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Two angles on Vietnam War |
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By The Hill Staff
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Posted: 10/15/03 12:00 AM [ET] |
In mid-October 36 years ago, as the Vietnam War raged on, two events unfolded that shook many lives. One was a wrenching battle fought Oct. 17, 1967, near Lai Khe in South Vietnam, between the U.S. Army’s Black Lions regiment and a Viet Cong regiment. The other was a bloody protest the day after the Vietnam battle, in Madison, Wis., pitting college students against the police.
David Maraniss, in his beautifully rendered new book, They Marched Into Sunlight, links the disparate worlds of soldiers and students by piecing together those pivotal occurrences. The battle of Oct. 17, obviously, was one of many that year; the University of Wisconsin protest against napalm-maker Dow Chemical Co. was not the only antiwar demonstration on the country’s campuses. But, in Maraniss’s telling, they become representative of the larger picture of 1967, as opinion shifted against the war and President Lyndon Johnson became nervous (“How are we ever going to win?” Maraniss quotes him as saying to his aides Oct. 16).
Early in his book, Maraniss introduces the characters through whom he tells his story. They included Clark Welch, a Green Beret sergeant turned lieutenant who is given command of the Black Lions’ new Delta Company; Lt. Col. Terry Allen, son of a famed World War II general who tries to live up to his father’s reputation but is plagued by a troubled marriage; history graduate student Paul Soglin, who emerges from the protests as a student leader and eventual mayor of Madison; and Ralph Hanson, the university police chief who tries to keep order while not alienating the students — a hopeless task.
Maraniss — whose previous books include a biography of Bill Clinton — also spends some time focusing on Johnson and his aides as they fret over the huge upcoming Washington antiwar protest of Oct. 21. In addition, Maraniss presents part of the story from the viewpoint of the Viet Cong soldiers involved in the Oct. 17 firefight.
But the heart of Maraniss’s tale involves minute-by-minute renditions of the Black Lions’ experiences Oct. 17 in what was known as the Long Nguyen Secret Zone and the Madison community’s actions during the protest at the university’s Commerce Building. Through plentiful interviews (he spoke to 180 people, often more than once) and additional archival research, Maraniss — a Washington Post associate editor who was a freshman at Madison in 1967 — tells a gripping story that makes the book hard to put down.
The battle scenes are so compellingly, almost cinematically, written that a reader can virtually visualize the death and destruction that the Black Lions walked into.
Many of them felt they were ambushed by the Viet Cong; the U.S. military brass preferred to see it as a “meeting engagement,” despite the heavy American losses.
“Costello felt a shrapnel sting in his back. He could do no more for the wounded soldier, who was going into shock and probably dying,” Maraniss writes from one young grenadier’s viewpoint. “He remembered that the guy had a candy-apple-red ’62 Chevy that he was proud of and a young wife he loved very much and that he didn’t care for Costello at all and Costello wished that he had.” In the end, dozens of Americans were killed or wounded, leaving a handful of shattered survivors.
While somewhat less dramatic, the Madison portions of the book also are rich in detail, much of it emblematic of the difficult changes the country went through in 1967.
“Behind the bugle and drum corps and the whiteface mimes and the stilted Uncle Sam followed a ragged but diversely attired line of students, with as many sport coats, ties and skirts as army jackets, blue jeans and beards,” Maraniss writes of the early hours of the protest. He describes the reactions of freshman Jane Brotman, from South Orange, N.J., who was on her way to a French literature review session when she spotted the demonstration — and was transfixed. “As she would put it, this stuff blew her mind. What is going on here? she thought to herself. There was nothing like this in South Orange.”
Popping up throughout the book are various figures who went on to bigger things. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, were graduate students at Madison in 1967, and, as Maraniss puts it, “they retained a strong memory of seeing, and being revolted by, the antics of the mimes” participating in the protest. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), then a Wisconsin law student, sent a letter to the university administration after the protests stating that “he intended to be interviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency when it came to campus in November and expected that those interviews would not be disrupted as the Dow interviews had been.”
There are shelves of books devoted to the Vietnam War. Many of the best, such as David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire and The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, were penned by journalists who covered the conflict. Maraniss is of a younger generation; his first trip to Vietnam, he writes, came in 2002 to research this book. But They Marched Into Sunlight follows in the same reportorial tradition and clearly deserves a wide readership.
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