They Marched Into Sunlight (75 page)

By the time the bus caravan reached the Indiana Toll Road, the first of the weekend’s protests was under way in Washington, with Yale’s chaplain, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, accompanied by Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, and a flock of antiwar notables, gathering on the steps of the Department of Justice. Judy Genack, whose plane had brought her to Washington in time for lunch, was in the audience alongside her new friend, the reporter Steve Matthews. She had never seen anything like this. Dr. Spock, the renowned pediatrician, was someone she had “never imagined could be an activist.” And there stood Mailer and the poet Robert Lowell. These were serious people, she thought, real thinkers, different from the hippies and freaks she encountered on the Wisconsin campus. The potent mix of intellect, passion, fame, and mass action thrilled her. She immediately understood what Matthews had told her at lunch: how intoxicating it was to be at that place and time, covering history in the making.

Matthews took notes and Genack listened in awe as Coffin delivered the major speech before going inside to hand over a bundle of draft cards, most collected at rallies earlier in the week, plus some given up now by draft-age men in the crowd. “We cannot shield them. We can only expose ourselves as they have done,” Coffin said of the young draft resisters. “We hereby counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces as long as the war in Vietnam continues, and we pledge ourselves to aid and abet them in all the ways we can. This means that if they are now arrested for failing to comply with a law that violates their consciences, we too must be arrested, for in the sight of the law we are now as guilty as they.” When Coffin and his delegation stepped inside with a bag containing 994 draft cards, they were met not by Attorney General Clark, as he had expected, but by an assistant, who simply refused to accept the draft cards. Coffin dropped the bag on the floor and walked away, complaining that the assistant was “derelict in his duty” for refusing to accept evidence. Mailer, the social historian on the scene, noted “a contained anger in Coffin, much like lawyer’s anger, as if some subtle game had been played in which a combination had been based on a gambit, but the government had refused the gambit, so now the combination was halted.”

In fact the little drama unfolded precisely the way Clark had laid it out to President Johnson and the Cabinet two days earlier. Still, LBJ was enraged by the act of resistance. He read about the draft-card dumping episode on a wire service ticker stationed near his desk at the White House and was so distraught that he called over an aide, Joe Califano, to read it with him. As Califano later recounted the scene, Johnson “began jabbing at [the UPI report] with his finger” while ordering Califano to let Justice know that the president expected the FBI to investigate.

Early that evening Johnson gave two off-the-record interviews to friendly reporters, first Ernest B. Furgurson of the
Baltimore Sun,
who was writing a laudatory biography of General Westmoreland, then the columnist Joseph Alsop, who supported the war and detested the protesters and was ushered in when Johnson wanted to leak raw intelligence reports detailing the ribald sexuality or political recklessness of antiwar partisans. After Alsop left, Califano accompanied his boss to the White House residence, where two Texas congressmen and their wives were to be dinner guests. As they were sitting in the living quarters before dinner, Califano later wrote, “the president called General Hershey of the Selective Service and delivered a monologue about the need to punish draft protesters.” At times LBJ seemed “infuriated,” according to his aide, “but at other times he seemed genuinely struggling to understand what could drive a young American to burn his draft card.” His dismay at the way the Justice Department handled the bagful of cards seemed to match Reverend Coffin’s. He complained to General Hershey that he wanted to know “who the dumb sonofabitch was who would let somebody leave a bunch of draft cards in front of the Justice Department and then let them just walk away.”

If his attorney general would not act decisively enough against draft-card burners and protesters disrupting the draft process, LBJ said, he hoped that Hershey would.

The old general would indeed act, six days later, by sending a letter to local draft boards urging them to draft any young men who violated draft laws or obstructed military recruiters. “I don’t want any revenge. I actually have a lot of confidence in the kids of this country,” Hershey would say, explaining the crackdown. “All I hope to do is to discourage some of the excesses we have had in the past.” Among the sharpest critics of this proposed policy would be Chancellor Sewell at the University of Wisconsin. It had been twenty-five years since Sewell worked side by side with Hershey in Washington, analyzing statistics for the wartime draft, and he still had a soft spot in his heart for his former boss. But now he would regard Hershey’s induct-the-Vietnam-protesters threat as a reactionary flouting of the First Amendment. It seemed to Sewell in that autumn of 1967 that defending freedom of speech from attacks by the left and right was nearly his full-time endeavor. His telegram to Hershey would go unanswered but be made public, prompting conservatives on the UW Board of Regents to call for his head, though eventually Sewell’s position would prevail, on the draft issue at least, with the Johnson administration backing away from the plan.

After finishing his long telephone conversation with Hershey that night of the twentieth, Johnson retired for dinner with Lady Bird and the Texas congressional couples, Jack Brooks and George Mahon and their wives. His mind was still locked on the protests. He had considered issuing a tough public statement, according to Califano, and had gone so far as to dictate the first sentence but decided it would only bring more heat his way. At dinner he mentioned the March on the Pentagon planned for the next day and, as Califano recalled, “worried that ‘Communist elements’ would take advantage of the situation to ‘make sure that there will be trouble in the Negro ghetto.’” President Johnson would not be run out of town—he had made that clear from the start—but now he wondered aloud whether he should ring the White House perimeter with army troops.

I
T WAS TWELVE HOURS LATER
in Lai Khe, South Vietnam, and the next morning had already broken in sunlight. The men of the Second battalion, Twenty-eighth Infantry—all the Black Lions, including scores of new troops but minus the wounded still in hospitals at Long Binh—gathered outside battalion headquarters for a memorial service to honor the soldiers who died October 17. They lined up in formation: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Recon, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, with Louis Menetrey in command. The First Division brass were there, including Major General Hay and Brigadier General Coleman. There were some words about the brave fight and the great victory and the ultimate sacrifice, but the men were not listening. They stared straight ahead or bowed their heads, lost in thought.

In front of them stood a solitary pair of empty jungle boots, and behind the boots an M-16, bayoneted into the ground. Atop the rifle rested a dusty helmet. It could have been Danny Sikorski’s, or Jack Schroder’s, or Melesso Garcia’s, or Pasquale Tizzio’s: it covered all of the dead. In the shade of rubber trees a chaplain read a prayer, a squad of riflemen fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and a mournful bugler played taps. When it was over, Top Valdez, Doc Hinger, David Stroup, and a few others were called forward and pinned with Silver Stars for heroism during the battle, and then more soldiers were called and given Bronze Stars.

Hinger was mortified, not by the honor, but by the timing of the presentation. It was a “miserable, miserable thing,” he thought, for those who lived to be given medals at a memorial ceremony such as this.
Some of them died. Some of them were not allowed to.

Captain Cash was in Lai Khe that day, conducting more interviews for his investigation of the battle. He carried a bulky cassette tape recorder and a notepad and interviewed soldiers individually, scratching names from his list one by one. Giannico. Hinger. Jensen. Phillips. Stephens. Stroup. Troyer. Woodard. Each man’s description of the battle was different, conveying only the microcosm of what he saw, but there were places where the stories connected. One thread that wove through the interviews was an overwhelming sense of chaos early in the battle. Was this the usual fog of war or something more? The soldiers, whether in Alpha or Delta, talked about how hard it had been to know where the other friendly forces were. Should they return fire or cease fire? Were they shooting at the enemy or their own side? If the surprise attack gave the Viet Cong fire superiority at the start, the confusion about battlefield positioning helped them maintain it. Some soldiers said they anticipated trouble that morning, but none expected to be defeated. They marched into the jungle with the sensibility that the Black Lions intimidated the Viet Cong and could not lose. It was not until the battle was under way that they realized otherwise.

Defeats can be caused by troop fatigue, poor morale, inferior weaponry, poor training, a lack of preparation, but in this case Cash’s interviews indicated that none of those factors was decisive. The information he gathered pointed in other directions, toward mistakes in tactics and communications that allowed the battalion to be surprised, surrounded, and badly outmanned. Terry Allen, as the battalion commander, had to absorb much of the blame. He took even more than he might have deserved because he was dead and could not defend himself or explain away points of contention the way his superior officers were able to do.

As the day progressed, Cash jotted down a preliminary list of lessons learned and other themes he picked up among the “scuttlebutt and complaints” from Delta soldiers:

• 1) We knew they were there and their general location. Air and artillery should have been used a lot more before we went in, to disrupt their organization, etc…. The artillery that precededus on 17 October amounted to nothing.
  
• 2) The companies were nowhere near their normal combat strengths, or what they are expected to be.
  
• 3) The smoke located our center of mass to any VC. Smoke can be seen hundreds of meters away. It also obscured our vision. Most of the smoke was coming from the battalion CP [command post]. There was definitely too much smoke used.
  
• 4) Personally, I don’t believe the battalion commander belongs with the men on the ground.
  
• 5) Bn CO [Allen] goofed. He should have let us pull back after we’d retrieved A Co’s wounded for them. Instead, we waited around for 40 minutes and that gave Charlie time to horseshoe us and zap us.
  
• 6) No mortars were fired at all. I heard the mort. Plat. sgt say “we were aching to go. I’ve still got it plotted on my board what we could have done. It’s a damned shame.” Mortars had been used very effectively by Lt. Welch the day before. On that day they fired mortars constantly on both sides going out there.
  

At division headquarters Brigadier General Coleman, who had watched the disaster unfold on the seventeenth, outlined his own summary of lessons learned. His intent was not to assess blame but rather to assure that such a disaster would not happen again, yet his long list unavoidably served as a catalog of battlefield mistakes. Among his lessons were: never withdraw leaving wounded; stress to all leaders the proper tactics of conducting a withdrawal; establish a positive succession of command through fire team level; provide backup RTOs and security forces for command groups; designate key individuals to carry red smoke to mark positions of enemy contact; strive for accurate and timely reporting at all levels; improve accuracy and content of journals and logs and perhaps use tape recorders on command [radio] nets; provide workable chainsaws, axes, and machetes in NDP ready for chopper delivery; and at division headquarters record the location of all jungle litters and plastic bags for the dead so they can be delivered to the field as necessary.

There was no mention in Coleman’s list of the lesson that ranking officers in helicopters should think twice before check-firing artillery against the advice of commanders on the ground.

At the Twenty-fourth Evacuation Hospital Jim George was still reliving the battle in his sleep. He could hear the gunfire and smell the cordite and hear guys yelling “I’m hit!” over and over again.

Three months earlier, in one of the letters he had written home to Jackie from aboard the USNS
Pope,
he had told her that he would try to be a good soldier, gentleman, lover, and Christian, but now he was struggling with all but the last of those. He thought he had been fighting in a just war, that he had done the best he could and was following orders, but the nightmares persisted. In some ways he felt that he had let his soldiers down, because although he had told them that they “needed to kill as many Viet Cong as they could,” he thought his major mission was to get them home safely, and it was hard for him to comprehend the number of casualties. The wounded Alpha captain was overcome by what he called “a powerful love for God and for the soldiers” but had a harder time feeling love for his wife and kids. He knew that he loved them, but the trauma of the devastating event had temporarily diminished his capacity to feel strongly about many things. “Each day’s light brings with it more hope, trust & humanity,” he wrote to Jackie. “I feel better today. Still haven’t had a good night’s sleep but that scar will take longer to heal. I finally went to sleep at about 3 this morning. I prayed myself to sleep.”

Late that afternoon Major General Hay traveled down to the evacuation hospitals to visit the wounded and hand out more medals. An aide came through the recovery ward ahead of time and briefed Joe Costello, who was to receive a Silver Star.
When they ask your age, make it older than eighteen,
he instructed the young Alpha grenadier from Long Island who had turned around during the retreat in the jungle and helped save soldiers left behind. “Don’t give us any grief on that,” the aide said.