They Marched Into Sunlight Read online

  When they could, the bored enlisted men slipped across the border into Canada. Gregory Landon of Vestal, New York, who wound up in the infantry after dropping out of Amherst College, rented a car for the trip and paid cash, not even having to use a credit card. He thought it odd to be provided a means of escape from Tacoma to the sheltering north but returned as scheduled. Mike Troyer, drafted out of Urbana, Ohio, while working the graveyard shift at the Navistar truck plant, made his way to Vancouver with another weekend squad. Some soldiers got drunk and climbed atop a memorial fountain before being run off politely by the Canadian police. Peter Miller, drafted out of the assembly line of a Procter & Gamble soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, found himself in jail in Seattle following a dustup at the bus station.

  After a few weeks of this military being and nothingness, the men of C Packet were told to get their wills in order, their teeth fixed, and their dog tags ready because they were being shipped to Vietnam as permanent overseas replacements in the First Infantry Division. Most of them knew what was coming, but some were taken by surprise, and the news provoked a round of concerned calls to the base from relatives, congressmen, and clergy.

  “Morale of the men is fairly good considering the situation we’re in, but there is an underlying gloom,” Greg Landon wrote home to his parents. There had been no attempt by the military to explain the war, he reported, and he felt “relatively ignorant” about jungle warfare even though there had been a Vietnam focus to his advanced infantry training at the notorious Tigerland compound at Fort Polk, Louisiana. What he thought he knew was discouraging. “Vietnam seems to be a real hell-hole,” he lamented, reciting a litany of horrors: Viet Cong (from Viet Nam Cong San, meaning Communist Vietnamese), poisonous snakes and plants, mysterious diseases, leeches, chiggers, ticks, tigers, contaminated water. With all that, he was shipping off to a war that from his “lowly Pfc’s viewpoint” could not be won short of a miracle because the Viet Cong could “easily blend into the populace while the large American” could not.

  The one certainty Landon confronted was morbid. “Sad to think that a certain percentage of people here are sure to die in Vietnam,” he wrote. In a P.S. he confided that he could sense even then who would die and who would survive and that he had to “extricate” himself from the doomed so that he would not die with them. Mike Troyer had similar thoughts. The favorite epigram of a gruff Tigerland drill sergeant stuck in his mind: It’s not your duty to die for your country. It’s your duty to make an enemy soldier die for his.

  Most of the enlisted men in C Packet entered the military as draftees or volunteers for the draft. Few had attended college. Even fewer were from professional, comfortably middle-class homes like Landon, whose father, an Amherst graduate, was a lawyer for IBM, or Troyer, who had studied psychology at Urbana College and whose dad was a labor leader at the truck plant. They were working-class kids drawn from a handful of states scattered around the country: Landon, Peter Miller, David Halliday, and Frank McMeel among a group from New York and Massachusetts; Faustin Sena and Santiago Griego part of a cluster from New Mexico; Troyer, Bill McGath, Doug Cron, Terry Warner, and Tom Colburn, five of the large contingent from Ohio and Michigan; Michael Taylor from Alaska; Doug Tallent from North Carolina; and Jack Schroder in a group from Nebraska and Wisconsin.

  Schroder was a quiet young man with reddish blond hair who had entered the army at nineteen after studying to be a dental technician at the Career Academy in Milwaukee. His aim was to own a lab and make false teeth. He had volunteered for the draft mostly out of a sense of duty and family tradition, partly from frustration. His girlfriend, Eleanor Heil, a nursing student, had become pregnant but at first did not feel ready for marriage. She feared that her father in the small northern Wisconsin town of Edgar would disown her if she tried to come home, so she chose to keep the pregnancy a secret until she could put the baby up for adoption. In early March, when her boy was born, Heil realized that she could not give him away. She felt instantly grown up and ready to marry Jack, who had gone off to the army a few months earlier and was finishing infantry training at Fort Bliss, Texas. Jack was elated by her change of heart. They got married on his first furlough and spent a few days together as a family before he reported to C Packet. When Eleanor learned that the packet was being shipped to Vietnam, she traveled to Fort Lewis to be with her new husband for his last few weeks stateside. They shared a mobile home in a trailer park near the fort with two other married couples. On her final day there, as she was saying good-bye, Jack blurted out that he would not come home a cripple.

  Four days later, on the day after the Fourth of July, Private Schroder started keeping a daily journal. “Was woke up this morning at 0515, had Reveille at 0600 and chow following,” the first entry began. “Had formation at 0800, the captain telling us that we had approximately 24 more hours till we leave Fort Lewis, Washington. He said to plan on leaving base at 0300 in the morning. There is a lot to do and a short time to do it in.”

  Schroder returned to his bunk and packed his large green duffel bag—four issues of khaki uniforms, still the stateside version, with heavier cotton than jungle fatigues, plus two pairs of boots, socks, and underwear. Then he walked to the post exchange with a pal to “get some personal items” he might need in Vietnam. After standing around while his buddy “called his 3 girl friends and took plenty of time to tell them good-bye,” Jack phoned his parents. No one was home. He tried Eleanor. “But it seemed she wasn’t home either, anyway no one answered, she and my son Lawrence Wayne probably went shopping in town.” Mail call brought a letter from his mother urging him to be careful and have a “fast trip back to the States” at the end of twelve months.

  That evening a posse of privates sat for haircuts, an outing described by Michael Taylor in a letter to his parents in Cordova, Alaska. “Everybody went haircut crazy…. Some guys got mohawks, some had rings going around their heads, others got polka dots. One guy had his look like wings…. Of course, we all have to have another haircut because the Old Man won’t go for it.” It was, if nothing else, another way for the young soldiers to express their conflicted feelings about the military before they departed for the unknown.

  “Men are anxious to leave now,” Schroder signed off his diary that night. “I don’t blame them much.” Officers included: at their own private going-away party, sixteen war-bound lieutenants emptied four cases of champagne.

  The soldiers were mustered at one the next morning and ordered to turn in their bedding and clean the barracks before being divided into three groups for the bus ride to the air field. “It was a very cloudy rainy & dreary day plus cold,” Schroder wrote. He talked to two stewardesses on the commercial flight to San Diego, but still it was “not a good trip,” lasting “4 hours and some odd minutes.” A charter bus brought them to the navy pier, where other replacement packets, some army aviators, and a vast contingent of marines waited to board the ship that would sail them all to Vietnam. It was the USNS General John Pope, an old bucket named for the Civil War general who was relieved of command by Lincoln after the second Battle of Bull Run.

  The USNS Pope had made its first Pacific run in December 1943 carrying troops from San Francisco to New Caledonia and was pulled out of mothballs by the Military Sealift Command for Vietnam service. It was a General Class transport ship: 623 feet long, with a maximum speed of twenty-one knots and room for 5,289 men. When sunlight hit at certain angles, massive dents became visible in the hull. “Is this what the Reluctant looked like?” asked C Packet lieutenant Tom Grady, a graduate of Lasalle University in Philadelphia, when he caught sight of the creaky vessel. Grady was reminded of the hapless supply ship that Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon were stuck on in the dark World War II comedy Mister Roberts.

  The C Packet troops waited three hours before they were allowed aboard. They marched up the plank to the huzzahs of a brass band, but once they reached deck, there was another delay before chow, because twenty-seven hundred marines ate first. The next morning
Schroder hustled to the breakfast line before the mob of marines. The ship was scheduled to leave port at one that afternoon, but the loading took several hours more, which seemed providential to the men. “All day there were young women & girls here at the dock trying to get the GIs to whistle and talk to them and they did,” Schroder noted. “Some even missed chow because of the girls. I don’t know what they are going to do when they get a leave in December for R.R. (Rest & Recuperation).”

  Not long after they shoved off, there was an abandon-ship drill and another meal. The food was not bad, Schroder wrote touchingly, as if he had been living in domestic bliss for years, but “not anywhere near the cooking at home I get from my wife Eleanor.” For Michael Taylor and Bill McGath, two C packet troops assigned KP duty, the comparison to home cooking was beyond imagining. One of their jobs was to help navy chefs prepare scrambled eggs for breakfast, which involved climbing up a metal ladder to crack 122 dozen eggs into a massive kettle. They staged contests to see who could crack the most eggs at once, with shell shards flying unappetizingly into the mix. McGath noticed from the crates that the eggs were not fresh but had been in cold storage for fourteen months. What struck Mike Troyer most about breakfast service was that meals awaited them on prestacked trays: eggs that were stuck to the bottom of one metal tray would be scraped onto the plate below.

  The enlisted men were also stacked, floor to ceiling, row after row, seven berths high. The first few nights at sea were all rocking and rolling. Troyer’s bunk felt like a stomach-turning amusement park ride. His feet would rise above his head, then his head would rise above his feet, up and down, all night long. “A lot of the men was sick during the night. The sea got plenty rough last night and has been almost all day,” Schroder’s July 8 entry began. “After chow almost everyone has been hanging over the sides vomiting.” Doug Cron, from an Ohio dairy farm, had never been on a boat before. He felt queasy as soon as the ship left port and stayed sick most of the way, spending more time on deck than in the mess hall. Santiago Griego discovered danger at the rail. His first time there he looked up barely in time to duck vomit streaming down at him from a deck above.

  Seasickness was what passed for excitement. The daily routine grew so tedious so quickly that Fort Lewis seemed hectic in retrospect. The soldiers went to movies, read paperbacks, prepared quarters for inspection, sunbathed when the weather turned hot, peeled their skin, began taking malaria pills, did more calisthenics, attended Vietnamese language classes, or skipped them, went to Bingo Night on Tuesday and Thursday, and jostled with the scruffy, tattooed marines. “Everywhere you go there are Marines, most of them are good men but there are a few that could stand to be thrown overboard,” wrote Mike Troyer. They also played poker in the latrines, organized boxing matches, wrote letters and notes in journals, talked endlessly about what they would do on R&R or when they got back home, and slept. Lieutenant Grady, who under normal circumstances prided himself on the ways he could avoid physical exertion (he was one of the winded officers during the long-distance runs at Fort Lewis), became so bored that he started looking forward to physical training twice a day.

  The only good part of the voyage, Grady told the troops, was that time aboard ship was subtracted from the one-year Vietnam tour. “Hey, look, it’s not that bad,” he often said, trying to raise spirits. “That’s three weeks you don’t have to spend there.” With his gregarious nature, and without rigid regard for rank, Grady, who volunteered for the draft and was commissioned at officer candidate school, often talked freely to the kids in the packet and made friends among them. He grew especially fond of Michael Farrell, a nineteen-year-old draftee from New Orleans, who had a “bubbly and optimistic nature.” Farrell was the sort of young buck who thought he was invincible. He confided to Grady that he wanted to be a machine gunner in Vietnam. “Why in God’s name would you want to do that?” the lieutenant asked.

  On the twelfth Jack Schroder wrote in his diary: “Well, today is my birthday, and what a place to be spending it out on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean miles from nowhere.” Private Landon, who also kept a diary of the voyage, described the atmosphere that day as “battle ship gray all the way.” He had been pulling guard duty on deck since they left port five days earlier and had “yet to see another ship.” On the thirteenth, as they crossed the International Date Line, he spotted a small whale three hundred yards away. What he saw most often were sweaty, bored men in T-shirts and caps, overheated privates looking for places to catch a breeze but lounging in all the wrong places. “Constantly shooing troops off equipment etc. Tedious job,” Landon wrote. “Other guards let the rule go to seed, making the job that much tougher. Hate having to be the son-of-a-bitch, but these privates stick together like glue.”

  Tom Colburn, another C Packet man with guard duty, was more lenient, allowing soldiers to sprawl on deck for five minutes or so before asking them to leave. Colburn, whose pals took to calling him Baby-san, was the youngest of the bunch, a high school dropout from Pontiac who had just turned eighteen and barely carried a hundred pounds on his five-nine frame. Faustin Sena, who guarded a freezer, was more substantial but also easygoing. He loved nothing more than to sit above the hatch chugging on liberated cans of Hershey’s chocolate milk.

  News from the outside world arrived in a shipboard newspaper known as the Pope Pourri, which had a twelve-man staff of editors, reporters, and illustrators and included wire reports from the Armed Forces Press Service and United Press International. It was a straightforward sheet, with little attempt to propagandize. Day after day came reports of deadly race riots in Newark, the arrest of segregationist terrorists in North Carolina, the difficult aftermath of the Six-Day War in the Middle East, fighting in the Congo, the debate over a national tax increase, and of course the news about Vietnam. On the Saturday morning of July 15, the men of C Packet read the latest unsettling figures: 282 Americans had been killed in battle during the previous week, the third-highest weekly total since the war began. The trend seemed to be more of the same. “More Troops to Vietnam—LBJ,” read the banner headline that day over a story noting that President Johnson, after two days of meetings with his generals at the White House, had decided to send more battalions into the war.

  Considering where the soldiers were coming from, and where they were going, it was inevitable that tensions would play out aboard ship. There were fights every day, mostly minor scrapes. But on the nineteenth Landon reported “a small riot on the deck, drawn along racial lines.” Not surprising, he thought, since fires of black rage were burning in so many inner cities that summer. “This tied in with the concurrent unrest in Newark, N.J. The problem grows with the length of the trip and as the climate grows hotter and thicker. Thank God for the air conditioning in the compartments.”

  That last sigh of relief was something that Captain Jim George could not utter. He was stuck in a small cabin with three other captains, a room without air conditioning that soared above one hundred degrees and was unbearably sticky even on windy days. George was fastidious about washing his underwear but was warned by the ship captain that they were using too much water and might have to start rationing. Some officers played poker at night, but George did not know how. He consistently lost at bingo, but at least won at Monopoly once. For George, who prepared for an officer’s career at Wofford College in his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, the long trip was another reminder of the occasional frustrations of the military bureaucracy.

  First the army cut short his command of a tank company in Germany to rush him to Vietnam, then they made him wait and do nothing at Fort Lewis for two months, and then they put him on this slow voyage across the Pacific. “I just feel as though I’ve wasted so much valuable time and also the taxpayers’ money just sitting around,” the earnest officer wrote home to his wife, Jackie. “I’m not doing much and ready to get on with the task at hand.” He was a bright officer, only twenty-five, with two young sons, John and Jay, and a wife whom he dearly missed. In one letter
home to Jackie at 155A Pine Grove Manor in Spartanburg, his mind drifted back to their first apartment and how they “worked together to prepare it for a happy marriage”; and to the day he rode a motorcycle up on the porch of their little house on Vernon Street and how Jackie “raised H——L” with him for buying it; and to the first night in their apartment in Germany and little John’s afternoon naps; and to all the good times they’d had in five married years “even though outside factors such as college, money, parents and the Army” had put some pressure on them “from time to time.”

  These wistful daydream remembrances were welcome interruptions to the sounds of war rumbling in his brain. In spare hours he read books about combat, first The Last Battle, a narrative describing the final Allied push toward Berlin in World War II, then Dateline: Vietnam, an account by Scripps-Howard war correspondent Jim G. Lucas of the fighting zone to which George was headed. During nightly bull sessions in the airless cabin, the captains talked about what to expect in Vietnam and how they would fare in battle. George wanted to command his own infantry company in Vietnam and was surprised to learn that some officers had no desire to lead troops into combat.