Free Last Man Out by Jr. James E. Parker

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 sawsigns 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