They Marched Into Sunlight (24 page)

Joe Kauffman loved nothing more than a campus. He had a tendency, he once said, to “romanticize and idealize universities.” Higher education had made his life, and he saw it as a defense against the narrow-mindedness of the world. He brought all his life experiences to the job at Wisconsin, but by 1967 he was facing the startling realization that, to some activist students, who he was and what he had done in his life made no difference and in fact only enraged them more. McNamara to the chancellor’s LBJ, indeed. “You know the worst thing you can do with a New Left radical is to tell them how you sat at restaurants with Whitney Young and how you helped start the Peace Corps and how you were against the war in Vietnam—but you weren’t for revolution. You were a despised liberal.”

J
OE
K
AUFFMAN AND
B
ILL
S
EWELL
wore the same label in that sense: west side liberals. Throughout Sewell’s rise in academia, from sociology chairman to chairman of the humanities and social sciences committee to chairman of the university committee, which served as the voice of the faculty at large, his natural tendency was to confront people and issues head-on when necessary, but until then to do all he could to find reasonable ways to avoid confrontation. The most heated moments of his tenure as chairman of the university committee came near the end, at special faculty meetings in late February and early March 1967. The university was dealing with the aftermath of the unsettling protests against Dow Chemical Company at which city policemen had arrested a band of nineteen obstructing students and Chancellor Fleming had posted the bail that sprung them from jail. There was intense pressure from the public and state officials to crack down on disruptive students. Governor Knowles, a moderate Republican generally friendly to the university, had turned into a rhetorical hard-liner on the issue of protests. The napalm demonstrators, Knowles said, went “far beyond the area of reasonable conduct.” He demanded that administrators expel misbehaving students “if this should ever occur again in Wisconsin.” Mail to his office was running twenty to one in favor of his tough stance. Newspapers from Saint Louis to Sheboygan took up the call. The
Sheboygan Press
editorialized against “long-haired protesters who are so convinced that their ways are the only ways.”

At the first special faculty meeting after the protests, on February 23, Chancellor Fleming said that he would not refrain from calling in the police the next time under similar circumstances, although with specific precautions. “Given the traditions of this campus,” he said, “it is fair to assume that the faculty wants to preserve dissent, but without anarchy, and that it wants order, but without repression.” The faculty overwhelmingly approved Faculty Document 122, which reaffirmed Chapter 11.02 of university regulations, prohibiting student protesters from disrupting university functions or the operations of corporations (such as Dow Chemical) that had been invited to use university facilities. In setting out guidelines for student demonstrators to follow, Fleming also thought it was important to give them advance warning. “Insofar as potential violations of Chapter 11 are known in advance, protest groups will be advised of the rules which will apply and will be cautioned that they must take any disagreements which they may have with the rules through orderly channels.”

The faculty then took up the related issue of the university’s relationship to private corporations. Maurice Zeitlin, an assistant professor in Sewell’s sociology department, introduced a proposal to prohibit firms that make war materials from interviewing and recruiting on campus, a measure aimed directly at Dow. Many professors who opposed the war, west side liberals, said that they nonetheless opposed Zeitlin’s proposal because they considered the issue a matter of free speech. The vote was 62 to 249 to allow Dow to continue to recruit on campus.

One of those sixty-two faculty members voting to move Dow’s recruitment interviews off campus was Bill Sewell. He considered it a practical matter, something not worth turning into a question of principle. He had noticed from advertisements in the
New York Times
that Dow set up student interviews at off-campus hotels when it was in New York City and other large eastern cities. “I didn’t see why they couldn’t have the interviews off campus since they had done that elsewhere,” he explained later. “But all the engineers, all the people in business, in agriculture, all with placement problems, they were all in favor of being accommodating. They thought moving it off campus was being unfriendly. We wanted the corporations to take our people and to make it as easy for our students and them as possible.”

Once the faculty voted not to change the corporate interview policy, Sewell accepted the decision as the reasoned will of the majority. He believed deeply in the sanctity of faculty decisions. Later that year, when Fred Harvey Harrington asked him to become chancellor, the specific question of whether Dow should recruit on campus did not come up, nor did Sewell dwell on it. He did not become chancellor to be the dean of students.

Book Three

Into sunlight they marched,
into dog day, into no saints day,
and were cut down.
They marched without knowing
how the air would be sucked from their lungs,
how their lungs would collapse,
how the world would twist itself, would
bend into the cruel angles.

Into the black understanding they marched
until the angels came
calling their names,
until they rose, one by one from the blood.
The light blasted down on them.
The bullets sliced through the razor grass
so there was not even time to speak.
The words would not let themselves be spoken.
Some of them died.
Some of them were not allowed to.

—Bruce Weigl, “Elegy”

Chapter 9

“What a Funny War!”

C
LARK
W
ELCH WAS
in a spirited mood as he sat in his small hideaway office at the Delta base camp in Lai Khe and wrote a letter home to Florida. His natural tendency was to share virtually every experience with his wife, Lacy, good or bad, trivial or exciting, but this was something special. It was the first day of the second week of training for his new rifle company, and he was exuberant about the budding esprit de corps. “This is going to be one hell of a fine combat rifle company,” he wrote. “I talked to the whole company yesterday and when I said—we had a new company and could make it what we wanted to, and what I
wanted
and would
have
would be the best damned company in the Big Red One—the company that would be the first in and the last out, the company that would be called on when any other company needed help, the first combat rifle company in the lst Infantry Division—all the men started yelling and cheering. It sounds kind of silly written down here, but if you could have seen them, you’d know why I’m here and what this is all about. These are good men, Lacy. Sometimes I don’t like to have to think about what must happen to some of them before the year is over, but to see these men now—this is America at its finest.”

Life is all in the perspective. Greg Landon, one of Welch’s new men, wanted to be a good soldier and for his platoon to function effectively, but he also expressed hope that his company commander would not be too “gung-ho.” The road to glory might lead instead to trouble, he feared. The question of whether Delta was going to be the best damn company in Vietnam seemed less relevant to him than the fortitude of the enemy. On the same day that Welch wrote Lacy about his spirited ambitions, Landon sounded a note of concern. “The possibility of the war ending before my time is up, although present, is not very large on the horizon,” he wrote to his parents. “The determined V.C. counter every new strategy with a new one of their own. His monumental patience leads me to believe that he actually likes living in his tunnel reading his newspapers and occasionally going out to tend his manioc or set up an ambush.”

At the
New York Times
bureau in Saigon on that very day, correspondent R. W. Apple was filing a dispatch that offered a perspective close to Private Landon’s. After interviewing dozens of military experts and “disinterested observers,” Apple presented a grim assessment of U.S. military prospects in Vietnam as of August 6, 1967. His conclusion was neatly summarized by the headline that would appear over the front-page article—“Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.” The number of American troops in Vietnam had increased from 50,000 to nearly a half million in two years, Apple wrote, yet there was a growing sense that “the war is not going well. Victory is not close at hand. It may be beyond reach. It is clearly unlikely in the next year or even the next two years, and American officers talk somberly about fighting here for decades.” The war was now draining the federal treasury of $2 billion a month, Apple noted, and there was a far larger human cost—74,818 American wounded and 12,269 dead.

Three reports to America on the same day: one bursting with pride, one cautious, one skeptical. Welch, the optimist of the three, was not naïve. He was often frustrated by the way the war was being run and strongly disapproved of constant attempts by army brass to make it sound as though things were going better than they were. His language was a mix of the blunt and the romantic. In one letter to Lacy, he longed for the sort of world that Hemingway might describe on his most optimistic day, one that was “clean, and clear, and real, and solid and good.” But he nonetheless had a subtle grasp of his Vietnam experience and was flexible enough to balance seeming contradictions. He was unflinching in his belief that he was fighting the good fight with the good guys. “There’s no doubt about whether or not we should be here,” he wrote home. “The VC are murderers and assassins and just plain thieves. The Vietnamese people want us here because for the first time in 20-30 years they are protected by someone who is not taking advantage of them.” Yet at the same time Welch worried about what war was doing to this beautiful, alien land and to its people. He could be angry and heroic, sardonic and reflective.

As for his own troops, he knew that if they were all still living their past lives as civilians in the States, he might not care too much for some of them. They were “hoods and kids just off the block.” But here in Vietnam they were his boys, and as he led them through an intense training schedule to ready them for combat, he declared that he would rather have one of his young draftees than a hundred “of those poor bastards carrying picket signs and burning their draft cards” on college campuses. There was nothing disengaged about commander Welch. It could not enter his mind that he was preparing his soldiers to fight to a stalemate.

F
ROM THE DAY
he started training Delta out in the rubber trees on the northeast rim of Lai Khe, Welch received a daily round of visitors. Some were welcome, none more than the friendly general who followed through on a promise of sheets and pillowcases for all the men of this new company. Others were barely tolerated. One day in mid-August, a colonel and his staff from First Division headquarters stopped by to watch explosives practice. The training was going fine, Welch thought, until “some assistant flunky came running over” and asked to have a word with him alone. This flunky was in fact a captain—Lieutenant Welch’s superior officer. Welch had little use for staff captains and majors. He assumed that some of them were jealous because he had his own company, and he feared that sooner or later one of them might actually snatch it away from him. Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen Jr., the new battalion commander, had reassured Welch that he was doing a first-rate job but also warned him that if all other positions normally held by captains were filled and a new captain joined the battalion, Allen might be compelled to give that captain Delta and find some other job for his talented but outranked lieutenant. So far five captains had entered the battalion and Welch still had his command, but it was uncertain that his luck would hold.

On this day the captain from division staff seemed to take pleasure in chewing out Welch for not following safety regulations in the way he conducted explosives training. Then the officer “sidled up” to the colonel and complained that he had “tried to convince Welch of the importance of the safety regulations but that he just didn’t pay attention.” The colonel asked Welch if he knew he was violating the minimum safety distances. “You’re damn right I know,” he responded, as he related the incident later that day in a letter to his wife. “I’m training these men for combat, not for practice maneuvers, and they have to get close to it to get any benefit from it.” To which the colonel replied, “You’re right, Welch—that’s the way we all ought to be thinking!” Another captain forestalled.

But again, life is all in the perspective. Greg Landon, writing home about that day’s training regimen, recalled dryly: “We set off a few explosions today. No sweat, except the C-4 that we had didn’t go off because the match was too wet.”

Late on the afternoon of August 19 a call came from brigade headquarters with word that there was a special guest waiting to be picked up and hosted for dinner at Delta’s mess hall. Miss South Carolina. When news spread through camp that the southern beauty queen was coming, the number of men claiming to be from South Carolina increased considerably. Authentic or not, a band of soldiers became South-Carolinians-for-a-day. First Sergeant Bud Barrow, who had been a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson, ran a quick tutorial, and four of the self-styled South Carolinians piled into a jeep to escort the visitor up to their place. It was apparent upon her arrival that the young woman had already accomplished one unlikely feat. “For the first time,” Welch wrote afterward, “everyone took a shower, and my whole company smelled of deodorant, after shave and soap! What a funny war!” Welch led the welcoming party, then showed Miss South Carolina around camp so that she could pose for pictures. She was brave and generous just to be there, yet the episode was almost unavoidably odd. Here she was standing in front of the bunkers. Here she was patting the company dog (which urinated on her outfit). Here she was serving food in the mess hall. After dinner Welch showed her the machine gun placements.
Oh, that’s nice.
And the mortars.
Oh, that’s nice.
And took her up to the perimeter and pointed into the distance across the north bridge and said the enemy was out there somewhere.
Oh, that’s nice.