When he gets home and explains what he’s done, she’s not thrilled; but neither is she angry. Stan is relieved and grateful. Anna has come to see that his Army experiences have formed Stan into the man he is, the man she loves and admires. A part of him will never really be happy if he isn’t facing the prospect of combat, or training for combat. He seems to need something—some force, some prospect of danger—out there, in the world that he can face and try to overcome. This need is a fact of his life, the way other men need golf, or alcohol, or mountain climbing to function. The problem, as they both understand it, is that Stan’s lifestyle includes jumping from airplanes, blowing up things, shooting guns, and being shot at. He promises Anna, just as he’d promised his mother years earlier, that he’ll be careful, Troop.
Stan completes the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, a three-month trial involving grueling physical and psychological challenges that students describe as life-changing and mind-bending; 60 percent of them don’t finish the course. Newly minted as a Special Forces soldier, he embarks for the world’s hot spots, and nearly every year for the next seventeen years, he’s absent for several months at a time, deployed in Korea, Honduras, the Philippines, and Thailand, often returning home on Sunday to resume his job as an ironworker on Monday.
After a while injuries start to pile up; while ironworking, he falls off a thirty-five-story steel structure in Wyoming, crashes through several stories of plywood decking, and lands in a safety net; he survives with a broken jaw. During military training, his parachute malfunctions at twelve hundred feet over Idaho during a night jump, and he missiles 95 mph to earth, where he lays with a broken back and cracked ribs for hours before rescue. At home, he gets thrown off a horse and crushes three vertebrae in his back. In his career, he’ll make 503 static line parachute jumps, and in the process break numerous other bones, including his pelvis. His capacity for injury, and for surviving it, will remain endless. He suffers each smack of the earth against his head, each crack of a leg on a tree or iron girder, with detachment and curiosity.
Throughout his post-Vietnam life, he rarely talks about the war unless he’s with another veteran, and few people ask. One day, though, in 1983, while standing at a gas pump outside Fort Carson in Colorado, a man notices Stan’s billed cap, lettered with “Vietnam Veteran,” and he asks if he was really there, fighting. Stan says he was. The man sticks out his hand and says, “Welcome home.” It’s a quick gesture, facile, even, but the man seems to mean it and its effect on Stan is titanic. No one in civilian life, during the fourteen years he has been home, has ever said anything like this before. That’s okay, he thinks. That’s okay: he’s in the Army again; it’s his home now, along with his home with Anna and the boys. He feels he’s where he belongs. He cannot wait to get home and tell Anna about this stranger’s kind words.
But still, memories of the war are ever-present, persistent. For a while after leaving the Army, he saw a shape in his mind’s eye—green, oblong, a machine with a bent tail. At first, he didn’t recognize the shape or why he was seeing it. A competent sketch artist, he whiled away time in restaurants drawing on place mats as the shape flickered on the paper, like film stuck in a projector. With each sketch, a detail emerged, until finally, after several weeks, the green shape snapped into focus. What he’d been seeing was the medevac helicopter he was in and which was shot down. He can taste the exhaust, the hot wind, feel the rifle kicking as he fires at the charging enemy soldiers. About this experience, he tells no one except Anna.
Other times, the dreams are nightmares. Anna will wake him and say, “You’re having another one?”
“Yep, I sure am.”
“Like the other ones?”
“Just like the others.”
“In the dream,” he tells her, “I’m in a firefight and we’re close to being overrun. It’s like, if we get overrun, we’re done. I’m finished. I’m not going to make it this time. I’m frantic. I mean, there’s too many of them.”
And then, if he can’t fall back to sleep, he often starts thinking about the boys who didn’t make it. Sometimes, he thinks about Kass, Pyle, Lintner, and Specialist Marvin Penry.
Penry was a forward observer in Echo Company’s mortar platoon. It was Penry’s job to crawl close enough to the enemy to radio back accurate coordinates for artillery and mortar strikes. Penry was a good soldier, quiet, steady, he never made a mistake in communicating coordinate information.
One day, Stan bumped into Penry at camp as the platoon was refitting and getting ready to head back on patrol. Penry said he was headed to Hawaii, where he would meet his wife and take some R&R.
“Man, Penry, this is great,” said Stan. “You’re so lucky. I am happy for you. You get to see your wife and have a good time.” He meant it.
Penry, being a nice guy, said, “You know what? I’ll give her a kiss for all of you guys.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Stan, “you give her a big hug.”
Penry got on a chopper and Stan waved good-bye as it took off.
Then Stan and the rest of the platoon got word that they had a mission. A rifle company was caught in a bad firefight and they needed help. The chopper crew told them they would be heading into a hot LZ. They would be coming under fire as they landed.
Well, when they landed, the LZ was engulfed in a bad firefight. When it was over, eight paratroopers had been killed and forty-two wounded, including five from Recon.
Stan was surprised when First Sergeant Koontz walked up and said, “Parker, you know what? I think Penry was here.”
“What do you mean?”
“He came here because of the firefight. The pilot diverted the chopper to help out.”
Stan felt a sense of panic. He started asking around in the platoon: Had anyone seen Penry? Had they? Nobody had seen him.
How could Penry have been here? Stan wondered. Just that morning he’d watched him fly away from this place to another world altogether, to another story altogether that didn’t end daily with death or sadness, a story in which Penry got off a plane in Hawaii and sat by a swimming pool with a cool drink, beside his beautiful wife.
When Stan saw First Sergeant Koontz again, Koontz told him straightaway, “I found out that Penry is dead.”
Oh, no, thought Stan. No.
“Far as I can figure out,” said Koontz, “is that Penry heard of the firefight from the chopper crew and he told them, ‘Those guys are going to need a forward observer. Put me down.’ ”
And the chopper had landed and let out Penry, who came under ambush. He jumped into a depression with four other soldiers, a bomb crater, to ride out the flying bullets. The crater had been booby-trapped with a 105mm artillery round, wired to explode remotely. The enemy exploded the trap.
Sergeant Koontz said Penry was probably killed instantly.
“Are you sure?” said Stan.
Koontz said he was.
Stan sat down, looked off at the green hills, and stared. He ran through the sequence of events, as if by retelling them they would make more sense, be more logical, that they would make sense at all. Why would any man get off a chopper to freedom to be put back in this hell? And Stan knew, or he guessed that maybe he knew—love.
But for . . . for what? Love for your fellow soldiers, for the life you had with them, for the constant ache it engendered in your mind, that each minute was precious because each minute might be the final one . . . ?
But Penry had seemed so happy about seeing his wife when he’d said good-bye. His getting off the helicopter didn’t make sense, at all. How could he do that? How?
None of this—the killing to stay alive, the feeling this would never end—made any sense. Now Penry’s wife was in Hawaii and somebody had to find her and tell her that he was dead.
Stan wanted to reach out, stop him, shake him. “Penry!”
• • •
As his injuries mount, and his deployments quicken, Stan and Anna decide that, in the interests of his health
and welfare, he needs to choose one job or another. By 1994, his deployments are stretching to seven months long and he quits ironworking and resumes life as an active duty soldier. He is assigned to Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) and sent to the Middle East. In 1997, after graduating from the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy, he begins active duty with U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and is selected as the command’s Senior Non-Commissioned Officer of the Year. Stan is thrilled with his career; Anna, who quit a successful brokerage job in Colorado to follow Stan to a new home in Florida, is understanding, though her worries mount that any day an unexpected knock at the door will announce Stan’s death. Between 1994 and 1997, he deploys to Jordan, Somalia, Kenya, and Eritrea, and in 2004 he goes to Afghanistan, where I meet him one year later as we board a Chinook helicopter headed for the Pakistani border. He’s fifty-eight years old and knows that his mandatory retirement date is approaching.
After we meet in Afghanistan, he flies home on leave, where Anna awaits him, happy once more that he is returning safely. As he takes his coach seat near the rear of the plane, dressed in his desert camouflage, a gentleman in a suit walks from the front of the plane and stops at Stan’s seat and says, “I’d like to give you my seat in first class.”
At first Stan is confused. Then he doesn’t believe the guy’s offer and says, “No.” The U.S. Army had purchased the seat for him and he feels some obligation, being a good soldier, to follow through on expectations, and those were that he would fly home on the Army’s dime. Sounds simple, but it’s how Stan thinks. Follow orders.
The gentleman leaves and he returns to the front of the plane. Stan thinks, That was nice. And then he reflects how different it is from when he came home from Vietnam. Then he hears the captain’s voice come over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a slight problem. And we can’t take off until we get it fixed.” And the captain goes on: “The situation is, we have a first-class passenger who wants to give his seat to a U.S. Army soldier who refuses to switch seats, because the Army bought his ticket for him. We need to encourage him to change seats.”
And that’s when the people around Stan start clapping for him; they stand and motion to the front of the plane, shooing Go, Go, and Stan reluctantly gets up, and then with a great whooshing feeling, takes a step down the aisle. When he gets to the first-class compartment, flight attendants hug him and ask what he needs. The captain comes over and says, “Welcome home, man.” Stan sits back in the plush seat, stunned. Why couldn’t this have happened thirty-seven years ago? he wonders. Why? Where were you thirty-seven years ago when I came home scared and wondering what I’d done for the past year? Was I crazy? Had I become a crazy person? And then he starts to wonder if these same people would be clapping for him if they knew, in addition to now serving in Afghanistan, that he is also a Vietnam veteran. The pain is so deep, the insecurity that deep, that these many years later he is still concealing from most people, unless they ask, that he fought in Vietnam.
• • •
More than two million Americans served in Vietnam and 58,282 were killed there. Nearly every day, mostly unknowingly, we meet people who fought in Vietnam; or we meet people whose sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, cousins, distant cousins, neighbors, fought and came home, or fought and died in Vietnam. That sixty-eight-year-old man you see at the buffet line at the Holiday Inn on weekends? He’s probably thinking about the war.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of America’s most visited memorials, and it is D.C.’s most visited site. In May 2012, President Obama presided at a ceremony at the memorial, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. entrance into Vietnam’s civil war in 1962. The president told the gathered Vietnam veterans, “Often you were blamed for a war you didn’t start. You came home and were sometimes denigrated when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”
• • •
Before he retired in January 2007, after forty-two years of being affiliated with the U.S. Army, Sergeant Major Stan Parker was informed by Army doctors that he would have to consult with a psychiatrist for an evaluation of his mental health as he exited the service.
Until this time, no one had ever really asked about his well-being. But someone at Special Operations Command, who was processing Stan’s request for retirement, noticed his incredibly long record.
“They saw that I had some hairy combat time,” says Stan, “and they wanted me to talk with somebody, to see how I felt.”
In Vietnam, Stan’s job had been to stay alive, and he and the Recon Platoon had accomplished this by killing. Death seemed an entity, a specter, a being, that sprang from the earth; it was always invisible but always present. He would try to explain this distinction to the psychiatrist treating him for PTSD. The best he could manage was by describing how the faces of the dead haunted him, and the sadness he felt that anyone at all had died. He also explained that he felt traumatized by coming home. Over time, he said, he’d found it a bit easier to articulate his feelings.
In the late 1980s, while working on a bachelor’s degree, Anna had urged him to enroll in a writing course at a community college. He discovered that writing down some of his experiences made him feel better about them. His teacher, an empathetic young woman whom Stan believed didn’t really, at first glance, understand his experience in Vietnam, insisted he write something for class. And then she asked him to read it. Stan was petrified. He showed up in class, holding his paper in hand. She asked to see it. He held it out and she took it, but he wouldn’t let go.
Anna was with him and she whispered to him, “Let it go, honey. It’s okay.”
Stan opened his hand and released the story. He spent a worrisome night at home, wondering what the teacher’s response would be when they met again. He feared she would dislike him for the feelings and actions he had described.
She approached him in the hall before class.
“The stains you see on the pages,” she said, “are from my tears.” As cliché as that might sound, Stan looked down and could see that the paper did look stained. “I had no idea what you’d gone through,” said the teacher.
What did you think was happening there? he wanted to ask.
• • •
On May 7, 1999, Stan and his two sons, Wes and Jason, took part in a military air show at MacDill Air Force Base by parachuting out of a C-130 aircraft. Both sons had followed Stan’s example of military service and Stan was proud to be jumping with them. Shortly after landing on the ground, Stan received a call from Anna. His father, she told him, had just died of pneumonia.
Stan was stunned. This man to whom he’d always been close was gone. He realized that if he hadn’t been in the company of his sons, he likely would have broken down on the spot. Who was he now, he wondered, at this time in his life? Who?
He had been his father’s son, he knew that; and now he was an older man, someone he believed his sons respected, just as he had respected his father. But who was he in his private moments—what did that shelf inside himself, where he’d stowed all those memories of the war—what did that place look like?
It wasn’t until his retirement, while sitting in the Army psychiatrist’s office at USSOCOM near Tampa, that Stan finally began to dig deeply. The doctor had suggested that he write more about his experiences, and now he asked him to read the pages aloud. “That’s the next step,” he said.
“But I can’t.” Stan feared that he’d see the lifeless faces again.
“You have to.”
Stan started reading. He had trouble breathing:
She was a young Vietnamese girl, very obviously a French Colonial descendant and I would guess to be about six or seven years old. Her clothes looked worse than mine. . . . I dropped to one knee as she put her fragile small skinny hand on mine and said, “Hi Airborne, GI number one.”
Go on.
As I knelt on one knee
looking at her a part of the war I had not seen before or not wanted to see before hit me square between the eyes.
I knew what death was, what hatred was, what frustration was, what fear was, what loneliness was, what hunger was, what war was, and even what love was but all of them through my eyes only.
Now for the first time I saw all this plus more in the eyes of this lovely, dirty-faced, raggedy clad little girl. . . . I wanted to take this poor little girl with me and in doing so hope I could stop the war for her.
Stan described handing her a can of peaches, and that she was then killed by NVA soldiers for accepting his gift.
The night was a long one. I could not get that little girl out of my mind. . . . As the sun was coming up I could hear the noise of something outside the partial building we were set up in. . . . Large rats were eating on the dead pitiful little girl’s body across the street.
Without even thinking of what I was doing I raised up my M-16 and started firing at the rats. . . . I do not know how many I shot. My magazine went empty. As I was reaching for more ammo, one of my buddies handed me another full magazine. I fired it up. He handed me another. . . .
I reloaded my weapon, got up, and walked out to the little girl’s body. . . . The rats had eaten off her nose, ears, and fingers of one hand. She still held the can of peaches in her left hand. My buddies say I screamed as loud as I could, I do not remember.
When Stan stopped reading his story, the doctor asked for the pages and, slowly, Stan placed them in his hands, just as he would, two years later, reach across the sunlit space in a helicopter in Afghanistan and touch my arm and say to me, “Will you write about us in Vietnam,” and another five years after that, I would reach across his kitchen table in his Colorado home and take these pages too and begin this book.