They Marched Into Sunlight (85 page)

Coming the other way, from Washington to Wisconsin, and making another unlikely connection between the worlds of soldiers and protesters, was John A. Cash, the army officer and military historian who had been sent to Lai Khe to interview survivors after the Black Lions ambush. Cash, a career army man, arrived in Madison during the summer of 1969 for graduate work in Latin American studies. Professor Thomas Skidmore oversaw his work, which was to prepare him to be a military attaché in Brazil. Cash took language labs in Portuguese and courses on Brazilian history and culture. On the first day of his first course, he arrived early and noticed that when other students came in, they pushed their desks to the other side of the room, isolating him. Someone told him they didn’t want to sit near a paid killer. “He was a bit shaken by this,” Skidmore told me later. “But by the end of the year he was quite comfortable talking to the students and almost wished he could switch over and be in the academic world.” His friends back at the Office of the Chief of Military History in Washington remember him calling back and saying, only half joking, “Man, this is rougher than Vietnam!” His first marriage was crumbling then, in part because his wife intensely opposed the Vietnam war, voicing the same arguments that Cash was hearing in Madison.

One legacy of Cash’s time at the University of Wisconsin was a daughter born to a woman with whom he had a relationship there. Martha White, bright and lithe, grew up in Madison with the sensibilities of an artist and a touch of the local counterculture. By the time I interviewed her, in the spring of 2002, John A. Cash had been dead for three years, buried in section 67, grave 3909 at Arlington Cemetery. Martha revered her father but wanted nothing to do with war or the military.

O
NE OF THE
blessings of the Internet is the way that it has linked soldiers who long ago shared the most unforgettable experience of their lives, none more than veterans of Vietnam. Most of the soldiers who survived the battle of October 17, 1967, returned to the United States and went their own ways. Because of the way the nation received them, with neglect if not hostility, many of them decided to bury their pasts, never talk about Vietnam, and not seek out their old buddies. This resolution changed noticeably in the early 1990s, as the Internet age began, and underwent a dramatic shift as the Internet exploded at the same time that Vietnam vets reached their mid fifties and early sixties, when they were once again feeling their own mortality. The result has been an endless stream of e-mail conversations, a profusion of websites created by and devoted to veterans of scores of military units, with guest books and photographs, and more frequent reunions with greater attendance. The Black Lions, like every group, rely on networkers to connect them together, and they are lucky to have two men devoted to that cause.

The first is Tom Hinger, the medic who marched into battle with Alpha Company and worked heroically to save lives that day but felt nonetheless that he had failed his fellow soldiers because so many men died. In the weeks after the battle, Hinger and his fiancée, Jane, exchanged calendar letters and crossed out the days until his return. He made it back; they married and moved to Florida, where she became a teacher and he worked for the utility company and became an expert guide for bass fishermen, and he tried to live a normal life, although sometimes, especially around October 17, the memories of Vietnam and the battle would overwhelm him, and he would sleep on the floor and guard the yard as though it were a dangerous perimeter. Then, more than twenty years after the battle, he started reconnecting with a few of his fellow Black Lions, brought together because a television production company was doing a story on famous athletes killed in battle, including Donald Holleder, the All-America football player from Army. Doc Hinger had cradled Holleder in his arms as he died.

Through a series of searches and coincidences, a group formed around Hinger and the Holleder story. It included Jim Shelton, who had risen through the ranks to become a brigadier general before he retired. Shelton, who, along with being Terry Allen’s best friend in Vietnam, had played college football against Holleder, had an irrepressible personality that made it easy for him to engage with enlisted men like Hinger and the guys, which he found preferable to sipping cocktails with other generals. Then there was Joe Costello, the Alpha grenadier who had marched into the jungle next to Hinger and who had bravely returned to the battlefront to help some stranded men. Costello had earned a Silver Star by his actions, along with something far more valuable—a rare and hard-earned peace of mind that allowed him to continue his life without feelings of regret or fear. He came back from Vietnam with an attitude that the rest of life was “all gravy.” He returned to school, studied criminal justice, and became a progressive-thinking warden in the New York prison system. Tom Grady, who had served as the executive officer of Alpha Company, also joined the group, as did Steve Goodman, the Black Lions provisioner, and Carl Woodard, the Alpha squad leader; all three shared Costello’s feeling that they were among the lucky ones. Grady had made it to colonel in the army reserve, while also doing well in the corporate world; Goody had entered the trucking business when he escaped the army; and Woody developed his talents in military security and intelligence.

These six men, four enlisted guys and two officers, formed the core of a larger gang that began meeting one football weekend every autumn at West Point for what Hinger dubbed the November Nightmare. Only Shelton had known Holleder, who was the original reason they got together, and none of them had attended West Point, but that barely mattered. After year-round reminders and e-mail updates from Hinger, a prodigious search engine all to himself, they descended on the United States Military Academy and environs for three days—paying homage to Holly, walking through the West Point graveyard, relaxing in a makeshift command post in a modest roadside motel, drinking and laughing and wolfing down hoagies and snoring and lying. Grady would tell the same joke every year and get louder laughs each time, and Goody would entertain the crowd with his uncanny ability to get better tickets for the Army game, and Doc would take his sarcastic jibes at the officers. And at some point, inevitably, they would rehash the events of October 17, 1967. Their “fearless leader,” Big Jim Shelton, was obsessed by the battle; he began writing his own account of it. He was driven in part by the unanswerable question of whether things might have unfolded differently had he been at Allen’s side that week, as his operations officer, instead of back in Lai Khe with the division brass. “It is etched into our souls,” Shelton said to me once. “Every night we refight the battle.”

As I began researching this book, these old soldiers took me in. Though I never served in the military and never experienced a battle, they allowed me to see the best of soldiering, a bond of love and respect that for all the hyperbole flying around was incomparably meaningful.

One recent year the November Nightmare had its first women guests. They were two of the Allen sisters, Consuelo and Bebe. They had known General Shelton for years, but this was the first time they would meet soldiers who were actually in the battle when their father was killed. In the motel room command post late on the first night, after hours of merriment, Joe Costello turned to Bebe and said, “I just wanted you to know something about your father. I might have been one of the last people to see your father alive.” As Costello talked, in his clear, soothing way, Bebe’s eyes filled with tears. She was confronting a subject that she had avoided for decades. Now here it was, the reality. “When I came by him during the battle he was calm and in complete control,” Costello said, and then he talked more about the battle and Terry Allen. Consuelo, sitting nearby and overhearing the conversation, said, “I have to keep myself together, I can’t have both of us crying.” But she felt the same pull on her deepest emotions, and all weekend she kept asking more questions about the battle and the death of her father.

The second Black Lions networker was Fred Kirkpatrick, the Delta Company point man who by chance had escaped the battle because the army let him go to Japan on R and R that week, his second vacation of his tour. After his year in Vietnam, Kirkpatrick returned to Stow, Ohio, haunted by the fact that he was not there on October 17. He did not know how to channel his feelings until a few decades later, when he received a letter from the mother of Jackie Bolen, who was looking for information about how her son had died. This set Kirkpatrick on a path that became his life’s mission, giving meaning to his sense of loss. With the advent of the Internet his effort became easier and more rewarding, as he tracked down survivors and families of the dead soldiers. He began organizing Black Lions reunions in Las Vegas, gatherings that centered on a memorial service on October 17, helping soldiers connect for the first time in decades.

It was at a Las Vegas reunion in October 2000 that Clark Welch saw his old first sergeant, Bud Barrow, for the first time since they had been in the hospital together in 1967. I was sitting with Welch at a table in the Black Lions hospitality suite when Barrow walked in, and I’ll never forget the look that washed over his face. “There he is! You sonofabitch!” That said it all, and he rose and engulfed Barrow in a tearful embrace.

By the time of the 2002 reunion, Kirkpatrick had found most of the surviving enlisted men from the original C Packet, and many of them came to Las Vegas. Greg Landon, called the Professor, was there with his wife. He had returned to Amherst after his Vietnam tour and was now a military contract specialist. Mike Troyer, Bill McGath, Mike Taylor, Doug Cron, Terry Warner, and Tom Colburn sat around a table, all together for the first time since 1967. Nearby were Ernie Buentiempo, Santiago Griego, and Faustin Sena. Each man was dealing with past and present in his own way. I felt a special affinity with Sena, a poetic Mexican-American who happened to be a huge Green Bay Packers fan, an unlikely cheesehead. One day when we were talking, I asked why he came to these reunions. I had met him a year earlier at another Black Lions reunion at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, which he and Griego reached by driving twenty-seven hours nonstop from New Mexico. “I have a headache every day of my life,” Sena explained. “Except when I am here, with these guys, my headache goes away.”

More than a year before the 2002 reunion, as I was working the telephone trying to track down survivors of the battle, I reached Tom Colburn at a number in Michigan. His voice was soft and shaking, and when I told him that I was trying to interview men who had fought with the Black Lions on October 17, 1967, his voice quavered more. He said he was still getting treatment for that day and was not ready to talk about it. Now, here he was, in Las Vegas, sitting at a table with his Ohio squadmates—Baby-san at age fifty-three.

It will be hard for me to think about war ever again without considering Tom Colburn. He was barely eighteen, in the jungle, all hell breaking loose, bullets raining down from the trees, a buddy wounded, within sight, in the sunlight only yards away, calling his name, pleading for help, and there was Colburn, behind a tree, shaking with fear that if he moved to help, he would get killed. Those few awful minutes cruelly defined his sense of self for all the years to come. When he came back to Michigan, he pushed everybody away, refused to go outside, and when he had to attend family events, he sat in a corner by himself. He was always looking for the closest exit, preferring doorways, where he could escape. Thunder made him jump. He had a hard time being near people. For a time he mowed lawns for the Pontiac parks department. More recently he worked for a moving company, but that ended sadly. The younger men on his crew discovered that loud noises spooked him. They were insensitive slugs with no knowledge of his history, and they thought it was fun to slam things around and watch him shudder. Finally, when they lit a pack of firecrackers, Colburn walked off the job and kept walking, right up the hill, ghostly white, sweating profusely, until he reached Shenanigans bar on Kennett Road.

By the time of the reunion Colburn was on 50-percent disability. “I still shake a lot,” he said. “Sometimes I’m holding a glass of water and it slips out of my hand.” His hand trembled as he spoke.

On the day before Thanksgiving 1967, an envelope arrived at the Sikorski family home in Milwaukee. It was stamped “Verified Deceased, Return to Sender.” It was the letter that Danny Sikorski’s sister, Diane, had written him on October 17 after waking from a dream in which she heard his voice and saw an image of him with a hole where his stomach should have been. In the years after Danny’s death, Diane heard about someone who got pregnant to try to keep her boyfriend out of the draft. Another person gained weight to keep out of the draft. She worked with a woman she admired greatly whose son fled to Canada to avoid the draft. His mother wanted him to come home; he was safe but not free. In 1972 Diane married Ron Kramer, a man she met at the manufacturing plant where they both worked. She was relieved that he was 4-F.

For thirty-four years, until the time I went to interview her in a Milwaukee suburb in the summer of 2001, Diane felt “hatred, denial, despair, depression” whenever she thought about Vietnam and her brother’s death. Then, in the aftermath of our conversations, she said she “was finally able to let go.” She ordered a bronze nameplate for Daniel Sikorski to be placed at Saint Adalbert’s Cemetery and a personalized brick with his name on it for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Veterans Park. In the summer of 2002 she felt ready, finally, to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington for the first time. She stopped at block 28 E of the sloping wall and left a memory box on the ground. Starting with Terry Allen in Row 25, fifteen rows in that single granite block are taken up by soldiers killed in the battle of Ong Thanh. Diane found her brother’s name in Row 31.

On January 22, 2002, on my way to Vietnam, I stopped in San Francisco and met with Jean Ponder Allen Soto. I had interviewed her at length already, and this was more a conversation. The Soto in her name came from her second husband, whom she had married within a year of Terry Allen’s death. They both had worked as VISTA volunteers in the
colonias
of El Paso. Soto was a stepfather to the three Allen sisters, who had a difficult time with him, and eventually he and Jean divorced. Now she was living in Richmond, California, and finishing her doctoral studies at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley on sexuality and the Catholic Church. She and her three daughters all had obtained undergraduate degrees from schools in Boston. Of all the characters in my book, Jean was in many ways the most complicated for me. She had invested trust in me by telling me her story, with all of its unflattering details. I wanted to present her actions accurately, all the while realizing that many people would dislike her because of what she had done. But of course she understood that better than I; she had dealt with it for three and a half decades.