They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Everything seemed in place for a successful search-and-destroy operation. When First Division troops went after the regiment in Long Nguyen, the VC unit would face the choice of leaving or being destroyed. “Even if it moves, the significant quantities of supplies in the area will be destroyed. So the conclusion is: Both the [First regiment] and its supporting logistical structure can be simultaneously destroyed or seriously incapacitated.” There was one final word of caution: because of all those conditions, the report noted, “the probability of chance encounters with sizeable enemy forces will be appreciably heightened.”

  It was with such great expectations that Operation Shenandoah II began.

  THE YOUNG SOLDIERS of Delta Company sensed that they would be seeing a lot of combat from late September into October. It was the talk of their camp: something’s coming. “In the months ahead we’re really going after the V.C.,” Greg Landon reported in a letter home. “No let up. Should be interesting for me since the company has been decimated by health problems, transfers etc. The CO [Welch] is a gung-ho lieutenant who…emphasizes close-in combat. Whew! Looks like lots and lots of jungle tramping after the little men.”

  That was the word: they were heading into the jungle north of Lai Khe. “The gooks up there have got their shit together,” Mike Troyer wrote to his parents. “The last time a company went up it took ten choppers to take them up and about four to bring back those that were left.” But Troyer was the sort of young soldier who thought he was invincible. “I am not too worried because there hasn’t been a gook born yet that is going to get me. Not as long as I have anything at all to do with it.”

  Jack Schroder was less confident. One night, after cleaning his M-60, he wrote a letter to his mother with more details about the mission ahead. “We’re supposed to be going up to Operation Shenandoah II for a ten-day operation,” he noted. “It doesn’t sound good. It kind of worries me. All hard core VC. So I don’t know what to expect.” A few days later he urged his wife, Eleanor, to send him a .38-caliber revolver. He had been pushing her on the subject for a few weeks, with no success. She had said that she might be able to send him a .22, but he worried that it “just won’t have enough to stop Charlie,” and furthermore he would have a hard time getting ammunition for it. “My buddy Bob Nagy from Ohio, his father bought and sent him the exact .38 revolver like I need and 100 rounds ammo,” Jack told his wife. “All they did is wrap it in newspaper and aluminum foil and put it in a coffee can with some cookies and mailed the package…. I know 5 different guys that have got these.” They were loading up on weapons for battles to come.

  The first few days in the field there was much searching, some finding, but little combat. “We found a base camp with 20 bunkers but no VC,” Clark Welch wrote of his company’s maneuvers on September 28. They destroyed the bunkers and brought back “all sorts of odds and ends”—land mines, booby traps, gunpowder, bicycles, clothes, fifty sets of chopsticks, thirty-two baby chickens, and a bag of documents. Welch’s company was the only one to find anything, so they were sent back the next day and found twenty more bunkers about a half mile from the first. They just missed the enemy troops; still-wet toothpaste remained on one of the low tables, and in the bunkers they found a map, dated the day before, that showed the Black Lions’ night defensive position and had several key marks on it, a prized document for the intelligence staff. On the way out one of Welch’s squads came across a small unit of VC setting up their version of claymore mines, pointing them straight up in the air, apparently to be used as antihelicopter weapons. There was a brief firefight and one Delta soldier was wounded. The casualty left Welch distraught. “I know we’re going to have them—but it really hit me when I saw him and knew he was mine…and there wasn’t anything I could do. A rifle company has a lot of people and some are certain to get hurt. I wish I could be right there each time to help.”

  These were still sporadic operations. During the last week of September the Black Lions were in the field a few days at a time, but they were called back on the third of October to serve as the division’s ready reaction force, which meant they spent most of their time in Lai Khe, waiting for action. Welch, who felt that he had not done much yet, was stunned to hear how Delta’s modest exploits were being exaggerated by the publicists of the First Division.

  Truth and falsehood in another context. “I don’t know sometimes what I should say about our actions—the 1st Infantry Division has got quite a reputation for ‘slightly distorting’ what actually happens,” Welch confided in his letter to Lacy. “Most of the time I guess they really bend things around so it seems like we always come out on top. Lately we’ve been taking quite a beating—my recon platoon killed more VC in the first two months than the entire battalion has killed, or even seen, since then. But the stories that come out of this don’t show that at all. I saw some of the stories being prepared for this last operation—and they’re just plain not true. They’re really building up Delta company. We were pretty successful in this operation…and they’re making Delta company into the shot in the arm to get the Bn going again. The end result is good—I hope we can bring success to the battalion—but I don’t like being a part of ‘lying.’ Maybe I don’t know enough about this whole thing to make any statements about it, but somehow I just don’t like to be part of it.”

  On the night of October 4 the Black Lions were placed on one-hour alert. Delta Company had to be able to pack its gear and get to the helicopter assault pads two miles away within sixty minutes of being called. Welch plotted how his troops could do it, taking trucks instead of marching, then went to sleep after midnight. At five the next morning he got the alert to be at the strip by six. At ten minutes to six Welch and the first truck arrived. “We were met there by evaluators from Division—they were just checking our reaction time,” he reported to his wife. “What a funny war!” Only two days earlier Welch’s company had been yanked back and forth in the field as division officers twice changed their minds on where they should go; now this. He would be “pretty disgusted with this sort of thing,” Welch said, but he was trying hard to look on the positive side. “My men do just about exactly what I tell them to and even after what we’ve had to tell them to do the last few days they’re still working and putting out for me. I know I’ve got a good company—even during these screwed up affairs—and they know they’re good so it comes out all right. All we have left to do now is find some Charlie.”

  Four days later, not practice but the real thing. On the morning of October 8 the entire battalion, minus C Company, which was assigned to protect an artillery fire base along Thunder Road, got the alert to be at the helipads in thirty minutes. George Burrows, a member of the recon team, would forever remember his squad’s quick trip to the helicopters. They were sitting in the back of a deuce-and-a-half, rolling through camp, when they passed the Red Cross station, and there, standing outside in the early morning light, stood a group of American women volunteers—“donut dollies,” they were called—singing softly: Shenandoah, I long to hear you. Away, you rolling river. Burrows loved the traditional folk song, and its hauntingly beautiful melody stayed with him as they boarded the choppers and were taken to the field. Official reports later said that 450 troops were moved by twenty-five airships making three round-trips each. The numbers were fictitious, based on the mistaken assumption that Terry Allen’s battalion was at full force. A more accurate count would have found about a hundred fewer men.

  Their landing zone was in the jungle of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, about twelve miles to the northwest of Lai Khe near the Cam Xe stream and a Michelin rubber plantation. It was in this same region, eight months earlier, on February 12, 1967, that the First Infantry’s chemical division conducted what its commanding officer later called “the largest CS [tear gas] attack of the Vietnamese war, and possibly of any war.” They had flown a fleet of Chinooks over the Long Nguyen jungles that February day and dumped 25,000 pounds of powdered CS gas on Viet Cong targets. The gas, actually a fi
ne powder, almost like talc, was expelled from fifty-five-gallon drums, 80 pounds of agent per drum. The choppers held fifteen drums on each side, thirty in all, for about 2,400 pounds per helicopter. Bombardiers on either side fed the drums out at a rate of one every three seconds. This massive use of CS gas, said Lieutenant Colonel Alvin Hylton, was an effective way to harass the enemy by contaminating base camps, rice storage facilities, supply routes, and road crossings. But what had the largest gas attack of the war accomplished? Reports now indicated that the Long Nguyen was thick with base camps and enemy forces. Triet’s First Regiment was said to be in that jungle, somewhere.

  It was expected to be a “hot LZ,” meaning a landing zone where the enemy might be lurking, but there was only one spray of gunfire and the rest of the day was quiet. So quiet, in fact, that a crew of print and television journalists (including a striking woman in a flamboyant black jumpsuit—could it be Oriana Fallaci?) who had come along to chronicle the action, left before nightfall, bored and disappointed. The battalion had spent most of the day trying to find a place to dig bunkers—a task made more difficult by the soggy ground—and preparing the night defensive position for what was expected to be a long stretch in the field.

  On the morning of October 9 two companies left camp on a search- and-destroy mission, Delta in the lead, Bravo behind. Battalion commander Allen monitored the scene in an observation helicopter. They moved slowly and kept coming across fresh tracks and trails. At 12:35 Sergeant Mike Stubbs, leader of the point platoon, quietly called back to Welch on his radio and reported that he saw three Viet Cong and was certain they had not seen him. As Welch moved forward, an enemy soldier popped his head above a large anthill. Stubbs shot and killed him, and an intense firefight began. It seemed to the soldiers that it lasted two hours. In fact, according to radio logs, it was thirteen minutes.

  “I have never been in anything like that before. I thought for a moment that somehow we had gotten in the middle of an air strike!” Welch wrote in a letter the next day. “The bullets were knocking down leaves and bark off the trees and kicking up dust so much there was just a cloud of dust and dirt all around. There were about 50 VC in trenches right in front of us and about 10 VC tied up in trees right above us. In the initial burst of fire 4 men were hurt, but the whole company kept firing. We expended our entire basic load before it was over.” Once again Welch struggled to explain precisely what it felt like in the heat of the battle. “I just can’t describe what it was like—I’ve been in firefights and other battles but this was 10 times any of those. There was so much noise we couldn’t use the radios. The VC in the trenches were shooting low through the grass—you could hear those shots kicking through the grass and ricocheting off the ground. Some VC were hiding behind ant hills and trees—their fire was mostly going over our heads. You could hear them cracking and snapping and breaking off branches and leaves. But the worst was the firing coming from the trees. That was just driving down on top of us and thudding into the ground.”

  Welch yelled for the men behind him to fire up into the trees. “And right then 3 VC fell down dead about 25 feet in front” of him. They had been tied into the trees, and “when they were shot, they just fell down the length of the rope and hung there in mid air.” When the battle ended, Welch counted 13 dead Viet Cong, all apparently members not of Triet’s regiment but of a rear services group in the region. One of Welch’s Vietnamese scouts was hit in the leg, and six Delta soldiers were wounded, including Sergeant Stubbs, one of Welch’s best fighters. Stubbs had been shot in the neck near the beginning of the firefight, yet had continued to direct his battered troops until they made their way to safety. He carried some of his wounded himself, ignoring his own more serious condition. The wounded were evacuated swiftly. They seemed to be in relatively good shape as they were dusted off. Stubbs, despite his wound, snapped a salute to Welch as the helicopter lifted; Welch made a note to himself that his sergeant’s actions were worthy of a medal. He was overwhelmed by how well not only Stubbs but the whole company had responded. “They did everything I wanted or asked of them, and then more. When I’d call to one of the platoons to move up on the flank, they’d just say, ‘Already moving, sir.’”

  It had been two months since Welch, at the beginning of training in Lai Khe, had roused his men to shouts and cheers when he told them they would be the best damn company in the Big Red One. Now they had endured their first battle, and they had not disappointed. They had found some measure of “success in combat.” They had come away with a sack of enemy weapons while leaving nothing behind except the boots of Private Cook; medics had cut them off to work on his wounded feet. A day that had begun in surprise ended in victory. “We ran into Charlie,” Jack Schroder wrote home to Eleanor afterward. In his rhetoric he had been chasing Charlie since the day he got off the USNS Pope. But the reality of the battle, as opposed to his earlier boasting about hunting down the VC to gain revenge for fallen buddies, left him with a different feeling. “For a lot of the men, this was their first firefight, they hope the last, too,” he wrote.

  On new stationery handed out to the men in the field after the battle, another Delta soldier, Ray Albin, a member of the mortar platoon, wrote home to his girlfriend Rhonda Sue Ruick at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. He told her where he thought they were (“About 10 miles east of the Cambodian border. If you have a Vietnam map and know a little about maps, I’ll give you the coordinates of our location and then you can see where we are. The coordinates are 658-557”) and the name of the operation (“Oh, the name of this operation is Shenandoah II. In case you read about it in the papers you can tell your friends that PFC RR Albin, a fan, sincere admirer, and close friend of yours is or was there.”) He also told her that they had “paid the price” for finding a VC base camp, with six men wounded. “But that’s the way this war and all wars are, Rhon.”

  The soldiers of Delta knew more was ahead. Word came down that they would stay in the field for seven more days of search-and-destroy patrols. Their commander, at least, felt they were ready for anything. “They’re some good men, Lacy,” Clark Welch wrote that night, recalling in his mind’s eye the scene of his tired troops trudging out of the jungle after the battle on their way back to the night defensive position. “I wish you could have seen them. Every one—whether they were walking or being carried—saluted me and said ‘Black Lions, sir’ as they came by.”

  Chapter 10

  Guerrilla Theater

  IT WAS ON the very next day, the tenth of October, thousands of miles away in a markedly different world, that the San Francisco Mime Troupe hit the road for a national tour through the universities of the Midwest and on toward New York. First stop, Minneapolis, then down to Madison, retracing a route they had followed the year before. Few institutions were more evocative of the counterculture than this spirited ensemble, yet by that fall, in the effusive wake of the Summer of Love, the troupe and its director, Ronald Guy Davis, seemed eager to get away from the hippie ambience of the Bay Area and focus on political action.

  Davis, who founded the troupe in 1962, became a noted figure in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement when he was arrested in a San Francisco park in August 1965 for performing what the park commission deemed to be an obscene version of an Italian farce. By the summer of 1967, as young people around the country were getting their first heady whiff of the counterculture, Davis had been through it all and was becoming concerned about contradictions he saw emerging. He felt the tension between free and easy do-your-own-thing egalitarianism, which was the attitude of the moment, especially in San Francisco, and artistic excellence. His political seriousness, as he later wrote, “made no headway against a tide of long hair, electronic music” and “the democratic notion of amateuristic total participation.” He was also struggling to keep the San Francisco Mime Troupe afloat financially, with more and more people hanging around, calling themselves members, and pushing their version of freedom, which was free everything. As a way of easing his artistic f
rustrations and money problems, he purged the troupe of thirty-five actors and stagehands that summer. Those cut loose tended to be more social than political, and they were eager to transform the troupe into a leaderless commune.

  That attitude, as Davis saw it, was a threat to effective guerrilla theater. While he kept a few superior actors who happened to be more into the Haight-Ashbury scene than he was, including Peter Cohon, who later made it in Hollywood as Peter Coyote, he worried about a valueless aspect to hippiedom that he considered as inane in its own way as the larger American entertainment culture. “The greatest error of the hippie movement is its amateurism, its innocence, and its ignorance,” he argued in a statement of purpose that he wrote to himself. “The result I presume of allowing everyone a creative soul. A good assumption under a strict artistic rule—but a bad one where all rules are discarded and all discipline, art, creation or tension are thrust away. The hippie generation with its acceptance of all with no values, no judgments, is impossible, nay stupid. To attempt to make no judgments is to deface oneself into a mere potato—just as the style of culture called entertainment does. The object is to produce mashed potatoes for mashed potato heads. All soft, thickly packed, soft gooey and heavy. Where there are no standards or comparisons or judgments we achieve no style, we receive trash called art, superficiality called inspiration.”

  The issues Davis contemplated in 1967 were philosophical questions that in various forms stayed at the center of the sixties debate for decades thereafter. Where did the unfettered individualism of the hippie movement take you? Davis from the Marxist left and conservatives on the right might agree that it led to a seeming lack of values. But while conservatives would call it a rejection of the American way, Davis saw it as the opposite; he considered it just another byway wending through that insipid land of “capitalistic middle America,” differentiated in this case only by hip language. Most of society operated in a dull haze, he believed, so in that sense merely dropping out was different only in style, not substance. He believed it was necessary to “step away” from bourgeois society, not drop out. To transcend mediocrity, he wanted to act as “a great man,” and he wanted his actors to be in the same mold. Only then, with will and talent, could they change the world. If this called for a certain elitism that ran counter to the democratic rhetoric of the movement, so be it.