And so Stan and I started to talk at great length over a span of several years. As with so many other stories about Vietnam, Stan’s would take a long time to tell. As he and I spoke, I occasionally saw a shadow in his eyes—call it memory, call it flashback. Something was there, traveling back and forth through his consciousness, unresolved. So many things, Doug. If I talk, I might be whole, I’ll be unburdened, I’ll be heard. I won’t be a better person, I know that, but I might be the person I am. Does that make sense?
It does.
I want to go on.
Go on.
May 20, 1966
Gary, Indiana
Watch him now, in this moment: It’s May 20, 1966, a sweltering, blue-sky afternoon in Gary, Indiana, and Stan Parker is crossing the auditorium stage at Calumet High, his tooled cowboy boots peeking and receding beneath the swirl of his maroon graduation robe. He’s slightly bow-legged, possessed of a high IQ, and flashes a friendly smile. From an early age, he’d always been ready to defend the bullied and lonely students in exile, the poor kids in class in their ill-fitting clothes ashamed of their uncombed hair. He reaches out now and grasps his high school diploma. Freeze. Watch him now as he looks out from the stage for his mother and father, the smiling, raven-haired Helen Laverne, and the tall, quiet John James Parker. He knows his entire life is ahead of him, yet he doesn’t know where this will lead. Will he be a good man? Is he brave? To answer these questions, he’s decided to enlist in the U.S. Army, a decision he’s kept secret from his parents.
Because he has an older brother, Dub, newly married and already a paratrooper (pending assignment to Vietnam), he knows his mother will disapprove of his decision. His father, he’s not so sure about. He figures his dad will think it’s fine. Whatever their feelings, Stan Parker can’t wait to become a paratrooper.
He hopes he’s heading to Vietnam, a small, rural country of 38 million people, 8,400 miles away from Calumet High’s gymnasium, a country that many of his classmates couldn’t find on a map in Mrs. Miller’s geography class. An A student, Stan was often bored by school and couldn’t wait to graduate and “see more of the world.”
Several days after he graduates, he and five buddies pile into a friend’s tiny Chevy Corvair and take off at dawn, so anxious are they that they can hardly sleep the night before. They pull up to the recruiting station and go inside.
Stan and his buddy Tom Gervais have decided they will join up using something called the buddy plan. The Army advertised this as a way for high school friends to stay friends even when they entered military service. It sounded like a good idea, kind of like going off on a long camping trip, except with live ammunition.
Stan first asks the Marine recruiter behind the desk, “Are you going to let me jump out of airplanes?”
The recruiter waits a bit and says, “Second hitch.”
“That’s what I thought. You sure?”
The recruiter says that’s the way it is.
Stan walks out of the office and across the hall into the Army recruiter’s.
“Can you guarantee me that I can be a paratrooper?”
“I can’t guarantee you will be one,” says the Army recruiter, “but I can guarantee you the training, if that’s what you want. Making the grade is up to you.”
“And I get to go to Vietnam?”
“As a paratrooper? Hell, yeah.”
“Okay,” says Stan. “Sign me up.”
Gervais steps forward and says he’s going too.
“We want the buddy plan,” says Stan.
The recruiter says that will be fine and explains that the plan allows them to go through basic training together. After that, depending on their ability and progress, he can’t promise they’ll stay together.
“That’s okay, Boots,” says Gervais. “We’ll go as far as we can.”
They next board a U.S. government bus to the Army’s induction center in Chicago, where they take an aptitude test and a physical, and are officially sworn in as members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Stan makes it home just in time for supper, tired but elated and still guarding his secret. He can hardly believe the adventure that awaits him.
His only disappointment is that the recruiter told him that he can’t begin boot camp, several hundred miles away in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, until August. He will have to wait. During the long, hot, ghastly Gary, Indiana, summer, he and his buddies broil in their impatience. To kill time, they cruise the streets, ogling girls, listening to the news on the radio in Gervais’s Camaro about a massive buildup of troops in Vietnam. There are 385,300 men already in the country. Stan can’t wait to join them.
• • •
When the day of departure arrives, August 8, 1966, Stan Parker silently stands in the bedroom doorway in his parents’ tidy mobile home, scanning his freshman football trophies (he was a decent running back), his junior and senior wrestling awards (he loved the desperate, solitary nature of the sport), and he wonders if he’ll ever return to this room. He knows he could be killed, but he also knows this won’t happen to him.
At the end of the bed sit his cowboy boots. He’d worn them so often during high school that he picked up the nickname “Boots.” On Friday nights, he and Gervais would pull into the Blue Top Drive-In for a milkshake with their girlfriends. Stan had believed his cowboy get-up let people know that he was his own man. He wants to take the boots with him to Vietnam. Out in the driveway, his father honks the car horn.
He closes the bedroom door and walks past his mother’s just-washed breakfast dishes, now in their drying rack, past the neat pile of his father’s magazines by his chair, as if seeing these details for the first time in his life. His mom is standing at the door, waiting for him. She’s crying. She says, “I know you are doing what you want to do. But please take care of yourself, Troop.”
Troop. That’s her nickname for him since he enlisted. She kisses his cheek. He promises her that he’ll be careful.
Stan opens the door for his mother and they descend the wooden steps and climb into the family’s Chrysler New Yorker. Stan slides in beside his high school girlfriend, Maureen, and his younger brothers, Bruce, sixteen, and Joe, six. Maureen lays her head on his shoulder and is quiet. They pull away from the house.
At the Greyhound station in downtown Gary, Stan spots Gervais right away.
“Boots!” yells Gervais.
The two boys run up to each other and hug.
“We’re doing it, Boots.”
“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” says Stan.
Stan thinks he catches a smile creasing his father’s solemn face. Stan knows his father is proud of him—proud and terrified, all at once. His father had been a decorated Army Air Corps and Air Force gunner aboard a World War II bomber, just twenty-three years earlier, which doesn’t seem all that long ago to Stan. How different can this new war be? John Parker had often described to his son the family’s history of military service, even in America’s Civil War. “If you get called and you don’t answer,” he told young Stan, “don’t come back home.” At the same time, he warns him to be careful what he wishes for, because combat does not resemble anything he’s seen in Gary’s downtown air-conditioned movie palace. Hearing this, Stan had told his father, “Yes, sir, I understand,” though he knew that he really didn’t understand.
As far as he can figure out, his father seems to be saying that a man is obligated to die for his country, yet he should hope that he will never have to fight in a war.
Over the summer, he and Gervais had agreed that joining the elite 101st Airborne Division was their best chance for survival. On D-Day 1944, the Screaming Eagles of the 101st had, among many feats of bravery, jumped out of airplanes into combat, fought at the Battle of the Bulge, and finally battled their way to victory in Hitler’s Germany. Stan and Tom want to be Screaming Eagles more than anything else on earth.
“Good-bye, Dad,” he says. “This is so long for now.” And then, seeing the worried look on his dad’s face, he says, ??
?I’ll make it back, I promise.”
His relationship with his father is a potent mix of fierce love and mutual respect. They shake hands, then hug. He hugs his mother and tells her he loves her. He is grateful for their unconditional love of him. Stan understands that his father has taught him how to be a man, while his mother is a mirror in which he can see what it looks like to be that man.
Helen Laverne Parker tells him, “You stay safe, Troop.” Stan feels a lump in his throat. He knows his mother opposes his enlistment, especially with Dub serving as a paratrooper too. He kisses Maureen, studies her face, her straight blond hair, and tells her that just the thought of seeing her again is going to keep him alive. She manages a smile and nods through her tears. Stan snatches his luggage and bounds up the bus steps.
Plopping down next to Gervais, he looks out the window as Maureen blows him a kiss. Grinning, he reaches up and snatches it from the air, and, with a flourish, drops it in his shirt pocket. His father and mother are waving at him. He knows that neither of them is able to tell him anything more about the world to come.
• • •
In this new world, he knows that he’s going to be fighting something called communism, and he knows he’s going to be fighting people called the Viet Cong and the NVA. President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara have called this a “war of attrition,” meaning, as far as Stan can tell, that his job will be to kill as many of these people as possible. The idea is to hurt the enemy so badly that they’ll give up. Stan knows this war is different from his father’s war. His father flew bombing missions across Europe in order to destroy and capture enemy territory. Stan will be fighting to kill for killing’s sake, all by way of winning the war.
Most of what he knows about Vietnam he’s absorbed by watching TV. After supper he’d plop down in the stuffed chair and watch Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, their smooth voices brewing within the TV’s wooden cabinet, filling the living room with bad news and good news about the war, and with numbers—the “body count.” By the end of 1966, 6,350 Americans had been killed, and more than a few of them were from Indiana. The TV flickered with images: destroyed buildings; torn bodies; Vietnamese women in conical hats with children huddled at their feet, ducking and looking scared, as if birds of prey were descending. Through the winter of Stan’s senior year, President Johnson, the hickory curl of his voice filling the room, told him, “Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate . . . therefore, to know war is to know there is still madness in the world.”
Stan thought about this: He felt that his world was not filled with madness. He did not know hate. He felt he was the kind of person his parents had taught him to be: someone who loved others and tried to serve them. He wondered how this war would change him.
• • •
As a student of military history, Stan also knew that during World War II, after France’s armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940, France was forced to surrender its Southeast Asian colony to Germany, which provided European markets with coffee, silk, and rubber. By an agreement with the Germans, the Japanese Army would occupy Vietnam during the war.
But with the war’s end in 1945, a question arose: Who would control Vietnam now? France wanted its colony back, but there were forces in Vietnam fighting for independence. A revolutionary poet named Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890 at the height of France’s presence, had been organizing the cause of his country’s independence ever since leaving his homeland in 1911 aboard a steamer ship for France, where he joined the Communist Party.
Tireless and pragmatic, Ho had traveled through Europe and the Soviet Union, and during World War II, he had assisted the Office of Strategic Services on the side of the Allies against the Japanese. Ho believed that there might be a place for Vietnamese independence in a postwar world led by the United States and Europe, even referring to America’s Declaration of Independence as his inspiration. At an international conference in 1946, he asked world leaders to let the Vietnamese people govern Vietnam, but his pleas for self-governance fell on deaf Western ears.
The United States, eager to extend influence in Asia in the face of tightening Soviet tensions, instead ceded control to the French, sparking a nine-year civil war between Ho and his guerrilla forces, called Vietminh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, and French forces. The fighting began in December 1946.
This new aggression heightened U.S. Cold War anxieties, which worsened in 1949 when a Chinese revolutionary named Mao Tse-tung captured China and declared it a Communist state. The following year, the Korean War ensued, involving Chinese and Korean troops. Increasingly, the United States saw France’s colonial rule as a hedge against communism’s spread, particularly after China began providing Ho with weapons to fight the French.
In assessing the situation in 1953, newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower feared what he would come to call the “domino theory,” which posited that one nation after another would fall in a line to communism. Ensuring Vietnam’s success as a non-Communist state became an obsession of the United States. The following year, when Ho Chi Minh, alongside a military genius named General Vo Nguyen Giap, defeated the French, it seemed the United States would eventually be involved.
Ho Chi Minh and Giap had beaten well-equipped French troops at Dien Bien Phu, in northwest Vietnam. The French, sorely miscalculating the reach of the Vietminh guns, found themselves under siege and were overrun and either killed or rounded up by the thousands as prisoners. They agreed to leave the country in a crushing defeat.
In 1954, both sides signed a peace accord in Geneva, Switzerland, guaranteeing the Vietnamese the opportunity to elect a government. Ho’s decades of struggle looked to be over. It was agreed that until elections took place, Vietnam would be partitioned at the 17th parallel, about 100 miles south of Hanoi, into two countries. South Vietnam would be governed by Ngo Dinh Diem, a French-educated Catholic bureaucrat whom many Vietnamese (and U.S. leaders) believed had manipulated a 1955 referendum to wrest leadership from the country’s emperor at the time, Bao Dai. Diem had promptly named himself president of the newly minted Republic of Vietnam, commencing an eight-year autocratic rule. The modern political state of Vietnam, which Stan Parker would helicopter into thirteen years later, was born.
Diem would rule in the South, and Ho Chi Minh, or “Uncle Ho” as his followers called him, would govern the North. His ancestral homeland and its capital, Hanoi, would remain a hotbed of revolutionary activity, increasingly Communist inspired.
President Eisenhower opposed the upcoming Vietnamese elections. He feared that the immensely unpopular Diem would not win and that Ho Chi Minh, supported by the Soviet Union and China, would gain control of a unified Vietnam. Diem in fact did not support the elections, claiming they had not been sanctioned by his new South Vietnam government. The tragic result was that the elections of 1956 were never held.
Consolidating power, Diem enacted laws banning dissident activity, executing or jailing as many as forty thousand agitators, Communists, and Buddhists, whose persecution the Buddhists blamed on Diem’s Catholicism. Ho Chi Minh’s soldiers intensified guerrilla attacks on civilian and military targets, many of them carried out by the newly organized National Liberation Front—peasants, farmers, teachers, and workers drawn from the North and South, successors to the Vietminh who’d beaten the French. The South Vietnamese and U.S. governments called these guerrillas “Viet Cong,” which, loosely translated, means “Vietnamese Communist,” or, more pejoratively, “Communist traitor to Vietnam.” American soldiers would call them “VC,” “Victor Charlie,” or “Charlie.”
In 1961, President John Kennedy, worried that Diem would fail, sent the first of what would be hundreds of “advisors,” including specially trained U.S. Army Special Forces Green Berets, to prop up the regime. On November 2, 1963, President Diem, failing to control the unrest, was overthrown in a cou
p by some of his own generals. (Two previous coup attempts had been made in 1960 and 1962.) Diem was arrested and, with his brother, Nhu, handcuffed and shot dead in the back of a military vehicle at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
President Kennedy and his administration had been looking for a way out of the worsening situation with the unpopular Diem, but when he heard news of his death, he was shocked. Informed of the impending coup, he’d been under the impression that Diem would be arrested and escorted into exile in France. Diem’s death forced Kennedy to consider sending more U.S. military support to an ever-faltering South Vietnam. Three weeks later, on November 22, 1963, however, Kennedy himself was assassinated, and the question of what the country should do fell to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson. The U.S. relationship with Vietnam was conflicted, ill defined, and in flux.
Because conventional wars, often involving thousands, even millions, of troops, are expensive and because North Vietnam’s allies, the Soviet Union and China, possessed nuclear warheads, Kennedy had envisioned a less risky, and less expensive, projection of power as a series of small wars, by first deploying U.S. Army Green Berets.
President Johnson, who was most interested in enacting the domestic programs of his Great Society, resisted escalating U.S. involvement. Running for reelection in 1964, he declared, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Yet Johnson also feared being remembered as “the first American president who lost a war.” When he received a report that North Vietnamese boats patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin had fired without provocation on a Navy destroyer, the USS Maddox, and when this was followed by a report (later discredited) of a second attack on the Maddox and another destroyer, USS Turner Joy, Johnson ordered the bombing of targets in North Vietnam.
Along with most other Americans, Stan and his family supported Johnson’s decision, as well as the passage that week of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson the almost unlimited power to fight a war in Vietnam without formal declaration. As 1964 ended, 23,000 American “advisors” had landed in-country, and Ho Chi Minh more than matched the U.S. effort, maneuvering approximately 170,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops into South Vietnam. Bombings, ambushes, and coordinated attacks were a weekly occurrence in Saigon and rural parts of the country.