We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (26 page)

To another friend Rescorla grumbled, “God, look at us. We should have died performing some great deed—go out in a blaze of glory, not end up with someone spoon-feeding us and changing our nappies.” Rick Rescorla’s
kairos
moment came, and his departure in a blaze of glory as well. He embraced that moment and his duty, just as he had done at age twenty-six on the battlefields of the Ia Drang Valley and just as anyone who knew him expected he would do. He was a warrior prince, a singer of songs, a poet, a writer, a romantic, a father to two children, Trevor and Kim, and our good friend and comrade. They broke the mold when they made Rick Rescorla. There is no tombstone in Arlington Cemetery with his name engraved on white marble. He told any and all that he didn’t want that. There’s just a small bronze memorial plaque on an eagle’s cage in a wildlife sanctuary called Raptors in New Jersey. That, and a life-size, quite accurate bronze statue of the young lieutenant from that iconic photo taken in Landing Zone X-Ray, which is in the Infantry Museum in Fort Benning, Georgia, where they still turn out Infantry officers and soldiers for America’s wars.

Across the Atlantic in Hayle, Cornwall, they collected small donations, little by little from the townsfolk, to build a lovely granite memorial topped with a bronze eagle, in memory of their hero, the boy nicknamed “Tammy” who was the only child of a single mother. Their Tammy is remembered as a brawler and tough competitor in the local rugby football games. He had never forgotten his hardscrabble roots and the hometown folks, and when he came back on trips to visit his mother he always made a point of visiting a lonely old blind man, Stanley Sullivan, at the nursing home. Rick would smuggle in cans of stout and he and Stanley would stay up late drinking and singing tearful renditions of the old Cornish songs.

We who served with him began a petition campaign within weeks after 9/11, urging President George W. Bush to bestow a posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rick Rescorla. Over 40,000 signatures have been collected to date and many personal appeals have been made to the White House, without either action or response.

His comrades at arms remember one Rick, the tough guy who could be a hard-eyed killer one minute and the life of any party at the tin-roofed homemade officers club back at home base in An Khe. We remember a lieutenant whose radio call sign was Hard Core. The folks of Hayle remember another, the hometown boy. Susan Rescorla remembers still another Rick—the romantic who would suddenly grab her and dance her joyously around the house, the street, or a shop full of strangers. She remembers the poet, the lover, the wood carver, the playwright, the man who could suddenly begin reciting from memory great chunks of Shakespeare or Proust or Milton. She talks of how they had been married for months and she knew nothing of his role in combat in Vietnam or his medals, only that he had been in the Army a long time ago. It was not until she accompanied Rick to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to attend a lecture I was giving to the Corps of Cadets that Susan found out she was married to a genuine hero.

I introduced Rick to the cadets and told them of his critical part in the fighting in LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany and his superb leadership—something they already knew—and he received a boisterous standing ovation. Afterward Susan watched in amazement as the young cadets lined up by the hundreds to have Rick sign their dog-eared copies of our book and reach out and shake the hand of a true hero and role model. She remembers their first meeting, on a dawn walk with her dog through the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, when Rick jogged by barefooted. He stopped to take a breath and she asked why he had no shoes. Rick told her he was writing a screenplay about Africa and needed to know what it was like to run barefooted, as his characters did. Susan talks of her new husband who took her on a visit to Hayle a year after their marriage and there suggested that they renew their wedding vows outside an ancient, abandoned church, reciting his version of those words that join a man and woman together. Today, in the suburbs of New Jersey and the skyscrapers of Manhattan, there are thousands of men and women who are living their normal lives and doing their normal jobs because of a man named Rick Rescorla. But for him and his sense of duty the death toll at the World Trade Center would be twice as high. No one will ever have to spoon-feed or change the diapers on one particular old veteran in a nursing home. Near the end Rick was studying Zen Buddhism, and if what he read is right, one day he may return to live another life filled with adventure and even greater deeds. His sort are always needed in this world, and somehow they always appear when most needed.

I
t was the middle of April 2004, and spring had come to the hills of Alabama and southern Georgia. The wild dogwood and redbud brought color to the woods and the azaleas were in full bloom in well-tended yards.

Drivers on Interstate 85 east of Auburn, Alabama, must have been startled when a phalanx of State Highway Patrol cars, red lights flashing, waved them off the highway and raced ahead to block the entrance ramps that fed into the river of traffic moving east.

Other state troopers and police led a hearse and long black limousines and a convoy of hundreds of other cars onto the interstate. It stretched back a mile and more. Then the cortege turned off the interstate and onto U.S. Highway 280, traveling south and east through the rolling Georgia hills.

Must be some former governor or maybe an old general to receive such an escort, such a cleared path to the cemetery, those sidelined motorists surely were thinking; never seen them block an interstate highway for a funeral procession before. But this honor and tribute was not for a politician or a general or a bishop. It was the final, sad ride home for a true unsung American hero: we were carrying Julia Compton Moore from the home she loved in the sleepy southern college town of Auburn to the old Post Cemetery on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia, her final resting place in the arms of what she only half-jokingly called “Holy Mother Army.”

Julie’s life began and ended with the United States Army and was inextricably bound to that institution for all of her seventy-five years. She was every inch a soldier herself all of those years, as much as, perhaps even more than, the men she loved who wore the Army uniform: her father, husband, and sons.

Her story and her own quiet heroism during five of our country’s wars in which those she loved served in combat—World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf War—had been told in our book and in the movie based on that book. In those dark days of November 1965, it was my wife, Julie, who followed the taxi drivers, house to house, trailer park to trailer park, in Columbus, Georgia, as they delivered the telegrams to Army wives and Army children telling them they had lost the one person who mattered most in their lives. It was Julie, the wife of their husband’s battalion commander, who came to their door to help them grieve and stood beside them at graves dug in the red earth of a Georgia Army post and helped them say farewell as an Army coffin was lowered into that red earth.

It took all her strength and courage to face those grieving women, even as she lived in fear that the next telegram to arrive might carry her name and address. She worried that those families would hate her because it was her husband who had led their men into the battle that took their lives. But there was no hate for a woman who came to share their sorrow; no anger directed toward another Army wife who was doing her duty as she had been taught by her own mother and father, and by her husband, who was now commanding soldiers in his second war.

Her own anger, her own considerable strength and iron will, would now be directed at righting what she considered a huge mistake by the Army she loved: dispatching taxi drivers to deliver the Western Union death notifications to the families of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. She and the wife of the 1st Cavalry Division commanding general together would lay telephone siege to the Pentagon, demanding that
their
Army do the right thing, right now. Within a matter of weeks Army policy would change. Those terrible telegrams would no longer arrive in the middle of the night and be handed over by a taxi driver. Instead an Army officer and an Army chaplain would personally come to break the news that would break so many hearts.

Just as she was brought home to an Army post at the end of her life, so, too, had she begun that life on another Army post: Julie was born on February 10, 1929, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the Army Field Artillery, to Captain and Mrs. Louis J. Compton. She was their only child and she was the quintessential Army brat, growing up on Army posts across America during the years between the two great World Wars as her father moved from assignment to assignment in the small, tightly knit Army of that time. She and her mother lived in Washington, D.C., off Reservoir Road in the shadow of Georgetown University, during the years when Colonel Compton was serving overseas in World War II in the European theater. Julie attended and graduated from Chevy Chase Junior College just across the line in Maryland.

Her father in 1948 was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Julie went off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In June of that same year I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. Julie was visiting her parents there in August of that year when the two of us met. She was nineteen years old, an auburn-haired beauty with an outgoing personality. I burned up the roads between Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Chapel Hill during the next year and a half, courting the woman I knew was meant for me. We were married at Fort Bragg on November 22, 1949, and our wedding reception was held at the old Officers Club on that post.

Our first son, Greg, was born in the spring of 1951 at the Army hospital at Fort Bragg. Our second son, Steve, was born a year later at Martin Army Hospital on Fort Benning. By then I was on orders to deploy to Korea, where the war was raging. Just a month later, in late June, I boarded a plane in Louisville, Kentucky, and left Julie standing there with two babies in her arms. By then her father had retired from the Army and was living in Auburn. Julie and the two babies moved in with the Comptons and lived with them for fourteen months while I was soldiering in Korea.

When I got home Julie resumed the gypsy life she had known as an Army brat, only now as an Army wife and Army mother. Packing up, moving, unpacking, settling in for a year or two years in places like Fort Benning; Fort Myer, Virginia; West Point; Fort Belvoir; Fort Leavenworth; Newport, Rhode Island; Oslo, Norway; Fort Benning again; Korea; Fort Ord, California; then back to Fort Myer. We lived in nine states, two foreign countries, twenty-five different homes, and Julie packed and unpacked our household twenty-four times over the years.

Our daughter Julie was born at West Point in the fall of 1954 and daughter Cecile at Fort Belvoir in the winter of 1958. We were in Norway when Julie gave birth to our third son, Dave, with the help of a Norwegian midwife, in 1961. The two older sons attended a Norwegian Catholic school and rapidly became fluent in Norwegian.

Julie was the rock of our family. On her we built a home rich in love, caring, and tradition. She volunteered as a den mother for the boys, taught sewing and crafts to the girls, and drove them to all the countless activities. She kept the house running amid times of chaos and joy that five growing children present. Never at a loss for song at the spur of the moment, always accurately sensing the mood of a situation, she knew how to instantly lighten our hearts. The Army was her family as well. The love she gave our family was selflessly extended to every community where we were assigned—“Bloom where you are planted,” Julie told us. It is this love that she extended to the wives and children of the Army family that would prove invaluable in times of crisis and help me build unit cohesion in times of peace.

The movie
We Were Soldiers
, taking poetic license, wrongly depicted all the wives and families of my battalion living in Army quarters, nice two-story bungalows on Colonel’s Row at Fort Benning after we left for Vietnam. That was Hollywood. Like all the other families living in Army quarters when we were ordered to Vietnam in the summer of 1965, Julie and our family of five were given thirty days to vacate those quarters and go somewhere else, anywhere else. The Army didn’t particularly care where.

Some of the wives of young officers went home to live with their own families, much as Julie had done during the Korean War. But the wives and children of the senior noncommissioned officers were as bound to the Army as Julie was and they scattered out in a desperate search for housing in Columbus, Georgia, just outside the gates of Fort Benning. For most that meant a rented trailer house in a sun-baked treeless trailer park. In those days it also meant blacks on one side of town, whites on the other. The only house Julie could find for rent was a tiny three-bedroom cottage, and she and the five kids crammed in there and waited for my homecoming. Each night she unfolded a cot for our son David, as there wasn’t room for one more bed anywhere.

At every Army post where she lived, from captain’s wife to colonel’s wife to general’s wife, Julie did everything she could to help the families of soldiers. She organized the officers and NCO wives to provide mutual support and worked to develop child-care facilities so that the wives could work and contribute to the pitifully small salaries their husbands earned from the Army. She was expert at whipping out a good, big dinner when I called on short notice and told her I was bringing guests home. She was an extrovert and never met a stranger at any of the official functions. She did all this while juggling all the duties of a mother with five children, and she did it better than anyone I ever heard about. Julie worked as a Red Cross volunteer “gray lady” from the time she was a teenager during World War II. After we married she continued that volunteer work in Army hospitals at Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Korea, Fort Ord, and Fort Myer, at the U.S. embassy clinic in Oslo, and at the hospital in our hometown of Auburn.