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.
IN 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 eve
nt. 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.
Jonathan Stielstra, who had cut down the flag atop Bascom Hall, spent twenty-three days in the Dane County jail during the early winter of 1967, then continued a Zelig-like existence that took him to virtually every memorable event of the counterculture and New Left in the sixties. Stielstra was, consecutively, at Columbia and in Paris, briefly, during the student rebellions of spring 1968; in Hanoi with a delegation of SDS leaders in May; on the streets at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago that summer, and later at both Woodstock and Altamont, the alpha and omega of sex, drugs, hippies, and rock and roll. “Hitched out here with 3 Madison friends,” he wrote to his parents after Woodstock. “It had to be the most incredible event: combination rock concert, be-in, Boy Scout jamboree, massive traffic jam, downpour during a Big Ten football game…all on a very-unbelievable-for-all scale.” He had another run-in with the law in 1971 when he refused induction into the U.S. Army but received three years probation after promising to undertake alternative civilian service. In 1974 he returned to Madison and started a natural foods grocery.
What once had seemed certain to Stielstra by the late 1970s appeared more complicated. If he had to do it over again, he believed, he would not have cut down the flag. It was a spontaneous act, he said, so he did not entirely regret it, but neither did he feel that it had any beneficial effect. As for refusing induction, he now felt that every person should fulfill some obligation to the country, though not necessarily military. His attitude toward the University of Wisconsin also changed. More than a decade after the Dow demonstration, he re-enrolled in school to obtain a degree in accounting. Most of his courses were in the very building where it all started, Commerce. From there he became a family man and accountant, living on a cul-de-sac in a quiet middle-class neighborhood on Madison’s west side, not far from the former district attorney who had prosecuted him.
Paul Soglin emerged from the Dow protest determined to broaden both the antiwar movement and his own political ambition, working—as young people were implored to do in the sixties—within the system. At the invitation of church groups, he spoke at forums on the east and west side about the meaning of the Dow protest and the Vietnam war. By year’s end he was plotting his race for Madison alderman in the city’s student-dominated eighth ward. He won that election in April 1968 and within five years was mayor, a job he held from 1973 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1997, and which he sought again, a third go at it, in spring2003. (By then he was regarded as the “conservative” candidate—and he lost.) As years and decades went by, and as Madison prospered, making virtually every list of America’s most livable cities, Soglin came to be seen not as a threatening radical but as a cultural and political totem of a progressive town. When he grew tired of politics, he retired and went into the financial consulting business and moved with his second wife and their daughters into a modernist house on Madison’s west side. He also began teaching public policy at the university. His classroom was in the old Commerce Building (now called Ingraham Hall), on the first floor, around the corner from where his back and legs had been bashed by billy clubs that long-ago October day. That same building also now housed the offices of Wisconsin’s center for Southeast Asian studies.
Soglin’s first chief of staff in the mayor’s office was Jim Rowen, who had been in the Commerce Building during the Dow protest and watched Soglin curl into the fetal position as he was being beaten. They barely knew each other beyond that. The intervening five years had been mercurial for Rowen. As an investigative journalist, he had written an influential series on Wisconsin’s connections to the Pentagon through the Army Math Research Center on campus. In the darkest hour one morning in August 1970, a massive explosion shattered Sterling Hall, the building housing the army math center, killing a young physicist who had been working on experiments in another part of the building. Four young men were charged with the crime, and three—Karl and Dwight Armstrong and David Fine—were apprehended; the fourth, Leo Burt, never resurfaced. Rowen had nothing to do with the bombing. His writings were expository, not incendiary, but he was haunted by that event.
The destruction of the Army Math Research Center was a pivotal moment in the national antiwar movement, and its effect was most profound in Madison. The intense antiwar movement that turned white hot in October 1967 with the Dow demonstration kept going for years, into the early seventies, through the protests against the invasion of Cambodia, but there was a sense that things changed when Sterling Hall tumbled down and took an innocent life with it. By 1972 Rowen was involved in a different world, traveling the country with his wife, Susan, on behalf of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law, the antiwar candidate Senator George McGovern. It was within a year of McGovern’s loss that Rowen returned to Madison and began a long, successful career moving between the worlds of municipal government and journalism in Madison and Milwaukee, his sensibilities shaped by feelings of outsiderness that came over him when the police marched into the Commerce Building.
Jane Brotman and Betty Menacher, who as naïve freshmen watched the events of Dow unfold—Brotman from the plaza outside, Menacher from the hallway next to her classroom—were each permanently touched by October 18, 1967. Three and a half decades later, the two women would attribute the course of their lives to changes that began that day. Menacher became a VISTA volunteer after graduating and eventually developed a career in educational policy in Milwaukee. Brotman grew more and more involved in the antiwar movement, started to develop a more internationalist perspective, and studied to become a psychologist. She left Madison in 1972, then moved back two decades later when her husband, a cardiologist, took a post at the University of Wisconsin. The job offer came on October 18, 1992. “There is something about that day for me,” Brotman would say.
Bill Kaplan, the junior from Wilmette who escaped into the Commerce bathroom when the police stormed the building, became temporarily radicalized by the events of that day, beginning a process of political maturation in which he first swung left into the SDS, and then gradually eased back toward the center-left, settling in the Washington area as a liberal Democrat. He looked back with self-reproach at some of his actions during the sixties and early seventies. What especially troubled him was the fraying of his relationship with his older brother. Jack T. Kaplan graduated from Wofford College in 1969, was commissioned through ROTC as a second lieutenant, then went through Special Forces School and headed to Vietnam in 1970. During that time, the brothers barely spoke. More than two decades later, in the 1990s, after their mother’s death, they began a reconciliation. “I wrote my brother a long letter saying, ‘I’m ashamed that while you were in Vietnam, I never wrote you, and I feel bad about it,’” Bill Kaplan told me, his eyes filling with tears, at the end of a long interview. “Jack then said to me that he didn’t feel bad about it because he remembered when I went to the airport with him when he left for Vietnam, and he never forgot that. I hadn’t realized that meant anything to him. I really spi
lled my guts and said, ‘I feel like an asshole, here you were, you could have been killed, and I’m not even writing you a letter because we were on different sides on the war.’ And that was wrong and I regret it enormously.”
On October 27, 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Kaplan wrote a guest column for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison saying that he supported the U.S. military action in Afghanistan, where Jack Kaplan was again on the firing line with the Special Forces. “AntiVietnam War leader backs this effort,” read the headline. Kaplan drove his brother to the airport again, just as he had thirty-one years earlier, but “this time,” he wrote, “he not only has my love, but also my political support.” On Vietnam, however, Kaplan’s views had not changed. “I’m still against that goddamned war.” He was also opposed to the invasion of Iraq.
William Sewell’s chancellorship was short and unsweet. He resigned within a year of the Dow demonstration and took a year’s leave to study at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, then returned to Wisconsin and continued his highly regarded career in sociology. The strains of the administrative job, with the constant pressure of dealing with radical students and a conservative legislature, did nothing to help his angina problems, yet he went on to live an extremely long and productive life. When I first interviewed him, he was ninety years old and still reporting to his office every day in the Social Science Building, monitoring the major project of his career, a longitudinal study of people who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1959, tracing their education levels, goals, and accomplishments. During the seventies and eighties he was interviewed for oral histories of the university. He had acute observations on the antiwar leaders he dealt with during his year as chancellor and seemed especially fascinated by Paul Soglin. Soglin, he said, was “one of the second- or third-rate people in the movement,” nowhere near as influential as Evan Stark or Robert Cohen, yet the one who rose politically. “He’s clever,” Sewell told an oral historian, “and he was by far the most consummate politician of all of them…. I don’t think Paul ever did anything in his life that he didn’t test the water pretty thoroughly first. But he’s managed, you know. I think he’s managed to do very well at it.”
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 64
