They Marched Into Sunlight (99 page)

Tom Hinger, a medic from Pennsylvania, was a walking skeleton by mid-October, down to a hundred pounds, but carried seventy pounds of supplies, an antlike ratio of load to body mass.

Joe Costello of Long Island, grenadier in Alpha’s second platoon, waits to rejoin his company in the field on the morning of October 15. As men retreated during the battle, Costello returned to the front to help stranded comrades.

Delta commander Clark Welch. Long and sinewy, his frame always tilting forward slightly, ready to move, the first lieutenant from New Hampshire was a soldier’s soldier in the most elemental sense. His boys called him Big Rock.

Lieutenant Welch and his trusted top aide, First Sergeant Clarence (Bud) Barrow, who came with him to pick up their new Delta company troops at Vung Tau. Barrow was the only one brave enough to wake Welch in the morning.

For Operation Shenandoah II, soldiers from 2/28 Black Lions gather at the helicopter pads at Lai Khe for the mission into the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. “It kind of worries me,” Jack Schroder wrote. “All hard core VC. I don’t know what to expect.”

The evening before the battle, Clark Welch (
right
) returned to the field camp and described skirmishing to senior officers. Behind bespectacled and helmetless Terry Allen stands the former West Point All-America football player Major Donald Holleder.

View from a medic’s tent the morning of the battle. October 17 opened in a bright haze, with temperatures already in the eighties. “It was just a very muggy dog day,” said Joe Costello. “It was just kind of aaaggghhh.”

The morning after the battle, survivors from Alpha and Delta were shipped back to Lai Khe. It usually took twenty helicopters to move a complete rifle company; now, with so many casualties, it required only five.

Five days after the battle, General William C. Westmoreland visited the 93rd Evacuation Hospital and pinned the Purple Heart on wounded Black Lions. He disagreed with soldiers who told him they had been ambushed.

Some of them died. Some of them were not allowed to
. A memorial service at Lai Khe for the fallen Black Lions soldiers.

The Union Terrace, epicenter of the University of Wisconsin, with its vibrantly colored green and orange metal tables and chairs stretching back from the Rathskeller down to the edge of Lake Mendota.

Jane Brotman followed a well-worn path to Madison. She was one of 124 New Jersey residents, seven from her high school, to enter Wisconsin that fall of 1967. She had a favorite table at the Rathskeller.