They Marched Into Sunlight (2 page)

Cheney, Lynne: UW doctoral student in English literature

Cheney, Richard B.: UW graduate student in political science and future vice president

Cipperly, Jack: UW assistant dean of students

Cohen, Robert: UW graduate student and leftist orator

Coyote, Peter: San Francisco Mime Troupe actor

Davis, Ronald G.: San Francisco Mime Troupe director

Dietrich, Cathy: UW student politician and Soglin girlfriend

Doan, Herbert Dow: Dow Chemical Company president and grandson of founder

Dow, H. H.: Dow Chemical Company founder

Edelson, Morris: UW English graduate student and
Quixote
editor

Emery, William: Madison chief of police

Fleming, Robben: UW chancellor before Sewell

Gabriner, Bob: UW history graduate student and
Connections
editor

Gabriner, Vicki: UW graduate student and mime artist

Genack, Judy: UW senior and March on the Pentagon participant

Gerstacker, Carl: Dow Chemical Company chairman

Goldberg, Harvey: UW professor of European history

Goodman, Jerilyn: UW freshman and observer

Goodwin, Everett: UW music school student at Dow demonstration

Hanson, Ralph: UW chief of protection and security

Harrington, Fred Harvey: UW president

Harrington, Jack: Police inspector

Haslach, Henry: UW Students for a Democratic Society leader

Hendershot, William (Curly): Dow Chemical Company college recruiter

Julian, Percy: Madison lawyer representing student activists

Kaplan, William: UW junior and antiwar activist at Dow demonstration

Kauffman, Joseph: UW dean of student affairs

Keene, David A.: UW graduate student and Young Americans for Freedom chairman

Krasny, Michael: UW English teaching assistant and Dow demonstration observer

Lenburg, Norm:
Wisconsin State Journal
photographer of Stielstra picture

Leonard, Jerris: Wisconsin senate majority leader and Nixon supporter

Leslie, Jack: Dane County deputy sheriff

Lipp, Jonathan: High school senior and March on the Pentagon participant

McCarthy, Tom: Madison police detective injured at Dow demonstration

McGovern, Susan: UW sociology senior at Dow demonstration

McMillin, Miles: Editor of the
Capital Times,
Madison’s liberal newspaper

Menacher, Betty: UW freshman inside Commerce Building during demonstration

Mosse, George: UW European history professor and expert on nationalism

Nathan, Eric: UW junior at Dow demonstration

Oberdorfer, Michael: UW graduate student and
Connections
photographer

Pickart, John: UW music school student and observer of Dow demonstration

Reiter, Michael: UW doctoral student and lawyer for antiwar protesters

Roehling, Al: Madison police officer at demonstration

Rolf, Ray: Dow Chemical Company director of recruiting

Roseleip, Gordon: Conservative orator in Wisconsin senate

Rowen, Jim: UW English graduate student at Dow demonstration

Schiro, George: Madison police captain inside Commerce Building

Seward, William B.: Dow Chemical Company publicist

Sewell, William: UW chancellor in 1967 and professor of sociology

Shapiro, Marshall: WKOW radio news reporter

Simons, Billy: UW student leader at Dow demonstration

Smail, R. W.: UW history professor and expert on Vietnam

Smith, Kent: UW student and March on the Pentagon participant

Soglin, Paul: UW graduate student at Dow demonstration and future Madison mayor

Stark, Evan: UW sociology graduate student and leader of Dow demonstration

Steiner, Alison: High school senior and March on the Pentagon participant

Stielstra, Jonathan: UW junior who cut American flag cable atop Bascom Hall

Wagner, Dave: UW student and
Connections
writer

Wheadon, Dave: Worker at Oscar Mayer and March on the Pentagon participant

Williams, William Appleman: UW history professor and theorist on American imperialism

Zeitlin, Maurice: UW sociology professor and antiwar activist

Washington Story

Califano, Joseph: White House assistant to the president

Cater, Douglass: White House assistant to the president

Christian, George: White House press secretary

Christopher, Warren: Assistant attorney general

Clark, Ramsey: Attorney general

Fortas, Abe: Supreme Court justice and LBJ confidant

Helms, Richard: Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Johnson, Lady Bird: First lady of the United States

Johnson, Lynda Bird: Daughter of the president

Johnson, Lyndon Baines: President of the United States

Johnson, Tom: Assistant press secretary, note taker

Katzenbach, Nicholas: Deputy secretary of state

Kissinger, Henry: Harvard professor and Johnson administration consultant

Leonhart, William: Assistant to the president

McNamara, Robert S.: Secretary of defense

Robb, Charles S.: Marine Corps major, Wisconsin graduate, future LBJ son-in-law

Rostow, Walt V.: National security adviser

Rusk, Dean: Secretary of state

Wheeler, Earle G.: Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman

A Brief Preface

T
HIS BOOK
is shaped around two events that occurred contemporaneously during two days in the sixties—October 17 and 18, 1967. The first was an ambush in Vietnam that occurred when the Black Lions, a renowned battalion of the First Infantry Division, marched into the jungle on a search-and-destroy mission forty-four miles northwest of Saigon. The second was a demonstration at the University of Wisconsin where antiwar protestors staged a sit-in aimed at preventing the Dow Chemical Company, manufacturers of napalm, from recruiting on the Madison campus. The title is taken from the first line of “Elegy” by Bruce Weigl, a poem about U.S. infantrymen in Vietnam marching into sunlight on their way to a deadly ambush. But the image applies to all the people of this book who were caught up in the battles of war and peace during that turbulent era. Soldiers in Southeast Asia, student protesters in the United States, President Johnson and his advisers at the White House—they lived in markedly different worlds that were nonetheless dominated by the same overriding issue, and they all, in their own ways, seemed to be marching toward ambushes in those bright autumn days of 1967.

Book One

Some say that we shall never know and that to the Gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

—Thornton Wilder,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Chapter 1

Sailing to Vung Tau

T
HE SOLDIERS REPORTED
one by one and in loose bunches, straggling into Fort Lewis from late April to the end of May 1967, all carrying orders to join a unit called C Packet. Not brigade, battalion, or company, but packet. No one at the military base in Washington State had heard of C Packet until then. It was a phantom designation conceived by military planners to meet the anxious demands of war.

The early arrivals were billeted on the far northern rim of the army base in a rotting wooden barracks with flimsy walls known derisively as “the pit.” Many of them checked in at night after long flights and bus rides from forts in Louisiana and Texas or home leaves in the Midwest, and for them morning sunlight revealed an ethereal vision. Out the window, in the distance, rose majestic Mount Rainier. But after gaping at the snowcapped peak, they had little to do. Some were attached temporarily to an engineering battalion, the 339th, but they had no duties. A captain named Jim George, trim and handsome, a marathon runner fresh from the Eighth Infantry Division in Germany, led them through morning calisthenics and long-distance running, which was a drag except for the sight of flaccid lieutenants wheezing and dropping to one knee. One lazy Saturday they organized a picnic at the beach club and grilled hamburgers but ran out of beer, so a young officer rounded up a squad of privates and marched them to the PX and back on a mission for more. It was perhaps the best executed training maneuver of their stay.

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.