They Marched Into Sunlight Read online

  The poetic and the harsh converge in Vietnam. From that glorified rendition of a noble sending-forth followed two months and twenty-seven brutal days. Triet and his comrades were transported by truck down Route 1 to Ha Tinh, then west toward the mountains near the border with Laos, and from there they walked more than six hundred miles south through the wilderness along the Truong Son range. They carried French-made MAS (modern army supply) rifles, a few Thompson submachine guns, radio equipment, and medical supplies. There was no road, only the most primitive semblance of what Americans later would call the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The route over and around densely forested mountains was marked by broken twigs left by advance scouts. Three weeks of training gave Triet little warning of how exhausted he would feel after only the first day. His boots made his feet swell, so he took them off and tied them around his shoulders, then threw them away altogether and replaced them with rubber-tire sandals.

  The sandals were less slippery on mountain slopes and also more effective when it came to tree leeches. If a soldier wore boots, the tree leeches could dig in, but with sandals at least they could be spotted immediately. The sight and sound of tree leeches haunted every man who marched down the Truong Son trail. Triet saw no tigers along the way, nor did he encounter enemies from the Saigon Special Forces, but he would never forget the tree leeches. They lived under leaves that fell from the trees, and when troops came by, the creatures smelled a human feast approaching. Triet and his comrades would hear a cranky yrrow, yrrow sound and see the trail move and the leaves rustle, and they knew that beneath the leaves tens of thousands of leeches were heading toward them en masse. The audacious bloodsuckers were about the size of pen tips before they gorged. They attached themselves in spherical hordes.

  Salt was among the most precious rations Triet carried. It was meant for cooking, but he used it for another purpose. At the end of the day he wrapped a piece of cloth around the tip of a stick and soaked it in salted water. This became his leech-removing prod for the next morning; the salt would make leeches jump from his feet. Instead of salt for flavoring, Triet and his squad often used the ash from charcoal to flavor their meals, which usually consisted of pressed rice along with greens they had picked along the way. Every hour they took a ten-minute break to gather food for dinner, collecting what they could find at the side of the trail: mostly bamboo sprouts and greens known as machete heads and airplane heads. When they reached camp for the night, they gathered and washed the greens, boiled them, spread them out on two nylon ponchos, and took out their chopsticks for a communal dinner.

  Lunch was a small portion of pressed rice, if available, and for energy in the early afternoon Triet reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny piece of the hundred grams of ginseng that he had bought in a traditional medicine shop in Hanoi. At an aid station in the Central Highlands, where there was no rice, his squad was provided a can of corn. It was divided evenly among the men, twenty kernels per soldier a day. During one stretch near the end of the march, they went seven days without rice. The storage bins at an aid station were empty, and the commander decided that if they waited around for rice, they might all get sick and die and have no one to bury them, so they kept moving. For morning sustenance they relied on what they jokingly called ca-phe doc, which means “hill coffee”—not the sort one would buy at the market. Every night, if possible, Triet and his squad camped next to a stream, which meant they were in a low-lying drainage area and the walk the next morning would be on a steep incline up the next mountain. They usually walked uphill from dawn until ten or eleven before reaching a crest, and this difficult ascent was their hill coffee because it unfailingly woke them up.

  The first southbound troops reached their destination on March 27. Triet’s squad arrived weeks later. Their new headquarters were at two base camps, one hidden deep in the jungle of War Zone C near the Cambodian border above Tay Ninh, about sixty miles to the northwest of Saigon, and another across the Saigon and Song Be rivers to the northeast in War Zone D. The camps were on the rim of a larger region of Vietnam called Eastern Nam Bo, where many native southerners had fought the French in the early 1950s. Abandoned tunnels and trenches from that earlier struggle were still evident. “Eastern Nam Bo is full of hardships but exudes gallantry,” troops had sung as they left the region to relocate in the North in 1954. Now they were back in this familiar landscape where they would fight and die for another fourteen years.

  Once in the South, the soldiers were reorganized into fighting units, part of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Vo Minh Triet, whose war name was Bay Triet, became part of a regiment with the code name Q761, a designation taken from its official founding in July 1961. A few months later, on the second of September, the national day in the North, Triet and his comrades were officially designated the First Regiment at a ceremony in the shadows of Nui Ba Den, the Black Virgin Mountain, where they recited ten solemn oaths of faithfulness and solidarity and promised to fight to the end for the liberation of South Vietnam and national reunification. Over the next few years Triet’s regiment would take on other aliases, most notably the Binh Gia Regiment, an honorific bestowed upon it after a decisive battle in late 1964 against the South’s ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) units near Saigon. American intelligence reports later identified it consistently as the 271st Regiment, though this was a name the unit itself never used. Q761, yes; First Regiment, yes; Binh Gia, yes; 271st, no. There never was a 271st, Triet later insisted.

  After the victory at Binh Gia, nearly four years into the fight against what they called the puppet troops of Saigon, Triet and his comrades believed their opponents were near defeat. It was an assessment shared by the Johnson administration in Washington, and soon thereafter, starting with the landing of elements of the U.S. Ninth Marine Expeditionary Force at Da Nang in early March 1965, the forces of the communist-led People’s Army of Vietnam found themselves in a new sort of strategic war, dealing with ever-increasing numbers of American infantrymen on the ground and B-52s overhead.

  The first full division of soldiers from the U.S. Army sent into Eastern Nam Bo in the summer and fall of 1965 belonged to the First Infantry, the old and proud Big Red One. By September 2, when Triet’s First Regiment was incorporated into the newly founded Ninth VC Division, his commanders knew much about these arriving Americans: the order of battle, the names and histories of generals and colonels, all the way down to the height and weight of the average soldier (1.8 meters and eighty kilos, compared to 1.6 meters and fifty kilos on their side). The Big Red One was translated into Vietnamese as “Big Red Brothers.” It was described in PAVN documents as an awesome force that had “a long history of warfare and had performed in an outstanding manner…in our military terminology, a unit that won a hundred battles in a hundred fights.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but close enough for propaganda.

  There was concern that the Americans, with their vast supply of armored vehicles, helicopters, big guns, and bombs, were invincible. One VC Ninth Division colonel even claimed that with inferior firepower and equipment, he gave his men the option of not fighting the Americans if they felt overwhelmed. (He reported later that fifteen of two hundred soldiers took this offer.) “Would the division be able to handle the Americans? How should it fight to beat them? These were extremely pressing questions,” Ninth Division historians reported later. When Triet heard that the Americans were coming, his first thought was that the war would be “terrible and fierce.” As to whether it would be a long war or a short war, he was less certain. From Hanoi radio he had heard reports of the incipient antiwar movement in the United States and pronouncements from Uncle Ho that the disquiet within America might be as important as armed conflict in Vietnam. Shaping public opinion was a strategic aspect of the political struggle, which was always waged in concert with the war itself.

  As for the Big Red Brothers, Triet thought they were strong in fire-power but also had potential weaknesses. What did they know about the people they were fighting and the land o
n which they fought?

  Chapter 3

  Lai Khe, South Vietnam

  LAI KHE, pronounced lie kay. It was at once a small Vietnamese village, a French rubber plantation, and an American military base camp, three cultures interwoven by history and circumstance if not trust. Fences encircled the local village, which was swallowed whole by the larger oval of the military base. Who the fences were supposed to protect, or keep in or out, was never obvious. Villagers worked for the Big Red Brothers, washing laundry, cleaning rooms, burning shit, cutting hair, serving drinks, providing sex, but many were quietly supporting the other side, the Viet Cong. The French managers of the Michelin plantation rarely showed up, though they seemed to have scouts who knew everything; if rubber trees were cut down to give mortars a cleaner arc into the nearby jungle, an invoice was sure to arrive soon thereafter billing the First Division a few hundred dollars per felled tree. While damning the French, the Americans took full advantage of the splendid remains of the colonial plantation; the officer corps occupied a resortlike villa of white stucco and red tile houses complete with recreation center and swimming pool. That some of the larger buildings came with oversized basins once used for rubber experiments was but a minor inconvenience.

  Slicing vertically up the center of Lai Khe was Route 13, an unpaved highway made of rocky red laterite soil that ran from the outskirts of Saigon, some thirty-two miles to the south, to the Cambodian border, another forty miles north. Thunder Road, as the Americans called the highway, was a critical supply line that the First Division spent considerable firepower trying to control, with limited success. Like much of that section of Vietnam, it tended to belong to the South during the day and the Viet Cong at night. Big Red One engineers, protected by rifle companies, worked on the road relentlessly, clearing it of mines and using wooden planks to make passable stretches that had been ravaged by monsoon-season craters. Before a massive repair job in 1966, an engineering report said that it “looked as if the whole road would shortly sink into the swamp.”

  Within the uneven perimeter of Lai Khe, a loop approximately three miles long and a mile wide, division, brigade, and battalion headquarters were situated to the west side of Route 13, or to the left of the road driving north, as were the village, the helicopter pads, the aviation units, known as the Robin Hoods of Sherwood Forest, and several rifle companies, including Alpha Company of the Black Lions. A perforated steel airstrip ran south-north on a parallel line less than a hundred yards to the east of the highway. It was also on that side, up on the far northeastern section of the perimeter, that Clark Welch set up base camp for his new Delta Company, a good two-mile hike from division headquarters and the village. Though it was not entirely within his power to decide where to locate his men, it certainly was appropriate for Welch to be apart from the crowd.

  There was no one comparable in the Black Lions regiment, few in the entire First Division. Long and sinewy at six foot two and 160 pounds, his frame always tilting forward slightly, ready to move, with his rough-hewn face topped by crew-cut black hair, his deep authoritative voice and fierce blue-eyed gaze softened by a sheepish smile, Welch was a soldier’s soldier in the most elemental sense. He was an innate leader who earned his own rifle company by sheer ability in the field. It was not out of West Point that he became a lieutenant, nor officer training school. His only academic degree then was from Oyster River High in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1957. After excelling as a Green Beret sergeant, he was commissioned as an OBV2 lieutenant on December 15, 1965, with his father, a retired Corps of Engineers colonel, administering the oath. The acronym meant that he was an obligated volunteer who could serve as an officer for two years but was not guaranteed anything more. “In other words, ‘Don’t plan on keeping it,’” is how Welch half jokingly defined his lieutenancy.

  The last thing Welch expected was to become a line commander in an infantry division. He had worn the green beret since it was authorized by President Kennedy in 1961, taking part in Special Forces operations in Lebanon, Laos, Venezuela, and Central America, and anticipated more of the same in Vietnam. He had studied Vietnamese at language school in Monterey, California, and had taken psychological operations training, all in preparation for what was known as Project Gamma, an ill-conceived project that envisioned small Special Forces teams consisting of two Americans and four Vietnamese living in villages near the demilitarized zone and collecting information on the enemy. By the time Welch arrived in the last days of April 1967, a few Gamma teams had been wiped out by the Viet Cong and the operation was scrapped. At the same time, the First Infantry Division desperately needed officers and was drawing them from anywhere possible. The realities of Vietnam and the demands of war changed Welch’s assignment. He was going to the 2/28 Black Lions in Lai Khe.

  The change surprised and upset him. At the First Division’s rear headquarters in Di An, where he stopped on his way to Lai Khe, he pounded on an officer’s desk and argued that this had to be a mistake. He was special. He had been trained for special things. He was still wearing his Green Beret uniform. From behind, an authoritative voice declared, “Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ll be happy in my old division.” Welch turned around to see the tough little former commander of the Big Red One, Major General William E. DePuy.

  “Oh, yes, sir. I’m sure I’ll be happy,” Welch answered.

  “Get rid of that silly hat,” DePuy said, and that was the end of that.

  From the moment he arrived at Lai Khe, Albert Clark Welch began making a special name for himself, even without his green beret. On his second day in camp, he was sent to an area several miles to the southwest where the Viet Cong functioned in an elaborate network of underground tunnels. A Black Lions unit had killed three enemy soldiers and three more were trapped in a tunnel, but the battalion interpreter had left earlier that week and Welch was the only American on the scene who knew some Vietnamese. “I talked 3 VC into surrendering,” he reported in a letter to his wife, Lacy Welch, a nurse then living in Fort Myers, Florida. (He wrote to her virtually every day—long, evocative accounts in the legible print lettering of an engineer.) “I told them they were surrounded and we had a flamethrower and they scrambled right out. They came out with their weapons and said all the others had escaped. We blew up the tunnel and the 3 VC were flown back to Brigade.” Welch was a modest man, there was a bit of the Jimmy Stewart awshucks quality to him as he detailed his accomplishments, but he was also a proud soldier who wanted to share his feelings with his wife. He thought he had made “quite a first impression” with his new battalion.

  Two days later the Viet Cong launched a mortar attack on Lai Khe, and Welch’s instinctive reaction further enhanced his reputation. After all the training he had done, it was almost as if he had been through it before, he told Lacy. He was in the mess hall drinking coffee when the rockets hit outside, blowing open the doors to the building. It was the first enemy attack at Lai Khe in weeks. Instinctively realizing that it was incoming mortar fire, Welch jumped up and yelled, “Get in the bunker!” He pushed his fellow soldiers out toward the bunker, then ran to the command bunker and asked where the mortar alarm was. No one had pushed it yet. “I was leaning on the siren when the XO (executive officer) ran in,” Welch wrote to Lacy. “He said that was the first time he’d been beaten to his own bunker—and to be beaten by a ‘newly-arrived lieutenant’ who not only beat him but was there sounding the alarm—was not what he expected. I think I can do well here, Lacy.”

  That assessment was shared by his superior officers. At a ceremony at the end of Welch’s first week, a brigade lieutenant colonel told the new troops that some “might be in combat before the sun set today and others would never see a shot fired during 12 months”—then cited the example of a new lieutenant who had already qualified for a Combat Infantry Badge. Welch was “looking around, like everyone else” to see who that might be, when the officer added, “I mean that lieutenant who got 3 VC to give themselves up earlier this week.”

  Welch was made
the leader of the Black Lions’ recon (reconnaissance) platoon, an elite unit that before he took over had served primarily as a protective guard for the battalion. He swiftly transformed it into a hot unit ready for action and led his men into their first firefight on May 16. A few hours after the battle, he struggled to describe what it felt like. “This morning I actually led my men in combat,” he wrote to Lacy. “I guess it should be one of the greatest things I’ve ever done—I’ve worked towards it for so long. I just can’t say what it’s like. This war is really affecting the whole world, but it’s only being fought right here along a very thin line separating combat soldiers from the Viet Cong. Much of this business is just plain awful—the people getting hurt and crying and even dying; but I saw men at their finest this morning. The infantry in close combat is just something else…. Although I’ve been sure that I could perform when I had to, now I know that I can lead, even under fire.”

  After another firefight a few weeks later, Welch again tried to relate to Lacy what it was like. Again he feared that he would not find the words. “We just gathered and shot at anything that moved because we knew we were the only good guys around…. For a few minutes it was like the whole world was right there with us, all my life, everything I’ve ever done or thought about was right there. After it was over and we dared to talk or look around, we just couldn’t comprehend that we were all alive and that the VC had really been that close. They were close, Lacy, and there was a hell of a lot of them.”