Where They Lay by Earl Swift

Author:Earl Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

An episode later in the afternoon suggests that despite his resolute bearing, Barker had questions himself about the wisdom of returning. Lt. Col. William N. Peachey, the major’s former battalion commander and the man who’d given him Bravo Company, saw Barker at a refueling pad near the Laotian border. Peachey was overseeing troop rescues from a chain of beleaguered PZs north of the Xepon and was in such a hurry that his crew gassed his bird “hot,” never shutting down its engine. Still, he walked over to say hello, asked Barker how his day was going. Badly, Barker replied. He struck Peachey as uncharacteristically edgy, downcast. “Well,” Peachey said, trying to lighten things up, “it’s good for you. It builds character.” To his surprise, Barker lit into him. “What we’re doing out here today,” he hissed, “isn’t doing anybody any good.”

At some point early that afternoon, Barker strode over to where 1st Lt. Jon Evans was standing with other members of the Kingsmen’s sister company, the Black Widows. “I’m going back out,” Evans recalls the major telling him. “What do you want to do?” Evans had caught wind of the trouble Barker was having getting another sortie into the air and was impressed with the major’s resolve. Here, he thought to himself, was a man who knew when he’d been dealt a bad hand, and accepted it. He replied that he’d join him, that he wasn’t going to let Barker fly alone, and two Black Widow crews prepared their slicks for takeoff. As they did, Barker dropped in to speak with them. Evans’s copilot, John Madden, was struck by the major’s calm, and by something he said that he’d never before heard from a career officer in Vietnam: If you want to pull out, Barker told him, now’s the time to do it. Nobody will say anything.

They stuck with him. With 185 in the lead, the three birds took off to the west.

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