They Marched Into Sunlight Read online

  The brutal reality of man killing man, he confided in a letter to Jackie, now dominated his conscious and subconscious thoughts. “I’ve had a lot of time to engage in deep thinking and it’s really sickening how the world is so full of conflict and what’s more how we’re so much a part of it. At times I feel so guilty and know I could do more to make it a better place. I’ll do what I can, and pray that God will lead me. I’ve already started to dream of killing and am already tired of the smell of death. Life is so short at times but too long at others. We’re all a ‘bunch of nuts’ I guess. I’m just out on a limb by myself today and have no one to talk to who has the patience to understand me or will let me try to understand them. I’ll endure what I must and remember that I must be a good 1) soldier, 2) gentleman, 3) lover and 4) Christian. The most important, of course, is #4 and the others as apropos.”

  Thoughts of killing also raced through the mind of Private Troyer. He wondered if he could take a human life. Peter Miller had the same question. Like the others, he had grown up playing army and watching John Wayne movies. Was that version different from the real thing? Bill McGath wondered too but felt a moral obligation. In his eleventh-grade speech class at Mifflin High in suburban Columbus, he had chosen the pro side in a war debate, and he believed still what he had said then—that the United States had to “protect its allies, fight communism, and let free policy reign.” Terry Warner, off a livestock farm in western Ohio, had “no feelings about the war one way or the other” but knew enough to be scared. Alaskan Mike Taylor was already sick of the military. “This Army is something else,” he had written home to his parents after his records had been mixed up with two other Michael Taylors. “They are always screwing up something.”

  Whether it was mass dyslexia, hope for some spiritual blessing for the year ahead, or most likely just soldierly sarcasm, some troops aboard soon reversed the name of their ship and started calling it not the John Pope but the Pope John. Not that they treated the vessel with more reverence after that. Somewhere along the Tropic of Cancer in the vast Pacific stretch past Midway Islands, one soldier felt so trapped that he jumped overboard, a suicidal escape attempt that was thwarted when the ship turned around and picked him up. He was the second would-be escapee from the USNS Pope that year. During the January voyage a soldier in the Ninth Infantry Division had gone overboard to his apparent death.

  They reached Okinawa at nine on the Saturday morning of July 22, the first land in two weeks. The troops were allowed off ship but ordered to return by 1800 hours. Mike Troyer and his pals marched up the hill to the enlisted men’s club, where they drank scotch for twenty-five cents a glass and played slot machines. Landon was forced to stay on board because an officer decided his hair was too long. In his diary he recorded the harbor scene: no gunboats; two cargo ships, one coming, one going (“war keeps them pretty busy”); bright white sand; turquoise water spotted with jellyfish; the wreckage of a four-motor airplane from World War II hulking on the beach; a storm approaching from the south.

  Vietnam was a few days distant and closing fast in Landon’s mind. “The daily reports of action in the war seem so common now,” he wrote on his lonely watch, reciting news from the Pope Pourri, “200 enemy dead in a sweep…15 American dead and 50 casualties etc. etc. It is as if we will never see the end. If N Viet Nam is bluffing, it backs up its bluff. Politics in S Viet Nam hardly help. Until there can be 2 sides to this war, and not 50,000 shades of commitment, this war cannot and will not be won. The populace is obviously confused and divided. These people must decide and decide soon or the U.S. will tire to the point of despair in tiptoeing through the morass of politics while ducking improvised weapons of Viet Cong and barrages of Russian-made artillery fire. Maybe.”

  The troops who scrambled off that morning stumbled back up the gangplank on their afternoon return. Lieutenant Grady said he never saw so many drunk kids in his life, almost every single one dead drunk. One smacked an officer and ended up in the brig. Another sauntered aboard toting a cheap guitar case, which when searched contained not an instrument but a fifth of whisky. A third pulled up in a taxi and stumbled out naked, claiming he had gone swimming and someone had stolen his clothes. Another wobbled halfway up the plank and keeled overboard. How’s the water? some buddies yelled down. Just fine, he answered, squirting an arch of spray from his mouth, and with that a few jumped overboard to join him. The officers were for the most part sympathetic: Just get these kids back in, Grady said. They know where they’re going. Let’s not make this any tougher than it is.

  Captain George had spent six hours in port. He wrote to Jackie that it was dirty and smelled “worse than Germany.” Even though he was impressed by the low prices of clothing in the PX, he passed them up, but he could not resist buying a Japanese steel string guitar for only ten fifty, which he would strum until his fingers went raw. He also went to a geisha house with the other captains and got a bath and a massage for a buck eighty, an enjoyment he described to his wife without hesitation: “It was real unusual. The woman started by walking up and down our backs.”

  Schroder wrote in his diary that he stayed away from the bars, choosing instead to go swimming. He got cut by coral, managed to avoid the jellyfish, but could not avoid his sloshed compatriots at the end of the day. “There were a lot of fellas they were so drunk they had to be carried back. 90% of them. There were several fights. A fight here in the compartment, two men on one. They beat him up while he was asleep in bed, he got messed up pretty bad he got kicked in the face. Nobody would break it up, so I broke it up, don’t like the odds 2 against one.”

  As the ship steamed down into the South China Sea, the weather turned from torrid to unbearable. One hundred degrees during the day and one hundred at night. The air conditioning system broke, which was when many soldiers first realized that the ship had air conditioning. Although sleeping on deck was prohibited, the rule was obliterated by necessity, and for a few nights a thousand or more men slept in the open air. “As many as could fit went up there,” Landon noted. “It looked like we were boat people.”

  The morning sunrise was soothing, the water a shade of dark blue the soldiers had never imagined and perfectly smooth. “I’ve never seen Indian Lake as calm as what this water is,” Mike Troyer reported to his parents, referring to a small Ohio lake of his boyhood. Flying fish were everywhere, and occasional whales. Four days past Okinawa, the ship reached Da Nang, Vietnam, where the rest of the marines off-loaded, leaving the mess hall at last to Schroder and the GIs. Jim George heard “artillery or mortar fire” when they pulled into Da Nang, but “it was about 10 or 15 miles away and I think it was ours.” Peter Miller stood at the rail and watched the marines march away, and surveyed the harbor with its exhilarating bustle of ships and boats, a riot of smells and colors, and here came barefooted Vietnamese men unloading cargo. It all seemed exotic to him, nothing like the soap line at the factory in Quincy. “Hoo boy,” he said, taking it in. “This is a different world.”

  Two days later, after a final leg south at the end of the six-thousand-mile voyage, the ship came to a stop a few hundred yards from the beach at Vung Tau, an old resort town known during colonial days as Cap St. Jacques, about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Late that night Faustin Sena saw bright lights in the distance and remarked that it must be a big city out there. The lights were not from a city, he was told. Those were the lights of war—bombs and tracers. A chill went up his back. “Oh, mama,” he whispered.

  The next morning, in the bright dawn of July 29, this latest batch of American infantrymen clambered down Jacob’s ladders into old World War II–style landing boats and came ashore.

  THE WATER WAS SMOOTH and easy, barely disturbed by the crafts plying back and forth from the big ship. The sand of Back Beach, white and clean, invited these young Americans in, with the verdant rise of Nui Nho, the little mountain, framing the vista at the southern end of the peninsula, its three rusted, thirty-three-ton French naval guns offering only an intimation fro
m on high of the war-torn history of this slender land.

  For most U.S. enlisted men in Vietnam, history tended to begin anew the day they stepped foot “in country” and to end the day they left. Evocative war stories were passed down from one group to the next, but few historical facts. Back Beach might have meant nothing to the men of C Packet, just an insignificant point of entry, a brief stop on the way to somewhere else. But in the legend of the First Infantry Division’s service in Vietnam, the white sands of Vung Tau represented the first station of the cross. It was here, less than two years earlier, during the early days of October 1965, that the main force of the First Division reached Vietnamese soil—9,600 troops and their equipment brought over on twenty ships as part of Operation Big Red. Army cameramen were at the beach October 7 and recorded that day’s arrival on 35-millimeter film. Their grainy footage of the seminal scene, as viewed later, flickered eerily between color and black-and-white, as though caught forever between present and past.

  Soldiers line the deck of the U.S.S. General Daniel I. Sultan, green duffel bags slung over their shoulders, waiting their turn to board landing craft, many of their faces pubescent, unmarked. On their shoulder sleeves, the proud Big Red One insignia, an olive drab shield two and a half inches wide, three and three-quarters inches high, with a red Arabic numeral one in the middle. Placid waters, blinding sand, a welcoming party of big brass on the beach, including the architect of the American buildup, General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, neatly attired in starched fatigues with a MACV patch on his left sleeve, his blue-gray eyes gleaming under a baseball cap. Behind him, an ethereal array of Vietnamese girls holding lotus flowers, each dressed in an ao dai of pure white. White, black, Latino—the soldiers disembark and march up the beach, their figures dissolving into brightness.

  The four-star general and the ao dai wisps were nowhere to be seen as the replacement troops from the USNS Pope came ashore twenty-two months later. A Vietnamese teenager chased after Doug Tallent as he reached the beach and tried to take his watch. Another group of local boys stood nearby yelling, “Fuck you, GI!”

  Greg Landon, with his deadpan sarcasm, said all he needed was a corncob pipe to feel like General MacArthur staging his dramatic return to the Philippines. The beach swarmed with six hundred men, some in formation, others roaming the sand, uncertain where they should go. There were now nearly a half million American forces in Vietnam and more arriving daily by air and sea. Battalions were growing from three rifle companies to four, which was what the packets were all about—a means of quickly providing fresh troops for the additional companies. C Packet was being divided into two units that would be assigned to different battalions within the Big Red One.

  First Lieutenant Clark Welch and First Sergeant Bud Barrow came upon this hectic shoreline scene looking like a modern-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the officer stooping slightly next to his shorter sidekick, who carried a makeshift flag that they had fashioned the day before—blue cloth attached to a bamboo pole with crossed rifles braced by the words D Company above and the numbers 2/28 below.

  “Where’s Delta Company? Are you Delta Company?” Welch asked the first beachmaster he encountered carrying a clipboard. These were not companies, they were packets, he was told. A navy officer finally pointed him toward a unit of men standing at attention in fatigues, “a beautiful formation, with this beautiful captain”—officers in front, sergeants in back, duffel bags at their sides, the ship behind them in the glimmering sea. It was the unit led by Captain George.

  “There’s only one commander here, and it ain’t you,” Welch told George in his invariably direct manner after they were introduced. C Packet existed no more. These men were now part of Delta Company, the fourth and final company of a battalion that made up half a regiment known as the Black Lions. What a storied history these Black Lions had: formed in 1901, the first American unit committed to combat in World War I, twice awarded the croix de guerre with palm, France’s highest military honor, named in the aftermath of their most famous battle there, when they became known as the Black Lions of Cantigny. Welch addressed the newest members of that proud lineage. He gave little thought to the fact that George was the superior officer, captain to lieutenant. He never was much on rank; he rarely even wore his rank on his battle uniform.

  Welcome to Vietnam. He was Lieutenant Welch, commander of Delta Company. They were now Delta Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division. They would move from Vung Tau to the Big Red One base at Lai Khe by C-130 airplane. No time to waste. But first Welch needed a guidon bearer, someone to carry the blue Delta banner. No one stepped forward. “Okay, goddamit, you!” the lieutenant bellowed, pointing to the tallest soldier in the rear. “Wherever I go, you go. Hold that banner high!” And with that he marched ninety-three of his new men, plus several dozen others who were as yet unassigned, off the sand, into the sunlight, toward the airfield and the transport planes that carried them to their strange new home.

  It was raining when they arrived at Lai Khe, but the division band was at the airstrip to greet them. Drum rolls and trumpets for the arriving heroes. Wow, this is special, Greg Landon thought. Then abruptly he found himself loaded into the back of an old deuce-and-a-half, a heavy supply truck, where he and the other Delta recruits slipped around on a truck bed as muddy as the hoof-slopped earth beneath a feeding trough for dairy cows in the aftermath of a midsummer thundershower. So much for feeling special. Captain George and the other new officers were taken another direction, to headquarters of the Big Red One’s Third Brigade. A colonel was waiting for them. He seemed eager to give them an unsentimental lecture on the facts of life in the war zone. Enlisted men could not be trusted, he said. Enlisted men were nothing but sons of bitches.

  Sons of bitches. Jim George was stunned. His “blood boiled” as he thought to himself, “Aren’t those the guys pulling the triggers and doing the fighting and dying?”

  Chapter 2

  Triet’s March South

  VO MINH TRIET had been fighting in the war fields between Saigon and the Cambodian border for more than six years by the summer of 1967. To the American soldiers at Lai Khe, he was the enemy, out there somewhere beyond the concertina wire, and all they had to do was go out and find him.

  Each of us has our own situation, Triet once explained, and his went like this: He was a southerner, the sixth child born into a farm family in the district of Ba Tri near the mouth of one of the Nine Dragons, or branches, of the Mekong River. Near the end of the summer of 1945, when he was fifteen, his life was reshaped by circumstances beyond his adolescent horizon. The wartime Japanese occupiers had left, a declaration of independence had been issued in Hanoi, and the long struggle to rid Vietnam of the French colonialists had begun anew. Ba Tri was a stronghold of the liberation movement. Less than a mile from Triet’s rural home stood the revered tomb of Nguyen Dinh Chieu, the great blind poet of the South whose patriotic verse a century earlier had inspired his countrymen as they took up arms against foreign occupation. “Better to die fighting the enemy and to return to our ancestors in glory / Than to survive in submission to the Western strangers.”

  Triet quit school and joined the resistance against the French, just as his father had done. First he was in a youth brigade, later in the army of the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, the Allied Vietnamese Independence League known as the Viet Minh. He was wounded in the right shin in 1952 during a battle in Kien Giang Province, but kept fighting until the French were defeated in 1954. At that point much of Vietnam was controlled by the Viet Minh, but its fate was determined by outsiders. The larger Communist powers, led by the Soviet Union and China, pushed the Viet Minh to accept the Geneva accords dividing Vietnam in two. It was to be a temporary separation until elections could be held to reunify the nation in the summer of 1956. Triet and his unit marched north to await the national elections, which never happened. The government in the South, with the Eise
nhower administration its primary benefactor, declared that the North’s aggression in the aftermath of Geneva negated the agreement.

  In the first days of 1961 Triet took the first steps toward the final battlefield of our story, walking back toward his native South with one of the first units of North Vietnamese forces to take up the fight against the U.S.-supported Saigon regime. He was thirty by then, an old warrior by military standards but one of the younger men of a squad whose average age was thirty-five. His comrades, like him, were transplanted southerners who had fought the French. For twenty nights before leaving, they had trained for the winding journey down Vietnam’s treacherous spine by walking three hours through the countryside beyond the Xuan Mai barracks south of Hanoi. Triet, weighing 121 pounds, trained by hauling a pack loaded at nearly half his weight. It was drudgery, he thought, but there was gratification at the end of each outing when they returned to camp and were given limeade and porridge and maybe some beer or quoc lui, rice whisky that to them tasted finer than Russian vodka.

  In the official military history of Triet’s regiment, published decades later, there is mention of a final meeting in Hanoi with the two leading figures of the Vietnamese revolution, Communist Party chairman Ho Chi Minh, referred to affectionately as Uncle Ho, and Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap, hero of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. It was reported that Giap, after briefing these southbound troops on their duties, “chatted with them cordially and open-heartedly” and asked, “Comrades, once in the South, where will you find guns to fight the enemy?” To which came the reply, “General, we will carry guns from the North to kill the enemy and take their weapons.” Later that evening Uncle Ho gave the soldiers four pieces of advice. First, maintain unity. Second, preserve secrecy. Third, act in coordination with new comrades. And fourth, be prepared “to go anywhere and do any work assigned by the party…and refrain from making demands.” The troops were said to be “extremely moved” by Ho’s “sagacious instructions” and promised to heed his teachings. So went the myth.