The Odyssey of Echo Company

  • • •

  Helicopters come in, and Stan and the platoon start loading up the dead of Charlie Company. Under the soft light of the trees, they look like wax figures.

  The platoon walks around the clearing, the killing zone, picking up the bodies. Someone’s already laid a tall soldier on a poncho; Stan and Dwight Lane pick up one end, and Jerry Austin and Tony Beke grab the other. The body shifts and the blood that had gathered around him as he sat cooling on the poncho is coagulated—like Jello-O, Stan thinks—and slides out of the poncho through a hole and lands, plop, on the ground at Stan’s feet. Stan sees this and starts throwing up. The men set the poncho down and they all get sick. Then they pick up the soldier again and walk him to the Huey.

  His detached leg falls out of the poncho onto the ground, and Dwight Lane says, “Hey, his leg,” and Stan, without thinking, says, “He ain’t leaving without his leg.” Then he sets his end of the poncho on the ground, walks over and picks up the leg, carries it back to the poncho, and places it on the bundle. He, Lane, Austin, and Beke keep walking and lift him up into the helicopter and are they ever glad that this is over. It’s like they are sleepwalking, as they move around the clearing carrying body parts, arms and legs, putting them on ponchos in piles, and putting the piles on choppers.

  • • •

  Stan, Al Dove, Tim Anderson, Tom Soals, Michael Bradshaw, and Dwight Lane set up an ambush, and after an hour, out of nowhere, Stan whispers, “I have to piss.”

  “What do you mean, you have to piss?” asks Dove.

  “Like, I have to go. Now.”

  Dove whispers to Stan to inch back up the hill on his belly and let ’er fly. Stan does just that lying on his left side, luxuriating in the immediate relief he feels. He crawls back down to Dove’s side. Within a few seconds, Dove asks Parker if his canteen is leaking because he is getting soaked with water.

  “No,” says Stan. “I drank all of my canteen water earlier, and that’s why I had to piss so bad.”

  “You mean that I am lying in your piss? I’m gonna kill you first thing in the morning!” says Dove.

  Dwight Lane, listening to this whispered exchange, finds it very funny that his friends are arguing about killing each other over who peed on whom. He whispers that he understands why Dove would want to kill Stan, and then has to stifle a laugh.

  Stan has his face buried in the leaves, trying to control his laughter. They have to remain silent on account of the ambush. They are very still and trying not to laugh. And Stan knows—all of them know—that there’s nothing Dove can do but surrender. He must sit in the warmth of the piss until it cools around him. Stan knows that in a funny way, they’re happy, giddy, even. They’re among friends and they’re still alive.

  • • •

  Stan is walking in a gray drizzle with Al Dove and Brian Riley, wrapped mummy-style in clear plastic shower curtains they’ve torn down from the shower stalls at the nearby schoolhouse. The curtains are their only protection from the cold rain. Their weapons poke through a part in the curtains and they make a strange sight, like translucent beasts. Stan sees a little girl standing in the middle of the road up ahead, watching the group’s advance. She looks scared, filthy, and very alone. As he gets closer, he sees that she’s also very young, maybe six or seven. Her hair is tangled and her face is dirty and streaked with tears. Stan takes off his shower curtain and offers it to her. She doesn’t move, so he wraps it around her. But it’s too long and bunches around her bare feet, so Stan takes his Ka-Bar knife and hacks away at the extra length to shorten it. She doesn’t say anything. She does not ask for anything, nor does she stand back and shy away. She stands there looking at him. Mute. Impassive. Courageous. Stan feels the need to do something for her, but he simply stares at her in his confused, sleep-deprived state. He looks and looks at her. And then he has what he can only describe as an epiphany, an awakening, as if his eyes are snapping open after a long nap. He is able to see the whole lousy war through her eyes—the shooting, the killing. Images roll back and forth over her face, and he watches them pass before them—a movie of who he is, who he was, who he is becoming. An animal. A killer. A young man who is filled with hatred, as President Johnson had predicted all young men would become in the jaws of war. He has this overwhelming desire to make the girl safe.

  But he doesn’t know how. He wants to give her something. Clean clothes, food, a future. He has nothing to give her except his attention. Then he remembers he has a can of peaches in the canvas bag on his chest where he stores his Claymore mines. He pulls out a heavy green can of the fruit and bends down to offer it to her. The can is large in her dirty hand, which sags under its weight. “It’s okay,” he tells her. “Go away now,” and he makes a shooing gesture with his hand. He would like someone to come and take care of her. He would like to come back to Vietnam as another kind of person and be able to offer her some peace and attention and safety. It’s quiet between the two of them, punctuated by the rustle of the shower curtain wrapped around her thin shoulders. She stares at the peaches and then back at Stan, as if asking him what she should do with this. It’s then he realizes he’s been left behind by the rest of the patrol. He knows they are in a no-man’s-land, where he could run into any number of enemy and he feels terribly exposed. Al Dove and Brian Riley, already far ahead, are calling to him, “Come on, man. We’ve got to go!” He finally turns from the girl, touches her gently on the head, says “Good-bye,” and runs to catch up. He rounds a corner and sees the other guys up ahead. A few seconds after that, he hears gunshots behind him.

  Oh my god! Not the girl. He wheels around and runs, his gear flapping around his body as his arms pump faster and faster. He turns the corner, and there she is, a tiny clump, no bigger than a pile of rags, in the street. Looking down the road, he sees four NVA soldiers fleeing among the buildings. He levels his weapon and fires at them, but he misses and curses himself. How could he miss when he’d killed so many men before? Stan runs up to the girl, looks at her, and drops to his knees, crying.

  Why why why oh why. He knows why. Because he’s a bad person. Because he’s an American soldier. Because he’s a man filled with madness. He looks down at her, still holding the peaches, her hand tightened in spasm around the can. Her fingers are incredibly slender and tiny. Why did he give her the can of peaches? He would love more than anything to reach back through time and take them back. She’s dead because she accepted the American’s peaches. The irony is that if he’d had no compassion for her, if he’d ignored her, she’d still be alive. He might as well have aimed his rifle at her and pulled the trigger himself. Stan looks up at the sky, shuddering, and he starts howling, a hoarse cry emptying from his stomach, more animal than human.

  The rest of the guys come running back to him. And they stop when they see him. They’re unsure what to do. They look at him, start circling him, as he rocks back and forth in the street and howls.

  Brian Riley finally walks up and says, “Hey, man, we have to get outta here,” looking around for the return of the NVA. “Let’s radio this in and go.” Riley then calls in the sighting of the four NVA soldiers, so that others in the battalion can be on the lookout.

  Stan reaches over and picks up the little girl and cradles her. She’s warm, her chest soaked with blood. He thankfully figures that she died instantly.

  He walks with her in his arms across the street to an empty building. It’s been bombed and reduced to rubble, but the front wall is still standing and he thinks that she’ll be safe there, away from the street. Next door is an apartment building that’s been bombed and is empty too. Al Dove and Riley want to leave the street, but Stan refuses. He tells them that he will not leave the girl there alone. He tells them he wants to sit across the street in the safety of another building, as a hidey-hole, and wait to see who comes passing by. Maybe the bastards who shot her, or some of their friends, or maybe her family, or someone who knows her. . . . But either way, he can’t leave her like this in an empty building alo
ngside an empty road as twilight falls now. The other guys try to convince him otherwise, but Stan won’t leave. He sets up an ambush position across the road, with his M-16 trained on the building where she lies in state.

  Through the long night, cold and raining, Stan thinks he hears footfalls in the dark, the steps of the approaching enemy, but nothing materializes, and as the sun rises, he gets up, feeling sore, and stretches. He has that feeling, worn-out, rinsed-out, after great strain, as if the terror of the past days had burned away his nerve endings. Across the road, he sees the rats.

  They are crawling all over the girl. He can hear their scratching, and he puts it all together. Oh god no! he thinks. Real calm, he lifts his M-16 against his cheek, takes aim, and fires. One of the rats goes flying backward, away from the girl, and he aims again, careful to guide the round away from the girl, and fires. Another rat cartwheels from the slight frame. Stan thinks that the report of the carbine would have scattered the rats, but they are persistent in their feeding.

  He starts firing more rapidly, knocking the rats down, and he keeps firing even after the last rat is dead, getting more excited now, feeling his nerve endings coming back to life, as if sprouting through his skin. He keeps pumping rounds into the dead rat bodies. He’s shot them all, every one, at least several dozen, and he says over his shoulder to Riley, calm and spooky, “More ammo,” and Riley, without objecting, hands him another magazine, nineteen more bullets, and Stan jams the mag up in the receiver and charges the weapon and begins firing some more. He fires several more magazines, then stops and it’s quiet. Real quiet. Dove and Riley quietly tell him, “It’s okay. You did good.” Stan realizes he’s gone berserk.

  After a few moments, he gets up, walks across the road to the girl, and looks at her. He can barely stand it, looking at her, the ugly thing he’s wrought by his attempt at kindness.

  She is still holding the can of peaches in her tiny left hand.

  Her ears and nose are gone. The rats have been feeding all night, and for a second time he has let her down. He screams.

  January 1947

  Texarkana, Texas

  Here we are, looking into the bedroom of a house on a wooded yard in Texarkana, Texas, where a baby is sleeping fitfully in a shoe box in the opened top drawer of a dresser. Sickly, born four months premature, each day has brought a new prediction of his death for his worried parents. The baby, one month old, is named John Stanley Parker, a long, old-fashioned name he will have to grow into. It’s a few weeks after the New Year, 1947. The streets are quiet and cold. On radios across town and across the country, Bing Crosby is singing “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” The war that consumed America for four long years is finally over.

  Helen Laverne Parker, the boy’s mother, age seventeen, is sitting in an adjoining room, rocking the baby’s one-year-old brother, J.W., nicknamed Dub. She doesn’t know how long she and her husband, John James, will stay in this rented house or even how long they will be in Texas. She had grown up on a watermelon and cotton farm in Muleshoe, Texas, about twenty miles as the buzzard flies from New Mexico. They met in February 1945 at a barn dance shortly after his return from the war. John James liked to call her his “Texas wildcat.” Having survived twenty-four missions over Europe aboard a B-24 bomber, he had come home eager to put the war behind him. Three months after they met, they eloped. What Helen Laverne knows about the future, well, it’s in her arms and around her: her sons’ and her husband’s love.

  The shoe box, the makeshift crib, had been the home of a pair of John James’s work boots. He’s rarely home now, working in oil fields across West Texas—wildcatter jobs, mostly. He wasn’t here for his son’s birth. Alone and scared and in labor, Helen Laverne called a taxi to take her to the hospital and walked inside, saying, “Help me, I’m about to have a baby!”

  The birth was quick and fierce. She gasped when the doctor handed her young Stanley. In hand, he seemed to weigh no more than a bird. He was wide-eyed as an owl, tiny and weak. The following day, the doctors informed Helen Laverne that he was close to death and needed a blood transfusion.

  John James arrived home just in time to save his son’s life. Doctors inserted an IV into his long, muscled arm and placed a tube into an incision, one of the four cut into John Stanley’s pale, thin legs. The four-pound baby, buoyed by his father’s blood, soon brightened, and doctors gave him a fighting chance to live. The baby would grow into a man who forever would feel his father’s blood coursing in his veins, a feeling of pride he would cherish. And if we could look ahead now to the future as John Stanley Parker sleeps in a shoe box, we would find the baby, now a young man, bleeding in a ditch with a piece of jagged metal sticking out of his side, his shirt stuffed into the wound, the stock of his rifle pressed against it hard to stanch the bleeding. He’s firing his weapon on full automatic, his mouth open in a roar that we can’t hear but can understand: Do not quit. But we can’t look into the future like that.

  Go back to the window, to the opened dresser drawer, to the boy.

  • • •

  He outgrew the shoe box. His parents packed up and left Texas. He kept on living.

  With two more babies in tow (a third son, Bruce, was born in 1950 in New Mexico, and a fourth, Joe, in 1959 in Colorado), John James and Helen Laverne migrated from oil field to oil field, now towing an enormous mobile home. It was a hardscrabble life but an increasingly secure living. There was always food on the table. When John James found skilled work as an ironworker, life in the Parker family became even more peripatetic, with John James following building projects across the country. By the time he was five, John Stanley had lived in ten cities, and as the new kid in school, he was picked on constantly.

  He got his first bloody lip during a school yard fight in Trenton, New Jersey, where his father was helping build a Manhattan skyscraper. At school, John Stanley tried sticking up for Gilbert, an African American classmate, when other students picked on him because of his race. And although Stan was too little, too scrawny, to win the fight, he sensed something righteous about the battle. Gilbert was his friend—and fighting for a friend was the correct thing for a boy to do.

  He got his first black eye in El Paso, Texas, in the first grade. He was a friendly and outgoing six-year-old, short for his age, with blue eyes that seemed perpetually turned up in surprise. His father was a god to him. The tall, rail-thin man could reach down and grip his skinny leg with one hand and lift him straight to the ceiling. His father called him, lovingly, “Stan,” mussing his blond hair, before setting him back to the earth. His kindergarten classmates called young Stan “gypsy” and “trash.” He tried ignoring those who called him names.

  When he was seven, doctors delivered some bad news to his parents: he had polio. He was fitted with clanky metal braces for both legs and used crutches to shuttle himself around the dirt roads, and past the cactus, on his way to school. He was filled with energy, curiosity, intelligence, and he didn’t know why his body was failing him. Seeing his leg braces, his classmates added new nicknames: “Cripple,” “Clinker Bell” (because of the noise the leg braces made as he shuffled on his crutches). And worst of all, they called him “Franken-Stan.”

  El Paso is cattle country and cows roam the fields and roads at will. They drop their cow pies wherever they please. The abundance of this excrement became one of Stan’s worst nightmares. He was regularly attacked by classmates, thrown to the ground, his face rubbed in the manure. Stan came to call these piles “Hereford pies,” displaying a delicate awareness of his situation, a kind of whistling-past-the-graveyard kind of humor.

  One day, he told himself that he’d had enough. He didn’t know how he was going to stop his classmates from picking on him. He wondered who was watching him as he sweated and groaned as he fought his classmates. The sky? God? Someone had to be watching, he figured. Someone. He knew he must defend himself.

  He was hopping home on his crutches one afternoon, his leg braces clinking in rhythm with his shuffl
ing feet, when he heard his tormentors approaching, laughing, calling after him: “Hey, Franken-Stan!”

  “Hiya, Clinker Bell!”

  “Get him!”

  Stan made a decision. He was going to run. He didn’t know how, but he was going to try. He sat down in the dirt road and unbuckled his leg braces. How he hated them. They were ugly, made of scratched aluminum posts, leather, and sheepskin padding. He removed one, then the other, and tossed them aside, where they landed in a pile.

  Using his crutches, he carefully pulled himself up, sure that his weak legs would snap under his weight. He stepped down, testing them. He looked over his shoulder, saw that the boys were closer than expected, and said a prayer. And then he threw the crutches away.

  He wobbled at first, and then began hop-skipping forward, finally breaking into an awkward gait. At any moment, he was sure that he’d pitch onto his face and that the boys would set upon him and beat the daylights out of him. He was more scared than he’d ever been.

  But his legs started moving faster—faster than he’d ever felt them move, and his short arms started pumping. Soon he could feel the dry Texas air move around, over, and past him. He dared to look down and saw tiny dust clouds rising at his feet, kicked up by his sneakers. He kept running. The would-be attackers receded. He turned and saw them pull up and watch him run away. He believed they must be amazed by his near-magical resurrection.

  He ran the half mile all the way home and into the kitchen, where his mother was making pot roast, his favorite.

  “Stanley,” she said, taking a look at him. “What happened?”

  He just stood there. “I don’t know, Mother. I ran home.”

  Helen Laverne stared at him. He was her special one—the child whose existence, after his difficult early childhood, seemed just this side of magic.

  “Well,” she said.