They Marched Into Sunlight (6 page)

Slicing vertically up the center of Lai Khe was Route 13, an unpaved highway made of rocky red laterite soil that ran from the outskirts of Saigon, some thirty-two miles to the south, to the Cambodian border, another forty miles north. Thunder Road, as the Americans called the highway, was a critical supply line that the First Division spent considerable firepower trying to control, with limited success. Like much of that section of Vietnam, it tended to belong to the South during the day and the Viet Cong at night. Big Red One engineers, protected by rifle companies, worked on the road relentlessly, clearing it of mines and using wooden planks to make passable stretches that had been ravaged by monsoon-season craters. Before a massive repair job in 1966, an engineering report said that it “looked as if the whole road would shortly sink into the swamp.”

Within the uneven perimeter of Lai Khe, a loop approximately three miles long and a mile wide, division, brigade, and battalion headquarters were situated to the west side of Route 13, or to the left of the road driving north, as were the village, the helicopter pads, the aviation units, known as the Robin Hoods of Sherwood Forest, and several rifle companies, including Alpha Company of the Black Lions. A perforated steel airstrip ran south-north on a parallel line less than a hundred yards to the east of the highway. It was also on that side, up on the far northeastern section of the perimeter, that Clark Welch set up base camp for his new Delta Company, a good two-mile hike from division headquarters and the village. Though it was not entirely within his power to decide where to locate his men, it certainly was appropriate for Welch to be apart from the crowd.

There was no one comparable in the Black Lions regiment, few in the entire First Division. Long and sinewy at six foot two and 160 pounds, his frame always tilting forward slightly, ready to move, with his rough-hewn face topped by crew-cut black hair, his deep authoritative voice and fierce blue-eyed gaze softened by a sheepish smile, Welch was a soldier’s soldier in the most elemental sense. He was an innate leader who earned his own rifle company by sheer ability in the field. It was not out of West Point that he became a lieutenant, nor officer training school. His only academic degree then was from Oyster River High in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1957. After excelling as a Green Beret sergeant, he was commissioned as an OBV2 lieutenant on December 15, 1965, with his father, a retired Corps of Engineers colonel, administering the oath. The acronym meant that he was an obligated volunteer who could serve as an officer for two years but was not guaranteed anything more. “In other words, ‘Don’t plan on keeping it,’” is how Welch half jokingly defined his lieutenancy.

The last thing Welch expected was to become a line commander in an infantry division. He had worn the green beret since it was authorized by President Kennedy in 1961, taking part in Special Forces operations in Lebanon, Laos, Venezuela, and Central America, and anticipated more of the same in Vietnam. He had studied Vietnamese at language school in Monterey, California, and had taken psychological operations training, all in preparation for what was known as Project Gamma, an ill-conceived project that envisioned small Special Forces teams consisting of two Americans and four Vietnamese living in villages near the demilitarized zone and collecting information on the enemy. By the time Welch arrived in the last days of April 1967, a few Gamma teams had been wiped out by the Viet Cong and the operation was scrapped. At the same time, the First Infantry Division desperately needed officers and was drawing them from anywhere possible. The realities of Vietnam and the demands of war changed Welch’s assignment. He was going to the 2/28 Black Lions in Lai Khe.

The change surprised and upset him. At the First Division’s rear headquarters in Di An, where he stopped on his way to Lai Khe, he pounded on an officer’s desk and argued that this had to be a mistake. He was special. He had been trained for special things. He was still wearing his Green Beret uniform. From behind, an authoritative voice declared, “Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ll be happy in my old division.” Welch turned around to see the tough little former commander of the Big Red One, Major General William E. DePuy.

“Oh, yes, sir. I’m sure I’ll be happy,” Welch answered.

“Get rid of that silly hat,” DePuy said, and that was the end of that.

From the moment he arrived at Lai Khe, Albert Clark Welch began making a special name for himself, even without his green beret. On his second day in camp, he was sent to an area several miles to the southwest where the Viet Cong functioned in an elaborate network of underground tunnels. A Black Lions unit had killed three enemy soldiers and three more were trapped in a tunnel, but the battalion interpreter had left earlier that week and Welch was the only American on the scene who knew some Vietnamese. “I talked 3 VC into surrendering,” he reported in a letter to his wife, Lacy Welch, a nurse then living in Fort Myers, Florida. (He wrote to her virtually every day—long, evocative accounts in the legible print lettering of an engineer.) “I told them they were surrounded and we had a flamethrower and they scrambled right out. They came out with their weapons and said all the others had escaped. We blew up the tunnel and the 3 VC were flown back to Brigade.” Welch was a modest man, there was a bit of the Jimmy Stewart awshucks quality to him as he detailed his accomplishments, but he was also a proud soldier who wanted to share his feelings with his wife. He thought he had made “quite a first impression” with his new battalion.

Two days later the Viet Cong launched a mortar attack on Lai Khe, and Welch’s instinctive reaction further enhanced his reputation. After all the training he had done, it was almost as if he had been through it before, he told Lacy. He was in the mess hall drinking coffee when the rockets hit outside, blowing open the doors to the building. It was the first enemy attack at Lai Khe in weeks. Instinctively realizing that it was incoming mortar fire, Welch jumped up and yelled, “Get in the bunker!” He pushed his fellow soldiers out toward the bunker, then ran to the command bunker and asked where the mortar alarm was. No one had pushed it yet. “I was leaning on the siren when the XO (executive officer) ran in,” Welch wrote to Lacy. “He said that was the first time he’d been beaten to his own bunker—and to be beaten by a ‘newly-arrived lieutenant’ who not only beat him but was there sounding the alarm—was not what he expected. I think I can do well here, Lacy.”

That assessment was shared by his superior officers. At a ceremony at the end of Welch’s first week, a brigade lieutenant colonel told the new troops that some “might be in combat before the sun set today and others would never see a shot fired during 12 months”—then cited the example of a new lieutenant who had already qualified for a Combat Infantry Badge. Welch was “looking around, like everyone else” to see who that might be, when the officer added, “I mean that lieutenant who got 3 VC to give themselves up earlier this week.”

Welch was made the leader of the Black Lions’ recon (reconnaissance) platoon, an elite unit that before he took over had served primarily as a protective guard for the battalion. He swiftly transformed it into a hot unit ready for action and led his men into their first firefight on May 16. A few hours after the battle, he struggled to describe what it felt like. “This morning I actually led my men in combat,” he wrote to Lacy. “I guess it should be one of the greatest things I’ve ever done—I’ve worked towards it for so long. I just can’t say what it’s like. This war is really affecting the whole world, but it’s only being fought right here along a very thin line separating combat soldiers from the Viet Cong. Much of this business is just plain awful—the people getting hurt and crying and even dying; but I saw men at their finest this morning. The infantry in close combat is just something else…. Although I’ve been sure that I could perform when I had to, now I know that I can lead, even under fire.”

After another firefight a few weeks later, Welch again tried to relate to Lacy what it was like. Again he feared that he would not find the words. “We just gathered and shot at anything that moved because we knew we were the only good guys around…. For a few minutes it was like the whole world was right there with us, all my life, everything I’ve ever done or thought about was right there. After it was over and we dared to talk or look around, we just couldn’t comprehend that we were all alive and that the VC had really been that close. They were close, Lacy, and there was a hell of a lot of them.”

During his first month in Lai Khe, Welch led his platoon on twelve missions and made contact with the Viet Cong eleven times. His unit of sixteen soldiers had killed “between 10 and 20 VC” without losing a man and had captured a pile of weapons, ten tons of reinforcing rods that the enemy used to make claymore mines, twenty tons of rice, salt, and oil, a stash of clothes, and a file cabinet of VC tax rolls and payroll vouchers, with the last entry May 1967. His men by then had a nickname for him—Big Rock. He was the talk of the camp, always in the middle of things. “That’s one old son of a bitch that’s got his shit together,” he overheard a soldier say of him one night, and he considered it the ultimate compliment.

“I keep thinking of what the news reporter wrote about me many years ago, when my trombone got bent and I couldn’t play my solo,” he reminisced in a letter to Lacy about his New Hampshire school days. “Something about, ‘Young Welch seems to be able to get in trouble very easily, but always gets out again just as easily.’” Soldiers from other companies now wanted to get into his platoon, believing that with him they would be safe yet never bored, an uncommon set of circumstances.

When Welch was out in the field, he had the habit of never being too far from his point squad. If there was action, he wanted to see it and be part of it. Men who walked with him considered him hyperalert, sensitive to any unexpected noise, yet an important part of his leadership style was to present himself as a cool operator. As he moved through camp, Big Rock carried in a holster under his shoulder a battle-scarred pistol with a bullet mark on the left side, and on a sleeve across his chest he sheathed a K-Bar fighting knife. For a rifle he seldom used the new M-16, preferring a Car-15 commando automatic, which was slightly shorter and easier to carry. But another of his weapons truly defined him—an old Thompson submachine gun that came his way with its own tale of America and Vietnam. One day when he was leading the recon platoon in an area southwest of Lai Khe near the Thi Tinh River, a sergeant emerged from the tree line and got shot in the shoulder. Welch ran to help and was cradling the sergeant in his arms when a Viet Cong soldier dressed in black shorts with no shirt came “running out of the woods screaming, just screaming,” and firing a Thompson submachine gun. The bullets sprayed wildly around Welch, who calmly picked up his gun, fired one shot, and “put a tiny little hole” in his attacker that “killed him real good.” A few days later his men presented him with a plaque that read:

S
HOOTOUT AT
T
HI
T
INH

L
T.
W
ELCH
1 VC 0.

They also gave him the Thompson, which they had retrieved. The name Dodd was carved on the side, clearly not a Vietnamese name. Welch heard that it had been brought over by American OSS agents in 1945 and given to Ho Chi Minh’s men to fight the Japanese. He often took the Thompson with him into the field after that; his sergeants said they could tell where he was by the distinctive
brrrrrrn
contrasted with the M-16’s much faster
zzzzzt.
There was also a special rack for the submachine gun on his jeep as he and his bodyguard rambled around Lai Khe.

Welch carried a small radio on which he picked up the
BBC News
when he could, and he preferred the folk music of the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary to rock or country. One cool commander, yet Clark Welch should not even have been in the army. He was a chronic asthmatic who had hidden the condition from doctors at his induction physical ten years earlier to prevent being classified 4-F. His parents, preferring that he go to college, thought asthma would surely keep him out of the service and were surprised when he passed. Later, when he went overseas, Lacy routinely sent him small glass inhalers in protective green plastic, which he carried in his pocket and occasionally used after ducking behind a tree to avoid being seen. The dust and vegetation of Vietnam made him wheeze but never disabled him.

During his command of the recon platoon, Welch found himself in situations where his rough comprehension of Vietnamese proved useful. His squad was occasionally assigned to patrol a section of Route 13 between Lai Khe and Ben Cat, ten miles to the south, where they encountered local men on bicycles or motorbikes who aroused suspicion. As he reported in his deadpan style to Lacy, the phrase he often used on such occasions was “Gentlemen, you must go quickly now or all us gentlemen will have to tie you up and put you in jail, please.” One day on road patrol he asked an old man in Vietnamese why he had stopped at the side of the highway closest to the brigade headquarters. The “papa-san” responded that his motorbike was broken. When Welch stepped on the pedal, the motor started right up. A search of the man’s belongings turned up “drawing instruments in a little silk bag in the bottom of his lunch pail.” They arrested him and discovered during questioning that he had been taking “angle measurements, distances etc.” around brigade headquarters—details the Viet Cong used for their mortar attacks.

More often Welch found himself swarmed by Vietnamese children, who were fascinated by everything about him, his crew cut, the hair on his arms, his height, his clothes, his language skills, and what seemed like a big heart inside this big American. One day he visited a Catholic school in Ben Cat with the battalion chaplain and said, after peering in a classroom, “All of the children look very smart. What are they studying?” At least that is what he meant to say, he explained in a letter to Lacy. “The class just broke up with everybody giggling and pointing. [The teacher] said very good and showed me a simple book that a little girl was writing in. I read a little bit out of it and everybody giggled again and the little girl grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go while I walked around and looked at what the rest of the class was doing. A group of boys were reading out of what looked just like a
Tarzan
comic book. I picked it up and read and then turned the page and sure enough—
Tar-san cac con truong,
Tarzan, leader of all the animals…”