Bob Parsons’ ‘Fire in the Hole’: The Autobiography of a Marine Who Made It Big

BY MARC LEEPSON

Given Bob Parsons’ exceptional success during his long career in business, it’s notable that he devotes a significant portion of his new autobiography, Fire in the Hole! The Untold Story of My Traumatic Life and Explosive Success (Forefront Books, 320 pp. $29, hardcover; $15.99, Kindle), to his tour of duty as a U.S. Marine in the Vietnam War and how he has dealt with PTSD after coming home.

Parsons, best known as the founder of GoDaddy and PXG Golf, tells his life story (with co-author Laura Morton) chronologically, starting with his youth in an unhappy, working-class family in Baltimore, and bringing things up to his present-day life as a “billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist.”

Looking back on it all, Parsons writes that the “the thing [he’s] most proud of is being a United States Marine.” His tour of duty in the Vietnam War, he says, “shaped me in so many ways, and it changed me to the core. What I went through and how I survived is a big part of whom I am today.” Parsons is “certain,” he says, that if he hadn’t served as a Marine rifleman in the war, he “wouldn’t have accomplished all that I have over the years.”

In April 1968, just before graduating from high school, Bob Parsons and two buddies decided to visit a Marine Corps recruiter. After a long sit-down, the three were sold and joined up on the buddy plan. His mother had to sign permission paperwork because Parsons hadn’t turned eighteen.

He joined for patriotic reasons, Parsons says, and because he “craved adventure, but also needed a change of scenery.” He sailed through boot camp at Parris Island, infantry training at Camp Lejeune, and advanced training at Camp Pendleton, then received orders for Vietnam. After brief stints in Okinawa and at Kadena Air Base in Japan, he arrived in-country and joined Delta Company of the 1st Battalion/26th Marines based at Hill 190 in Quang Nam Province.

The teen-aged rifleman put in an eventful tour of duty, experiencing the brutality of war almost on a daily basis during his first month. Not long after volunteering to walk point, about thirty days into his tour, Parsons snagged a trip-wire that set off a Chinese-made grenade which peppered both of his legs and his left elbow with shrapnel.

He was medevaced out of the bush in a Jeep (no helicopters were nearby). After treatment in Vietnam and at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan, he healed and volunteered to go back to his unit, but the Marine Corps had other plans. Bob Parsons filled out his tour working a courier job between Okinawa and Vietnam and later at a troop processing center. He ETS’d at El Toro Air Station in California after flying home.

Parsons returned to Baltimore and got on with his life. The rest—his marriages, jobs, and business entrepreneurship ups and downs (nearly all of them ups)—fills the second half of his book, which also contains advice on business and personal matters. This is a colloquially written, readable life story that effectively paints the full picture of Bob Parsons’ remarkable life.

You could fill a small-town library with the oral histories, eyewitness interviews, family papers, media accounts, FBI and Ohio public records, and legal documents dealing with the events surrounding what took place at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. On that dark day, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on student anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. (Eleven days later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, state police shot and killed two students and wounded twelve.)

Dozens of books and documentaries have come out in the last 54 years based on those sources about what’s become known simply as “Kent State.” That includes two recently published books that tell the story fully and extremely well: the journalist Howard Means’ 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence, published in 2016, and John “Derf” Backderf’s Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, a 250-page graphic docudrama with more than 25 pages of explanatory endnotes that came out in 2021.

Which bring us to Kent State: An American Tragedy (Norton, 416 pp. $35), by U.S. Naval Academy history professor Brian VanDeMark. The author of two well-received Vietnam War history books, Road to Disaster and Into the Quagmire, VanDeMark also unfortunately helped Robert S. McNamara write In Retrospect, (1995), the former defense secretary’s self-serving non-apology for his misguidance of the war under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

In his new book, VanDeMark admirably adds to the considerable body of historical work on the Kent State tragedy. He has put together an exhaustively researched and well-presented examination of the events leading up to the tragedy, the fateful day itself, and its legal and political aftermath built on a wealth of worthy primary sources and books that have covered the same ground.

Most significantly, though, VanDeMark has added to that wealth of material by providing the answer to a hitherto unanswered Big Question: Why did the Guardsman begin firing on the students? And its corollary: Who fired the first shot?

About midway through the book—after offering a tantalizing hint in his Prologue—VanDeMark reports that he elicited a “belated confession” from Matt McManus, a 25-year-old National Guard platoon sergeant in 1970 who was in the thick of things on May 4.

Sitting in his home in Ohio, McManus broke a 50-year silence that also included “evasive answers” to “investigators, grand jurors, and courts,” and told VanDeMark that with his men locked and loaded in the face of screaming and rock-throwing students, he barked out an order to “Fire one round in the air.” And he did so with the shotgun he carried, thereby setting off a volley of shots in the air—and directly at the protestors.

VanDeMark doesn’t blame McManus for what followed, saying that in the fog of war the young sergeant issued an order “in a desperate attempt to prevent bloodshed.” McManus “tried to do the right thing,” VanDeMark says, “but ended up making things much, much worse.”

VanDeMark places the bulk of the blame for the killing and wounding on Gen. Robert Canterbury, the Ohio Guard commander who sent armed, inexperienced, untrained, young troops onto a volatile college campus, setting the stage for what came next. Canterbury’s actions at Kent State, VanDeMark says, were a “failure of leadership.”

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