They Marched Into Sunlight (80 page)

Even more than the inaccurate depictions of the battle concocted earlier by General Westmoreland and his MACV publicists, the Silver Star orders for General Hay described events that were unrecognizable to the Black Lions soldiers whose lives were forever shaped by that single bloody day. The documents supporting his Silver Star award are missing. The commanding general’s name does not even appear in accounts of the battle provided by high-ranking officers who would have been in closest contact with him. This was not Handsome John Hay’s finest hour. In retrospect his comments disparaging Terry Allen seemed graceless and hypocritical.

Allen was gone but the war was not, and even in places like El Paso, where military service and patriotism were considered synonymous, the burden of war was getting heavier. “Feeling the War,” read the headline over an editorial in the
El Paso Times
days after Allen’s death. “Every war in modern history has taken its toll of El Paso young men,” the editorial began, citing the two world wars and Korea:

Now the war in Vietnam is no different. We have seen stories and pictures in the local newspapers of our young men who have fallen in that far-off land. News came [recently] of the death in action of a member of one of our more prominent families—Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., son of a famous general in World War II, a man who has lived among us for a long time and who married an El Paso girl. Every war is brought home to us in one form or another. Our sons lose their lives. Others are wounded. We make sacrifices. Still wars go on and on.

Casualty lists do one of two things: Either they make a nation angry or they make a nation weary. We wonder what casualty lists in the war in Vietnam will do to the American people. Those lists are growing longer and longer. We in El Paso know that only too well.

Friends and family gathered at General and Mrs. Allen’s house after the burial. Jean came and was relieved that a few people were friendly to her: Kiko Schuster and Terry’s friend Maury Kemp and the Calhouns, a farm family. Bebe Coonly was amazed to see that Jean could plow into this crowd with a smile on her face. In midafternoon Jean left for an appointment, leaving the three girls to stay with their grandmother. She drove to Channel 13, where she worked, and met with a production team from
ABC News
in New York, who were in town to report on the transfer of 437 acres of borderland known as El Chamizal from the U.S. back to Mexico. Vice President Humphrey was coming to El Paso the next day, and President Johnson the day after that.

It was the biggest political story in El Paso in years, and Jean Allen, who knew the local players because of her weekly television show, had agreed to help set things up for the network team. As the meeting started, she apologized if she seemed a bit distracted. “I buried my husband today,” she explained.

The production crew was baffled, to say the least.

T
HE WAVE OF DISSENT
that had rolled from the West Coast across America the previous week was now ripping back, like a tide, from the East. Dow and napalm were the focus again of antiwar protests on several college campuses. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at about the time of Terry Allen’s funeral, four hundred students from Harvard and Radcliffe began an eight-hour siege in a conference room, where they held Dr. Frederick Leavitt, director of Dow’s eastern research labs, captive. There was no violence, no police charge, but Harvard administrators said the protest leaders would face a year’s suspension. At the University of Illinois in Champaign, the Dow recruiter never got to his appointments that day. He was blocked from entering the interview room by demonstrators, who were isolated and waited out by academic officials determined to avoid a replay of the Wisconsin disaster. In Minneapolis, at the University of Minnesota, twenty students began a peaceful sit-in at the campus placement office and announced that they would fast for forty-eight hours to “express compassion for the innocent victims” of napalm.

In Madison the action had moved to the courts, where plaintiff Paul Soglin, lawyer Percy Julian, and the Dow protest leaders were celebrating a minor victory. Federal judge James E. Doyle had temporarily restrained university officials from disciplining students involved in the Commerce clash until he could decide on the constitutionality of the school’s regulations on obstructive demonstrations. His decision did not affect the criminal cases being prepared against several students involved in the protest. Michael Oberdorfer, the
Connections
photographer, heard that the police were looking for him soon after he got back in town from the march in Washington. He asked his stepbrother to examine his apartment at 548 West Main Street to see if there was anything incriminating up there. The authorities had Oberdorfer’s name and address because he had told them explicitly how to spell his name and where he lived, all in the heat of the protest, in an attempt to show that he had more conviction about his actions than officers who refused to wear their badges had about theirs. Now the police were on their way to charge him with disorderly conduct for pushing an officer.

Curly Hendershot was back in Midland by then, telling Dow colleagues about his harrowing hours inside the Commerce Building. There had been more than a hundred campus protests against Dow in the year since the first were held in October 1966 at Wayne State in Detroit and the University of California at Berkeley, but the sit-in at Wisconsin caused by far the most reverberations; it marked a point where the tactics of protest changed. A line graph charting the number of stories written about Dow during 1966 and 1967 showed two jagged peaks—the first Wisconsin protest on February 22, 1967, and the second Wisconsin incident on October 18. Dow I, as the February protest became known, pushed the number of stories around the country over the thousand mark for the first time. Dow II marked an explosion of coverage, with nearly two thousand newspaper articles and editorials.

To Dow executives the publicity was considered an oddly mixed blessing. They were reassured by the fact that virtually all of the hundreds of editorials were positive about Dow, or negative about the protests, and in any case provided Dow what public relations director Ned Brandt called “fantastic visibility.” A public opinion survey that fall, conducted by Dow’s in-house marketing pollster, showed that 88 percent of the respondents had heard of the Dow Chemical Company, making it nearly as recognized as U.S. Steel. On the other hand, Dow’s increased visibility was tied almost entirely to napalm. Almost half the respondents now identified Dow as a supplier of napalm, a remarkable increase from 1966, when only one person in a hundred could make the connection. And one in five now thought Dow was interested only in war profits.

In the aftermath of the Wisconsin mess, Dow intensified its public relations effort, launching what Brandt called “Phase 2.” The first phase, aimed largely at trying to minimize the damage, included Brandt’s March 1967 visit to the Pentagon, at which he tried to persuade the Department of Defense to take responsibility for the napalm controversy. The second phase would be more aggressive.

Brandt and his team of publicists started publishing an internal newsletter called “Napalm News” that presented top corporate officials with detailed reports on the latest protests and other events related to napalm. Public relations men were assigned to accompany recruiters to campuses where demonstrations appeared likely, bringing along new press kits that included a revised policy statement on napalm, an annual report, a list of Dow officials and their telephone numbers, a pamphlet on Dow’s nine hundred products, and statements by the military about the necessity of napalm. Where before Dow officials sought to avoid napalm debates, they now looked for opportunities to tell their story. Herbert Dow Doan, the president, was pushed forward to serve as the company spokesman, and by necessity overcame his earlier reluctance to take a visible role in the napalm discussion. Doan’s byline was placed on an essay Brandt wrote explaining Dow’s position on napalm, a piece later published in the
Wall Street Journal.
His essay would be part of a double-barreled media attack, the other half being the release of the letter McNamara had signed back in March.

Dow also undertook an internal program to explain its napalm position to the company’s thirty-five thousand employees, of whom only a minuscule few dozen worked on the production of napalm. Discussion groups were formed in Midland to encourage new ways of thinking about the controversy, provoking a constant round of memos circulating through the corporate offices. “Short of ending the war, I don’t think it is possible to force a climax of this issue,” wrote William B. Seward, one of the public relations men sent out to the campus battlefields. “In considering napalm, I think we should look at it very realistically”:

Not during this war, but afterwards, napalm may join the weapons banned by international convention. Today, either by formal or informal agreement, gasses, poisons, dum-dum bullets, atomic weapons, and radioactivity…are banned. If you remember the international furor over some relatively mild gas used earlier in Vietnam, it’s plain these agreements carry some weight. The position that napalm is saving American lives doesn’t count for too much in the international forum. So I think we should recognize the distinct possibility this could be the last war for napalm, just as World War I was the last war for mustard gas, and that it may be condemned somewhat retroactively like the World War II air raid and incineration of Dresden.

To the idea proposed by others that Dow start running full-page ads in newspapers, Seward said this might invite “the worst situation—a response of full-page ads of napalmed children. I suppose we could respond with dying soldiers, but in the end our objectives wouldn’t be served. At the outset, the protesters would decry full-page ads as the brute economic strength of the military-industrial complex, but I have no doubt they would find ample funds to match us inch for inch.” Dow should try to find areas of agreement with the protesters, Seward argued. “Let’s draw attention to the theme, ‘Are you dedicated to change for the better? We are!’ Let’s not get trapped into fighting these issues: the Vietnam War, Napalm as a Weapon, Defending the Status Quo, The Military Industrial Complex. For one thing, it would be phony; I doubt you could muster a majority from the board of directors in support of any of those causes.”

One of the questions debated internally within Dow was whether they should conduct their placement interviews off campus as a way of avoiding confrontations of the sort that erupted at Wisconsin. They decided to keep going to every campus to which they were invited and to play up that decision as a way of defining Dow. “We have resisted going off campus because we want Dow to be seen as a company with spirit and courage, not like a company that tucks its tail and runs,” said Ray Rolf, the manager of recruiting. “We want to show people that we have a winning atmosphere here…. The only type of person we might be losing is one who is weak and easily intimidated, and who retreats from conflict. A person without belief in right or wrong is the only type of person who might be missed because of the demonstrations…. We would miss far more good people if we didn’t support the placement office.”

From a historical perspective, the most interesting aspect of the controversy swirling around the Dow Chemical Company in October 1967 was that everyone might have been focusing on another chemical product. The controversy was all about napalm then. Napalm, the photographable monstrosity that clung unmercifully to human flesh as it burned at two thousand degrees, had become the brutal symbol of an unpopular war. But here was an instance where the passions of the moment faded with time and something else entirely—virtually ignored during the napalm protests—emerged as the more serious issue. In the long run the chemical product that did the most lasting damage was not napalm but the herbicide Agent Orange (and its cousin, Agent White), manufactured by Dow and six other chemical companies. The defoliants were sprayed in massive doses on much of Vietnam, including the jungles near the Black Lions in Lai Khe, to cut back the protective growth, flush out the Viet Cong, and destroy enemy rice crops. Use of the defoliants began in July 1965, but their heaviest use came in 1967, the year most of the men in this story were in Vietnam. According to later figures compiled by the Veterans Administration, about 4.88 million gallons of Agents Orange and White were dumped on Vietnam in that single year. The effects of the dioxin-laced chemicals were indiscriminate and plagued not only the citizens of Vietnam and their land but the troops on both sides of the war for decades thereafter. Seward, the Dow publicist, was right when he predicted that a company product might be banned from wartime use sometime in the future—but it was Agent Orange, not napalm.

Within three years of the Dow protest in Madison, the federal government halted the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, concerned that it might cause health problems ranging from cancer to birth defects. Seventeen years later, in 1984, Dow and the other chemical companies agreed to a court settlement establishing a $184-million compensation fund for thousands of Vietnam veterans who suffered from what they believed were Agent Orange–related ailments. The long-term effects of the chemicals became evident decade after decade. In January 2003, thirty-six years after the tumult of 1967, researchers announced that they had found a link between the herbicides used in Vietnam and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Good intentions and missed connections: there was no way they could have known it then, but if the Dow demonstrators had made Agent Orange their target, their struggle might have linked them more closely in common cause with thousands of returning Vietnam veterans, and furthered the notion that their protests were meant to save the lives of American soldiers.

W
HEN
T
HURSDAY
the twenty-sixth of October arrived in Vietnam, Clark Welch felt well enough to take a few hours’ leave from the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital. He described the trip later that night in a letter home to Lacy. Again he presented his most optimistic side, shielding his wife from the life-is-all-fucked-up anger that had overtaken him after the battle: