They Marched Into Sunlight (98 page)

Terry Allen Jr. and his mother, Mary Frances, welcome home General Terry Allen Sr. after World War II. Deep affection, not intimidation, funneled “Sonny” through the narrow chute of his family’s military tradition.

Second-to-last in his West Point class, Allen rose quickly in the army. In Vietnam, he commanded a Big Red One battalion at Lai Khe. Studying this photograph decades later, his daughters saw a proud, haunted look in their father’s gaze.

Jean Ponder Allen, the Texas beauty queen. While Terry fought in Vietnam, Jean hosted a local television show and felt alienated from her husband and the military.

Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen (center) and his 2/28 Black Lions commanders before the battle. Delta’s Clark Welch is second from right, Alpha’s Jim George second from left.

Jack Schroder studied to be a dental technician in Milwaukee. “They’re not playing games over here,” he wrote to his wife after arriving in Lai Khe.

Mike Troyer was drafted out of a truck plant in Ohio. In a letter home he wrote, “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.”

“Sad to think that a certain percentage of people here are sure to die in Vietnam,” Greg Landon wrote before leaving Fort Lewis. The Amherst dropout known as “the professor” sensed who would survive and who would die.

Michael Arias, drafted out of Douglas, Arizona, said later that to avoid Vietnam he could have walked six blocks south into Mexico and disappeared. With Alpha company during the battle, he read the compass and found the way out.

Captain Jim George of South Carolina, commander of Alpha company. “I’ll do what I can and pray that God will lead me,” he wrote during the voyage to Vung Tau. “I’ve already started to dream of killing and am already tired of the smell of death.”

Willie C. Johnson, staff sergeant, took Alpha’s lead platoon into the jungle that October morning. He marched as fourth man back in the right file, singing his rhythm and blues anthem of good luck, “Knock on Wood.”

If there was a prototype of the young men from Wisconsin who fought in Vietnam, it was Danny Sikorski, son of a brewery worker from Milwaukee’s heavily Polish south side. Boys from his neighborhood went into the military, not to college.

Danny on home leave with sister Diane in February 1967. Diane dreamed about him the night before the battle. In her vision, he appeared with a hole where his stomach should have been.