They Marched Into Sunlight (83 page)

It was ten days after the battle of Ong Thanh. The funeral was held in tiny Clay Center, Nebraska, eighty miles southwest of Lincoln. Clay Center, population 860, was known for its Old Trusty poultry incubators and its Spring Wing Ding celebrating the waterfowl migration of millions of snow, blue, and whitefront geese. This was Jack’s home turf, the people he had left behind to study as a dental technician in Milwaukee. It seemed that every person in Clay Center knew Jack’s mother, Helen. They all knew Jack’s grandparents, Florence and Samuel Moger. And they all knew Jack and knew that he had been killed in Vietnam and that he had a young wife and son living in Montana. News of his death spread quickly through town by word of mouth, then was recounted in turn-of-the-century formalized prose in the local weekly newspaper: “And thus there comes into the Clay county scene a third generation that has been touched by and felt the anxiety of war and its dread sorrow, and another young life is a sacrifice the families affected must shoulder. The sympathy of the public is often more verbal than sincere, but in their hour of tragedy and sorrow the Moger family in Clay Center has the sincerest sympathy of a large circle of Clay county people and friends of the family. Death, whose countenance may be friendly or not, in this instance did not come friendly and soothing, but as a terrible shock.”

On the flight from Helena, Eleanor Schroder thought about what Jackie Kennedy had endured.
You just do it,
she said to herself.
You walk through it like a maze. You can’t do anything about it. You just have to accept it and go.
Her family came out from Wisconsin, but she could barely remember talking to them. She wanted to see the body, but the men would not let her. Another closed casket; only Grandfather Moger and the mortician saw Jack’s remains. Eleanor couldn’t believe all the people dropping by with food and flowers. “Have a fast trip back to the states,” Jack’s mother had written in a letter he read in Fort Lewis in early July, the day he started keeping a journal. It was too fast, this trip back.

It rained the morning of his burial. Military rites were conducted by American Legion Post 87, whose veterans later renamed their baseball diamond Mills-Schroder Field in honor of Jack. Larry Schroder would grow up in Clay Center and play ball on that field as a teenager and would hear the checkout lady at the grocery remark on how much he looked like the dad he never knew. And eventually he would be given a box containing the .38 Smith & Wesson that Jack had pestered Eleanor to send him in letters he wrote from the jungles of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. The box had made its way to the Black Lions in Lai Khe a few days after Jack was killed; it came back stamped undeliverable. It would remain forever unopened, a reminder of the unfulfilled promise of a soldier’s short life. As the coffin descended into the wet Nebraska clay, Eleanor clutched tightly her baby son; her savior, she called him. And the world, as the poet said, would bend into the cruel angles.

Epilogue

W
HEN
C
ATHAY
P
ACIFIC
flight 765 from Hong Kong touched down at Ho Chi Minh City on the morning of January 27, 2002, here I was, finally, decades late, the fucking new guy. This was my first visit to a country that I only had imagined, for better and worse. With my wife at my side, I looked out the window from seat 45C as the airplane rolled toward the terminal. Everything seems exotic the first time: guard towers, machine guns, uniforms of deep olive green and dark red; motorbikes racing our jet on a parallel dirt road, three-packs of teenaged boys clinging to each seat; a hive of gray hangars, giant, culvert like cement half-moons that once provided cover for U.S. helicopters; patient queues of travelers at the checkpoints inside; more soldiers, stone-cold serious, born after the war was over; a clattering, expectant sea of people waiting outside, fingers gripping the chain-link fence, heads straining for the first glimpse of arriving relatives bringing appliances and cardboard boxes full of other material wonders from the world beyond. Then into the sunlight and a surprising jolt of exhilaration in the steamy Saigon heat.

Connections are what fascinate me, the connections of history and of individual lives, the accidents, incidents, and intentions that rip people apart and sew them back together. These interest me more than ideological formulations that pretend to be certain of the meaning of it all. I came to Vietnam looking for more connections. And I brought some connections with me.

I grew up in Madison, where half the events recorded in this book would take place. During the days in October 1967, when the Black Lions were fighting and dying in the jungle of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone and antiwar protesters were staging a sit-in at the Commerce Building, I was a naïve freshman at the University of Wisconsin. I observed the Dow demonstration from the edge of the crowd, and felt the sting of tear gas, and saw a few things that I mostly forgot. Three years later I received a low number in the draft lottery in 1970 and rode the bus to Milwaukee for an induction physical but was declared 4-F because of chronic asthma that I’d had since childhood. Campus demonstrations were still going on, and I began covering them in newspaper and radio reports. None of this was enough to warrant making myself a character in a book of history. I had no intention of including myself in any case, beyond the extent to which all authors of nonfiction or fiction are hidden characters in anything they write. But I was
of
Madison. I was steeped in its progressive tradition, honoring the right to dissent, and I carried that with me wherever I went, and in that sense I was making a connection as soon as I landed in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing the Wisconsin side of the story to the Vietnam side.

In the lobby of the Hotel Continental a few hours later, there stood Clark Welch, the great soldier of Delta Company, at age sixty-two his stomach filled out and his crewcut turned gray, but still with that characteristic forward lean and disarmingly sheepish smile. He was back in Vietnam for the first time in three decades, and he looked exactly like what he was: American veteran and tourist, wearing a short-sleeved striped shirt and fanny pack, his keen blue eyes occasionally darting around the room, always scouting the territory. And next to him was Consuelo Allen, oldest daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen Jr., the battalion commander who was killed thirty-five years earlier on that bloody autumn day. People had always commented that Consuelo was the spitting image of her father, and the resemblance was now stronger than ever.

For more than thirty years after the battle, Clark Welch burned with hostile feelings about Commander Allen and the flawed leadership decisions that sent the 2/28 Black Lions into the jungle that morning. He had thought about the battle every day since, and as he rose through the ranks to captain, major, and colonel, he committed himself to the promise that no one who trained under him would get caught in a similar situation. Welch knew that Allen had three daughters but was wary of meeting them. He was concerned for himself and them: afraid that they would not like him and that seeing them would only bring him pain. But in the final few years of the twentieth century, after he had retired, he was tracked down by his old comrade, Big Jim Shelton, who had been Terry Allen’s closest friend in Vietnam. Shelton told him about the Allen girls and how bright and curious they were, and it started Welch on the path of wondering.

“I’m going to ask you something: where are Terry Allen’s daughters and what do they think of me?” Welch asked me at the end of our first long interview, conducted in the lobby of a Denver hotel on a summer’s day in 2000.

I told him the daughters were in Texas—El Paso and Austin—and that they did not know enough about Welch to think much about him at all, except that he was a soldier with their father and that he had lived and their father had died.

“I dream about them,” Welch confided. “I want them to be wonderful people.”

Now here they were, together, Clark Welch and Consuelo Allen, connected for this mission in Vietnam. Consuelo came with questions. Where did her father die? What did it look like? What must it have felt like? How has it changed? Welch had fewer questions; he thought he knew the answers. He anticipated that the experience would be difficult, that his mind would ricochet endlessly from present to past to present to past.

Once, long ago, on an early summer evening in 1967 after he had flown over his little section of Vietnam in a helicopter, Lieutenant Welch wrote to his wife: “This place can be beautiful! The winding rivers, the little hamlets, the neat rice paddies, and little gardens are very tranquil looking. And the rivers are either bright blue or brown, the fields and forests are deep green, and the shallow water on the rice looks silver from up there. Riding in the chopper with the doors off—there’s a nice cool breeze, too. Maybe we could come back here some day when it’s as peaceful and beautiful on the ground as it looks from the sky.”

Nothing is that peaceful, ever, and certainly not the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but now the war was long over and Clark Welch was back. He was eager to see the beauty of the country again; and to reflect on what had happened in 1967 and how things might have gone differently, in the battle and the war; and to be there when and if I found soldiers who had fought that day for the other side, the VC First Regiment. And he and Consuelo would come with me to walk the battlefield in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone south of the Ong Thanh stream. Big Rock was ready: he had his old army pictograph map with the coordinates of the battle and a little global positioning system (GPS) location finder that dangled from his neck like a good luck pendant.

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2001
, my wife and I had returned to Madison for three months of research on the Wisconsin side of the book. On my first day back I walked into the offices of the
Capital Times,
my home away from home. My father, Elliott Maraniss, had been an editor of the
Cap Times,
and I had begun my journalism career there covering high school football games and writing movie reviews.

Ron McCrea, the city editor, saw me approaching and said, “Hey, Dave, isn’t that an amazing coincidence about your book?”

“What coincidence?” I asked. I had no idea what he was talking about.

One of McCrea’s best friends was Dave Wagner, a veteran journalist who had worked at the
Capital Times
in the early 1970s before moving on to editing jobs in Waukesha and Phoenix. Before that Wagner had been part of the antiwar movement at the University of Wisconsin and a founding journalist at the alternative newspaper
Connections.
More writer and intellectual than activist, he was not one of the people inside Commerce when the Dow confrontation began on October 18, 1967, but got there in time for the scrum on the Commerce plaza and the tear gas—and was assigned by editor Bob Gabriner to help put out the
Connections
special issue called “The Great Dow War.”

Wagner and his wife, Grace, who had witnessed the Dow protest, have two adult children. Their son Ben was born a year after Dow. He came back to the University of Wisconsin in the late 1980s to get a degree in philosophy, then returned to the Phoenix area in 1991. Ben found a job at the AT&T call center in Phoenix, where he sat next to a vibrant young woman named Theresa Arias. They had a constant patter going, and Ben thought Theresa was “a terrible smart-ass,” contradicting him all the time. In other words, he was taken by her. They started dating and never stopped and were married on October 19, 1996. Two days before the wedding, as he did every year on October 17, Theresa’s father, Michael Arias, visited a cemetery in Phoenix to pay respects and place a can of beer at the gravestone of his old Vietnam buddy, Ralph Carrasco. This was the same Michael Arias who had served as a radiotelephone operator in Alpha Company of the 2/28 Black Lions and who had taken the compass and helped lead Jim George and his wounded band out of the jungle. Ralph Carrasco was one of the dead soldiers they had to leave behind.

After visiting the grave, Arias went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Scottsdale with Ben’s father, Dave Wagner. The two men were meeting for the first time. Ben Wagner had told his father about the military decorations on a wall at the Arias home—an M-16 and various pictures and awards. Theresa Arias knew a bit about the Wagner family history—white, liberal, antiwar agnostics from the north. They were worried how the meeting would go. It went fine; the war did not come up.

In the crowd at the wedding were some of Michael Arias’s military buddies, including Randy Brown and Ernie Buentiempo, and Wagner’s old newspaper friend Ron McCrea, who was Ben Wagner’s godfather.

Years later, at a family gathering, Arias and Wagner got to talking about Vietnam and found that they agreed more than they disagreed. Theresa mentioned that a writer for the
Washington Post
had recently interviewed her father about an awful ambush his battalion had marched into on October 17, 1967. Wagner said that he knew one reporter at the
Post,
David Maraniss. That’s him, Michael Arias said.

Wagner passed the word back to McCrea, who told me when I reached Madison. The odds were infinitesimal—but there it was, a marriage connecting the worlds of war and peace in 1967, the Black Lions soldiers of Vietnam and the student demonstrators of Wisconsin. There were no great lessons to be drawn from this improbable marriage except a reminder of how people and groups are ripped apart and sewn back together. This has less to do with the overwrought notion of healing than with the unpredictability of life and the relentless power of the human spirit. Theresa and Ben Wagner were expecting twins late in the summer of 2003. In my mind’s eye I’ve added the picture of their young family to the last page of my mental catalog of Vietnam images, which begins with that napalmed little girl screaming as she runs naked down the street.

Many of the protesters who had been arrested in the Dow demonstration were, as one might expect, gone from Madison when I came back thirty-four years after the event. Evan Stark, the movement orator, left Madison days after the protest, officially withdrew from school in November, and never returned. He ended up later teaching at Rutgers-Newark in New Jersey, doing important work on spousal abuse. In terms of university discipline, seven other students were expelled or withdrew before they could be kicked out, and six who had been identified as protest leaders were placed on probation. In the courts Mike Oberdorfer, Robert Cohen, and four other students were found guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced to short jail terms, most for thirty days. Cohen, the best known of the defendants, struck a side deal with the judge: he could plead guilty and avoid jail if he promised to leave Madison and never come back. District Attorney Jim Boll heard about the informal plea bargain on the radio and was shocked. When he confronted the judge, William Sachtjen, he was told that it was true. “I was sitting in my office and Bob Cohen walked by,” the judge told Boll. “And I told him to come on in and we had a little discussion and I made this deal with him and I didn’t think you would care.” Cohen drifted east.