They Marched Into Sunlight Read online

  During his first month in Lai Khe, Welch led his platoon on twelve missions and made contact with the Viet Cong eleven times. His unit of sixteen soldiers had killed “between 10 and 20 VC” without losing a man and had captured a pile of weapons, ten tons of reinforcing rods that the enemy used to make claymore mines, twenty tons of rice, salt, and oil, a stash of clothes, and a file cabinet of VC tax rolls and payroll vouchers, with the last entry May 1967. His men by then had a nickname for him—Big Rock. He was the talk of the camp, always in the middle of things. “That’s one old son of a bitch that’s got his shit together,” he overheard a soldier say of him one night, and he considered it the ultimate compliment.

  “I keep thinking of what the news reporter wrote about me many years ago, when my trombone got bent and I couldn’t play my solo,” he reminisced in a letter to Lacy about his New Hampshire school days. “Something about, ‘Young Welch seems to be able to get in trouble very easily, but always gets out again just as easily.’” Soldiers from other companies now wanted to get into his platoon, believing that with him they would be safe yet never bored, an uncommon set of circumstances.

  When Welch was out in the field, he had the habit of never being too far from his point squad. If there was action, he wanted to see it and be part of it. Men who walked with him considered him hyperalert, sensitive to any unexpected noise, yet an important part of his leadership style was to present himself as a cool operator. As he moved through camp, Big Rock carried in a holster under his shoulder a battle-scarred pistol with a bullet mark on the left side, and on a sleeve across his chest he sheathed a K-Bar fighting knife. For a rifle he seldom used the new M-16, preferring a Car-15 commando automatic, which was slightly shorter and easier to carry. But another of his weapons truly defined him—an old Thompson submachine gun that came his way with its own tale of America and Vietnam. One day when he was leading the recon platoon in an area southwest of Lai Khe near the Thi Tinh River, a sergeant emerged from the tree line and got shot in the shoulder. Welch ran to help and was cradling the sergeant in his arms when a Viet Cong soldier dressed in black shorts with no shirt came “running out of the woods screaming, just screaming,” and firing a Thompson submachine gun. The bullets sprayed wildly around Welch, who calmly picked up his gun, fired one shot, and “put a tiny little hole” in his attacker that “killed him real good.” A few days later his men presented him with a plaque that read:

  SHOOTOUT AT THI TINH

  LT. WELCH 1 VC 0.

  They also gave him the Thompson, which they had retrieved. The name Dodd was carved on the side, clearly not a Vietnamese name. Welch heard that it had been brought over by American OSS agents in 1945 and given to Ho Chi Minh’s men to fight the Japanese. He often took the Thompson with him into the field after that; his sergeants said they could tell where he was by the distinctive brrrrrrn contrasted with the M-16’s much faster zzzzzt. There was also a special rack for the submachine gun on his jeep as he and his bodyguard rambled around Lai Khe.

  Welch carried a small radio on which he picked up the BBC News when he could, and he preferred the folk music of the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary to rock or country. One cool commander, yet Clark Welch should not even have been in the army. He was a chronic asthmatic who had hidden the condition from doctors at his induction physical ten years earlier to prevent being classified 4-F. His parents, preferring that he go to college, thought asthma would surely keep him out of the service and were surprised when he passed. Later, when he went overseas, Lacy routinely sent him small glass inhalers in protective green plastic, which he carried in his pocket and occasionally used after ducking behind a tree to avoid being seen. The dust and vegetation of Vietnam made him wheeze but never disabled him.

  During his command of the recon platoon, Welch found himself in situations where his rough comprehension of Vietnamese proved useful. His squad was occasionally assigned to patrol a section of Route 13 between Lai Khe and Ben Cat, ten miles to the south, where they encountered local men on bicycles or motorbikes who aroused suspicion. As he reported in his deadpan style to Lacy, the phrase he often used on such occasions was “Gentlemen, you must go quickly now or all us gentlemen will have to tie you up and put you in jail, please.” One day on road patrol he asked an old man in Vietnamese why he had stopped at the side of the highway closest to the brigade headquarters. The “papa-san” responded that his motorbike was broken. When Welch stepped on the pedal, the motor started right up. A search of the man’s belongings turned up “drawing instruments in a little silk bag in the bottom of his lunch pail.” They arrested him and discovered during questioning that he had been taking “angle measurements, distances etc.” around brigade headquarters—details the Viet Cong used for their mortar attacks.

  More often Welch found himself swarmed by Vietnamese children, who were fascinated by everything about him, his crew cut, the hair on his arms, his height, his clothes, his language skills, and what seemed like a big heart inside this big American. One day he visited a Catholic school in Ben Cat with the battalion chaplain and said, after peering in a classroom, “All of the children look very smart. What are they studying?” At least that is what he meant to say, he explained in a letter to Lacy. “The class just broke up with everybody giggling and pointing. [The teacher] said very good and showed me a simple book that a little girl was writing in. I read a little bit out of it and everybody giggled again and the little girl grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go while I walked around and looked at what the rest of the class was doing. A group of boys were reading out of what looked just like a Tarzan comic book. I picked it up and read and then turned the page and sure enough—Tar-san cac con truong, Tarzan, leader of all the animals…”

  Welch was soon surrounded by hundreds of children. He had heard a story once that if there were a number of little children around, you were safe, the VC wouldn’t try to shoot near you. “Well,” he wrote home, “I was the safest I’ve ever been in my life, because we were waist-deep in kids, we left the courtyard trailing a wake of yelling, waving little kids.”

  TWO MONTHS INTO HIS TOUR at Lai Khe, Welch was called to division headquarters. They were increasing the number of rifle companies from three to four, Welch was told. They wanted all the company commanders to be captains, but they had been watching Welch carefully and decided to make an exception. They wanted him to form and lead the new Delta Company of the 2/28 Black Lions. The day he was given the assignment, July 6, was the very day the USNS Pope departed San Diego, carrying many of the men who later would join his company. He couldn’t seem to stay anywhere for long, Welch wrote Lacy, “but this is almost an unbelievable thing. I’ll be able to choose a cadre of NCOs from units already here and then we’ll move into the woods, set up our tents, start building a place to live, eat, and work, and after a sixty-day training program I’ll have another infantry rifle company trained and ready to go.”

  For a soldier in Welch’s position to win a commission in the field was uncommon enough; for him to command a rifle company was extraordinary. He would be the only lieutenant with his own company in the entire First Division, one of only a handful in all of Vietnam. He considered it an honor and a challenge. When he began putting the company together, it amounted to nothing more than “one infantry Lt. (AC Welch) and a large section of rubber plantation,” as he described it to Lacy. Within a week he had a first sergeant, two tents, and a latrine, and soon he had a mess hall, an orderly room, and his first batch of soldiers—twenty veteran infantrymen from other companies handpicked with two thoughts in mind. First, Welch wanted men with combat experience who could steady the nerves of the FNGs, the fucking new guys, as new arrivals were called. And second, he was looking for soldiers with mechanical or electronic skills who could help him construct the Delta camp. There was no shortage of prospects. As word spread around Lai Khe that Big Rock was getting a company, men started volunteering. One night five jeeps pulled up to the orderly room and a band of men jumped out.
They were looking for the new Delta commander. “I came out to see what the commotion was about,” Welch reported in a letter home. “It was Recon—all those little bastards—wanting to come with me to the new company. That really got to me.” Afraid to show emotion, Welch barked at a sergeant to take his men home “before the VC find out that Black Lions Recon are all in one bunch and send in a suicide squad to get us all.”

  His rise from the noncommissioned ranks left Welch with a deep appreciation of sergeants, whom he considered the forged steel of the army. He would go nowhere without the new first sergeant of Delta Company, Clarence (Bud) Barrow. Square of face, with a burr haircut and southern Indiana twang, Barrow was an army lifer. Back in 1948, before some of his buck privates were born, he had escaped from Bloomington and a difficult stepmother by quitting school at age sixteen and enlisting after forging his date of birth on the birth certificate. By the summer of 1967, when he received orders for Southeast Asia, he had served nineteen years in the army, including nine with the Big Red One in Germany, without facing combat. He was one year from retirement but not ready to fade away. His military career would never seem complete, he believed, unless he did a Vietnam tour. When he at last reached the war zone in Lai Khe, he lost himself a bit, not unlike the C Packet boys on shore leave in Okinawa. “We’ve got First Sergeant Barrow,” Welch was told over the phone one night. He was expecting the new man to report, so he said, “Good, bring him up.” “You don’t understand,” came the response. Barrow was locked up. The sergeant had had too much to drink. The two men first caught sight of each other between the bars of the military jail.

  From the moment Welch arranged his release, Sergeant Barrow became his unfailingly loyal and effective top aide. As the company would fill out, Delta’s young platoon lieutenants all would outrank Barrow, but Welch left no doubt that his first sergeant was to take over if he became a casualty. Barrow would also serve as the company’s daily organizer (taking the morning report, assigning the day’s details), its best provisioner (he had a way of making sure there were morning pastries no matter where they were in the field), and father figure. During his days as a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he had kept a sign on his desk about tact: an ability to tell a person to go to hell and make him glad to be on the way. The men might not like to hear Barrow’s bark, but better his than the commander’s, and they would more often turn to him when they received troubling news from home or felt uneasy. He took pride in being pivotal to the operation, but it was also a heavy burden. And he had his own concerns about the alien world he was now in. On his first patrol in country, he fell asleep on an ammo box and awoke with a start when he felt something hairy running over his arm. Was it a monkey or a rat? He never saw it, but for that second he was “scared half to death.”

  Not much else scared Bud Barrow after that. He became the only person in Delta not intimidated by Welch, and thus the only one with the courage to rouse the commander in the morning. After starting the coffee and finding pastries, Barrow would approach Big Rock with a swagger stick and touch him very lightly two or three times while saying softly, “Lieutenant Welch, time to get up.” Then he would gingerly step to the side as Welch bolted upright and grabbed his gun, ready to shoot.

  The base camp that Welch and Barrow established for Delta Company was about the size of five football fields. It was situated entirely within a grove of mature rubber trees planted in perfect rows running east-west, with spaces of eight yards between rows. Welch planned to house his men in fortified tents jumbled unevenly among the rubber trees. He insisted that they not be set up in neat rows along the lanes because that would make them easier targets. The treetops formed only a light canopy overhead, allowing a cool breeze to blow through and sunlight to dapple the ground. When there was sunlight, that is: the camp was built during the rainy season. “There’s water everywhere (much more even than in Florida) and that means mud, mud, mud,” Welch noted in mid July. In a largely futile effort to keep their boots dry, they put down sidewalk planks made from baseboards and wooden ammo boxes. A concertina wire fence ran around the perimeter, and there were open areas for the sight line of mortars and M-60 machine guns.

  Division engineers paved a company street and put up three permanent structures—the mess hall, orderly room, and a little headquarters building, twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. Welch designed it himself. When you walked in the front door, the company clerk’s desk was to the left, First Sergeant Barrow’s desk to the right, and a hallway down the middle led to the commander’s office, which had a map table, desk, bookshelf, and what looked like a clothes closet but actually was a private entrance to Welch’s hideaway sleeping area. There were phones next to the desk and bed “so I can always be on top of things no matter where I am.” Further down the hall were the operations room and library, and it was only a few steps out the back door to an underground TOC (tactical operations center) and command tent.

  By July 26 Welch and his skeleton crew had consumed their first full day of meals in the mess hall. “BREAKFAST: bacon, eggs, french toast, pancakes, toast, french pastry breakfast rolls, butter, honey, jams, jelly, coffee, orange juice, milk (awful). LUNCH: fried ham, potato, rice, beans, corn, bread, hot rolls, salad, butter, jams and jelly, peaches with whipped cream, coffee, iced tea, milk (awful), Kool-Aid. DINNER: hamburger, cheeseburger, french fries, lima beans, rice, hot toasted buns, bread, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, ice cream! Cake! Coffee, iced tea, Kool-Aid.” The next day a truckload of weapons arrived. “We’ve got quite an arsenal here,” he reported to Lacy. “A rifle company is really a powerful force! I’m really looking forward to getting these people and the equipment together and ready so we can get out and help fight the war.”

  Big Rock had lost twenty-five pounds since he arrived in Vietnam and had gone through one bout of pneumonia, but now he felt well fed and healthy and raring to go. Two days later he and Bud Barrow hopped on a C-130 and flew down to Vung Tau to meet the soldiers of C Packet.

  “WE ARE CALLED the Black Lions,” Jack Schroder wrote home to Eleanor in one of his first letters from the Delta Company base camp amid the rubber trees. “We have a 500 piaster bounty on our heads for any member of the Black Lions. Charlie loves to cut your ears off and your Black Lions patch. We found a medic that had been completely skinned alive and hanged by his heels and had the patch cut off and [stuffed] in his mouth—not a pretty sight.”

  Not an entirely factual one, either. It took only a few days of hanging around the war-hardened soldiers of Lai Khe, drinking with them and listening to their stories, for the quiet dental technician to take on the bravado of his environment and send it along to his unsuspecting young wife back in the States. Everything Schroder reported in that gruesome account had some truth to it—the bounty, the cut ears and patches happened at some point somewhere—but not during his first week there. It was part of the lore of Lai Khe, spread night after night, month by month, in the bars and hooches, an expression of that part of human nature that adjusts to a frightening situation by mixing mythology and reality. Mike Troyer wrote home to his parents in Ohio with another version of the same legendary story. “The unit I am in is called the Black Lions. I’ll send you one of the patches that we wear on our left fatigue shirt pocket. The V.C. are so scared of us that they have a bounty on us of some 30 piasters…to collect it they have to take the Black Lion patch and a left ear as proof that they have killed a famed Black Lion. No big thing because Charlie is so scared to mess with us, whenever we are out on patrol he would just as soon leave us alone.”

  Things were rough enough and would get worse than the new soldiers could imagine, yet still there was an odd sense of comfort in embellishment. In Jack Schroder’s new world, as he transformed it in his letters, the rain fell nonstop for six months during the monsoon season, in the dry season the temperatures ranged from 120 to 140 degrees, and every night they were taking mortar hits from the Viet Cong that were killing five or ten or fifteen of his buddies—all
stretches of fact that reflected his absorption of a fundamental truth, one that he related in his first letter home. “They aren’t playing games over here,” he wrote. The most threatening of the events Schroder wrote about, the mortar attacks, truly happened, beginning on the first night he stayed in Lieutenant Welch’s new camp, though the casualties were fewer than he reported.

  A more subdued account came from Greg Landon, the Amherst dropout. “Mud is everywhere and so are the V.C., I am told,” he wrote after a few days in Lai Khe. “We have mortars every night and sometimes a few injuries…. We have a covered trench next to the tent which we jump into when attacked by the mortars.” A week later Landon was reeling from the hyperbolic stories coming at him. “I really don’t know what to believe over here. People just in from the field say that the 1st battalion 16th infantry just had 100% casualties. Must have meant a company (rather than a larger battalion) and 200 men in a company killed or injured is fantastic in itself.”

  Sometimes the truth stretching was so over the top that word got back to the commander. “One had written his mother that he’d been a point man on 50 patrols and been wounded 4 times and was now in the hospital—he said that his C.O. had visited him in the hospital and said to recover quickly because they needed him back as a point man,” Welch recounted in a letter to Lacy. “He told his mother he was ready to give his life for his country but he was getting a little tired of always being a hero. This kid has been an assistant cook (handles gravy + salad + cold drinks) since he got here, has never left the perimeter, and the only time he’s been near the hospital is when he goes on sick call (about twice a week)!! His mother wrote to me to ask if he hadn’t done his share and couldn’t he please come home instead of going back to war. I wrote a letter to her today, saying that her boy had done ‘a good job in his specialized area and was quite an asset to our company. We need him right in the job he’s in now and couldn’t let him come home early because the company couldn’t train a replacement that quickly.’ I wrote some more like that and showed the letter to the boy. He’s writing a letter tonight to tell his mother something a little closer to the truth so she won’t worry so much. After he shows me the letter tomorrow—we’ll mail both of them.”