They Marched Into Sunlight (39 page)

A frontal attack? Welch looked at the map in disbelief.
Man, it can’t be. I have very good eyes and very good hearing and it can’t be. I must be misunderstanding that. That’s just a fucking arrow showing us going south. Where’s Shelton? Jesus Christ! That is crazy. We’re going to attack right into them?
It made little sense to Welch. They knew where the enemy troops were; why not bomb them for a day with B-52s and napalm and then tiptoe in with a small force to see what effect they had had, then tiptoe out again and bomb them again?

But here are the orders. Alpha and Delta go south. Delta leads. They leave at eight thirty. Make sure everyone has enough water. Looks like another long day.

Major Sloan sat down and Allen stood up. Any questions?

“Sir, I…,” Welch said. That was as far as he got.

Allen stared him down. “If you’re not ready to lead, we’ll get Alpha to lead.”

“Sir,” Welch said.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Allen responded.

It was a shorthand argument that was so brief and loaded with un-stated meaning that some officers in the room missed it completely.

One more thing. The command group was coming on the ground. Allen would walk with them. Here was another sensitive issue, another contradiction. The company commanders groused when Allen was in the air asking them to throw smoke to show where they were, yet in some ways they preferred his being up there to his being on the ground. Now they might be more defensive and worry too much about protecting the command group in their midst. In the jungle a commander could only see as far as the next tree. During a firefight, George thought, Allen could do them “more good from the air, from the standpoint of directing our artillery, bringing in the air, asking our headquarters for additional troops if there was a need for it, assessing the situation.” But this was not a debatable issue. Alpha would now lead. The command group would walk with Delta. Allen did not tell his commanders that he had been ordered to walk by Newman and Coleman.

When the meeting broke up, Welch and George met outside the tent. Welch told George that he would have his hands full the next morning. George questioned too the plan to walk straight south but thought he could handle it. As Welch turned to leave, Major Sloan emerged from the tent. “The colonel wants to see you,” he said. It was dark now; a Coleman lantern illuminated Allen’s face as he sat on the edge of his cot. He looked at Welch.
You wanted to say something?

The tension between the two men did not arise from disrespect. Allen thought the world of Welch as a soldier. “First Lieutenant Albert C. Welch is one of the most outstanding officers with whom I have had the pleasure to serve,” Allen had written in Welch’s last U.S. Army Officer Efficiency Report. “Due to his exemplary performance of duty he was one of the few First Lieutenants selected to serve as a company commander in the First Infantry Division. His performance was characterized by the highest standards of leadership, aggressiveness, determination, maturity and sound judgment. He organized, trained and led a fourth rifle company of his battalion…. He is mature, cool and courageous in combat and has the ability to simultaneously look after the welfare of his men without sacrificing his mission.” If Allen was dismissive of Welch now, it was a reflection of the pressure he felt from above.

Welch did not have his own Plan B but made it clear that he did not like Plan A. “Jesus Christ, sir,” he said to Allen. “We’re going to get our ass kicked, sir. I was right there. I believe that’s the base camp. And we’re going to sneak up on them?” Allen listened but said nothing.

At the same hour in Lai Khe there was a nightly briefing of the division staff at the operations center. Charts, grease pencils, map overlays, all nice and neat and direct,
bing, bing, bing.
The room was juiced, everyone eager. It had been a good day, and the plan for the morning looked solid. There were three battalions out there on the move. Dauntless—shorthand for Terry Allen’s 2/28 Black Lions—was closest to the elusive Viet Cong regiment and had its marching orders. The artillery fire bases were ready. Finding the enemy was the name of the game.
Hope Dauntless has good hunting,
they said.

W
ELCH RETURNED TO
D
ELTA’S POSITION
inside the perimeter. He pulled out his pocket-sized flip-up spiral notebook, dark green with
MEMORANDUM
embossed in gold on the cover, and wrote out orders that he would give to his platoon and squad leaders. Five straightforward paragraphs: the general situation, the mission, the concept of the mission, the logistics, and command and signal. He presented it the same way every day to maintain a sense of order and stability—even if, as in this case, parts of the larger order made little sense to him. He spent the next few hours pacing the camp, talking to his men. Tomorrow they would be in a big fight, he said. They were in a fight today, but tomorrow would be big. He went over to his weapons platoon to set up a plan, figuring that as rear company he would have no control of artillery, so it was important to have his mortars ready. He tried to remain outwardly positive, but some of his boys sensed that he was upset.
The man is steamed,
Santiago Griego said to Faustin Sena.

Big fight,
is the most Welch would say.
Bring all the ammunition you can carry.
No mention of water, nothing about food.
Just bring all the ammunition you can carry.
George spread a similar message to his leaders in Alpha.

In their bunkers the troops were apprehensive. Michael Arias wrote a letter to his mother, Julia H. Arias, on Sixth Street in Douglas, Arizona, saying that Shenandoah II “might make the headlines back home.” He and his buddies stayed up most of the night. No one could sleep. Carl Woodard, an Alpha squad leader, walked the perimeter and noticed that his men were “talking about the bad things.” Nobody was drinking beer. Resupply had brought Coke and beer, and the beer sat there. Sometimes they drank because they were scared. Now they were too scared to drink. Peter Miller sat near a fellow draftee, a kid from Alabama who “never should have been in the army in the first place,” Miller thought. When they were eating dinner, the kid had been “shaking so bad he couldn’t hold a spoon”—and he was still shaking in the bunker hours later.
Jeez, this is terrible,
Miller thought.
This just isn’t right.
Joe Costello, a Catholic, but not particularly religious, said “a couple of extra prayers.” He prayed for his girlfriend and his family.

There was a lot of chatter among the guys.
There’s big time stuff going on out there. There’s a lot of enemy and we’re going out and A company’s into it and the shit’s gonna fly.
Rumors raced from bunker to bunker among the enlisted men. Costello was next to Michael Gallagher and Allan V. Reilly, the squadmates feeling spiffy in their clean new clothes. Reilly was older, street savvy, an operator who liked to talk about women and gambling and who would somehow disappear when the company was back at Lai Khe. The guys respected him as the toughest fighter in his platoon, someone who actually wanted to walk point, but they were “a little scared of him” and they were all ears now as he declared that “if the shit hits the fan,” he was “going to get gone.”

Ray Albin of the Delta weapons platoon had a brief conversation with “a guy named Schroder” that night. It was Jack Schroder, the would-be dental technician who had sailed across the Pacific with C Packet.

“How’d it go today?” Albin asked.

“Well, we ran into some stuff,” Schroder said. “Lot of lead flying.”

“Good you got out,” Albin said.

Schroder showed him his M-16. “One took it right there,” he said, pointing to where an enemy bullet had struck the rifle. “Man, I was lucky.” His weapon, he said, had saved his life.

Chapter 13

Michigan Men

O
N THE SIXTEENTH OF
O
CTOBER,
in time for dinner and his customary pair of after-meal manhattans, the recruiter from Dow Chemical Company arrived in Madison and checked in at the Ivy Inn, a two-story red brick motor hotel and restaurant ten blocks west of the Wisconsin campus along University Avenue. He registered under the name Robert Miller. It was an alias that Dow representatives had begun using in potentially hostile situations, in case antiwar protesters came looking. In this instance, in case they came looking for a recruiter named William L. Hendershot, known to his friends as Curly.

Curly Hendershot at age fifty-five was new to the recruiting game but old to Dow. He had worked for the headquarters in Midland, Michigan, since 1942, most of his adult life. Dow was that sort of place, a paternalistic company in a company town. One needed only to examine the listed occupations of forty-eight citizens on a typical page—page 521—of the 1960
Midland City Directory
to see how deeply the chemical company had saturated the community. Fifteen, nearly a third, were Dow employees: Heindel the patent attorney, Heintsill the technician, Heisman the supervisor, Helmreich the chemist, Helt the welder, Hembree the products manager, Heminger the electrician, Henderson the building superintendent, Henderson the utilityman, Hendrickson and Henninger the office secretaries, Hennis the chemist, Henry the machinist, Henry the supervisor, and Hendershot, William L., the department supervisor.

During most of his tenure at Dow, Hendershot had supervised communications services. He became so identified with the department that company telephone operators were often referred to by Dow’s male executives as “Hendershot’s Harem.” The connotation was more sexist than sexual: Curly was a God-fearing married man, conservative, but not without his own flair. He was a precise dresser, his row of business suits always lined up facing the same way on hangers in his closet. He wore white shirts, cufflinks, and black-rimmed glasses; smoked Camels; played golf; exercised three times a week; and drank those two cocktails after supper. He was about five foot eight and wiry, and clinging tenuously to the sides of his balding head were the last thin remnants of the curly black hair that had inspired his nickname.

Hendershot had worked his way up at Dow without a college degree. Management kept giving him chances and he took advantage of each one. They sent him to Europe to set up their communications office in Rotterdam for a few years, then brought him back and made him a recruiter, a job for which Curly had a natural aptitude. His daughter, Sherlynn Hendershot, who was in college at Michigan State during those years, described him as the classic “hail-fellow-well-met” who exuded positive feelings. In that he exemplified the Dow corporate personality. “Everything at Dow was positive superlative,” the wife of one executive explained. Curly also excelled at secondary relationships. When his daughter went with him to the grocery, gas station, or drugstore, strangers seemed to know him and would call him by his nickname. He was happy among like-minded folks but had no use for taxes, welfare, liberals, long hair, or dissent. Sherlynn, who was growing to distrust the government and dislike the war in Vietnam, tried to avoid those issues when she was with him, but there was a strain in the father-daughter relationship nonetheless. It would not enter his mind that there were parts of society that needed to be changed, she said. To him, the antiwar movement was nothing more than “kids who don’t know how to behave and needed discipline.”

This was not Hendershot’s first trip to Madison. He and fellow recruiter A. K. Prince had been on campus during the demonstrations against Dow the previous February, when then-Chancellor Fleming bailed out the arrested students. The Dow men were caught in the middle of the action then, confronted by angry, jeering students who called them “baby killers” and “good Germans.” Their job placement interviews persisted despite the hubbub, and they even had more appointments than usual, though it was often difficult for them to carry on conversations above the hallway din outside the interview rooms. It had been an unsettling experience for accentuate-the-positive Curly, and he returned to Midland complaining that he didn’t see why the authorities “couldn’t just throw those people in jail and keep them there.”

Shortly after that episode Hendershot’s boss in the recruiting department, Ramon F. Rolf, was summoned to the office of Dow’s president and chief operating officer, Herbert Dow (Ted) Doan, grandson of the company’s founder, Herbert Henry Dow. “Sit down, Ray, let’s talk about this,” Rolf later remembered Doan saying to him, referring to the campus protests. “What is your position? How do you intend to handle this?” Rolf responded that he had talked to the recruiters and developed a position. “We go back year after year,” he said. “We know the placement director, we know the faculty, and we have job opportunities for the students, and I think we ought to continue to go and hold a hard line and do that until we are not welcome. We are going to go and behave as gentlemen. If they tell us not to come, we don’t want to go if we are not welcome.”

Doan smiled and said, “That’s great. You’ve got the whole problem in your hands. Let me know if you need me.”

It was a familiar response, similar to what Doan had said to Ned Brandt, his director of publicity, when Brandt had suggested that Dow send a delegation to the Pentagon to discuss the anti-Dow protests and how the chemical company, rather than the military, was taking most of the heat over the war.
Good idea, go do it,
Doan had said then. In both instances this seemed to be more a reflection of the corporation’s delegate-to-the-troops management philosophy than of any effort by Doan to avoid the napalm controversy.

From the outside Dow appeared narrow and inbred, a stunningly homogeneous institution run since the turn of the century by conservative midwestern, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, all carefully molded in the personality of the original old man Dow, an inventive chemist who first settled in central Michigan because of the area’s rich deposits of ancient brine. The board of directors was made up solely of Dow executives, with no outsiders to infuse it with differing perspectives. It began as a curious college of chemical cardinals with H. H. Dow as pope. In the old days you knew when a debate had ended and a disagreement had been resolved, at least in Dow’s mind, when he would break into song. “I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,” he would croon, and soon the entire board of white Michigan men would be singing along, their gentle voices calling to “Old Black Joe” as they filtered out of the board room in capitalist harmony.