something to happen,” he wrote in a letter to his father. “Come on, do something! Shoot at us!”

  16 On January 23, 1968, Recon Platoon and the entire 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry loaded up on C-130s in Cu Chi and flew three hundred eighty miles to the Hue–Phu Bai area in the northernmost province in South Vietnam, following reports that the North Vietnamese Army was planning an attack over the Tet holiday.

  17 Brian Riley, Stan Parker, and Bob Cromer loading up in the C-130.

  18 The Recon Platoon on their first patrol from LZ Jane, about twenty-five miles south of the DMZ.

  19 Al Dove from Honolulu napping with his M-60.

  20 Charlie Pyle from Colleyville, Texas. He would be killed in action on March 22, 1968.

  21 Huey helicopters darted in and out of hot landing zones, delivering soldiers and supplies and carrying out the wounded and dead. The Recon Platoon considered the Hueys that dropped them off and picked them up to be their lifelines.

  22 Stan in a helicopter in February 1968 heading into combat.

  23 The Recon Platoon often set up their ambushes on rickety bamboo bridges, laying down trip flares.

  24

  25 Stan, war-weary, with a thousand-yard stare in his eyes, April 1968. He had been in-country about five months.

  26 Huey choppers lining up to take Recon and Company A, 1/501st Airborne Infantry, for combat assault into harm’s way as Al Dove, at the right edge of the picture, intensely watches incoming choppers.

  27 In March 1968, Stan—on a two-day convalescent leave, pictured here with his brother Dub—fell into a pit of needle-sharp punji sticks covered in excrement, a booby trap set by the Viet Cong. One stick punctured his wrist clean through to the other side, and he spent two weeks in the hospital, away from combat. Hi
s platoon-mate Charlie Pyle was killed in action while Stan was convalescing.

  28 The Recon Platoon assembled at LZ Sally on March 27, 1968, for a combat assault. Left to right: Parker, Lane, Bradshaw, Cromer, Austin, Russo, Soals, Holt, Jewell, and Wongus.

  29 A haunting photo of Viet Cong soldiers, developed from a roll of film Stan removed from the pocket of a man he had just killed. Approximately forty thousand Viet Cong and NVA soldiers died in combat during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

  30 Stan poses with skulls that he found placed atop each of a cluster of six secluded graves. He was ordered by battalion HQ to collect them as intelligence items to be sent to the rear area for examination. “I, as well as those around me, are trained to kill and have adapted to that characteristic habit very demonstratively,” Stan wrote in an unsent letter to Maureen. “I hope that I get out of here alive and when I get back home that I will be able to conduct myself in a sensible, rational, respectable manner and act normal again.”

  31 A photo of Stan taken in May 1968, at the end of the Tet Offensive.

  32 Stan in the San Francisco airport on his way home in December 1968 after his twelve-month tour ended. Soldiers back in Vietnam advised him to remove his uniform to avoid being hassled in the airport. But he wore it anyway.

  33 After getting out of the Army, returning home to Indiana, and being unable to reenlist, Stan reunited with Anna Runion and married her in August 1970. They had become the best of friends during the summer of 1964. They have been married ever since.

  34 After marrying Anna, Stan devoted himself to learning his chosen trade as an ironworker. He followed the ironworking circuit to Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, and Nebraska, bringing Anna and their two sons with him. Stan, the foreman (third from right), kneels on a steel beam 410 feet in the air with part of his crew. It was a steel structure similar to this one from which Stan fell 360 feet and survived in 1977. But Stan missed the military, and in 1976 he found a backdoor way to reassociate with the Army and signed on to become a member of the National Guard’s 19th Special Forces Group, splitting his time between training and ironworking. In 1994, he quit ironworking entirely and resumed life as an active-duty Special Forces soldier.

  35 In 1997, after graduating from the U.S. Army’s Sergeants Major Academy, Stan began active duty with U.S. Special Operations Command. He deployed to Jordan, Somalia, Kenya, Eritrea, and two tours to Afghanistan.

  36 Stan during an air mission in Afghanistan around Thanksgiving 2004.

  37 Stan and Tom Brokaw sharing a laugh at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, April 2005.

  38 Stan on the tailgate of a Boeing Vietnam-era CH-47 Chinook, holding his Colt M4A1 carbine and wearing a headset for communication with the helicopter pilot and crew.

  39 Stan checking location on a river in the Hindu Kush mountain region during a ground mission in Afghanistan.

  40 Stan with an Afghan boy he rescued from certain death out of a Taliban ambush kill zone on October 29, 2005, deep in the Hindu Kush mountains.

  41 Stan and his former Recon platoon-mate Tom Soals returned to Vietnam in April 2014. They are pictured here on a visit to the site of LZ Jane, where the 1968 Tet Offensive commenced for their platoon when it was overrun by soldiers of the NVA’s 10th Sapper Battalion.

  42 Stan looking at images of the war in a museum at the Khe Sanh battlefield.

  43 Stan walking through the rice paddy where Charlie Pyle was killed in action on March 22, 1968.

  44 Stan emerging from one of the VC tunnels at Cu Chi, with haunting memories of walking over the very same ground in December 1967 and January 1968 with the VC shooting at Recon from hidden spider holes. Now it’s a site for tourists to visit.

  45 Stan standing on the spot where he was wounded in action his first time by members of Mr. Sinh’s VC cadre and their NVA comrades-in-arms on February 18, 1968.

  46 Mr. Sinh and Stan reunited at the site where they tried to kill each other forty-six years earlier on February 18, 1968.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

  Many excellent books have been written about Vietnam, about the reasons the United States entered this war, and whether it should have done so at all. This is not that kind of book. This is a story intensely focused on a group of young men who survived something they often did not understand, but which they knew had changed them. This is a story of their survival and homecoming.

  Foremost, I want to thank members of Reconnaissance Platoon, 1/501st, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, for sharing the story of their time in Vietnam. These men, like many veterans, have fought their war twice—once on the battlefield and thereafter in memory. Asking them to relive these intimate moments of terror, longing, and hope caused them discomfort, tears, anguish. I deeply appreciate their brave honesty with me and graceful empathy for one another.

  In particular, I want to thank Stan and Anna Parker for allowing me into their lives to document a harrowing experience that shaped many things that followed for their family. Since leaving Vietnam in 1968, the war has never been far from Stan’s mind, and he generously shared with me his voluminous letters, photographs, and personal writing about his journey as a soldier, husband, father, and civilian. As well, his record keeping, sketching, and map drawing were an invaluable source for the maps, illustrations, and platoon roster in this book. His dogged and fearless search to recollect what happened and how he felt about what was happening animates the journey described in this book, and should inspire, I think, other veterans with that question of their own: “What happened to me in Vietnam?”

  Likewise, my deepest gratitude to the Recon Platoon members who invited me into their lives and Vietnam experience and allowed me to witness the complexity of their brotherhood, especially as it deepens as they reflect, now as older men, upon the past. Their courage in this undertaking infuses this story, I hope, with a visceral and emotional urgency. Thank you, Jerry Austin, Tom Soals, Al Dove, Paul Sudano, Michael Bradshaw, Tim Anderson, Dwight Lane, Dennis Tinkle, Tony Beke, Charlie Fowler, Marvin Acker, John Lucas, and Mortar Platoon member Ron Kuvik. Many of these men shared their letters, personal writing, and photographs about the places they fought, the people they met, and one another. Michael Bradshaw’s recollections about the death of Charlie Pyle and other platoon-mates added a rich understanding of the platoon’s brotherhood; Dwight Lane’s own recollection about Pyle and his description to me of sending flowers to Pyle’s grave was a revelation about this story’s heart, that loss might be assuaged by love, by the honoring of another’s memory. Stan Parker and Tom Soals generously offered their time and resources in planning and traveling to Vietnam. Thank you, Stan and Tom.

  This book is mainly based on hours of interviews with the men involved in the events described; their personal monographs/memoirs detailing their thoughts and experiences; letters written to and from Recon soldiers during their tours of duty; U.S. Army After-Action Reports and official records; author travel to Vietnam and to scenes of battle with Stan Parker and Tom Soals; interviews with the friends and family of Recon members; platoon members’ photographs taken in 1967 and 1968; and video and still photography taken by me and by the photographer Tony Demin documenting key areas of interest in Vietnam. During two trips to California, Anne Stanton and I met with members of Recon who’d reunited for multiday interviews, during which separate strands of one story began to entwine. Dialogue in the book recounted to me was done so by people who had participated in the conversations. Portions of the book were reviewed by some Recon members for their clarifications; and Stan Parker reviewed the entire manuscript. In both cases, the suggested corrections were invaluable. Researcher and fact-checker Julie Tate expertly, as ever, retrieved records and facts, and editor Heather Shaw helped with eleventh-hour research and assembly of the book’s front and back matter. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Heather.

  I also consulted a number of books about the Tet’s wider story in relation to the closely observed events within the Recon Platoon. Some of these books
are: Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow; Tet! The Turning Point in the Vietnam War by Don Oberdorfer; Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington by Peter Braestrup; The Cat from Hué: A Vietnam War Story by John Laurence; The Tet Offensive: A Concise History by James H. Willbanks; The Tet Offensive 1968: Turning Point in Vietnam by James R. Arnold; The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion by David F. Schmitz; The Tet Offensive: A Brief History with Documents by William Thomas Allison; A Personal Memoir: An Account of the 2d Brigade and 2d Brigade Task Force, 101st Airborne Division, September 1967 through June 1968 by Colonel John H. Cushman; and The 1968 Tet Offensive Battles of Quang Tri City and Hue by Erik Villard. Historian Villard also graciously answered questions by phone and email. Further reading is found in the bibliography.

  When I began researching, Stan Parker and I sat around his kitchen table in Colorado, as Stan, with boundless energy, pored over recently acquired maps and after-action reports, plotting and replotting his and the platoon’s movements. For more than forty years, the events of the Tet Offensive had remained slightly out of focus—crystal clear in some regards; in others, the fighting had taken on the feeling of a fever dream. Watching him fix himself in a place and a time that had meant so much, but had seemed to mean so little to anyone else, was akin to watching someone’s rebirth. As Stan’s pencil moved over the map in meticulous cursive, a new sense of himself, of where he’d been, and of where he might be going emerged. Stan Parker had long hoped to arrive at a place where he was at peace. Perhaps now this destination is in sight.