She came from “the patriotic generation,” Donalda Doan would say, but to her “there wasn’t any real reason to get into that mess” in Vietnam. She viewed the defense of the war as “kind of the knee-jerk response of big businessmen”—including her husband. One of her close friends in Midland, a clinical psychologist, had been antiwar from the start, and Ted Doan complained that the woman was putting ideas in Donalda’s head. Donalda said she could think for herself. And if the dinner table conversation got a bit heated, at least there was conversation. Her husband, from Donalda’s perspective, was usually “very much closed, like most of the Dow men.” They were not talkers, and particularly not about what they were doing at work. The tension of the war was starting to change that, for better or worse. Ted Doan found the new family dynamics frustrating. “My wife, in addition to being a very, very good, sound person, also got quite liberal,” he recalled. “One of the difficult things was that she was never sure herself that napalm thing was a good thing. I used to go home and have to talk this over—why were we doing what we were doing?—and I don’t think she believed me worth a damn. I think that was my hardest sell.” It was not exactly a family revolt, Doan said, but his views were no longer going unquestioned. He had to defend himself.
The reverberations of that family disagreement went on for years. The oldest Doan son dropped out of Pomona College in Southern California and was drafted into the army, but happened to be in the stockade when his unit was sent to Vietnam. “That bad boy was saved,” Donalda Doan later declared when describing the “wonderful story” that kept her son from going to Vietnam. The oldest daughter also headed west to California and turned away from the family history by marching with Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers during the grape boycotts. The youngest son became a conscientious objector. And so it went with one upper-middle-class midwestern family whose children were coming of age in the sixties and whose father happened to be president of Dow Chemical Company. Ted Doan was not alone. As he would later say, “There were a lot of guys in Midland who had a lot of trouble with their families.”
AS CURLY HENDERSHOT settled in at the Ivy Inn, a young son of Michigan sat among a group of 350 antiwar protesters who had gathered in Great Hall in the Memorial Union on that Monday night of October 16. There could never be enough meetings in the student movement, it seemed, and here was one more, a final tactical briefing and debate concerning the anti-Dow demonstrations that were to unfold over the following two days. The young Michigander was Jonathan Stielstra, identical twin of Phil Stielstra, the sons of William Stielstra, descendants of the Dutch-Calvinist Stielstras who settled in Holland, Michigan, in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a wave of religious immigrants fleeing the Netherlands. William Stielstra, who served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, was a highly respected college administrator who had been hired recently to serve as the dean of students at the Wisconsin State University system’s campus in Stevens Point, one hundred miles north of Madison. Clarence “Stiely” Stielstra, William’s brother and Jonathan and Phil’s uncle, worked as an executive at Dow Chemical Company. All in the family, again.
Jonathan Star Stielstra was a transfer student from Calvin College in Grand Rapids. He had arrived in Madison the previous spring term as a second-semester junior and philosophy major, and it would be hard to imagine a more dramatic cultural transition than the one he made that year, though in broad outline his journey resembled ones made by countless college students coming out of America’s suburbs and small towns and plunging headlong into the abundant new world of freedom. Calvin College was affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, which based its faith on the Scriptures as “God’s holy, inspired, infallible Word.” It housed the largest collection of scholarly works on John Calvin in North America. Its students attended mandatory chapel services. There was no dancing on campus. The student body was largely conservative. In his sophomore year Stielstra ran for class president and reached the office through a series of accidents, when the favorite dropped out and the subsequent winner was stripped of the title. He was regarded by some as an unconventional class leader, largely for bringing the New Christy Minstrels to campus to sing folk songs.
How did a young Calvinist get to Madison? For Stielstra part of the impetus was that he could attend Wisconsin as an in-state student since his parents had moved to Stevens Point (from Lafayette, Indiana, where William Stielstra had been an administrator at Purdue University), and part of it was a compulsion to escape, to find a place with a more freewheeling atmosphere. At Madison there was no infallible Word; everything was up for grabs; they sold beer to eighteen-year-olds; students smoked in classrooms; marijuana was available. Stielstra came into town a gangly, blond, six-foot-three Dutchman, and took spontaneously to the open life. His cultural and political interests bloomed. He grew out his hair, smoked dope, and began attending leftist student meetings. He bunked at a bohemian rooming house on North Frances near the corner of University Avenue, then found a house at 1215 Drake Street in the old neighborhood down by Henry Vilas Park that he rented with his brother Phil, who came at the end of the summer, and two other students, including Mark Knops, an antiwar activist and graduate student in history.
Only nine months after he got to Madison, the transformation of Jonathan Stielstra was complete: He and Knops were churning out antiwar leaflets in the dank basement on Drake Street on a mimeograph machine they called the Clandestine Bolshevik Press. He was a regular at SDS meetings and was on the periphery of the planning for the protests against the napalm-producing corporation where his uncle Stiely worked. The latest missive denounced the alliance between the university and the corporation: “Dow Chemical Corporation manufactures napalm that burns and maims the people of Vietnam. The university is furnishing the technicians who create the tools of destruction as well as the facilities for hiring these technicians. But war and violence have no place in an institution of learning. By permitting this recruitment to occur here the university in fact works for the war effort, in this case for the burning of children. The student can no more allow this university to facilitate this recruitment than he can excuse himself for seeking employment with Dow.”
The crowd in Great Hall was larger than that for the previous planning meeting three nights earlier at Social Sciences, and less contentious. There was less political posturing now among the various groups that had joined together to form the ad hoc anti-Dow committee. Evan Stark and Robert Cohen stood up front but did not try to dominate the session. Paul Soglin was there but did not speak. He and his lawyers, Percy Julian and Michael Reiter, had just filed papers in federal court—Soglin et al. v. Kauffman et al.—seeking to prevent university officials from usurping the free speech rights of the protesters. U.S. District Judge James J. Doyle had issued a temporary restraining order, Reiter announced, but this did not give the students “free reign to obstruct or be violent.” The court action, another law student explained, was “primarily for the newspapers” and probably would not be of much help. A group of law students would wear armbands to the demonstrations and provide legal advice as well as bring cameras to document the scene. Students were told that they did not have to give their names or show their fee cards unless they were placed under arrest. They were advised to come to the obstructive rally empty-handed, with nothing more than a fee card and draft card in their pockets, leaving their wallets, purses, and books at home. Women were told not to wear pierced earrings, rings, clips, chains, or contact lenses.
The same undercover agent from the Madison Police Department who had attended the previous meeting was there again, gathering information for another report to Chief Emery. He estimated the crowd at three hundred, and it seemed to him that “a majority of them seemed to be looking forward to the following two or three days of protesting in an especially militant fashion.” He paid particular attention to the final plans for Wednesday’s obstructive protest. The demonstrators would gather at 9:10 at
the bottom of Bascom Hill and be told there which of the three buildings where Dow interviews were taking place they would target for the sit-in. Then they would march to the chosen site en masse. (In his report to Emery, the agent offered a suggestion on how to counter this tactic: “It would probably be advantageous for us to divide and disperse them by only allowing a certain number into whatever building they pick, locking the door behind them and not letting any more in until those who go in come out. This would prevent them from getting their number concentrated in a small area, which would be to their advantage. It would also mean that they would have to subdivide several times in order to cover all the entrances to that building by which those legitimately wishing to interview with Dow might enter, and it would give our police more room to maneuver in.” An interesting idea, but apparently not one that the police leaders later considered.)
There would be monitors leading the way to the demonstrations, instructing participants on when to walk and when to sit, and Evan Stark would be in overall charge. No professors were joining the protests, one speaker noted, because “the rally was far too radical for them.” Maurice Zeitlin, the leftist sociologist, was mentioned specifically as a professor who opposed the obstruction tactic. As the meeting neared an end, Evan Stark rose to speak. He said there was no reason to be too defensive. “You can bet the university will not be brutal by bringing in the police,” he said. If things did get violent, there was “no reason at all that if you are hit by the police that you can’t hit back,” he added, but he did not expect that to happen. As another note taker at the meeting, an assistant dean, recorded it, Stark “felt very strongly that the University would not even drag people out of the building”—a prediction that he based on the experience of the antidraft sit-in at the administration building in 1966, when there were so many people taking part that the Madison police reacted cautiously. As Stark recalled it, when Chief Emery was asked during that earlier protest whether he intended to impose mass arrests, he responded by saying, “Are you crazy?” There would be no bloodshed, Stark said.
That is the impression that Jonathan Stielstra took away from the Great Hall meeting, as did many others in attendance that night. Over at the Ivy Inn, Curly Hendershot girded for what he figured might be a trying couple of days, though the worst the Dow men anticipated was that they might be trapped inside an interview room for a few hours. Hendershot had his own contingency plan. In his briefcase he was packing a ham sandwich so that no matter what happened on campus, he would not miss lunch.
Chapter 14
For Want of Rice
THE TOUGH LITTLE PIECE OF VIETNAM known as the Long Nguyen Secret Zone held no secrets from Nguyen Van Lam. This was his home territory. He knew the hamlets, the rice paddies, the buffalo trails through the tall grass and secret paths through the jungles. He was at home in the forest, and forest is how his name, Lam, translated into English. He was born in the nearby village of Long Nguyen in 1946, the year of the dog. His parents worked a small plot of rice and like many farmers in that area supported the liberation forces, first against the French, then against the Americans. Some families did this because they wanted to, some because they felt they had no choice. Lam was not coerced. He fought alongside the local guerrillas when he was in his middle teens and at nineteen joined the communist-led forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam, preferring it to the other side, the Army of South Vietnam, which had just drafted him.
Now, at age twenty-one, Lam was company commander of C1, a security unit that protected the perimeter of a base camp for Rear Service Group 83. He had no uniform to speak of, just the traditional lightweight pants and shirt, usually black, sometimes blue, and homemade rubber-tire sandals. He carried a Thompson submachine gun. Over the course of two years he had seen the big-nosed Americans only occasionally. There were two battles during that period, and every month or so a patrol might come near. He had become intimately familiar with the hardware of the U.S. military. He knew how to time the bombing runs of the massive B-52s, which circled round again with metronomic precision thirty or forty minutes apart. He had witnessed the destructive power of cluster bombs, napalm, and 105-millimeter howitzers. Trouble arrived in a swarm of helicopters. There was nothing fun about his youth, he once said, smiling and gesticulating, his high, cackling voice like that of an excited rooster. It was all work, all war.
A military doctor from Hanoi once told oral historian James Zumwalt that working in the southern jungles during the war of resistance against the Americans was “like being Robinson Crusoe on the island.” Everything had to be foraged and improvised; success depended on sweat and ingenuity. The quintessential example was of a soldier pedaling vigorously on a stationary bicycle in the tunnel complex of an underground hospital to power a generator that kept the lights flickering in the operating room. The Crusoe analogy aptly conveyed the need for adaptive skills, but in this case there were hundreds of thousands of Crusoes functioning inside South Vietnam, all supported by an intricate logistical network, of which Rear Service Group 83 was a small but integral part. The conditions demanded improvisation on the ground, but at least on paper it was all part of an elaborate bureaucratic plan.
Like other aspects of the war, the logistical command flowed from Hanoi, overseen by the General Directorate for Rear Services. As one of three main directorates in the National Ministry of Defense, Rear Services was responsible for moving men and materiel south and sustaining the war effort there. Its functional arm was the famed Group 559, which created and operated what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From the time Group 559 was formed at the dawn of the war in May 1959 (hence its name), it had grown into a massive logistical unit of nearly fifty thousand men who ran twenty-five military stations along the trail and were divided into six departments and twenty-three regiments: six engineering regiments, six antiaircraft artillery regiments, one surface-to-air missile regiment, three vehicle transportation regiments, two regiments for maintaining the POL line (petroleum, oil, and lubricants), two for assisting the Pathet Lao (for the trail’s path through Laos), one communications regiment, one for driver training, and one for rest and recuperation.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which started as a scraggy walking path wending south along the spine of the Truong Son range, had evolved over the years into a veritable interstate system of jungle-shrouded trails and roads (some, by the fall of 1967, allowing motorized transport) that snaked down through North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, with several arteries slicing west to east at entry points for B4, B3, and B2, the military fronts in the combat zones of South Vietnam. Each front in turn had its own rear service department. The rear service headquarters for B2 Front had offices for plans, political affairs, quartermaster, armaments, military medicine, finance, administration, and supply purchasing, in addition to a medical technician school, a pharmaceutical production unit, a drug storage site, the 320th hospital, three makeshift armories, and three units responsible for recruiting and managing people to grow and harvest rice and raise pigs and chickens. Finally, hidden deep in the jungles of B2 Front, there were five rear service groups that maintained their own base camps and were responsible for providing food, clothing, and supplies to the mobile regular army units in the area. Rear Service Group 83, with most of its operations in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, served a strategically vital function, located as it was in the vortex of the southern action, halfway between War Zone D and War Zone C on an east-west axis, and between the Cambodian border and Saigon running north-south.
Food, mail, and medical care, read the list in General Westmoreland’s wallet, reminding him of what made an army function well, and it was no different with the other side. The communist forces did not build forty ice cream plants, and they did not have resupply helicopters to ferry hot meals and pastries to troops in the field, but they placed the same emphasis on feeding soldiers.
The results were mixed, but the effort was enormous. There were a variety of means for getting food to Rear Service Group 83 base
camps and then on to the fighting units. Less than one percent of the rice and other food was produced by military agricultural teams or civilians working directly for the Viet Cong in combat hamlets. More rice could be obtained from local farmers. This involved coercion at times, but more often the motivation was neither political nor physical but financial. If a food broker was paying a farmer X amount for fifty kilograms of rice, and the broker then sold it to a processor for X plus two, who in turn sold it to a retailer for X plus three, an agent for the Viet Cong would cut out the middlemen and offer the farmer X plus two or three. “The reasoning process involved was, ‘I can make more money selling it to the agent. Why should I not sell it to him?’” said Robert DeStatte, a former U.S. Army interrogator who became expert on the methods of the enemy after conducting hundreds of prisoner of war interviews. There were also purchasing networks in several local villages that helped the rear service group acquire other foodstuffs. An agent would approach a woman and ask her to purchase ten cans of sweetened condensed milk for him the next time she went to market. He would give her enough money to buy fifteen cans. In doing that small service she also helped her family. The modest amount was less likely to come to the attention of local authorities, but if the agent had fifty people in the area willing to make the same deal, he could buy a substantial supply of food and other necessities, including antibiotics, bandages, and vitamin supplements.
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 31
