They Marched Into Sunlight (81 page)

I sort of had a pass today and went back to Lai Khe to make sure I left no loose ends in my company. The brigade commander sent his H-13 down this morning at 0600 and I went back to Lai Khe. It was a good day. I know now I left everything in good shape and no regrets. I didn’t want to leave this way, of course, but I did it the best way I could. D Company has a new CO and a new first sgt and is back up to strength already. The old timers (before 17 oct) have the run of Lai Khe and we were sure glad to see each other!…What we had is still going strong in the ‘new’ company, too. They’ll have just as good a company in a few weeks as we had. Not really, I guess—there will never be anything like the Delta Company that we started, organized, trained and brought into battle. Our ‘life cycle’ got awfully compressed, but we did more than anyone expected—except what I expected—they did exactly what I knew they would.

The trip to Lai Khe was a welcome relief for Welch, who was bored at the hospital. When he commanded Delta, he told Lacy, work that remained unfinished from the day before awaited him when he started up again at five thirty in the morning, and he would “stay hopping right until about midnight.” Now, he complained, all he had to do was get up and make his bed. “Then I’m done. Feels funny.” It was also feeling lonelier by the hour. Most of the Black Lions had been released, sent back to the States or transferred to larger hospitals for further treatment. A group of wounded Delta men had left for Japan the day before, leaving the ward to Welch, Sergeant Barrow, and Greg Landon.

Then, while Welch visited Lai Khe, Landon mailed his Purple Heart home, packed his bags, and left as well, going by bus to Bien Hoa, where he was flown to Vung Tau for recuperation at the Thirty-sixth Evacuation Hospital. On the ride to the airport Landon, who had been stuck in the remote countryside around Lai Khe for three months, got his first glimpse of a heavily populated stretch of Vietnam. He recorded the scene like an anthropologist. Noting that he saw more churches than temples, he concluded that the area was “more Catholic than Buddhist.” The paved roads, he said, were torn up from large American vehicles, “making the bus ride hell” on his back. He was surprised to see a row of seven car wash establishments along the side of a stream. “Each would pick an American word such as ‘Good Chance’ car wash or ‘Happy’ car wash.” Nearby was a “Washing Ton Laundry.”

Vung Tau closed a circle for Landon, the kid his buddies called Professor. Here was the first Vietnamese ground he had touched three months earlier. The place seemed more welcoming to him now. “Somehow, I plan to have a long recovery,” he wrote to his parents in Vestal, New York. His records said he could stay from twenty to sixty days. He was assigned to a ward that held sixty beds in two rows, every face a stranger. “Place looks like a garage, as do most of the hospital developments over here,” Landon wrote of the quonset hut architecture. “No trees. I will get down to the beach tomorrow. But there’ll be no swimming, just sunning. I imagine it will be January before I get going on the operations again.”

The war went on without him. On the day he left for Vung Tau, October 26, 1967, in Vietnam, according to the MACV Office of Information, there were eighteen operations of battalion size or larger. Enemy forces launched a rocket attack on American troops north of Pleiku City, wounding nine men. Most of the action was in the air, where American forces seemed to be answering President Johnson’s call to “pour the steel on.” Air Force, Marine Corps, and navy pilots flew 142 missions over North Vietnam, pounding the power plant, airfields, rail yards, and storage areas near Hanoi. During the air raids over Hanoi, one Navy F-8 Crusader and two A-4 Skyhawks were shot down. One of the fallen Skyhawks was piloted by a thirty-one-year-old Navy lieutenant commander, who parachuted into White Bamboo Lake after his jet was hit by a surface-to-air missile. Mai Van On, in a nearby bomb shelter with sixty other Hanoi residents, saw the plane plunge into the lake, its tail sheared off by the missile. Instinctively, and against the wishes of those around him, On ran to the lakeshore, grabbed a bamboo pole, and swam out more than a hundred meters to save the American, who had been caught up in his parachute and was struggling below the water’s surface. It was John McCain.

To On he was just another human being about to drown, but Hanoi’s propagandists knew they had someone special as soon as John S. McCain III was pulled from the water and processed as a prisoner of war. They immediately began broadcasting radio reports trumpeting the capture of the “crook” son of an American military big shot “crook.” McCain’s father, John S. McCain Jr., was a Navy admiral, then commander in chief of Europe and soon to take over the Pacific Command.

T
HE ODD COUPLE
of Madison law enforcement, Prosecutor Jim Boll and Deputy Sheriff Jack Leslie, were closing in on the flag cutter that day. They already had made the drive north to Stevens Point to interview William Stielstra, dean of students at UW–Stevens Point and father of the twins Jonathan and Phil Stielstra, to see if he would help the authorities determine which of his sons had snapped the flag lanyard atop Bascom Hall. They had brought with them an FBI enlargement of Norm Lenburg’s caught-in-the-act photograph, but it was of no help. In pictures, the father had insisted, he could not tell the twins apart. Leslie grumbled on the way back that the old man must have been lying, but Boll was not so sure. Then Boll and Leslie visited 1215 Drake Street and knocked on the door, where they were confronted by a tall blond-haired young man who identified himself as Philip Stielstra. The flag cutter? They still were uncertain. But Boll noticed that this fellow who answered the door had the makings of a beard, about a quarter-inch of facial hair. The suspect in the picture did not have facial hair. Boll called an expert dermatologist and asked him how quickly someone could grow that amount of facial hair; the dermatologist consulted his European journals and called back with an answer: several weeks. Through process of elimination they had their man at last.

Jonathan Stielstra’s arrest jolted his parents, mild and fair-minded Calvinists who had taught their sons to do good in the world. They thought of him as a gentle boy, an Eagle Scout who had earned a God and Country award and had been selected as a model scout at the Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, and who had been elected president of his sophomore class at Calvin College, following the path of his father, the senior class president there a generation earlier. They knew him, above all, as the product of a family that stressed “being of service to our fellow man.” Could this be the same person who struck at the symbol of America and provoked a vengeful manhunt?

On that Thursday the twenty-sixth, eight days after the Dow demonstration, as Boll and Leslie prepared his arrest, Jonathan Stielstra began typing the first of two long letters to his parents in an effort to explain himself. One was political and dealt with his thoughts about Vietnam and his own behavior. He had not only cut down the flag, he had also decided, during that same Stop the Draft week, to resist the draft by sending his draft card back to his draft board. “Now is a time when it is of utmost importance not to think that it’s hunky-dory in America,” he wrote. “Because right now, 24 hours a day, the people of South Vietnam are being killed…. The stakes are very high for anyone who wants to change this society. A very easy way out is available to me as a college student. (Moral abdication is the route of least resistance, especially for those who feel least oppressed.) I could hide behind a 2-S and never worry about a thing—not worry about others, especially those who can’t afford to go to college, who are being made to murder Vietnamese and risk their own lives in my place. But my stakes are meager compared to a Vietnamese peasant’s. Really meager.”

In the other letter, which he titled “A Little Manifesto,” Stielstra drew heavily from the philosophy classes he was taking and from the counterculture lingo of the sixties. It was an abstract articulation of what he called his “philosophy of life.” What it boiled down to, in its own way, was an attempt by a young man to cut the apron strings and perhaps to prepare his parents for difficulties to come. “It is incumbent on he who would criticize me to attempt to understand the kind of life I aspire for, and it is incumbent on me to live faithfully in accord with those aspirations,” he wrote.

More concretely, I will structure my own life creatively vis-à-vis the tyrannies of a less-than-democratic location of state power and university power, over-structured curriculums and formalized class learning, programmed social existences which falsify and dehumanize life, and vis-à-vis authority figures and parents when they come into danger of exercising unwarranted hegemony over my life by threatening to mold me in a particular prescribed fashion. Parent hegemony is a natural and beneficent relationship to the helpless child in the process of growing up, but becomes unnatural and malicious when it interferes with the child’s acquiring his own capacities for awareness (intellectual and artistic) and for forming positive, intimate feelings and relationships. This is no allegation or sermon; it’s just an explanation of where I want to stand as a human being. I write this because I love you in a manner which you may not suspect.

Jon

Where Stielstra stood as a human being then was on the verge of copping a guilty plea with a sentence of thirty days in jail. They had him cold, Boll and Leslie did. Percy Julian would represent him, as he did most student protesters, but there was no argument the lawyer could conjure up that would erase Norm Lenburg’s photograph.

For the family of Danny Sikorski, eighty miles away in Milwaukee, Thursday the twenty-sixth was a day they wanted to forestall. That morning Diane Sikorski and her father and stepmother rode in silence to the Max A. Sass & Son Funeral Home at 1515 West Oklahoma Avenue in south Milwaukee. On the way they got in an accident. Another driver plowed into their rear fender. In a daze Edmund Sikorski got out and told the woman driving the other car that it was okay, no need to exchange insurance cards, he would handle it later, but now he was on his way to his son’s funeral. When they arrived at Sass’s, Diane glanced at the closed casket and started crying. The night before, at the visitation for Danny, she had tried to cry but no tears came. Now they cascaded out of her. “I wanted him alive. I wanted to rip the cover off to see if he was really in there. This was my last chance. I felt so helpless and angry,” she recalled later. After Father Czaja said a prayer, Diane approached the casket. In her next conscious moment she was looking up from the floor at her father and the funeral director, who were trying to lift her into a chair. She had fainted while blessing her brother.

The funeral mass was held at Saint John Kanty’s Church. The family had sat in the same row three years earlier for the service for Danny and Diane’s mother. Time now circled back for Diane and the two moments merged. Father Czaja, in his homily, talked about Danny as a child and a young man and revealed that Danny had visited him on his leave before going to Vietnam and asked for the priest’s blessing because he knew he wasn’t coming home. Prayer cards were distributed. The photograph showed Danny in army dress, looking a little pudgy.
Merciful Jesus, grant him eternal rest (7 years and 7 quarantines). Sweet Heart of Mary, be my salvation (300 days’ indulgence). My Jesus, mercy! (300 days’ indulgence).

Then the burial at Saint Adalbert’s Cemetery, in the veterans section, not far from where Diane had stood five years earlier, on Memorial Day 1962, and delivered the only public speech of her life. She was selected because she had written “Freedom As America Knows It,” the winning entry in an eighth-grade essay contest. “Even before 1776 the world looked upon America as a refuge for the persecuted, a land of social equality—a land of opportunity,” she had written. “It took a cost of hardship and heartache, labor and loneliness to purchase these freedoms. Liberty is a thing of the spirit—it is freedom to worship, to think, to hold opinions and to speak without fear. Freedom to challenge wrong and oppression with surety of justice. Liberty is far more valuable than money or riches, more valuable even than our country and friends.”

Now she was looking at the Stars and Stripes draped over her brother’s casket. The same symbol that had enraged Jonathan Stielstra comforted Diane Sikorski. She wished that the American flag could be buried with her brother to keep him warm in his grave.

In Madison a few hours later, at seven that night in Capitol building room 421 south, the Senate Select Committee continued its hearings into “the Riotous and Unlawful Activities the Week of October 16, 1967 Occurring on the Madison Campus of the University of Wisconsin.” This was a prime-time show: Chancellor Sewell was at the witness table. At his side was Richard Cates, one of Madison’s toughest lawyers, who represented the university in the three-ringed legal case that surrounded Dow: the legislative hearings, the Soglin-led court challenge to university rules, and the university discipline hearings against thirteen suspended student leaders. Five years later Cates would be in Washington, working for the House Judiciary Committee as it investigated the Watergate-related crimes of the next president of the United States. Now he advised Bill Sewell as the state senators and their counsel took the chancellor through the sequence of events of October 18 minute by minute, pressing him on why the protesters were allowed to enter the Commerce Building at all, why the Madison police were called, and how Sewell had expected the confrontation to be resolved.

An hour into the questioning, Senator Walter Chilsen noted that Sewell’s field was sociology. “I wonder if you would like to comment on the sociological impact of the demonstrations of a week ago,” Chilsen said. “Have you changed your attitude about the sociological meaning of that demonstration and of other demonstrations around the country? I suppose we can tolerate a short dissertation.”

Chilsen assumed that Sewell’s specialty was collective behavior, but Sewell corrected him. “Oh, no. My major interests in sociology are in research methodology, in which I think I have made some significant contributions in the field of personality and social structure…but I am not a specialist in collective behavior,” Sewell said. And he had not had time in the seven days since the Dow demonstration, he added, to reflect on the sociological meaning of the events. But he then offered what, in a sense, amounted to a classic liberal variation of Diane Sikorski’s eighth-grade essay on American freedom. “If you ask me, what do I think is the effectiveness of protest sociologically, then I believe that in general the effective protest makes people who would otherwise be unaware of the feelings of those who protest aware of the nature of their cause.” He went on: