They Marched Into Sunlight Page 6

  Since he only picked up 93 men at Vung Tau instead of the 140 he had been expecting, Welch was allowed to pluck some more experienced troops from other units in the division to reach his full complement of soldiers. For his four platoon leaders—three rifle platoons and the weapons (mortar) platoon—he had two battlewise officers and two untested young lieutenants. He tried to keep that same half-and-half ratio down through his squad leaders, but troop demands in Vietnam were so strong that summer, and the supply of experienced infantrymen so depleted, that he ended up short nine sergeants. Who wants to be a sergeant? he had asked at the end of the first day in camp. It would not be an official promotion, he could not pay them any extra, but at least they would get to eat in the sergeant’s mess tent. A few of his pseudosergeants were too young to vote.

  Working from a division handbook, Welch and his cadre of seasoned men trained the newcomers in jungle warfare: how to board helicopters, how to respond to enemy fire from the left or right, how to set an ambush, how to recognize booby traps and pungi sticks, and how to dig the famed DePuy bunker, named for the former division commander, which featured a berm in front and rifle holes angling left and right so that enemy attackers faced interlocking fire. Welch was a stickler about where to locate the bunkers at NDPs (night defensive positions), often moving them two or three times before the arrangement felt exactly right. His men eventually learned to mark temporary locations with their rifles and sandbags and not dig in too deeply until their finicky commander had walked the perimeter several times and given his final approval.

  Greg Landon, with his Amherst background, uncommon for an enlisted man in the infantry, was called Professor by his bunkmates. He was assigned to carry the radio as an RTO (radio telephone operator), a job about which he had mixed feelings. “The job is rather risky in a fight since the radio is the first or second target, the other being the squad leader,” he wrote. On the other hand he would get to know what was going on, which he considered “imperative,” and “get familiar with tactics that may become useful in later parts of the war.” It also might help him avoid other annoying assignments like listening post, for which a few men sat outside the perimeter all night listening for enemy approaches. “The radio is rather heavy with its extra battery, being over 30 pounds, but I’ll bear it somehow,” Landon reported. “Just so long as we stay out of ambushes as much as possible I’ll be fairly safe. But that damned 10’ aerial is a dead giveaway.”

  Jack Schroder trained on the M-60 machine gun. His squadmates started calling him Machine Gun Red. In his letters home he alternated between trying to reassure Eleanor, by telling her that the training would keep him out of harm’s way for several weeks (and that after that he would try to get assigned to Lai Khe’s dental lab), and alarming her with increasingly hard-edged stories. One night, he said, VC mortars came in near the airstrip as he was making the long walk to Delta from the village. “I ran all the way back to base camp. I never knew I could run as fast as I did. Over here speed counts.” Another day he described walking through a rice paddy and finding himself “up to my ass in human waste,” which he said was used as fertilizer.

  The central themes of his letters became revenge, comradeship, and drinking, and the three seemed inextricably linked. He was undergoing the transformation of a soldier facing battle, his world shrinking from his country down to his division, then battalion, then company, then platoon, then squad, and finally the men he knew and lived with every day, the guys to the left and right of him. They were what he would fight for.

  In his first letter the enemy was the aggressor to be feared; now Schroder was the predator. “We had a beer party last night. I got drunk and they said I went hunting Charlie with the M-60,” he wrote. “I’m glad they found me. I am going to get Charlie one way or the other for he killed 7 of my buddies.” In another letter he said he was eager to go on patrol at the perimeter that night. “I am going to try to find me a Viet Cong,” he boasted, adding that the last VC they captured was skinned alive and had his throat slit. This was followed by an account of how a friend was killed by a mine and how they scooped up his remains and placed them in a bag.

  Sprinkled amid the bloody tales were comments about the delicious fudge that Sarge got from home, dreamy thoughts of meeting for an R and R in Hawaii, and requests for rolls of 126 color film and Kool-Aid, and then sign-offs about how much rougher it was than he had expected and how much he loved his wife and baby son and wanted to come home.

  Mere days in country and already many new Delta Company soldiers felt alienated from the world around them. “Nothing but bars and whores,” Mike Taylor told his parents after making his first visit to Lai Khe village. “Got a haircut and massage. They slapped the———out of my ass. That’s the last of those.”

  From the distance of his fourteen-man tent under the rubber trees, Greg Landon wrote to his brother, America seemed “very far away.” So far away that he wished he were “in Peoria, Illinois, right now.” But they were stuck in Lai Khe and the surrounding jungles. “What bothers me is that we will not be able to get to Saigon, ever. It’s off limits to the 1st Division now.” As for the fighting, Landon wrote, the Viet Cong had “the upper hand in this goddamned war,” and it seemed that “by one means or another” every peasant had been contacted and “asked to perform duties for the V.C. against us.” His sardonic streak was growing darker. Vietnam, he mused, “would be an OK country except for the Vietnamese. Since they pledge no allegiance to the govt., they pick the winner, the V.C. by default, and give us a tough time. We had three women spies in here yesterday pacing off distances and spotting troop areas on the pretense they were looking for a job. It’s impossible to tell who is and is not a V.C. sympathizer. Right now we’re in the process of killing everyone one way or another. So that the insects can have the place to themselves.”

  Here was a common theme among the enlisted men, the notion that they were being used by both the Vietnamese and their own government. “I’ve seen what it’s like over here,” Mike Troyer told his family on a three-inch reel-to-reel recording that he sent home at the beginning of his tour. “Not that I feel like marchin’ in any protest march against Vietnam, but this war is worthless. These people over here are playin’ both ends against the middle. They got it made, man. If Charlie won’t give it to ’em, the Americans will. If the Americans won’t give it to ’em, Charlie will. The comparison is like a divorce. They both want custody of one child. One parent gives it to ’em if the other won’t. So they think, why the hell should I go with you?…I’ll tell the president himself, this damn war, it just ain’t worth it.”

  Natural beauty all around, yet the most descriptive word was shit. “Here it’s used for everything,” Lieutenant Welch explained in a letter home. “They call a Chinook helicopter a shit-hook. When the firefights first begin is when the shit starts and when things are really going hot and heavy, you’re in the shit. The code name for our officer that’s the preventive medicine officer (checks for flies, correct latrine maintenance, clean garbage etc.) is Shithouse 6. And if a guy gets drunk he is shitfaced.”

  Some things were shittier. The men heard stories about soldiers stepping on pungi sticks laced with human feces, and about puddle jumper bugs that bit out chunks of human flesh, and about the three-step viper, a snake that bites you and three steps later you’re dead. They had daily encounters with the water buffalo, an animal that snorted at the sight of Americans and seemed incontrovertibly on the side of the VC. There were mosquitoes everywhere, voracious red ants, yellow spiders as large as your fist, dogs and monkeys with rabies, and during the long summer nights, through twelve hours of heartless darkness, the soldiers could hear little lizards, in voices soft and clear and matter-of-fact, calling out to them over and over again, with a refrain that sounded like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  THERE WERE ALWAYS fucking new guys to hear the lizards call out their names at Lai Khe. New soldiers arrived every day, and old soldiers left every day, their identities i
n large measure determined by their DEROS, which was both a noun and a verb: Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas. Every soldier knew his DEROS, and when he left he was derossed. The simultaneous arrival of so many 2/28 Black Lions from the troop ship that summer was unusual. By 1967 most soldiers were flown to Vietnam. They traveled together on chartered commercial jets with meal service and movies and stewardesses, diversions that could be pleasing but also discordant with what awaited them on the ground. The three weeks at sea might have seemed like an endless purgatory, but for those who arrived by plane, the transition from one world to another was swift and unsettling.

  Tom Hinger, a Black Lions medic from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the son of a steelworker, flew to Vietnam that July with two vastly contrasting images in his mind. The last thing he had seen on television while waiting to board a chartered 707 at Fort Ord, California, was the major league all-star game, a memorable contest won by the National League on Tony Perez’s home run in the top of the fifteenth inning. That was something to talk about. But the last thing he had read at the airport before saying good-bye to his parents was a front-page account that by eerie coincidence focused on the medics of the 2/28 Battalion of the First Infantry Division and how dangerous their jobs were. That was nothing to talk about at all, and in fact enough to make Hinger fib to his parents, telling them not to worry about him because he would be safe in Vietnam, working at a hospital. On the way over, the plane stopped in Hawaii and Okinawa, and Hinger noticed that on each leg of the trip the meals got sparer and the stewardesses older.

  Joe Costello, an eighteen-year-old Alpha Company grenadier from Long Island, the son of a Manhattan insurance executive, arrived at Bien Hoa Air Base by civilian jet late on a summer’s night. As flight attendants instructed him to lock his tray table and put his seat back in the upright position, he could see flashes of gunfire in the darkness and explosions in the distance. Before he enlisted, Costello had never traveled farther from home than Pennsylvania. Now this: first rocket fire, then overpowering smells, a jangling bus ride, straw hats, pajamas, bare feet, women carrying wares on perfectly balanced poles, the company out on maneuvers at Lai Khe, someone taking him to the enlisted men’s club, where soldiers tell grisly war stories about something called Operation Billings. Wow, is it going to be like that? Then another soldier escorting him to the plantation and demonstrating how they harvest rubber, cutting a diagonal slice through the bark and watching the fluid run down the slit like white sap or milkweed, or some sort of purified blood.

  Michael Arias, a Mexican-American from Douglas, Arizona, was delivering laundry detergent and mouthwash door to door in Phoenix when he got drafted. He flew from Phoenix to Oakland to Anchorage with a final stop in Japan on his way to Bien Hoa that March, then was sent up to Lai Khe to join Alpha Company, which was out on Operation Junction City in War Zone C when he arrived. They tried to keep him occupied at jungle training school, which was thought to be a last, safe transitional interlude before going out in the field, but he and Jesús Razo and Ralph Carrasco quickly found themselves in a tense standoff with some other Black Lions when they tried to take a few beers that were stashed in a Coke machine. M-16s were locked and loaded, bayonets at the ready, until cooler heads prevailed.

  Steve Goodman, a Black Lions mechanic from Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish milkman and the grandson of a pasta salesman, flew TWA to Vietnam on a bouncy, seemingly endless trip from New York with stops in California, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Long Binh. The entire journey “scared the shit” out of him, but that was nothing compared to his first encounter at Lai Khe. He reached Headquarters Company just as they were “hoisting down an American GI’s body” from the watchtower. When the lifeless soldier neared the ground, “his insides came out and were all over the ladder and everything else and just slopping down on the ground—red, purple, black.” He had been killed by the unfriendly friendly fire of a Big Red One comrade, plugged with twenty rounds as he was jokingly screaming, “I’m Ho Chi Minh! I’m Ho Chi Minh!”

  Three hundred sixty-four days to DEROS.

  Whatever bonds the soldiers made with comrades on the way over were usually broken as soon as they reached the replacement center at Bien Hoa and were assigned to different divisions, brigades, battalions, companies. Doc Hinger had been seated next to Jerry Saporito and shared stories with him for seventeen hours, then saw him again only once more in his life. Here was a paradox of army life. So much effort was put into stripping men of their individualism to make them effective parts of the killing machine, so much emphasis was placed on the fraternity of the squad and platoon, so much faith and trust was invested in the relationships of buddies on the fighting line, all of this was indisputably essential and true, yet each man also moved through Vietnam in his own distinct world, hundreds of thousands of individual overlapping years, each with its own beginning and unique end, a serial number and a date eligible for return.

  Last name: Sikorski

  First name: Daniel

  Home of record: Milwaukee

  State: WI

  Sex: Male

  Race: Caucasian

  Marital status: Single

  Branch: Army

  Rank: SP4

  Serial number: RA16889558

  DEROS: March 8, 1968

  Danny Sikorski was another gunner in Delta Company, an experienced hand who helped teach Jack Schroder how it was done. Machine Gun Red and Ski, as his army buddies called Sikorski, were the same age, twenty, with connections to Milwaukee and a tendency to drink to ease their boredom or anxiety. Sikorski, in country since March, was one of fifteen Black Lions transferred from Alpha to Delta to help train the new guys from the ship. “The only good thing about it is we stay out of the field for 15 days training this new company,” he reported in a letter to his sister Diane. Otherwise it was an uneventful assignment. “Well, there isn’t too much to talk about because we aren’t doing anything except training these new fellows. I sure am drinking a lot of beer lately. Our club opens at noon and closes at 10 that’s where I spend half of my day. P.S. Please send the Booze.”

  Diane Sikorski, two years younger than her brother, cringed when she read the P.S. In every letter home since Danny had arrived in Vietnam, he had begged or demanded that she send him a bottle of rum. Diane loved her brother deeply. When he wrote in one letter that she should call WOKY “and ask them to play a request for a boy in V.N., I want them to play Mercy Mercy, I really like that song,” she was happy to oblige, but sending him rum was a different matter. Back during his last year at home on Eighth Street on the south side of Milwaukee, after their mom had died and she became the “homemaker,” her tasks included cleaning his upstairs bedroom each week. On the floor behind his bed she had come across stale vomit of rum and coke that made her gag and she had screamed at him that she never wanted to see or hear the word rum again.

  Each soldier with his own story, yet if there was a prototype of the young men from Wisconsin who fought in Vietnam, it might be Daniel Patrick Sikorski. He was a third-generation Polish immigrant, the son of Edmund Sikorski, himself one of twelve children born to Joseph and Stella Sikorski, who came to Milwaukee from Krakow. Edmund Sikorski quit school after sixth grade and went to work, spending most of his career as a filler on the assembly line at Miller Brewing Company. He married Stella Kubiak, another southsider, and together they raised Danny and Diane in the familiar patterns of the Polish working class. They had a dog named Penny, vegetables in the backyard, a color portrait of Jesus in the living room, and latch hooks on the side door. There was a little cottage on Lake Lucerne up in Crandon where they enjoyed a two-week vacation every July and where Danny and Diane swam and fished, climbed the watchtower, and fed the deer. At Christmas they hung stockings on the fake fireplace, attended midnight mass and shared the oplatek, the blessed Polish wafers. Danny and Diane broke bread and exchanged good wishes and held their breath as they kissed cheeks and toasted with Mogen David wine. They went to church at Saint John Kanty an
d attended parish school in the early years. No one called him Ski on the south side. There would be no way to tell him apart from anyone else. His classmates in eighth grade were Tarczewski, Kucharski, Mikolajewski, Arciszewski, Mrochinski, Badzinski, Odachowski, Banaszynski, Kumelski, Benowski, Kitowski, Witowski, Szapowski, Kawczynski, Szutowski, Jaskolski, Moczynscki, Zlotkowski, Czerwinski, Kulwicki, and Danielewski.

  In preparation for life as a tradesman, Danny attended Milwaukee Boys Tech, where he played football and took an apprenticeship at Harnischfeger, a tool manufacturing plant. He was extremely close to his mother, a light-hearted talker like him. They shared a love for professional wrestling, and when matches came to the Milwaukee Arena, where he worked part-time as an usher, he made sure that she got tickets. He fell into a depression when his mother died suddenly at age forty-three, before he had finished high school. Neither he nor Diane knew anyone in their neighborhood who had gone to college. When he got his draft notice, Danny and a buddy enlisted in the army. His last trip home before heading for Vietnam was a furlough in late February. By then his father had remarried and moved to the north side and there was no bedroom for him, so he slept in the cold basement. He rode the city bus back to his old neighborhood and visited the Saint John Kanty priest, Father Czaja, and confessed that he thought he was going to die.