Last Man Out (32 page)

“Why?” I asked.

“We come from two cultures. The American culture and the Negro culture. If you are a Negro, you can only play white. Black stands out on a white background.”

“Get off that black-white shit, Joe.”

“Hard to, Jimmy,” he said. “I will always be a black man in a white man’s society. We are friends here, but you’re from North Carolina. You won’t want me to date your sister, would you?”

“You know my sister?” I asked.

In Frankfurt we turned in the car and changed into our dress uniforms with our medals. We were more decorated than anyone else we saw. Singing “Nothing could be finer …” we marched into the terminal and got first priority standby tickets to the States. Within an hour we were on our way to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.

There, on 30 September, Joe and I said good-bye. We didn’t
have much money left. He took a bus to Philly, and I took a bus to New York City to see an old girlfriend.

No one noticed me in the bus terminal. Everyone seemed busy with their own lives. I took a seat toward the back of the bus and felt insignificant, lost.

The urban New Jersey countryside appeared dirty and in disrepair. The weather was chilly, especially to someone coming back from a year in the tropics. The bus rattled through the bumper-to-bumper traffic and crossed the George Washington Bridge into New York City, where I knew one person.

I took a taxi from the bus terminal in New York City to the apartment house of my friend. It was mid-afternoon of a weekday and she was working. I didn’t have her office telephone number, so I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building and wondered what to do. When the bellman asked if I was waiting for someone, I told him that I was but had timed my arrival a couple hours too early.

“Lenore Mills [alias],” he said. “You’re the soldier boy Lenore Mills talks about. I thought you were kilted once.”

“Wounded maybe,” I said, glad to find someone to talk to in this city of millions. “Is Lenore’s roommate around or someone who can let me in?”

“I’ll let you in. Lenore would want me to. Come on, follow me.”

He showed me up to Lenore’s door, opened it, and told me to relax. She should be in around six. I sat down on her couch and fell asleep. She was kneeling beside me and crying when I woke.

The next afternoon I left on the train for Southern Pines, North Carolina. When the train hissed to a stop at the train depot in downtown Southern Pines, I saw Mom, Dad, and my youngest sister Kathy and the Lylands, a couple from the church, waiting on the platform.

It is a special time for a young man when he comes home from war. The anticipation, the explosion of emotion, the touching, the feeling, the crying, the stories, the old news, the new news, and then the comfortable regular routine. My Bronze Star had arrived in the mail. After dinner, my mother pinned it on my tunic and then ran her trembling fingers across my lips. Daddy read the citation aloud. Kathy applauded. My other two sisters, Judy and Joan, came in the next day and we held hands as Daddy said
grace at supper. He thanked the Lord for looking after me and returning me home.

I looked up old friends. The person I wanted to see most of all, Cottonpicker, was himself in Vietnam, assigned to the 173d Airborne Regiment. He had influenced much of what I had done in Vietnam, and I wanted to report to him, to get his approval.

Most of my other boyhood friends did not know what questions to ask about my experiences, and I did not volunteer much. Public energies during this war were spent on moral hand-wringing. There was little understanding about what was going on in the jungle of Indochina. American soldiers were not the war’s heroes. Actually, they played a minor role in everyday reporting. The principal characters in this country were the politicians and media opinion-makers.

The media were a powerful influence in the war. Comments from everyday Americans tended to be reframed television and newspaper reports. Each day, the media people rearranged their words to deliver the same message: “bad war.” The TV video clips of the fighting were not balanced. They were impersonal, catastrophic, horrible imagery of a losing army—intentionally cast that way, it seemed to me. My memories of our Army in Vietnam were of dedicated men doing dangerous work.

I stopped reading the papers, and at home we did not watch the evening news.

After two weeks of home leave, I flew to Lincoln and picked up my car for the drive to Fort Ord. Pete’s parents met me at the airport and listened carefully to my version of the stories about Pete and the action on the day he was wounded. Mrs. Peterson held my hand in the car as we talked and said how fortunate that we came out of that chaos alive.

We went down to the filling station where my Mercedes was garaged. As we drove up I saw it parked off to the side, cleaned up and serviced for my arrival. How handsome it looked. I thought about the day I saw it sitting on the edge of the farmer’s lot. It still looked as good a year later. They also serve who sit and wait—that car had soul. I had the feeling that it was glad to see me, too, as it jumped away from the service station—like a young kid, I thought, happy to be on the road again.

Though winter was setting in, I put the top down, turned the
radio up loud, and streaked across the wheat lands. I felt great. “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina, in the morn … ing.”

I passed through Cheyenne, Wyoming, where we had stopped for a rest during our train move to Oakland en route to Vietnam. I’m lapping the world, I thought. Small place.

  FOURTEEN  

Pete was asleep in his BOQ room when I arrived in Fort Ord. We embraced, but Pete said that was generally frowned on between two men alone in a BOQ room. I had brought along a six-pack of beer, and we sat talking, laughing.

Though late, we decided to visit Bob and his bride Linda, who lived in a Monterey apartment. We bought a bottle of champagne on the way and jumped over the back fence of the apartment house. The sliding glass door was unlocked, and we barged in, catching Bob in his shorts. I said that only six weeks out of the combat zone and already Dunn had dropped his guard. He promised to sandbag the patio over the weekend and post Linda guard. She said, “I can do that. Got my broom and my hair spray, they’ll never take us alive.”

We liked Linda right away. Perky, bright, personable, and attractive, she filled out the group. We sat around their living room and out by the pool of the apartment house that evening. Finally everybody had to show their battle scars. Pete’s shoulder looked terrible, with lacerated, pink skin stretched over what looked like the end of a coat hanger. Bob had been wounded in so many places, we tried to count all the scars, marking them with a ballpoint pen. For me, Pete and Dunn held me down and pulled my pants to my knees. There isn’t much honor in getting your butt shot in war, although Linda said, “Well, Jimmy, at least you weren’t facing the other direction.”

I officially signed in at Fort Ord the next morning. Within the month I was officer in charge (OIC) of the 6th Army Area Drill Sergeant School, the boot camp for drill sergeants in the Northwest. Sergeant Vick was the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC). There were seventeen senior NCOs on my faculty, all
impressive soldiers. Each carried a riding crop, the symbol of authority of a drill sergeant school instructor.

The school was a showcase for the post commander when VIPs toured, and the staff and I were called on almost weekly to conduct 6th Army Area award and retirement ceremonies. As the OIC, I sat on NCO promotion panels, prosecuted summary courts-martial, and was a mainstay on OCS review boards.

I taught two classes, conducted Saturday morning inspections of the drill sergeant candidates, and had the final word on who graduated.

It was the best job in the Army, at one of the most sought after posts, and my closest friends were nearby. Pete and I roomed in the same BOQ. He was assigned to a line unit that went to a field garrison every Monday through Friday. On the weekends we spent time with Bob and Linda, playing bridge and doing the Monterey Peninsula. Carmel and Big Sur were incredibly beautiful and we were particularly enthralled with the area in between—the Carmel Highlands—where we could drive to scrub-lined vistas high in the hills and look out over the rocky coast littered with rafts of seal otters and herds of sea lions far out into the Pacific where migrating gray whales passed. Late one afternoon, Pete and I, with dates, were on an overlook when a storm came in from the north. Under the threatening sky the waves broke angrily on the rocks and lightning flashed in the distance. The old evergreen trees in the Highland swayed in the wind. There was salt in the air, the smell of nature.

“This is what we were fighting for, this is America,” I said.

“Boy,” Pete said, “how times change. We used to say America was those people back in that honky-tonk bar in Junction City, Kansas. Remember?”

“Aug,” I mused, “fuck ’em, I hadn’t seen this yet.”

My sister Judy, married with a couple of kids, lived in the San Francisco area. Pete and I occasionally drove up to the Bay Area on the weekends and hung out, at Judy’s and in the Fisherman’s Wharf area.

Pete Javit, another OCS graduate and Vietnam vet, told us the ins and outs of off-post housing. We applied, got preapproved for a substantial allowance, and started looking for a place—with what we would be given, the three of us could live almost anywhere
on the peninsula. I was for something along Cannery Row in Monterey because I was a John Steinbeck fan. Javit wanted something near Pebble Beach.

Pete, however, found the best place—a furnished three-bedroom house in the Carmel Highlands owned by a local professor on a year’s sabbatical somewhere. To reach it we had to turn off the ocean highway and climb a winding road halfway to the top of a hill and then down a small one-lane road behind an Episcopal bishop’s house. Our house faced the ocean and jutted out over a ledge so that standing in one of the front bedrooms there was nothing but ocean to the front. Below, the distance of five or six football fields, was the rocky coast where seals and otters and sea lions played. The sound of waves crashing on the rocks was a pleasant background to the noise of birds in the trees behind the house. It was as near a perfect setting as three boys in their mid-twenties could hope for. On the weekends it became “party central” to all levels of the local community, although there was a tendency toward Vietnam veterans and zingy, hippie girls. One-on-one, the braless wonders of northern California got along with the short-haired GIs of Fort Ord, especially when they found out some of us had war wounds. Linda Dunn did not approve of most of the girls who hung around the house, however.

“Jimmy Parker, and over there, you, Larry Peterson, you both are bad. Bad. And Bob Dunn, you listen to me, you are never, ever allowed up here without me.”

Kim Novak lived two houses down from us. Everyone I knew had seen her in
Picnic
with William Holden. She lived by the ocean in a compound with a gate. Almost every day we stood on our terrace, looked down toward her house, and quoted William Holden’s lines to her. Sometimes at night before going to bed, we went outside and said, “Good night, Kim.”

Our mailbox was near the cutoff by the bishop’s house. The mailbox for the house across the street hung on the same board. The woman who lived there often worked in her garden, and she would wave at me. Occasionally we met at the mailbox or in the local supermarket. One day I was coming in from the drill sergeant school in my dress uniform. She hailed me from her yard as I checked the mail.

She was in her late forties or early fifties and looked bookish, like a New Englander, I thought. Obviously she had been working in her garden for some time that day; she was dirty and rumpled. After she asked me about the plumage on my uniform and I explained it briefly, she told me that she was having a garden party that weekend and wondered if I would be able to come. Possibly the other men in my house would also attend. I said I couldn’t speak for them, but I’d be there. She asked if I would wear my uniform because, she said, I looked so handsome in it.