They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  The command readjusted the perimeter the next morning, moving some troops a hundred meters to ground that was higher and half-protected by bamboo and trees. They were now near the intersection of two intermittent streams, the Ong Thanh and Ba Gia. The coordinates were noted in the daily log and radioed back to Lai Khe—XT684586. This is where the First Division operations center wanted Allen’s Black Lions to be—on the northern rim of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, 12.3 miles north of Lai Khe, blocking the path north toward Cambodia, within striking distance of where the latest U.S. intelligence put their long-sought quarry. By whatever name—Q761 or First Regiment to the Vietnamese liberation forces, the 271st to the Americans—elements of the elusive unit were now thought to be closer than ever in the jungle to the south.

  Erwin’s recon platoon and Kasik’s Bravo Company were sent on the first search-and-destroy patrol from the new location while Alpha and Delta stayed back. They marched due south toward an area that had been targeted for B-52 bomb strikes the day before. Not far into the dense jungle, they discovered “a kind of trail that was really spooky,” as Kasik later reported. The trail “consisted of broken saplings to your left and right as you walked down it. If you were not directly between the broken small trees, you would totally miss it.” Kasik assumed they had found “a marker system used by the V.C. to move at night.” The Americans followed the markers carefully and reached a larger trail, where recon spotted a rucksack placed at the trunk of a tree. Erwin set up an ambush, and soon three Viet Cong soldiers came into view, walking north. One was shot in the surprise attack, but his two comrades pulled him along as they made their escape, leaving behind the wounded man’s canteen and a pair of blood-stained sandals. Kasik took the canteen, Erwin the sandals—mementoes of war.

  The mission that day and the spoils the officers brought back added to the cocksure sensibility of the battalion leadership. Yes, the long march of the day before had been trying, but overall the experience in the fields of the secret zone that month had built their confidence. They were the Black Lions, feared unit of the powerful Big Red One. It seemed apparent to Allen and some of his aides that they had the enemy on the run, that the Viet Cong did not want to stand and fight, and that an American victory inevitably would result when and if a battle developed.

  A few days earlier, during a search-and-destroy operation out of their first NDP (night defensive position), Bravo and Delta had wandered into the largest VC base camp they had ever seen, larger than three football fields, in “good repair but otherwise unoccupied,” according to Kasik. When they had reported their find back to Allen, he had responded with the bold order, “Each bunker gets a grenade.” Kasik had joked with Welch that they would have to “put in a rail line and haul box cars of grenades in” to carry out the command, but they tossed as many grenades as they had with them. There was little voiced concern that a base camp of that size, though empty, might portend danger. On another patrol that first week, Alpha Company had chased after a lone Viet Cong soldier at dusk. They had wounded him and picked up his AK-47, which he dropped while escaping. Jim George double-timed his troops back to the defensive perimeter as the sun fell and brought the captured souvenir to the nightly meeting of the Black Lions command group, where the other officers “had some good laughs” about it. George went along with it, but he was not feeling invulnerable himself. As he rushed his men back to the safety of their protective bunkers, an eerie sensation had washed over him. He wrote in a letter to his wife, Jackie, that he had “a very bad feeling” about the mission in the secret zone.

  FOR PROSAIC, OBVIOUS, AND ODD REASONS, or for no discernible reason at all, soldiers came and went, even when the battalion was in the middle of an operation. Joe Costello, the grenadier in Alpha’s second platoon, rejoined his company on the morning of the fifteenth after spending a week in the infirmary at Lai Khe, where he was treated for a huge abscess on his ankle. Someone snapped a photograph of Costello as he waited for the Huey that ferried him back to the field. He was sitting in the scruffy grass near a helicopter pad, a lanky, dark-haired private of only eighteen, knees drawn toward his chest, arms tucked under his legs, helmet and rifle to the side, eyes squinting into the sunlight.

  What was Costello thinking as he sat there? If only I had said I could type. When word had gone out that the company was looking for a clerk, Costello had thought about applying for the job but decided not to because the clerk was supposed to have minimum typing skills, which he lacked. Now, looking forward to another round of grunt work in the field, he thought, Damn, I could have volunteered for the thing. How much typing could there be? They wouldn’t have given me a test. What a jerk! He was confident by nature, not afraid, but still he wanted to make sure that he got back home to his high school sweetheart on Long Island. Behind him were piles of supplies headed for the field with him—ammo boxes, weapons, food, clothes, including a new pair of pants for Michael (Peewee) Gallagher and a fresh web vest for Allan V. Reilly, two members of his platoon. Peewee and Reilly would be “feeling all spiffy about their clean, new clothes” when the shipment arrived. Their reaction, such a simple pleasure, stuck in Costello’s mind’s eye as a grain of unsullied memory.

  The same Huey that brought him in might have taken Gerald Thompson out on the return flight. As Costello’s ankle healed, Thompson’s toes worsened. The long march had aggravated his ingrown toe-nails so much that he now was rendered virtually immobile, and a medic recommended that he go back to Lai Khe for treatment, which entailed wearing flip-flops and soaking his feet three times a day. The point man in Thompson’s squad, Fred Kirkpatrick of Stow, Ohio, also left that morning on a helicopter that took him down to Bien Hoa. He was yanked from the field for a welcome but unexpected week of R and R in Japan. Kirkpatrick had put in for the vacation with his squadmate and good friend Ronnie Reece. He expected Reece to get the break but not him, since he already had taken five days off in June. Military bureaucracies work in mysterious ways: Kirkpatrick was approved, Reece denied. Kirkpatrick did not complain; he was exhausted from the daily grind and glad to be getting away. In the morning stillness, before leaving the NDP, he had a brief talk with his buddy Reece, who confided that he was nervous about going out on another mission. Kirkpatrick tried to ease his mind by borrowing ten dollars from him, promising to repay it when he returned. In Bien Hoa later that day, as he awaited his flight to Japan, Kirkpatrick scribbled a lighthearted letter to Gerald Thompson, the “Baddest Squad Leader in Delta” Company.

  “Hello Dude, how’s the infantry life going?” he began, as though he had been away from that life so long that he could barely remember. “I’ve been in the NCO club most of today and the rest of the time in the EM [enlisted men’s] club. I’m about half drunk now. Hope you guys are staying out of trouble; I’d sure hate to come back and find no squad.”

  The letter was postmarked the next day, October 16, from Japan.

  Kirkpatrick, a battle-tested rifleman who took pride in walking point for his squad, was one of nine Delta soldiers on R and R that week. Another seven had contracted malaria during the rainy season and were recovering in the medical wards of the Ninety-third and Twenty-fourth evacuation hospitals at Long Binh. Ten more were being treated for wounds suffered in the battalion’s skirmishes during the first half of October. And at least that number were back in Lai Khe with various problems ranging from swollen feet to combat fatigue. The unit that Clark Welch had in the field was a thin shadow of a company. By the book he might have had 185 men, and at least 140. According to the personnel roster for October 1967 he had 92, including cooks, supply staff, and a mortar platoon that did not leave the NDP. Jim George’s Alpha Company was equally shorthanded. There were almost half a million American military personnel in Vietnam, and General Westmoreland was clamoring for more, but only one in eight was going to infantry units that did most of the fighting and were being further depleted every week.

  Nothing to be done about it; most vacancies just sat there, ghosts of men left behind.
Only a few positions were considered essential and filled quickly. Every company had a forward artillery liaison team, usually a lieutenant and sergeant detached from an artillery battery who walked with infantry commanders and called in artillery strikes during search-and-destroy missions. Clark Welch had been working with a new team since the start of Operation Shenandoah II, but he had an uneasy feeling about the lieutenant, who “thought he was hot shit.” Late one afternoon, after a long day in the field, Welch watched the lieutenant and sergeant as they sat side by side cleaning their .45s. When the sergeant finished with his weapon, the lieutenant said, “Let me see that!” and grabbed the gun. The gun was turned toward the sergeant. It went off; a bullet ripped into his abdomen an inch above the navel. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” the sergeant shouted.

  There was no blood and no bullet; it had lodged in the sergeant’s midsection, expending all its energy inside. Before the battalion surgeon arrived, the sergeant was dead. Welch, disgusted, ordered the lieutenant to leave on the same helicopter that carried away the lifeless soldier. The next incoming Huey brought in Delta’s new forward artillery liaison officer, a young second lieutenant with a bright smile who had eagerly volunteered for the job. He was Harold Bascom Durham Jr. of Tifton, Georgia, who had answered to one nickname since the day he was born in a hospital that had run out of blue blankets. A random act, reckless gunplay by his predecessor, is what brought Pinky Durham out to march with the Black Lions along the bamboo-shaded edge of the Ong Thanh.

  The thinness of their ranks drained bravado from the men. So did daily contact, or near contact, with the enemy. Many of the officers might be exuding confidence, but more soldiers were feeling that they were being used, or misused, as pawns in the larger search-and-destroy strategy. During the long march, the man in front of Alpha Company radioman Ernest Buentiempo turned back to him as they slogged through the brush and muttered, “Ernie, we ain’t nothin’ but a chain of fools.”

  Back at Lai Khe, Lieutenant Tom Grady, now Jim George’s executive officer at Alpha Company, was spending more time as a psychological counselor, the same role he had played during the July voyage to Vietnam aboard the troopship. A private balked at an order to rejoin the company in the field. Grady was given the job of “getting him straight,” as he recounted later. “I talked to the kid and he was a nice kid and I sat him down and said, ‘Look, you gotta go. You gotta go. We gotta go.’

  “He said, ‘Sir, I’m scared.’

  “‘We’re all scared,’ I said. ‘If you think I’m less scared than you are, you’re nuts.’ He said, ‘I’m just too scared to go.’ I said, ‘But you’ve got to go, because what’ll happen is when you refuse, when I say, “Private, get your gear, get on the helicopter, go to the forward area,” if you refuse it’s disobedience of a direct and lawful order. I’ll then have to put charge sheets together. You’ll be court-martialed. The normal sentence is six months confinement, reduced to lowest enlisted rank and forfeiture of two-thirds pay’—it’s called Six and Two-Thirds—‘You’ll go to Long Binh Jail for six months and the bad part is that’s bad time. You still have to do your full year. You’re scared? We’re all scared. You just gotta go. We’ll get through this together. Just stick with me. Stick with somebody and we’ll all get through this.’ And he was a good kid.” Reluctantly, the private joined his buddies in the field.

  AT A QUARTER AFTER SEVEN on the evening of the fifteenth, General Westmoreland took leave of his family at Clark Field in the Philippines and flew back to Saigon to prepare for another week as commander of American forces in Vietnam. In his wallet he carried a slip of paper on which he had scribbled a few words to remind him of what he considered most important for his soldiers: Food, mail, and medical care.

  The scorecard in those areas was not perfect but mostly good.

  The lives of wounded American soldiers were being saved at unparalleled rates by skilled doctors, nurses, and medical evacuation teams that could get wounded men to field hospitals within a half hour of a battle. There were complaints about mail service, to be sure, and a hot rumor spreading from base to base, according to army intelligence reports, that “pacifists employed in the San Francisco Post Office” were “deliberately delaying the mail in order to undermine the morale of troops in Vietnam.” Army postal authorities were said to have documented a deterioration in mail service and were investigating the cause. There were periods when the men got shut out for a week or more, then a whole delayed batch came in, but at other times the letters that Danny Sikorski received from his sister Diane in Milwaukee, for instance, came almost as dependably as if they were being sent to Green Bay instead of Lai Khe.

  As for Westmoreland’s third necessity, if wars were decided by food alone, this one would have been an overwhelming victory for the United States. In an effort to make GIs feel at home, the military built more than forty ice cream plants in Vietnam. One was at the base in Lai Khe. In the First Division every effort was made to fly in at least one hot meal a day to troops in the field, often including gravy and mashed potatoes, with even a garnish of parsley—and pastries for the morning. When Alpha Company soldiers returned to base camp, they walked past barrels filled with Coke and beer on ice. Steve Goodman, a Black Lions armorer who also served as the unofficial acquisitions expert for his battalion, traveled down to Long Binh twice a month and was amazed by what he could find in the huge warehouses there—“everything from soup to nuts…Coke, Pepsi, piled as far as the eye could see, mountains of stuff.”

  The list of basics was in Westmoreland’s wallet, but there were more pressing matters on his mind when his plane touched down at Tan Son Nhut Air Base that autumn Sunday night and he was chauffeured to his villa in a black Chrysler Newport that had four silver stars above the front bumper. For more than a week he had been exchanging telex messages with Major General Robert G. Fergusson, his former classmate (class of 1936) at West Point, now the American military commander in Berlin. Fergusson’s son Bob had been critically wounded, shot in the head, while serving as a forward observer for the 101st Airborne Division during a search-and-destroy mission in Vietnam on October 8. Young Bob was now at the Ninety-seventh Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon, slipping in and out of consciousness, his brain damaged, fighting for his life. Westmoreland could not possibly know the personal story of every wounded soldier under his command, so in a sense Fergusson’s struggle became representative of them all. He received hospital reports daily and passed them along to General and Mrs. Fergusson in Germany. Would medical care make any difference for this twenty-four-year-old lieutenant? The latest report from the hospital showed slow improvement, vital signs stable.

  Westmoreland also had to deal with the fallout from a report from Vietnam that had appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite six days earlier. The story involved a company of the First Division at Lai Khe, in this case not the Black Lions but the First Battalion of the Eighteenth Infantry Regiment. Correspondent Don Webster and a cameraman had gone out with the battalion on a search-and-destroy mission and witnessed soldiers cutting ears from enemy bodies. Here is how it played:

  Cronkite: Ambush, surprise attacks, terrorism, brutality, all are part of the character of the Vietnamese conflict. It remains a basically guerrilla war defying the normal conventions of warfare. As such, it can produce savage responses, even among American GIs. CBS newsman Don Webster came across one example at a U.S. Army base camp thirty miles north of Saigon.

  Webster: This is not a pretty story. In fact, it’s a rather appalling one, but there are situations in this war which are appalling, when perfectly normal Americans under the intense pressure of combat do things they’ll later be ashamed of.

  Last night this base camp, a unit of the First Infantry Division, had a sneak mortar attack. The VC fired hundreds of rounds of mortar into the camp, but the Americans fought back valiantly, and, as dawn came, their own mortars were still firing back. Many air strikes were also called in, pounding the jungle growth where the enemy was believed hiding.
All in all, there was little doubt the Americans took more enemy lives than they gave up.

  The Viet Cong like to drag away the bodies of their dead to confuse the Americans about how many casualties they took. In this case the Americans turned the trick, dragged Viet Cong out of the nearby jungle and into the camp. The main reason this was done was to get intelligence, to search the papers on the bodies and find out what unit they were with.

  A base camp like this is an eerie sight the morning after a big battle. These men have brushed close to death, and death has passed them by. In a situation like this, nothing is treated more gingerly and more lovingly than the body of a dead companion. Many of these men are still in their teens, impressionable and emotional. They’ve lost a good friend. They also know it might have been them.

  When the battle is over, some of the men keep souvenirs. This Russian-made Viet Cong rifle, and this light machine gun, both taken off dead VC. Sitting in a comfortable living room in the United States this will seem shocking, but you must understand the emotional state of some of these young men and their anger and sorrow at the loss of their buddies. A few of the Americans, as souvenirs of the battle, cut off the ears of the dead Viet Cong to keep as mementos. Of the three dead VC we saw, all three had one or both ears lopped off.