Last Man Out (8 page)

Later I went to Fort Bragg, home of the Special Forces, and bought a jungle hammock from the post exchange. It was made
for Vietnam, and I wondered why the battalion hadn’t been issued similar types. If I could pack a 12-gauge shotgun in those antitank weapon boxes, then I could squeeze in a hammock. I put it in the duffel bag along with the shotgun.

When I was ready to leave, my parents told me to be careful. I laughed and said, “Okay.”

“Come home,” Dad said, shaking my hand. Mom, with tears in her eyes, twisted her mouth to one side and looked off to the side. I put my arms around her and she looked at me, tears now rolling down her cheeks. She kissed me and said softly, “Please come back.”

I went to Pope Air Force Base to catch a space-available military aircraft hop to Fort Riley, but was bumped and rerouted twice. In Chicago the morning after I was supposed to return to base, I finally got Pete on the telephone. He said, “You are where?” and added that Woolley was pissed. Movement had been rescheduled and we were leaving within the week. Woolley himself had taken a forty-eight-hour pass to go somewhere, and I had better be there when he returned.

At reveille the next morning, I was back under the oak tree by the orderly room. The battalion was moving out to Vietnam in five days.

Railroad tracks ran beside the highway dissecting Fort Riley. For days passenger cars and engines came through the base to make up a train to transport the brigade to Oakland Naval Base, California.

I had the company armorer take off most of the barrel of my shotgun. It changed the balance, but I thought that the weapon would have a broader shot pattern and I could point it quicker at close range. Bratcher, King, and I packed it with the jungle hammock in an antitank weapon box. King called it the “lieutenant’s survival kit.”

There were surprisingly few problems in packing out the company. We did not have that much equipment; the infantry operates with what it can carry. The antitank weapons and mortars were our biggest pieces, and after those were packed we killed time doing PT, waiting for the last of the platoon to return from leave.

Captain Woolley and I were at battalion headquarters one morning doing administrative chores when the sergeant major motioned us into Colonel Haldane’s office. “What are we going to do about this guy, Private Beck?” Haldane asked.

Woolley, in his usual good-mannered way with the battalion commander, said, “Well, sir, Beck’s a pretty good soldier according to Parker here. We think he’ll do okay.”

“The sergeant major says we can get him paroled to the 1st/28th. But if he proves to be disruptive or criminal, what’s the point?” Haldane looked at me as he finished.

“He’ll do fine, sir,” I replied. I briefly considered telling the colonel that the man had bribed his way to the 1st Division, but that sounded loopy as I thought about it, so I continued to hold the colonel’s gaze without further comment.

“Okay, we’ll do what’s necessary here. He’s the only man in the battalion in this kind of situation. He’s supposed to already be out of the service with a DD. How did he get here, anyway?” Haldane asked. I looked at Woolley and he shrugged.

Later I told Beck that he was going to Vietnam because I had stood in front of the colonel and vouched for him. “You better not make me look bad.”

Standing as tall as he could, Beck said, “I won’t let you down.”

When the train was finally assembled, formal movement orders were posted in the battalion area. We were to leave at 1500 hours on 17 September 1965.

Pete and I packed out of our BOQ the night before and left our gear in the orderly room while we went into Junction City for one last beer at the seedy bar we had gone to my first night at Fort Riley. Pete and I sat on the edge of a damaged pool table and watched the colorful mix of prostitutes, drifters, and other patrons going about their Thursday night business, which probably wasn’t much different from any other night. About to start a trip halfway around the world, we had no idea what awaited us. The common night crawlers who frequented that bar couldn’t have cared less, and we smiled about that.

“We gotta remember this scene,” Pete said. “It means something. I don’t know what exactly, but I think this is America, if we’re ever going to wonder about that later. I mean if we’re ever
going to try and put our finger on what we’re doing over there, who we’re fighting for, just remember this lineup at the bar.”

A bum came over and begged a dollar to buy a beer.

After he left, Pete and I agreed that we might very well be that guy in a few years. We were just going through a phase, our short-haircut phase. I wondered aloud what lay ahead—the adventures to come, the danger.

“Any last-minute things that we needed to do?” I asked Pete.

“Well,” Pete said, “we’ll mail those insurance forms on the way back to base and that’s it. We’re set to go warring.”

Earlier that afternoon we had filled out the change-of-beneficiary forms for our ten-thousand-dollar policies. If I were killed, Pete would get ten grand, tax-free. If Pete died, I would get the same amount. The change-of-beneficiary forms were in my jacket. On the way back to Fort Riley, I got out of the car and walked to a mail drop, but then the devil overcame me. I put Pete’s change-of-beneficiary form in the drop but put the envelope with my form back into my jacket. If I died, Mother would get the ten thousand.

There is something very rotten about this, I thought, but then I smiled. Naw. Walking back to the car, I figured the people back in that beer joint would have given me a hand; it was their kind of thing. Naw, I thought, this is rotten. Later. I’ll mail it later. It made me smile, because we did not expect to die, neither one of us. We were doing it for bragging rights with Dunn and McCoy. Plus I could always say I was worried that Pete might shoot me for the money.… I’d just give it some time to make sure he was honest. Then I’d mail it in.

All the men in my platoon had returned except Sergeant Castro. He had called from Puerto Rico the previous morning, and I had told him to be back by 1200 hours the next day or he’d miss movement. I had trouble understanding his accent, but I thought that he had only one thing to do and he’d be on his way. I said, “You’re in Puerto Rico—you’re out of the country—you’ve got just a few hours to get to Kansas and you’ve got something else to do before you leave?” There was no answer. “Castro,” I said, “are you crazy?”

“I be there, I be there, I be there,” he kept saying.

He still wasn’t back by 1500 hours the next day as we started
to assemble in the company street. I had Bratcher bring out Castro’s duffel bag and put it in formation. Castro was the only man missing in the 3d Platoon. We stacked arms, loaded our duffel bags into trucks, and milled around. At 1600 hours Captain Woolley called us to attention and said, “Let’s go kick some ass.”

We were marching out of the company area when a taxi screamed up and Castro leaned out the front passenger window. Bratcher told him that his uniform was on his bunk, we had already packed his duffel bag. Castro motioned the taxi driver to drive on.

The train cars stretched out of sight in both directions. Air hissed from brake lines. Everyone in my platoon was talking and laughing as we marched along the tracks. I stopped the platoon beside our assigned cars and had the men climb aboard. From across a nearby congested parking lot, Castro’s yellow cab, speeding dangerously, made its way in our direction and stopped almost at the tracks. Castro was putting on his field uniform as he got out of the cab. Everyone in the platoon cheered. He paid the driver and waddled past me quickly to the train. I followed him up the train stairs. The men clapped their hands in unison and shouted.

“I told you I be here!” he called out to me before he slumped down in a seat.

Children on the shoulders of their parents, old people, farmers, and businessmen lined the road. People in cars drove slowly by. Some late-arriving wives and girlfriends raced by us on foot and asked soldiers leaning out of windows what unit they were with. One soldier down the line reached out and kissed a girl for a long time. She finally stood back with tears in her eyes. Another GI reached down and took a small child into the train and played with him for a few minutes before returning the boy to his crying wife. The division band was playing at the front of the train.

The sun had begun to set over the western prairies when, without warning, the train lurched and started to move. It went slowly at first, and the well-wishers easily kept up with it. Then it picked up speed and only a few people could keep pace. As our section of the train pulled through the main post area we saw
signs that read, “God Save America,” and “The Big Red One.” Well-dressed civilians stood by large cars in the parking lot of division headquarters.

We stopped at Laramie, Wyoming, where the snow was two feet deep, so the men could disembark and stretch their legs. Back under way, we traveled over the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere east of the Oakland Naval Terminal the train came to a stop again. Scuttlebutt sourced to battalion headquarters in the front of the train was that a large demonstration of peaceniks blocked the train tracks into the terminal.

“Hell,” Lyons said, “put me on top of the engine with some live ammo and I’ll clear the tracks.”

On Monday, 20 September, three days after leaving Fort Riley, the long train pulled into a railroad terminal inside the naval base. Sections of the train were pushed down a pier beside an enormous gray World War II troop carrier, the USNS
Mann
. We had to lean out the window and look up to see the deck. After waiting for hours to disembark, we walked in single file along the pier toward the gangplank with our duffel bags over our shoulders. Grandmotherly-looking Red Cross workers stood smiling behind tables filled with pastries and coffee.

The endless line in front continued up a gangplank to the deck, across a passageway, and down into the bowels of the ship. Once we arrived at the fifth level down, we found the company’s area in a large compartment with bunks stacked five high. There was barely enough room to pass down the rows of bunks. The men were happy about leaving the train, and began settling into the smaller spaces of the ship in good humor. A card game, started on the train before we left Fort Riley, picked up again in the latrine. I noticed that there wasn’t much air circulation. I was thinking it was going to be a long Pacific crossing for me down in this hold, when a Marine told me that the officers’ quarters were above. I wished Bratcher well, told him it was better he than me down here, and left. Pete, McCoy, and Dunn had already secured a four-bunk stateroom off the main officers mess. I stood inside the hatch and looked at our plush, spacious cabin.

“Goddamned if I don’t feel a little guilty about this,” I said. “Those men are crammed together like cattle down below.”

Dunn reminded me that in the U.S. Army, a second lieutenant took what was given to him and said thank you.

Troops boarded the ship all that day and throughout most of the night. Eventually twenty-eight hundred soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, boarded the
Mann
.

Around two o’clock the next day the ship’s horn blew and I went out on deck. Halfway down the pier a military band stood at the ready. The Red Cross women were cleaning up around their tables. Longshoremen disengaged heavy ropes from cleats on the pier. Fewer than a dozen civilians stood below looking up at the huge ship. Another whistle blew and the band started to play. The women stopped picking up trash and looked up. One out in front waved, and then the others joined in. The longshoremen heaved the ropes away, tugs moved the ship from the pier, and, under her own power at last, the
Mann
headed into San Francisco Bay.

We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed out to sea.

  FOUR  

The second day at sea I began preparing and delivering training classes on small-unit tactics and field hygiene to the company. Later, support personnel from brigade headquarters delivered a series of lectures on Vietnam and its history. These were held on the open deck where movies were shown at night. The movies were better received.