They Marched Into Sunlight (69 page)

Among the new Black Lions was Phil Duncan, a dropout from the University of Missouri at Kansas City who had signed up for a four-year stint in the army believing that he might avoid Vietnam by enlisting rather than waiting to get drafted. No such luck. He ended up in Lai Khe and was in his second week of jungle training when the Black Lions were devastated and he was called in as a replacement. If he was not already anxious enough about Vietnam, his introduction to the battalion was sufficiently traumatizing. In every tent were bunks where men now dead had slept. Duncan had managed to convince himself when he arrived in Vietnam that if he “kept his head down and obeyed orders” he would survive. Now that confidence was shattered. He felt as though he had “been operating under a myth. Anything could happen to you, and probably would. It was paralyzing that your fate was the luck of the draw.”

At night, in the tent or down at the enlisted men’s club, soldiers who had survived the battle recounted the experience. They were seething men, angry that they had been led into an ambush. Their buddies died, they told Duncan and other replacements, because of Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, General Hay, and Lieutenant Colonel Allen. They had seen the worst of battle and felt that only those who went through it with them could understand. The ambush might have been an unmitigated disaster, but nothing upset them more than to hear outsiders question the battlefield effort of those who fought. Carl Woodard, who had marched into the jungle that day as a nineteen-year-old sergeant in Alpha and come out alive, was at the club drinking a beer and watching a John Wayne movie when he heard a new second lieutenant behind him “running off his mouth” about how the Black Lions would have lived if they’d had “their heads out of their fuckin’ asses” on the seventeenth. Woodard turned around and asked him to stop, but the new lieutenant only grew bolder. “And all you fuckin’ guys, if you don’t listen to me, you’ll get killed just like the dumbass fucks on the seventeenth!” he ranted. Woodard rose from his chair and slugged the lieutenant twice, then chased him out of the club into the darkness.

What he had done, Woodard realized, striking a commissioned officer, could be grounds for court-martial. He was not certain that the second lieutenant would report him, but he took no chances. He went to Alpha headquarters, found Lieutenant Grady, and essentially turned himself in, telling Grady what offense he had committed and why. “Woody, what the fuck have you done?” Grady said to him, after hearing the story. He told Woodard to go to his bunk and stay there until he was called. Grady stayed up late into the night pondering how to handle the case. His friend and leader, Captain George, was in the hospital. The kid he had become close to during the voyage across the Pacific on the USNS
Pope,
Private Farrell, was dead, along with so many other of his soldiers. Woody’s punch was a blow for them all, but it was also against regulations. He had to be punished. In the end, after conferring with the new battalion commander, Lou Menetrey, Woodard’s officers gave the young sergeant a slap on the wrist, an Article 15, confined him to base camp for a thirty-day suspension, two weeks without pay. Decades later, fondly recalling the incident, his Black Lions buddies would label Woody “the battalion disciplinarian.”

“T
ODAY IS THE
nineteenth of October,” Delta survivor Mike Troyer drawled into his tape recorder that evening, preparing another reel for his parents in western Ohio. “Got one letter. Tell everybody I’m still kicking. I want to get off line. Drive a truck or something. Some easy job. The tape’s pretty short. Don’t have much more to say. I’m still alive and all. You can tell everybody. If you get anything in the papers about Shenandoah II, you can send it to me. I want to see the papers and how they’re gonna lie about it. See what they’re gonna say. ’Cause I know what happened out there. I wanna see what they’ll say about it. They’ll say things we really didn’t do.”

At the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, Greg Landon was still waiting for his back to be resewn, and since he was in better shape than the other wounded, he had spent most of that Friday assisting the staff. As he moved from bed to bed, the Professor tried to learn more about who had died in the battle. “I have very little information yet as to just who was hit,” he wrote home to his family in New York State. What he had learned was horrifying enough. The other two squads in his platoon had been wiped out, including the lieutenant and his sergeants. By the luck of where they were positioned, the men in his squad were the only ones to all survive. “It really can unnerve a person to go through that mess,” he wrote. “October 17—I’ll remember that day.”

Nearby, at the Twenty-fourth Evacuation Hospital, Jim George took out his American Red Cross stationery and wrote another letter home to his wife, Jackie, in Spartanburg. “Feel about the same today,” the wounded Alpha commander reported. “My right eye is almost swelled shut, but I can see a little out of it. Gen. Hay (Div. Co.) came by to see me today. He said we did a good job…. The psychology of all of it hasn’t registered yet. I keep having nightmares of men dying and yelling out, but hope that will all pass with time.”

Chapter 26

“Tragedy Beyond
Our Words”

B
ILL
S
EWELL AWOKE
to a shattered world. He had begun his job as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin only a few months earlier with a euphoric sense that he and a collegial academy could construct a liberal pragmatist ideal in Madison. Now that grand notion lay in ruins, broken amid the blood and chaos of the Commerce Building. He was angry and depressed and could not bring himself to place the blame entirely on others. He could not fault only a faculty that, against his advice, had voted to allow the Dow Chemical Company to recruit on campus; nor the police who, to his horror, had marched into the swarm of demonstrators with nightclubs raised high; nor the students who, to his dismay, had rejected pleas to end their unlawful assembly. This was the worst of situations, where he could find no single scapegoat upon whom to focus his wrath. Sewell felt badly served by everyone, including himself. Bascom Hall was the last place he wanted to be now, so he spent the morning of October 19 holed up at his house, dodging phone calls, taking only a few from his closest faculty friends, wondering how he would be received at the three thirty faculty meeting, and preparing his own defense.

Paul Soglin had run through a range of emotions since that moment inside Commerce when he curled into the fetal position to protect his body against police clubs. First fear washed over him, then anger, then sadness, but by the end of that day, with the mass rally in the darkness on the library mall, it struck him that the violent confrontation—shorthanded into police brutality—had sparked a combustive reaction in the larger student body that years of speeches about Vietnam had not. Now, on the morning after, he was invigorated by the sudden prospect of a mass audience and his enhanced role as cochairman of the Committee on Student Rights, an ad hoc group that had been formed the night before to lead the strike.

Madison had made the evening news. The networks and big city papers were sending correspondents to town. There was a stirring sensation of being part of something larger, of Madison making its mark on the national movement as it swept across the country that week. Antiwar leaders in New York and Washington would take notice of the scrappy little band of demonstrators on the midwestern campus who had stood up to the war machine and had their heads bashed. Soglin made his way up Bascom Hill at the unlikely hour of eight thirty for the first rally of the day, attended by nearly two thousand students. It was held on the steps near the statue of Lincoln, whose noble face was covered with a gas mask.

This was not Old Abe’s sort of day. The prevailing mood was malice toward all and charity for none. Several speakers, including Soglin, who wore his sheepskin coat unbuttoned in the bright morning sun, attacked the university for sending police into the Commerce Building and urged students to express their disapproval by boycotting classes. The circus atmosphere of the morning before was gone, along with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose members had packed their costumes and instruments into the blue-paneled truck and were driving their raucous caravan out of town, traveling southwest on Route 151 toward Iowa City, where, as Ron Davis put it, they would “see what mischief we might stir up” at the University of Iowa.

In place of the mime agitators, the morning crowd was now filled with unexpected faces. Much as the night before on the library mall, some people were attending their first demonstration. James Hadden, a freshman from Madison, came to the rally displaying a visual statement of his changing sensibility, a “nonconformist jean jacket.” For Hadden, who still lived at home, on the west side, with a father who was a veteran of World War II, this was all new. He listened to Soglin connect the university to the “war machine” and denounce Sewell and Kauffman for lying to the students. He heard rumors rippling through the crowd about how police had clubbed girls in the midsection and had ruptured the uterus of one.
Look up there,
someone said, and Hadden noticed men in trenchcoats perched on the roofs of nearby buildings, focusing down on the scene with binoculars and cameras. He thought he might be put on “some subversive list by the FBI and considered a commie sympathizer.” Should he be there or not? He found no easy answer. It made him uncomfortable to think that he was among “the students who could afford to go to school, protesting against the establishment, while poor kids who couldn’t afford to go were fighting for the establishment” in Vietnam. Just standing there with the activists made him feel guilty, yet he was also thinking, “I’m a student and I’ve got to break the home ties and I don’t like the war.”

When the rally ended, picket lines were set up in front of major buildings on campus. The most boisterous picketing took place outside Bascom Hall and Commerce, where several dozen students chanted and carried homemade signs and banners that had been constructed overnight. “Stop Administration Brutality.” “Cops OFF!” “Strike against Police Brutality.” “Support Strike.” “Get Out of Vietnam.” “Police Brutality—Kill It Before It Multiplies!” Several students entered Bascom and stood outside Sewell’s office holding a sign that read “
J’accuse
William Sewell—Student Blood Is on Your Hands.” As another measure of how things had changed in twenty-four hours, the strike now had the blessing of Wisconsin Student Association leaders, who had opposed the obstructive sit-in the day before. Steve Richter, the WSA vice president, said that police brutality, not the war or Dow, was now the issue. The president of the National Student Association, Ed Schwartz, was on his way to Madison from Washington, D.C., arriving at Bascom Hill in time for the second rally of the day there, where he would say that the country was being “ripped apart at the seams” and that the actions at Wisconsin marked “the beginning of a long, hard struggle for politicization of American students.”

The strike was also supported by movement-oriented graduate teaching assistants who had begun organizing themselves that year in the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA). About 150 teaching assistants had met as an ad hoc group late Wednesday night, after the rally on the library mall, and had decided to support the student strike. Bob Muehlenkamp, then a leader of the Wisconsin TAA, who went on to become a reform organizer for the Teamsters, explained the group’s decision in a pamphlet about the strike and its aftermath. “Like everyone else on campus, the TAs had been deeply troubled by the day’s events and were carried along by their emotion,” Muehlenkamp wrote. “Certainly some response seemed necessary—and a particular form was already available: to strike. Also, TAs consider themselves as teachers to sympathize with and represent the student point of view. We thus felt impelled to join the strike because the students had already decided on it, and because TAs were expected to and indeed wanted to unite with the students in the protest. It now seems clear that these forces were strong enough to cause us, even before we met, to make up our minds to participate in the strike.” Since the decision seemed obvious, Muehlenkamp wrote, there was no discussion of issues, only tactics. They settled on three: first, that they would wear armbands reading “TA on strike”; second, that they would “depart from the normal academic routine by bringing their students outside the classroom to join the strike and to discuss the issues”; and third, that they would circulate a petition supporting teaching assistants and other graduate students and faculty against administrative reprisals.

In the end 302 TAs signed the petition, about one-seventh of the two thousand teaching assistants on the Wisconsin campus. Lynne Cheney was among those in the English department who rejected the petition and continued teaching. Her husband, Dick Cheney, the political science graduate assistant, found the picketers “a minor hassle” as he made his way through campus with his stacks of computer data cards.

The first picketers stationed outside Music Hall on the bottom of Bascom Hill were not teaching assistants but John Pickart and Everett Goodwin, the strings section pacifists who had witnessed the events inside Commerce. The music school “in its typical manner kept right on rolling along, oblivious to the real world,” Pickart reported in a letter he wrote later to his friend and fellow cellist, Pam Crane. “Even so, we really shook it up some.” Before class they walked inside and talked to students and professors, explaining why they were striking, then walked out and picketed the entrance. The music school held its weekly all-school convocation that day, a one-hour session that music majors were required to attend every Thursday, and Pickart and Goodwin and several allies marched in and stood in the aisles holding signs. “Music students are inventive, and we had some good signs, although somewhat irrelevant to the question,” Pickart reported to Crane. “Johannes Brahms Not Tear Gas Bombs,” “Mahler Not Mauler,” “Hammerklavier Not Well-Tempered Students,” and “Music Strikes Keys and Classes” were mixed in with signs deploring police brutality.