They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Nevertheless, even if it is accepted that yesterday’s fight was a victory, the battle raises some very disturbing questions about the overall state of the war. First, this was not just a few guerrillas making a hit-and-run attack. This was a full regiment, two thousand five hundred men. This large unit was able to position itself to ambush the American battalion—two thousand five hundred men so well concealed that the Americans literally walked into a trap. A force of this size cannot move through the countryside or the jungle, no matter how thick it may be, without Vietnamese civilians knowing about it, and there’s the heart of the matter, because there is good reason to believe the very people who staged the ambush yesterday are back tending their fields in the same area today.

  Not long ago, a high-ranking American officer told an ABC correspondent that the VC in that region were so weak, they could fight as a unit only one day a month; the rest of the time they had to work as farmers. Well, that may well be true, but it is not very encouraging to reflect on the fact that while they are farming, they are preparing for fighting. There seems to be little progress in winning their hearts and minds, as the saying goes. There are officials in Washington who insist enemy morale is very low; maybe it is, but the people who took the lives of fifty-eight young Americans yesterday, obviously, do not believe their cause is hopeless. And if they are so weak they can fight only one day a month, but on that one day they are strong enough to do so much terrible damage.

  In fact Triet’s unit was not planning an assault on Saigon. That attack was months away. Triet was headed the other direction, toward an attack on Loc Ninh. And though it was not quite accurate that some of the Viet Cong who fought in the battle were back farming the local fields the next day, here Jennings was close to the truth. Farmers in that isolated area of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone who supported the South Vietnamese had fled by then to the protected hamlets of Chon Thanh or Ben Cat. The farmers who remained were Viet Cong or sympathetic to the Viet Cong. One was Nguyen Van Lam, commander of one of the Rear Service Group 83 security companies. Lam was not yet back working the fields because he and his men had gone into hiding to avoid the intense American bombing that followed the battle. But the land he farmed was indeed close to the battle site along the Ong Thanh stream. His house of bamboo, mud, and tin was even visible in a pictograph map that Clark Welch had carried in his pocket.

  Chapter 21

  Down with Dow

  THE MORNING SKY hung low and gray over Madison on the morning of the eighteenth. An unsettling wind slapped across Lake Mendota and ripped the first dying leaves from the canopy of American elms, foretelling winter’s approach. The darkening atmosphere felt like dusk even though it was only twenty after ten. At the base of Bascom Hill, on the vast lawn between Science Hall on the north and Music Hall on the south, a battalion of students who wanted to challenge the Dow Chemical Company’s presence on campus was now taking rough shape.

  Paul Soglin had done his daily doughnut run in the Kroger’s parking lot on the walk over from North Bassett. Jonathan Stielstra had bicycled to campus from his Drake Street rental house on his old English three-speed, which he left on the sidewalk without a lock. Phil Stielstra was there too, though the twin brothers were intent on going their own ways. Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern had made it in from their apartment in Monona. Evan Stark and Robert Cohen were there, though they had delegated the task of organizing the two hundred or so troops on hand to a few younger students who were called “marshals” and wore red cloth armbands on their left sleeves and took turns shouting instructions into a battery-powered bullhorn. Most of the crew from the underground paper Connections was on hand, including Michael Oberdorfer, the photographer, who wore an army fatigue jacket and wool ski cap and carried a Nikon.

  Stuart Brandes, a doctoral student in history, had descended from his fourth-floor carrel at the State Historical Society library across the street and joined the crowd as something between participant and curiosity seeker, a straddling position that was not uncommon. Like many people who opposed the Vietnam war, he considered it a tragic waste of human life and a misuse of American military power—the wrong place at the wrong time—but he was also unmoved by leftist rhetoric and interested only in peaceful protest. With a poor sound system and swirling wind, no one could hear much of anything, but Brandes, who recorded his observations that day, noted that one marshal cautioned participants “not to give their identification until they were arrested” and told them they should be prepared for “fisticuffs” at the site of the demonstration. Fisticuffs, Brandes noted, was “not a term people generally use, and that sticks in my mind.” He also heard someone welcome “our brothers from San Francisco.” It was not hard to pick out the interlopers from the West Coast. Brandes described them as “very unkempt, more outlandish even than our most wildly dressed hippie in Madison. One had a drum, another a bugle, and there were also a couple of marimbas.”

  That would be the San Francisco Mime Troupe, following through on the promise director Ron Davis had made the night before at the end of the performance at the Union Theater. “See you at the demonstration,” he had told the audience, and here they were, all but Peter (Coyote) Cohon, who missed it, as he explained later, “having overslept after a bawdy night with an undergraduate Valkyrie who was not about to let me go until I had decimated every ideological misconception and physical tension she had accumulated since birth.” But Davis, Arthur Holden, Darryl Henriques, Kent Minault, and Charles Degelman had roused themselves in time and came with a collection of instruments they had brought along in the blue-paneled truck. Now they were not mimes but mummer agitators, an early configuration of what Davis would later call the Guerrilla Marching Band. Brandes had it about right, except for the marimbas; they were tambourines. Filling out the band on this morning were a few members of the local guerrilla theater group Uprising painted in whiteface and dressed as symbols of the university and the military-industrial complex, including an LBJ and an Uncle Sam on stilts. Vicki Gabriner, a veteran activist from Brooklyn, came as Miss “Sifting and Winnowing”—the singular phrase evoking the UW’s proud tradition of vigor and tolerance in the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

  In keeping with a compromise that had been reached at the final organizing meeting of the protesters, the crowd was divided between those who intended to sit in and obstruct Dow interviews that day and those who did not want to obstruct but would participate in supportive picketing. As these delineations were being explained, a young man walked through the crowd with a bag of firecrackers. Stielstra stuck out his hand and pocketed a few and then “forgot about them, completely” for the next several hours. Enough with the instructions. The mime troupe grew tired of milling about and decided to move out. “A bugle call, blat, blat, blaaa…a drum roll…and the whole crowd followed the incipient marching band up the hill,” Davis wrote later. The obstructionists were supposed to march up one side of the hill and the supporters the other, but less than halfway up they joined forces again and moved forward as one high-spirited crew. 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.

  Paul Soglin, wearing jeans and his trademark coat with sheepskin collar, marched up the hill with certain expectations. The students would obstruct. They might get arrested and carried off to jail. But the university would respect the tradition of civil disobedience and not further punish demonstrators, despite Dean Kauffman’s threat to expel students who broke the law. Those were the “unwritten rules of engagement,” Soglin thought. The day before, U.S. District Court Judge James Doyle had refused to issue a temporary restraining order in Soglinv. Kauffman, but in doing so the federal judge had kept the case open and directed both sides to make their cases on the question of whether university regulations regarding disruptive protests were unconstitutionally vague and broad. Soglin and his lawyers had considered the ruling a
partial victory that might compel the authorities to handle the Dow demonstration with extra caution. There would be no violence, Soglin assumed.

  Jim Rowen, dressed in traditional English grad student attire, dark green turtleneck and sports coat, marched up the hill with his wife and a few friends, feeling “excited and energized, but a little scared.” Okay, he said to himself, later in the day you might be in the pokey, and then see what happens. He was afraid of being arrested and made more vulnerable to the draft and having to explain to his family that he was not in grad school after all. But he also remembered the great history of civil disobedience and the heroes of the civil rights movement who had been willing to make sacrifices for a good cause. He hated the war in Vietnam above all, and he was outraged by the hideous effects of napalm, and he told himself that if enough people did enough things to stop the war, maybe it would stop.

  Stielstra, wearing dark tennis shoes, a cotton sweater, and a hip-length tan coat, had never experienced anything like this at Calvin College. He felt alive with “that full-bodied feeling.” It had been a decisive week for him already. Two days earlier, in keeping with the Stop the Draft movement throughout the nation that week, he had sent his draft card back to his draft board, Indiana Local Board no. 266 in West Lafayette (where he had finished high school), along with a letter withdrawing his request for a student deferment. He was uncertain about the next step but determined to show that he opposed the war and the draft. Now, walking up the hill to oppose Dow Chemical, he was also unsure of what awaited, but he knew he was “walking into the face of it.” The mime troupe added to the sense of adventure and helped “light up the charge.” He and his fellow marchers “had no idea really where this was going. It was on some level an understanding that we were going to step over the line into the unknown. And with a lot of energy. A lot of good fellow feeling. You didn’t necessarily know the person next to you. You didn’t know how committed they were. But it was sufficient that they were marching up the hill, too.”

  “Down with Dow! Down with Dow!” the marchers chanted. From his office window at the top of the hill, Chancellor Sewell watched them advance. Their destination was supposed to be a tactical surprise. Dow interviews were being held in two buildings, Engineering and Commerce. But every student seemed to be in on the secret. They were on their way to the Commerce Building. Up the left side of the hill, gathering more marchers along the way, around the south side of Bascom Hall, where Sewell lost sight of them, partway down the long set of stairs toward Van Hise, a sharp right turn and there they were, at the side of Commerce. The mime troupe marching band stayed outside, leading the line of a hundred or so supportive picketers in a thrumming, blaring, rhythmic procession along the wide sidewalk on the east side of the building and over to the cement plaza on the northeast front. Chancellor Sewell had moved to Dean Kauffman’s office in the back of Bascom Hall, where the rear window provided a clear view of the events unfolding on the plaza below. At 10:50 the protesters who had decided to obstruct filtered inside and took their places in the east-west corridor. Soglin, Rowen, McGovern, and Stielstra were bodies in this crowd.

  Soon the gray-speckled granite floor virtually disappeared from view as the hallway brimmed with demonstrators sitting cross-legged side by side and leaning against the walls. This was no place for a claustrophobic. The hallway was narrow, a mere ten feet across, and no more than fifty yards from end to end. The ceiling hung low, eight feet high. The walls, lined with salmon-colored institutional tile, were nearly as hard and slick as the floor, creating a cacophonous echo effect when the protesters began chanting and singing. Because there were classrooms on either side, behind closed wooden doors, the only natural light barely glanced in from stairwells at either end. It felt like being in an overcrowded basement or submarine.

  Curly Hendershot, the Dow Chemical Company recruiter, had set up shop behind the closed door of room 104, about halfway down the east-west corridor. The protest marshals, supplied with an intelligence report from scouts who had come by hours earlier, moved their strongest and most determined demonstrators to the floor just outside this room, space they considered the epicenter of the obstructive sit-in.

  FRED HARVEY HARRINGTON, the university president, left Madison at eight that morning. Like General Hay on the seventeenth in Vietnam, he was preoccupied elsewhere on the pivotal day. He had “left Madison reluctantly,” a report later stated, “realizing that it would be a difficult day on the Madison campus” but drawn away by regular appointments in Milwaukee. Harrington in the past year had extended his administrative vision far beyond Madison, to the burgeoning UW system statewide, and was leaving matters at home to Chancellor Sewell, whom he had talked to the previous day, and to Dean Kauffman. “Joe can handle it” was a phrase first uttered by President Harrington.

  At about the time Harrington rode out of town in the back of a dark chauffer-driven Cadillac, Ralph Hanson assembled his troops. He began with forty men, including all twenty from his own Protection and Security force on campus and twenty off-duty Madison officers, ten more than he had had available the day before. After reiterating the guidelines he had drawn up for handling protesters, which seemed designed to minimize the possibility of violence, he told his combined force that they were “not facing a hostile group,” despite exhortations of resistance coming from some radical student leaders. The chief felt that he had come to understand Wisconsin’s antiwar students and did not believe that physical confrontation was in their repertoire. “The kids,” he said, “are too sophisticated for this sort of thing.” As a measure of Hanson’s confidence, his initial group of forty were dispatched without riot gear helmets or batons. The Madison off-duty cops carried .38-caliber pistols but removed the bullets and put them in their pockets.

  Hanson was less certain about where the action would be, so he deployed his troops in several places. A handful went to Engineering, another group to Bascom Hall, protecting the offices of Sewell and Kauffman, a small reserve force roamed in squad cars, and the largest number, fourteen, were stationed inside the Commerce Building.

  The ranking officer inside Commerce, aside from Hanson, was Captain George Schiro of the Madison Police Department, who placed two or three officers outside the door of each room on the east-west corridor. Schiro and his men observed quietly and did nothing to stop the protesters when they came in at 10:50 and began their obstructive sit-in. Almost immediately a young woman tried to enter room 104 to see Curly Hendershot for a job interview. Schiro was pinned against the wall by the mass of humanity, which made it difficult for him to help her. He found himself in the odd position of asking her, rather than the protesters, to calm down. “I asked the young lady please not to make any trouble because this was just impossible,” Schiro reported later. “She told me she had her rights and she wanted to exercise them. I said, ‘I agree with you, but these students evidently feel that their rights are a little better than others.’ I advised her to write to Dow Chemical and ask for an application and to set up an interview at a later date and she got to arguing back and forth with the other students. The students told her that she didn’t have any rights. She had no rights to be interviewed by Dow. Dow had no right to be on campus, and so forth. And the girl, you could see the girl was getting emotionally upset and I tried to reason with her and tell her to leave but she wanted to stay there.”

  Stuart Brandes, the doctoral student in history, was standing atop the wooden base of a portable bulletin board in the foyer to get a better view. With that small boost, and with his imposing six-foot-five height, he was able to see clearly down the hall, and he watched the prospective Dow applicants get stopped at the door to room 104. Students who tried to weave through were pushed away, he reported. “A campus mailman didn’t even make the effort.” One of those turned away was Leonidas Doty, a Vietnam veteran, who was already familiar with napalm. “I unloaded napalm because it was on my plane,” he told a Daily Cardinal reporter. “It’s not more deadly than any other weapon.” Warre
n R. Wade, a graduate student in political science, entered the building as a sort of test, to determine whether he could get an interview with Dow if he wanted one, which he did not. It was “jammed,” he reported later, but with great effort he was able to force his way in and out.

  A few minutes later Professor Charles Center descended from his office on a higher floor and headed toward room 108, about halfway down the corridor, where he was to hold an eleven o’clock class on life insurance. The route was blocked, and he could get no further than the school of business’s administrative office in room 102, a larger room close to the main entrance that Chief Hanson and several officers and deans were using as their tactical headquarters. Center told Hanson that he had to teach a class, and Hanson decided to escort him down the hall. “Professor Center has to go to class! Professor Center has to go to class!” Hanson shouted as they inched along, accompanied by three of Center’s students. Another three students made it in after that group, and Center started his class. Six of his seventeen registered students were there.

  Hanson maneuvered his way back to room 102 and called Joe Kauffman’s office at Bascom Hall. Chancellor Sewell was there, along with one of Harrington’s top aides. Hanson reported that the corridors were filling up with more protesters, who were now “willfully” obstructing the Dow interviews, thus breaking university rules. He also suggested that Chancellor Sewell remain in Bascom and not attempt to visit Commerce because it was not safe. “Down with Dow! Dow Must Go!” resounded in the hallway.

  Professor Center, at the other end of the hall, began teaching. “A real futile effort to conduct class was made. We could scarcely hear each other and the distraction outside the door made concentration most difficult,” Center recounted in a memorandum to authorities later that day. “There was in the corridor immediately outside upwards of a hundred in the protest group, their enthusiasm stirred by their leadership by use of bullhorn, to lead singing, to chant slogans and by means of stamping of feet. It is noted that the corridor has a terrazzo floor and hard tile walls. The din can be imagined.” After a few minutes Center went to the door and asked the police officer outside if anything could be done to quiet the protesters. The officer returned moments later with Jack Cipperly, an assistant dean, one of four members of Joe Kauffman’s task force who had been monitoring the scene all morning.