They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  He was not arrested, nor was Oberdorfer or anyone else from Madison. Kent Smith, carrying a small Instamatic camera, took pictures of the soldiers and Pentagon officials atop the building. On the way back to the departure area Alison Steiner “bopped into the Marriott” to wash her face and saw a group of black protesters having a hard time getting into the establishment, a scene that would stick in her memory. There were hundreds of buses in the parking lot, and trying to find the right one in the darkness was “sort of a scary feeling; you didn’t know where you were,” Kent Smith thought. Sojourners from the Madison group who found the buses early built a campfire and sang protest songs and passed around different buttons and posters they had collected during the day. The coaches were quiet on the way home. Steiner quickly fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a satisfying dream of fireworks, kaleidoscopic explosions not of warfare but of wonder and joy, like the ones she saw in her Madison childhood on the Fourth of July at the Vilas Park Zoo.

  IT WAS WELL INTO Sunday the twenty-second in Vietnam by then. After lunch with his top aides and a conference with South Vietnamese generals in Saigon, General Westmoreland left for Long Binh to visit the evacuation hospitals. His wife, Kitsy, had been a frequent visitor to the Twenty-fourth and Ninety-third in 1967, but this was his first appearance. Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, Chuck Connors, Henry Fonda, James Garner, Ephrem Zimbalist Jr., Lana Turner, Ann Landers, Billy Graham, the cast of Peyton Place, the actresses In a Balin and Ann B. Davis, the singers Tina Latin, Joy Eilers, Mary Grover, Susie Chandler, the Rolling Souls, and Dr. James Cain, personal physician to President Johnson—all had visited the hospitals that year before Westmoreland. He came to see the wounded Black Lions.

  At four that afternoon his chopper landed on the helipad. It was supposed to be a surprise visit, but the staff knew he was coming. The greeting party included Colonel Jackson Walker, commander of the Ninety-third; P. Evangeline Jamison, the chief nurse, who in her pocket still carried the large pair of scissors she had used to cut open the uniforms of the wounded soldiers; chaplain Bill Wells, who wore a baseball cap with a cross on the brim; and several surgeons. On the way down the covered walkway toward the hospital wards, Westmoreland ducked his head into the first room and asked, “What’s in here?” The clerks and orderlies inside were surprised to see the MACV commander and a cordon of staff officers staring at them. Gerard Cygan, a nurse anesthetist, remembered one detail above all others—the fine silk blue lining inside Westmoreland’s green baseball cap. Elizabeth Finn, who had joined the U.S. Army Nurses Corps after serving in the religious community at the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Louisville for eighteen years, was struck once again by how “when the generals came around their uniforms were all starched and ironed and had a pleat—they didn’t look like they had been in the same country.”

  The protocol for the visit called for doctors from each wing to stand outside the quonset huts of their wards and greet Westmoreland as he arrived. Chaplain Wells stayed near the general’s side, following him down one wing and back the other side. “In one ward we got up to the nurses’ station in the center, and before anyone could steer the general to the left, he went to the wing on the right, which was the urology wing,” Wells recalled. They approached the first bed, where “a skinny young private was resting on his back.”

  “What happened to you, son?” Westmoreland asked.

  The soldier, mortified, stammered out his answer. “I…I…was circumcised, sir.” Circumcisions were occasionally necessary for men with venereal diseases.

  “Well, you don’t get a Purple Heart for that!” Westmoreland said gruffly and turned on his heel and marched away.

  He was there only to give out Purple Hearts. “Medical wards! I don’t want to see medical wards,” Westmoreland announced. “I don’t want to see those fakers.”

  The remark stunned Phil Eastman, an army doctor drafted out of his second year of residency at Montefiore Hospital in New York. Eastman now worked in the Ninety-third’s medical ward and his patients were anything but fakers, he thought. He made a mental note of the soldiers he had treated that day. There was the case of Japanese B encephalitis, a severe infection with high fever that could cause permanent brain damage, leaving a patient with an IQ of eighty. There was the army truck driver with meliodosis, a severe pneumonia contracted when the soldier had been part of a convoy that rolled across a dry river bed after a bridge had been blown up, raising a dust storm that caused his infection. And there was the patient with cerebral malaria, a virulent form of falciparum malaria, which unlike the more common vivax malaria was prevalent in North Vietnam and resistant to the pills passed out by the U.S. military. This cerebral malaria, Eastman thought, could have been passed along by mosquitoes in areas with close combat between American and North Vietnamese soldiers. These were serious conditions that were in no way the soldiers’ fault, Eastman thought. Westmoreland’s offhand comment upset him greatly. It also infuriated the medical ward nurses. “He said they were goldbricking,” said Elizabeth Finn. “Some of these men were sick as dogs.”

  In the recovery ward at last, Westmoreland moved down the row of men, pinning Purple Hearts.

  “I just want to congratulate you,” he said to Bud Barrow, the Delta first sergeant.

  “Well, I’m not sure whether you ought a congratulate me or the enemy,” Barrow responded. “They’re the ones who won that one.” His mind raced back to the seventeenth, the denseness of the jungle floor, the Viet Cong shooting from the trees, the terror of being out there, the grief of losing so many of his boys.

  Westmoreland pinned a Purple Heart on Barrow’s pajamas and said, “Tell me, sergeant. What happened out there?”

  “Well sir, we walked into one of the damnedest ambushes you ever seen,” Barrow said.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Westmoreland replied briskly. “That was no ambush.”

  “Call it what you want to,” Barrow said. The combination of his wounds, the medication, and all he had been through allowed him to speak more bluntly to a general than he would have normally. “I don’t know what happened to the rest of the people, but, by God, I was ambushed.”

  Next came Clark Welch, the Delta commander. Shoes clicked, papers ruffled. Westmoreland pinned a medal and said a few words. They propped up Welch with pillows and snapped pictures of the brave lieutenant and the crisp general. Westmoreland moved on, but his staff aide, a marine major, lingered and asked Welch a question about the battle.

  Welch was barely conscious, his thoughts uncensored. He had survived, but the idealism that buoyed him during the early days of forming Delta Company died that day in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone.

  Things were totally fucked up, he told the major, as he lay wounded in the hospital bed, his arms and chest wrapped in bandages.

  You could try to do everything right, but things were as fucked up as they could be.

  Everything was fucked up, from the battalion commander up through the President of the United States. As fucked up as anything he had ever seen. Colonel Allen, even if he was the son of a famous general, was fucked up. The operations officer was fucked up. The entire operation was fucked up. They shouldn’t have gone out there like that. They should have had more air support beforehand. They shouldn’t have check-fired the artillery. They should have let him fire his mortars.

  Just a fuckup from beginning to end, a fuckup that killed Terry Allen and left Danny Sikorski and Jack Schroder and a lot of other young men dead.

  A fuckup is what Clark Welch said to the major. He had never felt quite that way before, but it came spilling out of him on that Sunday in Long Binh, feelings that would linger for decades.

  On the way out of the hospital Westmoreland passed through the admitting lobby. Peter Miller, another Delta rifleman, the kid drafted out of the Procter & Gamble soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, was there. He had just been flown down from Lai Khe, where he had collapsed with a high temperature four days after the battle. He had taken five steps and just fall
en flat on his face. He thought it was an infection from an arm wound, but in fact it was malaria. He was so weak that he could barely stand when Westmoreland and his entourage strode by. Salutes were snapped. Miller did not know that Westmoreland might have regarded him as a faker.

  After Westmoreland left, Clark Welch wrote home to Lacy for the first time since the battle. Until then he had been too weak to write. He tried to keep his darkest thoughts from her. “My Lacy,” he began. “I’ve been getting your letters right along, and they’ve really kept me going.”

  As you can see, I don’t have my own writing material: in fact I don’t have my own anything—except your letters. I love you, Lacy. I’ve been on a pretty full schedule since I came to the hospital, but now I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what I have to have done and what I have to do myself. The two machine gun bullets in my left arm took out a lot of muscle—that’s what concerns the doctors. The shrapnel in my back and hands & face is no trouble at all. All they did was just get it out. There won’t even be any scars on my hands or face and just a few stitches in my back. I’ve been in the O.R. three times and now they say once more tomorrow morning, then I’ll go to another hospital for whatever’s required. Most of the men with wounds like mine have been sent to Japan.

  After saying that he still hoped he could meet Lacy in Hawaii for R and R in January, Welch turned to the battle. He had been reading about it for two days in Stars and Stripes, he said, but barely recognized what he was reading. “So many of our leaders were lost in the action…that the story that does get out has really been distorted.” So distorted that the stories did not mention Delta Company at all. “You wouldn’t believe the number of generals, to include Westmoreland, that have been here to see us. It was a hell of a battle, Lacy, the worst thing that I ever want to see.”

  In the hospital there was talk of medals earned during the battle. Welch had heard he was being put in for a Distinguished Service Cross. “I’ve thought a lot about medals and I’ve written to you about them,” he wrote.

  It was all over on the 17th. Each man knows what he did, that’s what counts. And I know what my company did. They did good. I wish it didn’t have to be my men here in the hospital and going home for good but we handled it better than anyone else could have—there were just too many. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what “battle” is, but there’s nothing like what my men went through. No man should have to go through what we were in. If it had to be done, though, my men did it better than anyone else could have. There were men that ran, and men that shot themselves but I just feel sorry for them. They were just normal men that reacted normally. All the others were exceptional, far above what we have any right to expect from a man. They’re just good men, Lacy, and now most of them are out…. All these men should have big signs on them so they could have anything they want the rest of their lives.

  Welch’s fellow company commander, Jim George, in a moment of brutal honesty, realized that during those first few days in the hospital his heart was so focused on God and his soldiers that he barely had room for his wife and sons. Welch told Lacy that he could not have made it through without her.

  I love you Lacy. It looks silly to just see it written out there. I remember the second time I was hit and couldn’t get up or talk or do anything anymore. For a second I just wanted to be home with my Lacy to take care of me. Just to be home, that’s what was inside me all the time. I love you, Lacy. Tell our boys their Dad did the best he could and that was all I could do—there were just too many of them and too much fire.

  IN HANOI THAT VERY AFTERNOON readers of the leading military and political newspapers were learning of both the death of Terry Allen and the Dow protest at the University of Wisconsin. As portrayed by the journals of the North, these events were two signs among many that things were turning their way that October.

  The bottom of the front page of the People’s Central Organ of the Vietnam Labor Party carried a major article about the demonstrations in America under the headline “Supporting Solidarity Day with the Vietnamese People. Tens of Thousands of American Youth Continue to Demonstrate against the Draft and Opposing the War of Aggression in Vietnam. Students of Many American Universities Refuse to Go to Class.” It began: “According to all the western news agencies, the closer one got to 21 October, the day the American people organized before the presidential palace [White House] and American Defense Department [Pentagon] a giant demonstration demanding America to terminate the war of aggression in Vietnam, the momentum of indignation of the American people against the American war became more seething and more fierce.”

  The article recounted the demonstrations against the draft at the Oakland induction center at the start of the week, where students were said to be “defying the savage terrorism of the gang holding power.” On the nineteenth of October, the report continued, “more than five thousand students at the University of Wisconsin [Uy-xcon-xin] boycotted in opposition to the board of regents expelling thirteen students after a demonstration on the eighteenth of October of about two thousand students of this school opposing the enemy representative of Dow Chemical Company [cong ty hoa chat Dao] coming to the school to recruit students to come in and work at this company, being a place specializing in producing napalm [na-pan] bombs for the American aggressive gang to use in Vietnam.”

  The article went on to say that in Washington “the national student committee issued a proclamation supporting the struggle of the University of Wisconsin students. Panic-stricken before the seething struggle of the American people in the previous days, the Johnson group hurriedly had two airplanes bring a unit of the 82nd Airborne division from their base at Fort Bragg in North Carolina state to Washington in order to defend the ministry of defense headquarters.”

  The official newspaper of the People’s Army of Vietnam, People’s Army, meanwhile, was publishing the first reports in Hanoi of the ambush that Triet’s First Regiment had staged on the seventeenth. The article located the battle at Thu Dau Mot, a provincial place name used by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to describe an area near the Long Nguyen Secret Zone:

  On the seventeenth of October, the liberation army stopped and fiercely attacked one American battalion of the First Infantry Division about sixty-six kilometers north of Saigon. Providing information about this battle, the UPI wrote that at least fifty-eight people were killed and sixty-one people were seriously wounded in the terrible battle which broke out at 9:50 in the morning of 17 October and continued until almost nightfall. Among those dead were one battalion commander…and an important staff officer. This battalion leader crook is the Lieutenant Colonel crook Terry Allen [to-ri an-len], the son of the American crook general crook Allen who formerly commanded the American First Infantry Division in Europe in the second great war. The important general staff officer crook was the crook Major Holleder [Ho-li-do], the staff officer of the brigade which follows this battalion. The sergeant crook Valdez [van-de-da], still living after the battle spoken of above, said this: “The enemy arranged themselves to await us like a cat preparing to pounce out and grab a mouse.”

  As these reports from Vietnam and America were being hailed throughout North Vietnam that Sunday, the Politburo was meeting in Hanoi. This was the midpoint of a critical five-day session, the culmination of ten months of strategic planning that had begun in the first days of 1967 when General Nguyen Chi Thanh had returned to Hanoi from the southern jungles and broached the idea of mounting a massive surprise attack on every province of South Vietnam during a holiday. Several military leaders, most notably Vo Nguyen Giap, the national hero, were skeptical of the idea, fearing that it was premature and would prove too costly in manpower. But month by month since then the design had taken shape. In April the Politburo and the Central Military Party Committee dispatched cadres to the battlefields of the South to analyze the military situation and prepare the forces for an offensive. In June the Politburo approved a resolution underlining its strategic resolve to “achieve decis
ive victory within a relatively short period of time”—meaning sometime in 1968. In July the General Staff briefed the Politburo on plans to use urban warfare to launch a general offensive uprising in the southern cities and towns. The effort only intensified in the months after the death of Nguyen Chi Thanh that July. They reorganized the military and political structure in Saigon and its surrounding provinces and improved the combat readiness of troops in the South, who had increased in number from 204,000 to 278,000 since the beginning of the year and from 126 combat battalions to 190.

  Now the Politburo was laying final plans. The military committee presented the potential problems first. Even if they successfully assaulted every city and town in the South, they would not have the strength to hold them. And their overall capacity to launch annihilating attacks was “still weak.” Still, it was believed that “the strategic opportunity had presented itself” and had to be seized. The United States was “still obstinate” but facing more isolation in the world and opposition at home. And Westmoreland and his generals seemed oddly distracted, obsessed with the idea that the North was planning another Dien Bien Phu–style siege somewhere. What the Vietnamese lacked in weaponry, they would make up for in surprise. The Politburo decided to launch the surprise offensive even sooner than originally planned. They would strike during Tet Mau Than, the national holiday, at the end of January 1968.

  WHEN SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, arrived in Washington, President Johnson received an early morning briefing on the demonstrations from Joe Califano, then ate breakfast in the White House residence with Lady Bird. At 9:23, after placing a call to Dale Malechek, the foreman of his ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, he went with the first lady and their daughter Lynda to the East Wing exit, where they slipped into the presidential limousine and were driven out past the security ring of soldiers and on toward National City Christian Church. His city was swarming with people who hated him. Even as the president was making his way up the steps of the church, someone in the back of a city bus moving down the street shouted out “Stop the war!” But inside Lyndon Johnson found a sanctuary. The minister, Dr. George R. Davis, was on his side. “There are greater torches by far than the torch of peace,” Davis said, referring literally to a peace torch that had been carried to the rally from San Francisco. “The torch of human freedom, and of human dignity.”