Warrior Wannabe: A Memoir

By Tom Baker

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Readers will get to know Tom Baker well in this unflinching, introspective, and honest account of his always-interesting life. In prose that is unadorned, sometimes ugly, but always authentic, he mixes harrowing tales of combat in Vietnam with humorous tales of growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina. He introduces readers to the friends, family members, and forces that have shaped him and his experiences. In the process, he reveals how history impacts people in ways large and small that echo for generations and across continents. His story reveals firsthand the thrills and consequences of a warrior mindset, a mindset that can lead to be trauma and enlightenment. Tom Baker is much more than just a warrior, though, and certainly not a wannabe. He is someone who has seen a lot of darkness but has not let that block out the light.

—Alex Macaulay, PhD, US military historian

Many people have sought solitude and inner peace in the mixed hardwood forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains. My father, Charles Woodard, also heard the call to the woods. Like Tom Baker, his mentee and friend for many years, Dad was pulled into the comforting and sometimes dangerous confines of the forest. These forests were where Tom Baker went to not only make a living but also to confront and deal with the demons of war and the struggles they bring to lives beyond war. Living life one day at a time, he searched for the inner strength to slowly, over time, remake himself, his life, and so many of the lives around him.

—Dickie Woodard, former timber cutter and lifelong outdoorsman

All of us have demons. Tom Baker’s memoir is moving in how transparently and unashamedly its author shares his demons with us. Here is a man who has loved and been loved, has dodged death and has dealt death, has been scared and has been lost, and has loved and been loved yet again. As you read about his life, you realize that it is not insanity that leads a former soldier and logger to run and bike and navigate through the woods at all hours of the day and night, but sanity and his need to preserve himself for himself and for those he loves. Baker tells a tale of how adventure racing, instead of helping him to outrun his demons, gave him the emotional tools to turn, face those demons, and stomp them into the ground. His example is a gift to all who know him, and his memoir is a gift to all those who will know him now through his writing.

—Nate Kreuter, PhD, author and adventure racer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662466014

Book preview

Part 1

From a Boy to a Man

Like my dad, I have always struggled baring my soul about my experiences in war. Hell, I struggled with going back to some of my childhood years. As I wrote, though, I began to understand better the two main reasons why I was making this journey. One, it was an attempt to help myself. To clear my mind of the demons that will never go away, but like the class bully, if you can confront them, if you can drag them out of their lair into the light of day, you can handle them. Reason number two, there are far too many veterans and active-duty personnel killing themselves every day! If my story, good, bad, or indifferent, can help even one veteran, one person, realize that there is a way out of the dark hole we sometimes put ourselves into, then there is no battle I will not fight for them.

There was one dark night, ten years ago, when the .45-caliber pistol shook in my hand as tears ran off the grip. The demons danced in my head, shouting that I didn’t do enough, but luckily that night, I also heard other voices calling to me—voices of friends, veterans from my past, telling me it was not my time and that I had work to do. That I had an obligation, a duty to tell people what really happened in Vietnam, why we fought, and how it haunts us still. If not for them, I would not be here writing this. So read this story, laugh at some of my antics, and walk with me on my journey to be a warrior.

So let’s get started. In order to be a true warrior, you have to start young, very young. You also need to have a vivid imagination, accompanied by a great sense of humor, or Mr. Murphy will kick your ass. You don’t know who Mr. Murphy is, you say? Well, Mr. Murphy is the god of war and doom, and he sits at the right hand of the god of probability. Mr. Murphy’s mission statement is as follows: anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time. So Mr. Murphy, sooner or later, will kick your ass, but if you have that great imagination, you can tell huge lies to cover your failures, and the sense of humor will allow you to laugh about it later.

My road to warriordom began when I was about three years old and not very well potty-trained. I was playing in the front yard of our cinder block home outside Camp Pickett, Virginia, doing what any three-year-old would do—getting dirty—when, suddenly, the urge hit me. Now we all know you can only hold back your bowels so long, and my mother had already threatened me with severe bodily harm if I shit my pants one more time. So I was in a tight spot. The sensible thing to do, of course, would have been to go into the house and use the toilet. But when you are a warrior wannabe, you take the rocky road or maybe, in this case, the shitty road.

So after maybe two seconds of deliberation, I decided to fill my diaper (yes, at my age, I was still wearing a diaper), and load it I did. For a child of three who didn’t eat very much, I could fill a diaper like a man. The problem, one of many with a full diaper, is that it slows your tactical maneuvers. It also attracts flies, and for a warrior, both of those things are bad. Luckily, my little ninja mind, coupled with my great imagination, saved me—sorta. Mom was working in the side yard pulling weeds or something, so I waddled over (well, you can’t just stroll with a full diaper) to where she was, looked her straight in the eye, and told her that I was simply playing in the front yard when some soldier (we were very near the Army post) had come up and pooped in my pants. One minute I’m a happy young boy, and the next I’m nearly abused. I held my breath, hoping against hope that I was saved from the beating I knew was coming. My mother didn’t laugh or beat me; she simply turned (if she was laughing, I couldn’t see from where I stood) and walked away. I was saved, I thought, at least for a few minutes. After standing there with my diaper full for, I guess, five minutes or so, I heard her footsteps coming back, and they didn’t sound like happy feet. My pitiful cries probably still linger around that old house to this day.

My mom was a good woman, but she could be a hard woman at times. Her childhood had been very difficult. She and her older sister had been placed in an orphanage when Mom was eight years old and her sister was ten. Their father had recently been killed in a construction accident. It was spring of 1916. Their mother, Pearl Nichols, my maternal grandmother, was a beautiful woman, at least in the few photographs I have seen of her. She had to have been aware of the difficulties of raising two children alone in the early twentieth century. She made a choice and simply abandoned Mom and her sister to a Catholic orphanage in Louisville, Kentucky. I’m not trying to defend my grandmother’s decision; it is just a fact. It was an extremely emotional period for both children, especially for Mom. I remember her telling us boys some of what she went through in that orphanage.

PTSD is not a new thing, and it is not limited to soldiers. Those five tough years before her adoption probably led to her hardness and maybe to her smoking and drinking from an early age. She told us boys that she had considered becoming a nun while in the orphanage, but her adoptive parents persuaded her to go to nursing school instead. A few years after graduating, she married Sergeant Major Roy J. Baker from Dillsboro, North Carolina. He was stationed at Fort Knox, just below Louisville at that time. Their life was a far cry from being easy, but they always said it was happy enough. The bitter fighting through the hedgerows after D-Day had been hard on Dad. He developed his own problems.

After many failed attempts, I finally became potty-trained and, soon after, fell in love. I was four and a half, and my sweetheart was just a few months older. Perfect ages for the doctor-nurse saga that every warrior must endure. I think maybe it is a combination of curiosity and imitation of acts (God forbid) that we saw our parents perform. It starts with the physical exam. We had picked the perfect spot for the examination way up under her house, complete with a dirt floor and low light. It was here that I made my first of many warrior mistakes. I had no escape route. But then who would have guessed that her father would pick that exact moment to miss his little girl and come tracking her down? To the best of my memory (having been beaten up the side of the head several times doesn’t help your memory), the examination had barely (no pun intended) begun (the awkward awareness of her missing parts compared to mine) when the door of the basement suddenly burst open and there stood her father.

Now a warrior generally knows when a fight is useless, and I quickly realized that since he was at least ten feet taller than me, my best option was to run. But where? The only possible escape route was through the door that his huge legs blocked. So after only a second or two of deliberation, I took off in a dead run straight for the door and had almost made it by his legs when his right hand (I believe it was his right hand) grabbed me by my shirt collar and jerked me skyward. My warrior cries probably sounded more like a child’s whimpers as he carried me and my nurse toward my mother who was waiting for us with fire shooting from her eyes. Had I known that a simple anatomy class would elicit such excitement, I would have never thought about becoming a doctor. I also learned a little about the law: there is no such thing as double jeopardy when it comes to punishing kids. I was beaten by my nurse’s father; I was beaten by my mother, and when my father got home, he gave me a lecture on the birds and the bees, which I didn’t understand, and then he beat me. I made so many promises that day about life and about girls it’s a wonder I didn’t become a priest at the age of five.

Even though the road to warriordom is steep and rocky, life still moves relatively fast. Before I could say, It wasn’t my fault, we were leaving Camp Pickett and heading to Webster, North Carolina, where my warrior training would continue. After twenty-seven years in the Army, thirteen of it as a sergeant major, my father was retiring. As I said before, Dad had been born in Dillsboro, which lay just down the river from Webster about four miles. He was coming home. The next few years would be hard on Dad. He had hit Omaha Beach D-Day, plus thirty with the 70th Field Artillery of the 8th Armored Division. He saw a lot of fighting through the hedgerows and the Battle of the Bulge. PTSD wasn’t a word back then, but shell shock and battle fatigue were attempts to explain a lot of problems. I loved my father, but he would sometimes get angry and slap Mom around some, especially when she was drinking. Us boys had to walk a fine line. He was used to soldiers jumping when he barked an order, and he struggled when we didn’t jump at his command. We got our asses beaten a lot.

I was five when we moved to the mountains of Western North Carolina and was glad and lucky to find that there were no girls my age within a mile of our house. Besides, my desire to become a doctor had been beaten out of me. Oddly, what Webster lacked in girls my age, it made up in heavy drinkers. Around 1914, the county seat had been moved from Webster to Sylva, mainly because of the railroad, but there were other reasons. Financially, that move decimating many Webster families. Drinking sorta helped their pain. Some of them referred to it as the second removal, in sad comparison to the first removal, which was the terrible relocation of Cherokee Native Americans in the late 1830s from Cherokee to Oklahoma—the infamous Trail of Tears.

I’ll give you an example. Several years before the Andy Griffin show appeared on TV, I had a real-life experience just like Opie. Robert Madison Jr. lived a couple of houses down from where Dad was building our new house, and Mr. Madison had an old Model T just like Opie’s dad. Robert Jr. was the son of Robert Madison Sr., a founder of Western Carolina College. The college lay about four miles up the river from Webster. Robert Jr. was an English teacher, a musician, a doodah maker, a heavy drinker, and he liked to fish. Many days that first summer in Webster, Mr. Madison would see me hanging out around Penland’s old country store bothering people and would ask my father if he could take me fishing. Dad was always too busy to take me fishing, so he said sure, take him and teach him how to fish. I would crawl into the passenger seat of that old Ford, and off we would go down toward the Tuckasegee River just below where ol’ man Arthur Allman lived.

We both fished with cane poles and a long line attached to a number six hook. Night crawlers were our bait of choice, but occasionally, a cricket could be found and used. As we sat by the river, Mr. Madison would tell me stories of his younger days in Cullowhee when his father taught at the college. I don’t remember very much about what he said, but I do remember he was sad most of the time when he talked about his younger days. Mr. Madison would talk as he baited our hooks and then slip back up the bank to the old Model T. He seemed to always keep a small pint bottle of whisky behind the seat, and I caught him several times taking what he called a nip. He said it was to keep his head from hurting. He also said it would help our fishing. He usually drank a lot, but our fishing was generally poor. Years later, he went to sleep on a railroad track near Hickory and never woke up in time.

People, as a whole, won’t leave warrior wannabes alone, and I was no exception. It started when I became six and went off to school. Back then, I had to walk uphill, both ways, maybe as far as a quarter of a mile—hard times. The only thing I was good at in the first grade was napping, and I was often told that I was a fairly good boy when I was asleep. The rest of the time, not so good. I fell in love again in the first grade with a gal named Bonnie Marie, with beautiful curly brown hair and green eyes, but she ditched me for a boy named Danny. Danny Boy was a big song then, so I was toast. Mrs. Roper, our second-grade teacher, whipped my hind end so many times that I still have flashbacks. She was a sweet old lady, but she was determined to change my ways with ass whippings. It didn’t work. My buddy James and I were her worst nightmares. She failed him and passed me just to separate us. James quit school a few years later and died in a car wreck when he was sixteen.

I’ll tell you one quick tale here about trying to help the starving kids in China. I was about seven years old, and I hated green beans. Hated them. One night, I was staring down a plate of green beans, hoping against hope they would just disappear. Dad walked over and stood beside me. Son, he said, there are thousands of starving kids in China who would give anything for those beans, so eat them for their sake. My little child brain began to spin. If those kids want and need these beans and I don’t, then we should simply send the beans to those poor starving kids. Great idea! My warrior mistake was, I guess, how I explained that idea to the sergeant major. After several slaps upside the head, I realized that those starving kids in China were on their own.

I said there were no girls my age near where I lived. Well, that is not entirely true. When you are six or seven years old, the word near is relative. There weren’t any girls my age that lived in downtown Webster, but there was this one very pretty blond-haired girl who lived up around Buchanan Loop on Kings Mountain. Her name was Barbara Sitton, and she was very pretty. She was also very fast and tough as nails. Not much bigger than me, but then I was the smallest kid in the neighborhood. She was quite the athlete. She could not only kick most of us boys’ asses, but she also could run us down to do it. Girls were not supposed to be that fast or that tough, but she was the exception. No doctor games there, I’ll tell you that.

Baseball was king in America during the mid-’50s, and most everybody I knew wanted to play baseball. Many of the kids my age in Webster would oftentimes gather at the wide spot where Buchanan Loop merged with Highway 116, the main Webster Road, and choose sides to play ball. Incidentally, that wide spot was right in front of Mr. Ensley’s house who, in a few years, would have me drive him to the local bootlegger’s at least once a week to get his booze. I was barely fourteen and had difficulty seeing over the steering wheel, but that didn’t bother Mr. Ensley. Let’s go, boy. Take me to Sylva. Sometimes he would give me a quarter and other times nothing.

Most of the kids, boys only (sorry, Barbara), wanted to play Little League baseball. The age limits were nine to twelve, and we had tryouts. Nowadays, nobody gets cut from the teams, but back then, if you weren’t good enough, you got cut. That is hard for a nine-year-old to understand. Four or five of my buddies from Webster tried out with me at the age of nine, and I was the only one in my grade to make the team. One minute you are buddies and the next, you are different. A major shift of friends.

My two older brothers tried out, and both were picked by a team called the Lions. I got picked by what everybody thought was the best team, the Cardinals. Since I was only nine, my father oftentimes took me to the games, but when my brothers became too old to play and I was ten, I was tasked with thumbing to Sylva to play. It was about three miles. With so little traffic back then, thumbing usually meant walking although most everyone would pick up a kid in a baseball uniform if they had a chance. I remember once thumbing a car that turned out to be a taxi. When I saw the sign, I jerked my hand down and started walking forward, but the taxi stopped anyway. The driver rolled the window down and shouted, Don’t you want a ride, kid? I sheepishly looked at him and said, Yes, sir, I do, but I don’t have any money. He smiled and said, I guess I can let you ride free this time. I hopped in.

The taxi driver happened to be a baseball coach who, five years later, pulled me from the third base position during a State Senior Little League championship game for an error that was, honest to God, the catcher’s fault. I’m not sure what inning it was, but Randleman, home of NASCAR hero Richard Petty, had a runner on second base. The batter laid down a short bunt, and our catcher raced up, grabbed the ball, and threw it to me. My job was to guard third base. The runner on second was heading to third. Our catcher threw the ball into the dirt just in front of me, and I bobbled the throw. The runner was safe. You do not bounce the ball into third. Too close! Coach storms out of the dugout, motions for me to go to the bench. Jesus! I’ll never forget the embarrassment of walking off that field with hundreds of people watching me. I hate him to this day, and he has been dead for over twenty years.

I remember waking up one day and I was in the sixth grade. Barely able to read, I was lost. The ass whippings continued even worse. Mrs. Cowan was our teacher, another nice lady but tough. One day, I called her a liar over some tale she was telling about my brother Bob who had been in her class a few years before. Wrong! Mrs. Cowan had a temper, and she had polio when she was young, causing one leg to be a little shorter than the other. When she leaned you over her desk and grabbed that stick of wood, she called a paddle, you knew you were in trouble. I was in trouble. She rocked up on that long leg and came down on that short leg with that paddle trailing smoke as it sped toward my hind end. My britches had burn spots on them when she was through. If she had threatened me with one more lick from that paddle, I would have given her the nuclear code.

I’m not