Still Lonesome End, still a military legend

The Lonesome End is still alone, flanked out now on the edge of America, in a remote log house that abuts Montana's Glacier National Park.

Bill Carpenter won't be coming home for tomorrow's 107th Army-Navy game.

Even though the retired Army general grew up here, remains one of the storied series' most memorable participants, and is a military legend to boot, it's been years since he's returned for one of these annual football spectacles.

Friends and Army officials have tried to persuade him, regularly prodding the 69-year-old graduate of Springfield High (Delaware County) to reconnect with his alma mater.

They've told him that Cadets, Iraq veterans, and plain old retirees would love to see the 1959 all-American whose pass-catching skills and gridiron isolation landed him on magazine covers and made him one of that simpler era's more intriguing sports icons.

They've pointed out that the man a colleague once called "the finest officer-leader this country has produced since the Korean War," the Vietnam hero who during a fierce jungle battle in 1966 ordered an air bombardment atop his own position, ought to be present when the Corps of Cadets marches into Lincoln Financial Field.

But just as he stood apart from his teammates in that revolutionary formation Col. Earl Blaik devised for those long-ago Army teams, Carpenter continues to stand alone.

"Bill has always marched to his own drummer," said Bob Anderson, an Army teammate. "I'm probably his best friend, and yet when people have asked me to explain him, I can't. I have no idea."

Anderson, who was Carpenter's initial West Point roommate, asked his friend last year to attend a reunion of their 1958 team. He declined.

Earlier this year, Skip Werley, the ex-Springfield High athletic director who has become a close friend, wanted Carpenter to meet him in South Bend, Ind., for the Army-Notre Dame game since members of his 1959 team, the last to beat the Irish, were gathering there.

"He didn't want to go," recalled Werley, who visits Carpenter every year or two in Montana. "He's a little down on Army. He looks at Air Force and Navy and the success they've had in football and wonders why Army can't do the same thing."

Carpenter shuns attention, turning down an interview request for this story and countless others in the years since his playing career ended with a 43-17 loss to Navy at Municipal Stadium on Nov. 28, 1963.

Since he retired as a three-star general 16 years ago, he and his wife, Toni, have lived in isolated Whitefish, Mont. Whitefish, however, has become a popular tourist destination, and, friends say, he's considering a move deeper into Montana's woods.

"He's not a hermit," Werley said. "He just doesn't like the limelight."

He hikes, fishes and canoes. His children and grandchildren sometimes visit, and occasionally an old friend from West Point or Springfield will journey to his five-acre homesite.

Every few months, with no warning to anyone, he hops in his pickup and drives the 2,000 miles back to Delaware County, where he was one of the 1950s' most accomplished and versatile athletes. He visits his mother, Helen Dunn, at Dunwoody, a Newtown Square retirement community, and then just as quickly, and just as quietly, retreats.

If his solitude on the gridiron added an element of mystery to his football talents, Carpenter's continued isolation has only enhanced the aura that engulfs him in military circles.

"Everyone knew about the Lonesome End and the hero of Dak To," one of his former commanders, retired Col. Terry Roche, told Sports Illustrated a decade ago. "He walked in the back of the room with his fatigue uniform on, and this silence fell across the room. Everybody turned around."

William Stanley Carpenter Jr. was born in 1937 in Woodbury, Gloucester County.

Anyone who doubts the role destiny played in his life need only view one of the first photos taken of the boy.

In it, the tiny towhead is smiling widely, fighting determinedly with his hands and mouth to hold on to a football that is nearly as large as he.

The picture was taken by his namesake father. A few years later, Bill Carpenter Sr. would be killed by a German bullet during the final month of World War II.

"One summer Bill and I traveled around Germany and Holland with my brother," Anderson said. "He wanted to visit the cemetery where his dad was buried. My brother and I started to get out of the car with him, and he stopped us. He asked us not to go.

"I think he was bitter about his dad's death. I think it made him want to join the Army and kill someone."

Since football and West Point were what his father wanted for him, those wishes became the son's.

Carpenter's mother eventually remarried, and they relocated to leafy Springfield. Since his step-dad, Cliff Dunn, was the comptroller at the Philadelphia Navy Base, the boy, already obsessed with the military, got to attend several Army-Navy games during the rivalry's heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s.

At Springfield High, the 6-foot-3, blond, blue-eyed teenager was the quintessential all-American boy. In 1955, senior classmates voted Carpenter "best looking" and "most athletic." He starred on the basketball court. He ran the 100-yard dash in 9.9 seconds as a track star. And he was a hotly recruited, all-county running back on the Cougars' football team.

"He excelled at everything but baseball," Werley said. "He didn't care for it. Thought it was boring, too slow."

Carpenter was traveling full speed by the time he graduated. He enrolled at Manlius Pebble Hill School, a military prep institution, and a year later entered West Point.

His first two seasons there were solid but unspectacular. Then, at 4 a.m. on a summer morning in 1958, Blaik awoke with an idea. The Army coach jotted it down on the notepad he always kept on the nightstand.

"In those days, the hash marks were wider apart," recalled Anderson, who was the Cadets' starting tailback. "For a flanker like Bill, it was 20 yards into the huddle and 20 yards back. Col. Blaik decided that was a lot of wear and tear on maybe his best athlete. So he formulated a plan to keep him out there even during huddles."

Blaik tagged the position "The Lonely End." Sportswriters altered it to "The Lonesome End." Whatever it was called, the position seemed made for Carpenter.

He got his signals from quarterback Joe Caldwell. If Caldwell's left foot was forward, it was a running play. If it was his right foot, a pass was coming. There were only six pass routes, and Caldwell indicated which it would be by touching something - his belt buckle, his helmet, his knee pad.

"Simple, but no one ever figured it out," Anderson said.

Carpenter caught a school-record 22 passes in 1958 as Army earned a No. 3 ranking and beat Navy, 22-6. A year later, with Blaik replaced by Dale Hall, the Cadets were a struggling 4-4-1. But Carpenter, the captain and by now a national phenomenon as much for his unusual position as his talents, had 43 receptions for 591 yards, Army records that lasted 21 years.

Maybe his most remarkable athletic accomplishment took place after his final football season had ended. Army's lacrosse coach, aware of Carpenter's formidable mix of size, strength and speed, asked him if he'd ever played the sport.

Though Carpenter hadn't, he agreed to give it a try. After his one and only lacrosse season, he was named an all-American.

The NFL's Colts, knowing he was destined for an Army career, drafted him anyway. The Oakland Raiders of the fledgling AFL also tried to sign him. But, except for a stint with a base team at Fort Campbell, Carpenter was done with football.

He arrived in Vietnam as a military adviser in 1962. Before his tour was through, he'd been wounded twice and awarded two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. In 1966, he returned for a second tour.

Then on June 9, 1966, Capt. Carpenter and his company found themselves trapped on a low-lying slice of land at Dak To. Enemy fire was heavy, and wounded U.S. soldiers surrounded him. Retreat was unthinkable.

Carpenter knew he had to clear the enemy to rescue the wounded and save his remaining men. So he did the only thing he could.

"Bring it right on top of me!" Carpenter called to his air support. "Put it right on my smoke!"

The fighter jets were out of "VT fuzes," the midair-detonating explosives they usually employed in such situations. They dropped napalm instead.

It worked. The North Vietnamese soldiers fled the napalm's orange-chemical sting. Carpenter and most of his men were safe. The 29-year-old captain would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest military honor.

"That man is a real soldier," said Lt. Col. Henry Emerson, his battalion commander at the time. "He never got excited. . . . The air strike he called in on his own position saved the rest of his men."

Months later, Carpenter would earn more medals when, after the crash of a transport they'd been flying in, he pulled an injured fellow officer out of the burning plane. His subsequent career included the command of American forces in South Korea.

"Those things don't surprise people who know Bill," Werley said. "He's a very determined individual. He knows what needs to be done and does it."

And maybe one day in the future, the Lonesome End's to-do list will include a sentimental journey back to an Army-Navy game.

View a slide show of Army-Navy photos, including images of Bill Carpenter as a football player and a war hero.

EndText