They Marched Into Sunlight (57 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
Lieutenant Grady gathered the remnants of Alpha, a total of twenty-seven men who had not been killed or wounded. This is going to hit big, he said. “I want every man right now to write a letter home and you tell your wife, sister, brother, mom, dad, whoever, that you’re okay. I want to see a letter from every man.” They all followed Grady’s advice—all, that is, except Grady himself, who got too busy dealing with replacement troops and forgot to write to his wife, Mary Helen, who was staying with her parents in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Michael Arias wrote a one-page note to his mother on First Infantry Division stationery. “Dear Mom, I don’t know where to begin. But I must tell you that I’m O.K. thanks to God. Remember I told you about Operation Shenandoah II, well the 17th of Oct. we lost 2 companies against a Viet cong regiment…. Mom, it was the most terrible 2 hrs I have ever spent in my life. Men were dying right and left and there wasn’t anything anyone could do. Out of my platoon—4 made it back to our perimeter without a scratch—I was one of the 4—I don’t know how I did it but God was with me…. P.S. Mom—I lost a lot of good buddies. Love, Your Son, Michael.”

Doc Hinger had never told his parents back in Latrobe that he was in a rifle company. They thought he worked in a hospital in the safety of downtown Saigon. He wrote instead to his fiancée, Jane, and told her that he was okay and that she might see an account of the battle in
Newsweek.

Delta Company survivors received the same instructions. Ray Albin, of the Delta mortar platoon, wrote to his mother, Geraldine Albin, in Detroit. “Dear Mom, Hi, how are you doing? Got your letter yesterday and I was glad to hear from you. Hope to receive those flicks from you soon.” He eased into the story of the battle, talking about lost friends and “dead gooks,” and then closed: “I still can’t believe it happened. The company area is deserted now and no replacements are due for a week. As you might have guessed D company won’t be going to the field for a while. Well, mom, guess I’ll sign off for now. Write soon and take care. Love, Ray.”

In his letter home to Alaska, Mike Taylor let his parents know that he had made it out of the jungle somehow, then said everything about the battle in three sentences. “I’ll never forget the screams out there. The way my buddies were being killed. One minute they were there, the next they weren’t.”

Mike Troyer scribbled a quick note to his parents in Urbana, Ohio (“I am alive and unhurt. I survived that massacre”), then turned on his tape recorder and began preparing another three-inch reel-to-reel tape to send home. Troyer was not one to hold things back. During his three months in Vietnam, his messages home had become increasingly hard-edged. In one letter—the one with a long riff about officers that ended with the refrain “Fu-k the Army!”—he had said sarcastically that anyone stupid enough to volunteer for Vietnam should be shot “to save the gooks the trouble.” But now the workaday complaints of military life seemed trivial in comparison with what he had endured, the worst of war. His oral report on the battle was typically graphic, but more philosophical: “People had faces blown off, legs blown off. Charlie just running up and setting claymores and running back and blowing them. He really had things going for him that day. I don’t know that we killed that many of them because I didn’t see but one. Somebody else shot him. They were staying in trees. I was scared to death…. It was hell, you know. The worst I’ve ever been through. I hope I never get it like that again. Something was with me. I told you my helmet came off. Charlie knocked it off with a round. I ask myself why I made it out…. That was suicide out there. Charlie really put it on us. Couldn’t have got much worse.”

The wounded too were sending word home that night from the hospitals. Jim George, recovering at the Twenty-fourth, wrote to his wife in Spartanburg.

Dear Jackie,

I don’t know where to begin, but the kid finally got hit. I want you to let Mom and the Georges know. We got into a hell of a fight yesterday. I was the lead company. All of my platoon leaders were hit and I think two are dead. My F.O., Lt. Kay, was also hit. The Bn CO & Sgt. Maj were both killed.

I got hit in the face and had my left sinus hit with a piece of metal. I’ll enclose it for the boys. I got hit in the arms, legs & back with fragments also. They operated on me last night and I believe I’ll be fine. I must really look funny. My whole face is swelled and my left eye is swelled shut.

A little more about the battle, and then George closed: “So much for the details. I don’t want to talk about it any more for right now. Darling, please don’t worry about me, as I am in good shape. I walked all the way out of the jungle with part of my company.” They were taking good care of him in the hospital, George said. They told him he would hardly even have a scar.

Over at the Ninety-third, Frank McMeel couldn’t use his arms, so he dictated a letter to an army nurse. Nearby, Greg Landon wrote a long letter to his parents on American Red Cross stationery. “Dear Folks,” he began,

I’m O.K. I just got a bullet run across my back. They’ll sew me up in a couple days and soon I’ll be back up and around.

Yesterday’s battle was one of Vietnam’s worst. Two companies were very nearly destroyed by North Vietnamese regulars in a gigantic ambush in the jungle. Alpha and Delta companies left the N.D.P. south for about a mile with no sign of the enemy. Day before we were caught in a firefight with several wounded, but only one death—an attached captain. It was a well-executed ambush. Yesterday’s was a regular Little Big Horn.

A reference to Custer’s Last Stand was not in the minds of the army press officers who at that hour were churning out the MACV news for morning release. The battle was mentioned on the fifth page of release No. 291-67. The description would not have been recognizable to any soldier who had fought in it. It began:

OPERATION SHENANDOAH II

(Binh Long Province)
—Elements of the U.S. Army’s 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division killed 103 enemy yesterday…

At Westmoreland’s direction, his aides kept massaging the story, pressing the argument that the battle was a victory. The effort had mixed results. In the United States, on the next evening broadcast of
ABC News,
the young anchor Peter Jennings, an experienced Vietnam hand, analyzed the battle in great depth. He accepted some of the new military spin but placed it in his own skeptical perspective. Within hours of the battle, Jennings noted, correspondents in Saigon were being told that “this disaster was really a big victory.” This, Jennings said, was “not merely because the enemy lost more than one hundred men, but because the same VC unit was planning an assault on Saigon, less than forty miles away. Because of losses incurred in yesterday’s battle and the discovery last week of an enemy supply depot, also not far from Saigon, the assault presumably did not take place.” Jennings went on:

There is no reason to doubt that the VC were planning an assault on Saigon. Apparently, the American military learned of it from a communist defector and troops were sent into the area of yesterday’s battle in order to smash the plot. This they have now done, even though we must recognize a fearful price was paid—fifty-eight Americans killed.

Nevertheless, even if it is accepted that yesterday’s fight was a victory, the battle raises some very disturbing questions about the overall state of the war. First, this was not just a few guerrillas making a hit-and-run attack. This was a full regiment, two thousand five hundred men. This large unit was able to position itself to ambush the American battalion—two thousand five hundred men so well concealed that the Americans literally walked into a trap. A force of this size cannot move through the countryside or the jungle, no matter how thick it may be, without Vietnamese civilians knowing about it, and there’s the heart of the matter, because there is good reason to believe the very people who staged the ambush yesterday are back tending their fields in the same area today.

Not long ago, a high-ranking American officer told an ABC correspondent that the VC in that region were so weak, they could fight as a unit only one day a month; the rest of the time they had to work as farmers. Well, that may well be true, but it is not very encouraging to reflect on the fact that while they are farming, they are preparing for fighting. There seems to be little progress in winning their hearts and minds, as the saying goes. There are officials in Washington who insist enemy morale is very low; maybe it is, but the people who took the lives of fifty-eight young Americans yesterday, obviously, do not believe their cause is hopeless. And if they are so weak they can fight only one day a month, but on that one day they are strong enough to do so much terrible damage.

In fact Triet’s unit was not planning an assault on Saigon. That attack was months away. Triet was headed the other direction, toward an attack on Loc Ninh. And though it was not quite accurate that some of the Viet Cong who fought in the battle were back farming the local fields the next day, here Jennings was close to the truth. Farmers in that isolated area of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone who supported the South Vietnamese had fled by then to the protected hamlets of Chon Thanh or Ben Cat. The farmers who remained were Viet Cong or sympathetic to the Viet Cong. One was Nguyen Van Lam, commander of one of the Rear Service Group 83 security companies. Lam was not yet back working the fields because he and his men had gone into hiding to avoid the intense American bombing that followed the battle. But the land he farmed was indeed close to the battle site along the Ong Thanh stream. His house of bamboo, mud, and tin was even visible in a pictograph map that Clark Welch had carried in his pocket.

Chapter 21

Down with Dow

T
HE MORNING SKY
hung low and gray over Madison on the morning of the eighteenth. An unsettling wind slapped across Lake Mendota and ripped the first dying leaves from the canopy of American elms, foretelling winter’s approach. The darkening atmosphere felt like dusk even though it was only twenty after ten. At the base of Bascom Hill, on the vast lawn between Science Hall on the north and Music Hall on the south, a battalion of students who wanted to challenge the Dow Chemical Company’s presence on campus was now taking rough shape.

Paul Soglin had done his daily doughnut run in the Kroger’s parking lot on the walk over from North Bassett. Jonathan Stielstra had bicycled to campus from his Drake Street rental house on his old English three-speed, which he left on the sidewalk without a lock. Phil Stielstra was there too, though the twin brothers were intent on going their own ways. Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern had made it in from their apartment in Monona. Evan Stark and Robert Cohen were there, though they had delegated the task of organizing the two hundred or so troops on hand to a few younger students who were called “marshals” and wore red cloth armbands on their left sleeves and took turns shouting instructions into a battery-powered bullhorn. Most of the crew from the underground paper
Connections
was on hand, including Michael Oberdorfer, the photographer, who wore an army fatigue jacket and wool ski cap and carried a Nikon.

Stuart Brandes, a doctoral student in history, had descended from his fourth-floor carrel at the State Historical Society library across the street and joined the crowd as something between participant and curiosity seeker, a straddling position that was not uncommon. Like many people who opposed the Vietnam war, he considered it a tragic waste of human life and a misuse of American military power—the wrong place at the wrong time—but he was also unmoved by leftist rhetoric and interested only in peaceful protest. With a poor sound system and swirling wind, no one could hear much of anything, but Brandes, who recorded his observations that day, noted that one marshal cautioned participants “not to give their identification until they were arrested” and told them they should be prepared for “fisticuffs” at the site of the demonstration.
Fisticuffs,
Brandes noted, was “not a term people generally use, and that sticks in my mind.” He also heard someone welcome “our brothers from San Francisco.” It was not hard to pick out the interlopers from the West Coast. Brandes described them as “very unkempt, more outlandish even than our most wildly dressed hippie in Madison. One had a drum, another a bugle, and there were also a couple of marimbas.”

That would be the San Francisco Mime Troupe, following through on the promise director Ron Davis had made the night before at the end of the performance at the Union Theater. “See you at the demonstration,” he had told the audience, and here they were, all but Peter (Coyote) Cohon, who missed it, as he explained later, “having overslept after a bawdy night with an undergraduate Valkyrie who was not about to let me go until I had decimated every ideological misconception and physical tension she had accumulated since birth.” But Davis, Arthur Holden, Darryl Henriques, Kent Minault, and Charles Degelman had roused themselves in time and came with a collection of instruments they had brought along in the blue-paneled truck. Now they were not mimes but mummer agitators, an early configuration of what Davis would later call the Guerrilla Marching Band. Brandes had it about right, except for the marimbas; they were tambourines. Filling out the band on this morning were a few members of the local guerrilla theater group Uprising painted in whiteface and dressed as symbols of the university and the military-industrial complex, including an LBJ and an Uncle Sam on stilts. Vicki Gabriner, a veteran activist from Brooklyn, came as Miss “Sifting and Winnowing”—the singular phrase evoking the UW’s proud tradition of vigor and tolerance in the pursuit of knowledge and truth.