COASTAL OBSERVER

Sometimes the nature of a brotherhood is better than any treatment provided to veterans.

“I had no contact with any of these guys, you know, throughout the entire 40 years,” said Joe Amerling, who served as platoon sergeant in the Army’s Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 187th Airborne Infantry in Panama for three years.

Amerling and Paul Roberts, the only member of the company he stayed in contact with over the years, decided to send out Facebook messages to see who they could wrangle together. Everyone seemed in favor of the idea, Amerling said.

Many of the soldiers went on to join the Army Rangers, including Amerling. Of the 197 men he was one of the 90 who graduated from the Army Ranger School. He returned for his second tour in Panama as a Ranger instructor with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 508th Airborne Infantry

“It was a voluntary school but it was demanding,” he said.

Within just four years of reconnecting, Amerling said the group has found its bonds are as strong as ever. They come from across the country to his vacation home on Pawleys Creek. From a company of about 80 paratroopers, they had about 30 attend along with some spouses and a couple of grown sons who followed their fathers into the Army.

They kept it simple with plenty of chairs and stories to tell. There’s alcohol, too, but Amerling pointed that a couple of bottles of Crown Royal that once would have been emptied still sat on a folding table under his house midway through the reunion weekend.

“Out of all the units in 20 years of the military, there’s not another group of guys you feel this way about them,” said Gill Soley, who traveled from Florida. “It’s pretty dang special that this group of guys pull back every year to link up.”

“It’s a love fest is what it is. I can’t explain it. When I come here, I love being around,” added Jack Scarborough of Wilmington, N.C., a former sergeant.

Greg Sturm, who served 18 years, said he doesn’t see a group of retired veterans. He still sees the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds in their old company photographs who had no idea what they had signed up for.

“When I started seeing these guys show up, it was like I never missed a day. I wasn’t looking at them like they are now, the old guys that they are,” Sturm said. “We’re all brothers.”

The band of Army brothers particularly bonded over experiences with the company’s first sergeant, Don P. Lamica.

“He was pretty much crazy,” Amerling said. “Instead of a company of paratroopers, we were all his prisoners.”

Amerling recalled that Lamica always went beyond what was required of other companies. If they would run 10 miles, Lamica’s men would run 12. 

Stephen Corrow agreed. He served 32 years in the Army rising from private to command sergeant major.

“When you walk through a jungle, you often have to walk in single file lines. It’s the only way you can physically walk,” Corrow said. “He would know who we were just by the way you walked.”

Soley recalled the time Lamica made each soldier remove one boot during an inspection to make sure they all had GI socks.

“The attention to detail is what he was teaching,” Soley said.

“If you can’t do the little things, you can’t do the big things,” said Mark Larocque, who came from Arizona and served 20 years in the infantry.

Lamica, now suffering from dementia, resides in a home for veterans in Texas.

“The way we acted is the way we fought,” Larocque added. “That’s the way we survived. That’s why we’re still here today, and that’s why we are together today.”

He recalled one of his jumps into Honduras. He looked to see the jump masters holding their fingers up to the temples of their heads as horns. Larocque was confused until he made it to the ground.

“There’s all kinds of obstacles depending on the drop zone,” Larocque said. “We steered away from the cows, and some of us couldn’t.”

They would fall 15 to 22 feet per second, about 10 miles per hour, according to Larocque. He said each jump has its risk.

“They’re all close calls,” he said.

Soley and Larocque said they knew they wouldn’t find a similar connection in other units.

“I didn’t even want to leave, just because of the fear of it not being like that,” Soley said.

“Even when I went to Italy, after Panama, it wasn’t the same,” Larocque added.

Corrow said other regiments can not compare to the bond they had in Panama.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and all of us talk about this,” he said. “Nobody has a group that is this solid together. No one.”

It was the best and worst of times in Panama for a lot of the retired paratroopers. It wasn’t a time of war during their service but tensions were building within Central America in the ’80s. The platoon members received hazardous pay, but they didn’t understand why at the time, Corrow said.

“We didn’t know how dangerous it was, what we did every day. Just the job of going to work,” he said. “There’s a reason why they gave us just a little bit extra.”

Life isn’t the same upon returning home, according to Steve Verdugo, who served four years. He said post-traumatic stress disorder had such an effect on his mentality that he had attempted suicide just two months before the company’s first reunion.

“That was enough for me,” Verdugo said.

Amerling said he received a call from one of his comrades, Danny Wallace, in 2014. He met Wallace at Ranger camp during his second tour in Panama. After Amerling retired in 1995, Wallace continued to serve, and he was deployed to Iraq in 2003 when an explosion blinded him.

Trying to navigate his new life, Wallace got involved with the Blinded Veterans Association and asked Amerling, who was a police officer at the time, if he could arrange a training session for the blind American and British soldiers.

“It was an incredible experience. It took off from there,” Amerling said.

It was a time of suffering, they said, but they understood each other’s suffering. 

“It’s a hard life. I mean, it ain’t no joke,” he added. “People don’t understand until you get into an environment like this, where a lot of these guys haven’t been able to get their feelings out.”

Corrow said he barely graduated high school in Boston, and he flunked out of college. After he retired from the Army, he received a degree in civil engineering. He credited his success to Amerling, who he called “St. Joe.”

“I would not be where I’m at if it wasn’t for him. He’s a humble guy,” he said.

Amerling said there is more awareness of PTSD today.

“It was never diagnosed, there wasn’t PTSD for World War II, even Vietnam. But now you’re seeing veterans groups helping veterans cope,” he said. “We talk all the time on the phone, and if we hear someone in distress, we’re trying to reach out. They’ve just been through a lot of traumatic things.”

“That’s what helped me,” Verdugo added.

Amerling created a nonprofit organization, Overhead Cover, with his wife in 2022 to help homeless veterans as his way of giving back.

“It was kind of humbling,” he said after the fact that his comrades said the reunion is all because of him.

Larocque said their reunion is the best resource of them all. If it wasn’t for the reunion, he said he would suffer.

“Tomorrow is not promised,” he said. “As long as I can make it, I will be here.”

It’s not the fact they have to depend on one another, he said, but it’s reassuring to know the support is there.

Of the values the paratroopers learned during their service, one that was instilled in each of the men stands out.

“Never leave a man behind,” Larocque said.

That means to be there for one another emotionally, mentally and physically, Sturm added.

“We were a tight-knit group. You don’t find that in a lot of places,” he said.