They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  The guns found on the Ong Thanh battlefield eventually made their way to Steve Goodman, the unofficial battalion armorer, who examined them to see if any could be repaired. Of most interest to Goodman were not the M-16s, whose problems were familiar, but the larger M-60 machine guns. There were eight M-60s recovered from the battlefield, and when Goodman started pulling them apart, he discovered that in five the gas pistons had been turned backward. “When the gas piston in the M-60 is turned backwards that means it only fires one round at a time; it’s not a machine gun anymore, because there’s nothing to collect the gas to perform the recoil of the bolt which makes it an automatic weapon,” Goodman reported. He thought back to the battle and to the possibility of soldiers being killed and wounded or fleeing because they lacked the firepower they should have had. What happened? Could five machine gun teams make the same mistake? Goodman did not have answers. When he raised the question with higher-ups, he never heard another word about it. The thought of the backward pistons haunted him for years.

  They had a dual meaning, these weapons recovered from battle, signifying not only possible mechanical malfunctions, but human ones as well. In the horror of the ambush, with enemy soldiers on three sides and firing down from the trees, with the Black Lions outnumbered almost eight to one, some men froze, some threw away their weapons and fled, some hid without firing back, and most struggled to reconcile what the eminent military historian S. L. A. Marshall, in his seminal work Men Against Fire, described as the competing impulses of fear and honor, the instinct of self-preservation versus the desire to be respected by comrades. In his study of combat in World War II, Marshall concluded that as few as 15 to 25 percent of soldiers on the front line fired their weapons during combat. For various reasons most did not fire. Using a smaller sample, Russell Glenn examined the combat instincts of infantrymen in Vietnam and arrived at different results. While a majority acknowledged at least one instance where they did not fire, Glenn concluded that in a normal firefight in Vietnam about 80 percent of the soldiers would use their weapons.

  From research conducted by military historians after the battle, it appeared that the percentage of riflemen who engaged the enemy in the jungle of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone on the morning of October 17 was somewhere in the middle, above Marshall’s estimates but below Glenn’s.

  JOHN A. CASH, an army historian, happened to be in Saigon that week when the 2/28 Black Lions marched into battle near the Ong Thanh stream. Cash was there to conduct research for the Office of the Chief of Military History, which by 1967 had begun to document the history of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. To call him a military historian defined Cash no more adequately than to say that he was an army captain. He was a soldier of uncommon qualities. He had a master’s degree from Rutgers, was fluent in Spanish, helped train Cuban nationals for the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, commanded his own rifle company in Vietnam, served as an assistant brigade operations chief for the Seventh Cavalry during the famous early battle of Ia Drang, and then temporarily turned his attention to history and writing. It was hard to miss John Cash when he strode down the creaky wooden floors of Tempo C at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., where the army historians were quartered. He was an imposing presence, nearly six foot three, 205 pounds—and black. He was the only black officer there, as in most places he had served since joining the army in 1960. It was said that he bore a resemblance to the magnetic young boxer, Muhammad Ali, with smooth coffee-colored skin and a handsome face, and while Ali would refuse induction into the army and Cash was fiercely loyal to the institution, the two shared a strong sensibility about race. When colleagues asked Cash how he preferred his coffee, he invariably responded, “I want it beautiful.” Beautiful, they came to learn, meant black.

  On the afternoon of the nineteenth, when he was at the military quarters at Long Binh, Cash received a message that his orders had changed, at least for the next few weeks. The brass in Saigon and Honolulu, where the Pacific command was located, wanted him to conduct a special investigation of the battle in which Terry Allen Jr. and Donald Holleder were killed. Cash was to quietly prepare his own confidential report while working in concert with Major William E. Daniel Jr. of the First Division’s Seventeenth Military History Detachment, who had begun gathering information for the standard after action report. Military history detachments in Vietnam were in the regular chain of command, responsible to brigade and division commanders, and because of that their reports sometimes could be shaped to satisfy superiors, consciously or unconsciously. The Office of the Chief of Military History, by contrast, had an ethic of academic freedom and a fierce pride in not being a mouthpiece for the army. That independence was not always prized by the generals running the war, but in this case it might come in handy. General Westmoreland in particular, Cash was told, “was not satisfied” with early reports he was getting on the battle from the First Division. It was a terrible firefight by any definition but became especially delicate because of the deaths of the famed West Point football star and the son of the former division commander. Old man Allen was said to be working his network already, trying to find out what in hell really happened to his only son.

  Cash was picked up by a driver at Long Binh and taken to the Big Red One rear headquarters in Di An, where he caught a flight to Lai Khe. When he arrived, Major Daniel was in the field conducting interviews, and no one else seemed particularly eager to see him. It became apparent to Cash that he had walked into a sensitive situation. The First Division was “very uptight,” he later reported, and at first refused to make the daily staff journals and duty officer’s logs available to him. The journals and logs recorded the times and brief summaries of communications between officers in the field and at the base camp. When he finally received the files for October 17, Cash suspected but could not prove that some entries had been altered.

  What happens in a battle? The “fog of war” is the classic cliché of military jargon. It means that when the fighting starts, the objective truth or reality of what is happening unavoidably becomes clouded by the chaos of the event. There is no omniscient observer hovering overhead, looking down at the battlefield with all-seeing eyes (down through a canopy of trees, in the case of jungle warfare), understanding every move on each side, chronicling who fired when and precisely where they were located and what the response was, as though it were a ballet that had been carefully choreographed. There are, to start with, several different levels of awareness within the experience of the battle. The reality of the average infantryman is shaped by what he does and sees, a hectic little narrative that presents a world in itself and yet often seems absurdly infinitesimal and haphazard in contrast to the comprehensive story. The radiotelephone operator might have a more nuanced slice of reality—what he sees augmented by what he hears. A medic tends to move around more and so might see things from several angles. Among officers, there are two competing conditions that shape their version of reality: the higher up they are, the more they might understand how the mission objectives compare with the mission as it is being carried out, how different units in the battle are performing, and how it all fits into a larger picture, but the less likely they are to be near the heat of the action. Who had a better grasp of a battle’s reality, the brigade colonel monitoring the fight from an observation helicopter or the company commander down maneuvering among his men?

  Captain Cash wanted to talk to them all. Armed with a notebook and a small cassette tape recorder, he began methodically piecing together the narrative of the battle. Moving back and forth between Lai Khe and the two hospitals in Long Binh, he interviewed thirty soldiers and officers who had been in the battle, and reinterviewed several who had talked to Daniel or his assistant. He built his own timeline of October 17, piecing together the official logs and interviews, and from that timeline drafted his report. His job was to present a precise account of the battle, not to draw conclusions about it, but some themes came through in his interviews. Soldier after soldier raised questions about the
half-hour period early in the battle when Lieutenant Colonel Allen had his troops hold their positions in the jungle instead of withdraw, with the artillery check-fired and no air support yet. Cash, from his interviews, was uncertain whether that decision not to withdraw rested entirely with Allen or with the higher-ups, but he was certain that the decision to check-fire the artillery came from above. He also developed some opinions that he kept out of his report. While Westmoreland and the generals persisted in calling the battle a meeting engagement, not an ambush, Cash’s oral interviews with soldiers made it obvious that they had walked into an ambush. His reporting also made it clear to him that the body count of Vietnamese was false. The body count had been concocted, sloppily if not intentionally, through a sort of battlefield confidence scheme.

  Hours after the battle, at the night defensive perimeter, a brigade intelligence officer had canvassed each company of the 2/28 Black Lions for a body count. The reconnaissance platoon reported 22 dead enemy soldiers. Delta reported 21. Alpha reported 43, Bravo 6, and Charlie 9. Total—101.

  But the companies reached their totals by adding up the numbers provided by various soldiers. If a sergeant reported seeing 11 dead Viet Cong and a private saw 12, that became 23, with no consideration that the two might have seen—and probably did see—the same bodies. The brigade reached its 101 total using the same flawed methodology, again assuming the same bodies were not being reported by more than one company. When he interviewed the brigade intelligence officer, Captain Cash pointed out that the body count was “obviously duplicative.” The officer, he noted, “had no comment.” Major Sloan, the battalion’s operations officer, told Cash that he believed “101 bodies was a grossly exaggerated figure…the same bodies were counted two or three times.” The most reliable number, Sloan and others said, might have been the 22 seen by the reconnaissance platoon, which was the first unit to reach the battlefield after the firefight.

  The false body count would become part of the legend of October 17, and a source of bitterness for the soldiers from Delta and Alpha who marched into the jungle that day. If it was not quite the Little Big Horn massacre that Greg Landon compared it to, it was undeniably a lopsided fight. The enlisted men wanted no part of an official effort to sugarcoat what had happened. They knew what they had endured, and to deny the reality, however horrible, or perhaps because it was so horrible, was, in a sense, to strip them of their battlefield honor.

  At the time of the October 17 battle the military was undergoing an intense internal debate over body counts and the larger issue of battlefield numbers. Statistical experts at the Pentagon’s Office of Systems Analysis had concluded that the official body counts from Vietnam were greatly exaggerated. The tendency to exaggerate was most pronounced, they determined, in instances where American troops were ambushed. “In the opinion of systems analysts, American field commanders were inevitably embarrassed by [their] losses, believing themselves rather than their tactics at fault. To protect both their own careers and those of their superiors, they compensated by padding their claims of enemy killed,” William M. Hammond noted in his detailed study The Military and the Media. In “case after case,” the analysts noted, body counts were inflated at the company level and then subject to “almost universal doubling” at the battalion and brigade levels. Although the military in Vietnam conducted its own study that disputed assertions that body counts were being inflated, Winant Sidle, the brigadier general in charge of information at MACV, worried about credibility problems with correspondents in Saigon and decided to play down the numbers, inflated or not.

  The body count debate that month was not only about enemy dead. On October 15, two days before the Black Lions battle, General Westmoreland had received a telex from his nominal boss, U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of the Pacific Command, urging military spokesmen in Vietnam to obfuscate the numbers of American casualties. “I note that reports of action in the vicinity of Con Thien continue to cite exact numbers of enemy artillery and mortar rounds and to recount precisely U.S. casualties,” Sharp wrote, referring to fighting near the Demilitarized Zone. “It is difficult to see any advantage to releasing such information to the press regarding an engagement and certainly there are disadvantages to telling the enemy how he is doing. Request you review press release procedures at all echelons to assure precise statistics are not made available during the general time frame of an action.”

  The attention that the deaths of Allen and Holleder brought to the October 17 battle made it difficult to misrepresent the number of American casualties even if the army had wanted to do so. It was far easier in this case to inflate enemy numbers.

  THE BATTLE WAS ONLY a few days gone, but at the Alpha and Delta camps it seemed ancient and distant. Things were defined by whether they happened before or after October 17. The men who survived without serious wounds felt out of sorts in Lai Khe, like lingering ghosts. By what right could replacement officers in fresh new uniforms tell them what to do? A new lieutenant came in and found Ernie Buentiempo sprawled on his bunk. He would not get up and would not salute, and the lieutenant, incensed, tried to challenge him until Buentiempo said that he had been in the battle and that his M-16 had jammed with blood and that he had carried the radio for platoon leader Willie C. Johnson, who was in a hospital bed down in Long Binh, dying, his body riddled with bullets, and that Buentiempo himself had just returned from being sewn up for minor wounds. Some of his old card-playing, pot-smoking buddies in Alpha were dead or wounded, but those few still around headed out to the farthest bunk to smoke some joints, which the laundry woman still provided, neatly rolled, in a plastic carton. It was always “for medicinal purposes,” Goodtimes said, and those purposes had never been more urgent than they were now.

  Nothing could be worse than what he had experienced already, so he was unconcerned about the consequences of getting caught smoking marijuana. “What are they gonna do?” he asked, in the familiar grunt soldier’s refrain. “Send me to Vietnam? We’re already in hell. Put me in jail? Thanks!”

  Who were these new soldiers moving into the old hooches? “They didn’t wait to build our company back up,” Mike Taylor wrote to his parents in Alaska. “We got about 75 new guys already. It isn’t the same around here anymore. The guys who made it are a helluva lot closer, but you sure miss the rest of the guys.” Captain Grosso, the new commander of Delta Company, was sensitive to the complicated feelings of the battle survivors and spent much of his time that first week in conversations with small groups of them, trying to draw them out. One platoon leader, watching Grosso in action, joked sarcastically that he was “doing an S. L. A. Marshall on them”—referring to the military historian who had based his findings on men in combat from conducting thousands of after-battle interviews.

  Among the new Black Lions was Phil Duncan, a dropout from the University of Missouri at Kansas City who had signed up for a four-year stint in the army believing that he might avoid Vietnam by enlisting rather than waiting to get drafted. No such luck. He ended up in Lai Khe and was in his second week of jungle training when the Black Lions were devastated and he was called in as a replacement. If he was not already anxious enough about Vietnam, his introduction to the battalion was sufficiently traumatizing. In every tent were bunks where men now dead had slept. Duncan had managed to convince himself when he arrived in Vietnam that if he “kept his head down and obeyed orders” he would survive. Now that confidence was shattered. He felt as though he had “been operating under a myth. Anything could happen to you, and probably would. It was paralyzing that your fate was the luck of the draw.”

  At night, in the tent or down at the enlisted men’s club, soldiers who had survived the battle recounted the experience. They were seething men, angry that they had been led into an ambush. Their buddies died, they told Duncan and other replacements, because of Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, General Hay, and Lieutenant Colonel Allen. They had seen the worst of battle and felt that only those who went through it with them could u
nderstand. The ambush might have been an unmitigated disaster, but nothing upset them more than to hear outsiders question the battlefield effort of those who fought. Carl Woodard, who had marched into the jungle that day as a nineteen-year-old sergeant in Alpha and come out alive, was at the club drinking a beer and watching a John Wayne movie when he heard a new second lieutenant behind him “running off his mouth” about how the Black Lions would have lived if they’d had “their heads out of their fuckin’ asses” on the seventeenth. Woodard turned around and asked him to stop, but the new lieutenant only grew bolder. “And all you fuckin’ guys, if you don’t listen to me, you’ll get killed just like the dumbass fucks on the seventeenth!” he ranted. Woodard rose from his chair and slugged the lieutenant twice, then chased him out of the club into the darkness.

  What he had done, Woodard realized, striking a commissioned officer, could be grounds for court-martial. He was not certain that the second lieutenant would report him, but he took no chances. He went to Alpha headquarters, found Lieutenant Grady, and essentially turned himself in, telling Grady what offense he had committed and why. “Woody, what the fuck have you done?” Grady said to him, after hearing the story. He told Woodard to go to his bunk and stay there until he was called. Grady stayed up late into the night pondering how to handle the case. His friend and leader, Captain George, was in the hospital. The kid he had become close to during the voyage across the Pacific on the USNS Pope, Private Farrell, was dead, along with so many other of his soldiers. Woody’s punch was a blow for them all, but it was also against regulations. He had to be punished. In the end, after conferring with the new battalion commander, Lou Menetrey, Woodard’s officers gave the young sergeant a slap on the wrist, an Article 15, confined him to base camp for a thirty-day suspension, two weeks without pay. Decades later, fondly recalling the incident, his Black Lions buddies would label Woody “the battalion disciplinarian.”