They Marched Into Sunlight (25 page)

The original plan called for two months of training for the new company, but the contingencies of war changed everything. First Welch was given a combat readiness date of October 12. Then it was late September. By the last week in August, his company was being yanked from its training schedule to protect the Lai Khe perimeter. “Right now I could take this company into just about anything and we would come out on top,” he wrote to Lacy one night that week. “I’m really proud of these Americans. They want to do a job and we are ready for anything. I hope I can give them what they need so that we can be ‘successful in combat.’ That phrase is in all the manuals and books I’ve been looking at for over 10 years—now it really has meaning.”

A
ND THESE SOLDIERS
of whom Welch was so proud, were they as determined as their commander to achieve “success in combat”? It depended, for many, on one’s definition of success. If it meant staying alive and getting back home, certainly.

“Right now I am back in the tower” guarding the perimeter, Mike Taylor wrote home to his parents in Alaska. “I am getting tired of this crap. I should jump out of the tower and break my leg. It’s worth a six-month profile, which means easy work. Christ, I’ll probably break my neck. I do the same crap every day & night. I can see now why you got out of the %*#% Army, dad. Anybody that stays in the outfit has to be crazy.”

Greg Landon, with characteristic sarcasm, told his parents that he was “hoping for a slow-healing, painless wound in a couple of months that will clean up around springtime of next year.”

Jackie E. Bolen Jr., the oldest of six children who grew up hunting and fishing in rural West Virginia, wrote home with increasing concern. He had arrived in Vietnam a few months before the C Packet men. His comrades respected him as a skilled soldier, and Lieutenant Welch had already made him a squad leader, but Bolen wanted to leave. Vietnam was nothing like he expected, and war was worse than he could have imagined. “You don’t know what it is to have to kill men or to watch your friends die,” Bolen said in a letter to his grandmother. “It’s even worse to have to carry them off the battlefield when you can’t even find a part of a body. Grandma, I don’t know what I ever done to deserve the hell that I am in.”

It was “just a Chicken Shit War,” Mike Troyer wrote home to his parents in Ohio. “The V.C. have everything in their favor, why should they resign to a peace treaty?” In his next letter Troyer presented an enlisted man’s brief against the army:

You asked about the Army and how things are over here. Well if I really got down to the nitty-gritty I’d use a lot of cuss words because that is the language fitting to use when discussing the army….

You wouldn’t know who you were fighting over here if it wasn’t for Charlies shooting at you. The sergeant fu-ks with you and the generals do. For instance you’ve been in the field a long time and you go out on patrols all day long. Now you got a nice perimeter set up with your foxholes and overhead cover on them. Well you are hot and tired and just plain pissed off. You come in and here some S.B. general comes in his bubble top chopper and looks over your perimeter in the boonies. Well he’s got out his ruler and decided your firing points are a half inch too far to the left. Then you have to tear the top off and move the firing point over. This takes hours when you work like hell. In our case it’s 6
P.M.,
you are tired and could work like hell to save your soul. Then you get maybe 3 hours sleep if you get out of pulling guard. So there’s two hours sleep and you’re back up and ready to go after Charlies before the sun even thinks about coming up…. Now you’re out all day long and what happens, another general comes in and says that very same about firing points are too far to the right by a half inch. Now I’ve really got a case of the ass because it has to be done all over again and you’re twice as tired as the night before. This goes on all day long and every day.

Now what really gives me a case of the ass is that for one thing I am going to be fighting from that foxhole not that S.B. of a general. And in the second case the damn thing was perfect to start with. I had a perfect field of fire I could cover my buddy and cover myself. But it wasn’t exactly by the book so it was wrong and do it again.

The whole damn war is run by the book and Charlie can’t read English so he gets all the breaks and we usually get killed.

Now after you’ve went through this routine just once your morale has went so far down it will never come back.

Now if the facts were known over here there would be real heartbreak. For the simple reason a man can only take so much and after a while he goes through the jungle pissed off at the army for so many reasons that I haven’t enough paper for. Also, he’s had sleep, according to the army, 2 hours a night. Everything is done in double time in the army, if you get 2 hours sleep they call it four. That goes except for the paycheck.

Now you take said GI walking through the jungle with his head up his ass pissed off at the world. First thing you know Charlie has blown him in little pieces with a claymore or else put a bullet between his eyes. Now don’t let no one tell you Charlie can’t shoot because there have been a hell of a lot of men killed with a bullet right between the eyes over here. Now then you got one American boy, soul sounds listening, average protester against the war in Vietnam (if he had a chance) killed. Why? Because the army would not leave him alone to fight a war with the knowledge he learned to fight with. They keep fu-king with him and making the whole damn thing a Disneyland war fought by a book with some S.B. in the sky in a chopper with no more intention of getting shot at as the man in the moon. He’s up there looking and waiting for a chance to bitch at something.

I’ve got three words for the army and I’ll tell LBJ himself or Westmoreland, makes no difference. “F——K The Army.”

C
LARK
W
ELCH,
the soldier’s soldier, was driven by his vision of an ideal, but he was not unaware of war’s chaotic effects. One night, as he was writing Lacy a letter, a call came in about a reckless shooting on the perimeter. “You won’t believe what happened,” he reported later. Two men from the battalion’s communications section, who had been assigned for that night to Delta company, got in a fight. One hit the other, “so naturally the second loaded his M16 and shot the first thru the heart.”
Dead man in front of Bunker fourteen.
By the time Welch arrived, all he could do was fill out forms, answer questions, and ruminate on why it happened. “I just don’t understand. No, I guess I do understand. Both men, I just found out, were pending discharge for being unsuitable for military service. They both had jail records and have IQ’s under 100. All this shooting and dying just got to be too much for some people and they react in odd ways. I guess it will be called ‘murder’—but it’s not as simple as that. A war is really something, Lacy. Some people can take it and others can’t.”

Snafu
—situation normal, all fucked up—was coined in the American army and followed it to Vietnam. Most things went right, but there was always something screwed up in Lai Khe. An air force pilot accidentally killed by Big Red One artillery, his wing struck by an eight-inch shell as he banked overhead to make the next pass with his napalm bombs. An infantryman wounding himself in the leg with his M-16. A radio operator shooting his buddy in the arm with his .45, mistakenly thinking a VC was sneaking up on him. Two patrols running into each other in the jungle and wounding five of their own men. Three soldiers hospitalized when a claymore mine exploded as they set it up. And now another call from the perimeter: this time a soldier on ambush patrol had taken too many pills. He was slapped awake and “dusted off”—taken by helicopter—back to camp, where his stomach was pumped, his life saved. Welch interviewed him there. “When I talked to him then, he said he wanted to kill himself and had taken 10-20 Darvon. He had gotten a letter from his fiancée that she was pregnant and was marrying another guy. He said he didn’t realize he was endangering the other guys on the patrol and he sure didn’t want to do that,” Welch recounted. “I asked if he was ready to come back to the company and be part of a team again. He said he’d come back if I ordered him to and he sure didn’t want to cause any trouble, but if he ever got his weapon back he’d shoot himself! Well, the Division psychiatrist and Division chaplains are taking turns with him now.”

Dealing with the local Vietnamese—sorting out the friendly, the benign, and the dangerous—was more difficult. When Delta Company was sent to a village near Lai Khe to practice what was called search and seal—surrounding a village and searching it for VC—the practice session immediately became real. The first troops on the scene encountered four men scampering out of a dilapidated hut. To Welch’s relief, his men “handled it real well—no shooting—they just grabbed the old men. By the time we’d finished we had 35 people. They were supposed to have been resettled in a refugee village about two miles away, but there wasn’t room so these 35 had just moved out and no one knew where they had gone to. Well, Delta 2/28 found them. The whole thing came off real well. These are the types of operations that can really help over here. So often on something like this—4-5 civilians are needlessly killed. Then we have to fight their friends and relatives for years afterwards.”

Who was who? It was a question that never went away. One night that same week Welch stopped an old man driving a truck down Highway 13 after the curfew. “I had to go out and explain to him that the road was closed at 1800 and no vehicles are supposed to move after that, and that he was lucky he hadn’t been shot, etc. etc. After seeing the old guy who really doesn’t know anything about curfews, road blocks, or anything—he just wants to bring the wood he’s cut down to Ben Cat and sell it—I really wonder about WARS and things. I’m so damn tired I can’t think right, but it sure is confusing.”

In his encounters with the Vietnamese as commander of Delta Company, Welch was haunted by one incident from his days running the recon platoon. Most of the time he could not afford to think about the people he was shooting at. In a sense he had tried to dehumanize the essential act of his job—killing human beings—by using descriptive lingo that was almost light-hearted: putting “little holes” in the enemy and “killing them real dead.” But early on the morning of May 16, for one brief moment, the hard walls he had built up to stave off empathetic emotion and perform his job collapsed. His platoon had been assigned to conduct a night ambush patrol about six miles west of Lai Khe in a joint mission with a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, the South Vietnamese equivalent of the National Guard. Big Red One intelligence reports indicated that the VC were using a certain trail late at night and early in the morning to move supplies. At noon on the fifteenth Welch and his men took their gun jeeps to a nearby village where they hooked up with the irregulars and rehearsed the action, plotting their moves on a pictograph map and a sand table, with Welch using his rudimentary Vietnamese when necessary. They planned an
L
-shaped ambush where the trail made a sharp bend as it paralleled a creek.

At midnight on a pitch-black night, they moved into position. Claymore mines lined the side of the trail. One machine gun was placed to fire straight down the trail, and two machine guns were hidden in locations down the long side of the
L
.

Welch, with his Car-15, a .45 pistol, and night vision scope, waited at the bend of the trail. The irregulars, serving as advance scouts, were to alert him by radio when they saw the VC coming, and he would trigger the ambush by firing a long burst from his semiautomatic. They waited through the night; every other man could sleep, according to Welch’s order, though he stayed awake. Just before first light the irregulars called quietly on the radio to report a squad of bicycles on the trail. Welch whispered to his men to get ready and pass the word down the line through short tugs on a string. Through his scope he saw the enemy coming into view—one soldier in front, followed by heavily loaded bicycles pushed by more troops. The first soldier was illuminated by a dim light; the others were nothing more than shadows. As the lead soldier reached the bend in the trail, Welch let loose, emptying the magazine of his Car-15. The claymore mines blew and his entire platoon started firing. It was over in a few minutes. “The noise, light and concussion of the claymores was incredible,” Welch recalled. The sounds and smells were overpowering. What moments before had been dense jungle was now leveled, only smoke and dust remaining. The Americans started yelling to each other that they were okay.

In front of Welch there was no sound or movement. The enemy seemed slumped in crumpled mounds on the trail. One bicycle remained upright, wedged against the wreckage. After calling in artillery to the left and right, Welch gave the signal for some of his men to go to the trail. He went with them, flashlight shining. The lead enemy soldier was sprawled on the far side of the trail, dressed in the black work clothes of a farmer, still holding his AK-47. Welch rolled him over on his back, took the rifle from his mangled hands, handed it to one of his men, and moved on to the next fallen enemy in line. This soldier, also carrying an AK-47 and dressed in the traditional work clothes of black pajamas, was lying in a heap of rice spilled from the bicycle load. Welch, on his knees, again pulled out the rifle and handed it to one of his soldiers. Then he ripped open the dead enemy’s shirt, looking for more ammunition. A flash of awareness washed over him, making him nauseous. The face had been hit and the body was badly shot up, but there were no wounds or blood on the chest, and there was no mistaking the white breasts, glistening in the darkness.

“It’s a girl,” a soldier standing above Welch shouted.

“No. God damn it, no!” Welch said.

But he knew it was a girl. He pulled her shirt over her and stepped back, his mind reeling. He could not search any more bodies himself. He stood and looked down at the young woman, this Viet Cong soldier in her black pajamas, her faced bloodied and ripped open, her legs crumpled under her, still partly covered by the bicycle and the rice, her conical hat torn and lying on the ground under her head, a ribbon tied under her chin—and he turned away and could not look again. The mission was called a “success.” Welch eventually was awarded a Bronze Star with “V” for his “heroism” in the ambush. But that one horrible sight, a quick and deep pang of awful recognition, stayed with him for the rest of his life, and it had nothing to do with success or heroism. From then on, as he trained soldiers for battle, starting with the new men of Delta Company, he made sure the training included role-playing in which soldiers dealt with enemies who happened to be women.