They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  “TODAY IS THE nineteenth of October,” Delta survivor Mike Troyer drawled into his tape recorder that evening, preparing another reel for his parents in western Ohio. “Got one letter. Tell everybody I’m still kicking. I want to get off line. Drive a truck or something. Some easy job. The tape’s pretty short. Don’t have much more to say. I’m still alive and all. You can tell everybody. If you get anything in the papers about Shenandoah II, you can send it to me. I want to see the papers and how they’re gonna lie about it. See what they’re gonna say. ’Cause I know what happened out there. I wanna see what they’ll say about it. They’ll say things we really didn’t do.”

  At the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, Greg Landon was still waiting for his back to be resewn, and since he was in better shape than the other wounded, he had spent most of that Friday assisting the staff. As he moved from bed to bed, the Professor tried to learn more about who had died in the battle. “I have very little information yet as to just who was hit,” he wrote home to his family in New York State. What he had learned was horrifying enough. The other two squads in his platoon had been wiped out, including the lieutenant and his sergeants. By the luck of where they were positioned, the men in his squad were the only ones to all survive. “It really can unnerve a person to go through that mess,” he wrote. “October 17—I’ll remember that day.”

  Nearby, at the Twenty-fourth Evacuation Hospital, Jim George took out his American Red Cross stationery and wrote another letter home to his wife, Jackie, in Spartanburg. “Feel about the same today,” the wounded Alpha commander reported. “My right eye is almost swelled shut, but I can see a little out of it. Gen. Hay (Div. Co.) came by to see me today. He said we did a good job…. The psychology of all of it hasn’t registered yet. I keep having nightmares of men dying and yelling out, but hope that will all pass with time.”

  Chapter 26

  “Tragedy Beyond

  Our Words”

  BILL SEWELL AWOKE to a shattered world. He had begun his job as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin only a few months earlier with a euphoric sense that he and a collegial academy could construct a liberal pragmatist ideal in Madison. Now that grand notion lay in ruins, broken amid the blood and chaos of the Commerce Building. He was angry and depressed and could not bring himself to place the blame entirely on others. He could not fault only a faculty that, against his advice, had voted to allow the Dow Chemical Company to recruit on campus; nor the police who, to his horror, had marched into the swarm of demonstrators with nightclubs raised high; nor the students who, to his dismay, had rejected pleas to end their unlawful assembly. This was the worst of situations, where he could find no single scapegoat upon whom to focus his wrath. Sewell felt badly served by everyone, including himself. Bascom Hall was the last place he wanted to be now, so he spent the morning of October 19 holed up at his house, dodging phone calls, taking only a few from his closest faculty friends, wondering how he would be received at the three thirty faculty meeting, and preparing his own defense.

  Paul Soglin had run through a range of emotions since that moment inside Commerce when he curled into the fetal position to protect his body against police clubs. First fear washed over him, then anger, then sadness, but by the end of that day, with the mass rally in the darkness on the library mall, it struck him that the violent confrontation—shorthanded into police brutality—had sparked a combustive reaction in the larger student body that years of speeches about Vietnam had not. Now, on the morning after, he was invigorated by the sudden prospect of a mass audience and his enhanced role as cochairman of the Committee on Student Rights, an ad hoc group that had been formed the night before to lead the strike.

  Madison had made the evening news. The networks and big city papers were sending correspondents to town. There was a stirring sensation of being part of something larger, of Madison making its mark on the national movement as it swept across the country that week. Antiwar leaders in New York and Washington would take notice of the scrappy little band of demonstrators on the midwestern campus who had stood up to the war machine and had their heads bashed. Soglin made his way up Bascom Hill at the unlikely hour of eight thirty for the first rally of the day, attended by nearly two thousand students. It was held on the steps near the statue of Lincoln, whose noble face was covered with a gas mask.

  This was not Old Abe’s sort of day. The prevailing mood was malice toward all and charity for none. Several speakers, including Soglin, who wore his sheepskin coat unbuttoned in the bright morning sun, attacked the university for sending police into the Commerce Building and urged students to express their disapproval by boycotting classes. The circus atmosphere of the morning before was gone, along with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose members had packed their costumes and instruments into the blue-paneled truck and were driving their raucous caravan out of town, traveling southwest on Route 151 toward Iowa City, where, as Ron Davis put it, they would “see what mischief we might stir up” at the University of Iowa.

  In place of the mime agitators, the morning crowd was now filled with unexpected faces. Much as the night before on the library mall, some people were attending their first demonstration. James Hadden, a freshman from Madison, came to the rally displaying a visual statement of his changing sensibility, a “nonconformist jean jacket.” For Hadden, who still lived at home, on the west side, with a father who was a veteran of World War II, this was all new. He listened to Soglin connect the university to the “war machine” and denounce Sewell and Kauffman for lying to the students. He heard rumors rippling through the crowd about how police had clubbed girls in the midsection and had ruptured the uterus of one. Look up there, someone said, and Hadden noticed men in trenchcoats perched on the roofs of nearby buildings, focusing down on the scene with binoculars and cameras. He thought he might be put on “some subversive list by the FBI and considered a commie sympathizer.” Should he be there or not? He found no easy answer. It made him uncomfortable to think that he was among “the students who could afford to go to school, protesting against the establishment, while poor kids who couldn’t afford to go were fighting for the establishment” in Vietnam. Just standing there with the activists made him feel guilty, yet he was also thinking, “I’m a student and I’ve got to break the home ties and I don’t like the war.”

  When the rally ended, picket lines were set up in front of major buildings on campus. The most boisterous picketing took place outside Bascom Hall and Commerce, where several dozen students chanted and carried homemade signs and banners that had been constructed overnight. “Stop Administration Brutality.” “Cops OFF!” “Strike against Police Brutality.” “Support Strike.” “Get Out of Vietnam.” “Police Brutality—Kill It Before It Multiplies!” Several students entered Bascom and stood outside Sewell’s office holding a sign that read “J’accuse William Sewell—Student Blood Is on Your Hands.” As another measure of how things had changed in twenty-four hours, the strike now had the blessing of Wisconsin Student Association leaders, who had opposed the obstructive sit-in the day before. Steve Richter, the WSA vice president, said that police brutality, not the war or Dow, was now the issue. The president of the National Student Association, Ed Schwartz, was on his way to Madison from Washington, D.C., arriving at Bascom Hill in time for the second rally of the day there, where he would say that the country was being “ripped apart at the seams” and that the actions at Wisconsin marked “the beginning of a long, hard struggle for politicization of American students.”

  The strike was also supported by movement-oriented graduate teaching assistants who had begun organizing themselves that year in the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA). About 150 teaching assistants had met as an ad hoc group late Wednesday night, after the rally on the library mall, and had decided to support the student strike. Bob Muehlenkamp, then a leader of the Wisconsin TAA, who went on to become a reform organizer for the Teamsters, explained the group’s decision in a pamphlet about the strike and its aftermath. “Lik
e everyone else on campus, the TAs had been deeply troubled by the day’s events and were carried along by their emotion,” Muehlenkamp wrote. “Certainly some response seemed necessary—and a particular form was already available: to strike. Also, TAs consider themselves as teachers to sympathize with and represent the student point of view. We thus felt impelled to join the strike because the students had already decided on it, and because TAs were expected to and indeed wanted to unite with the students in the protest. It now seems clear that these forces were strong enough to cause us, even before we met, to make up our minds to participate in the strike.” Since the decision seemed obvious, Muehlenkamp wrote, there was no discussion of issues, only tactics. They settled on three: first, that they would wear armbands reading “TA on strike”; second, that they would “depart from the normal academic routine by bringing their students outside the classroom to join the strike and to discuss the issues”; and third, that they would circulate a petition supporting teaching assistants and other graduate students and faculty against administrative reprisals.

  In the end 302 TAs signed the petition, about one-seventh of the two thousand teaching assistants on the Wisconsin campus. Lynne Cheney was among those in the English department who rejected the petition and continued teaching. Her husband, Dick Cheney, the political science graduate assistant, found the picketers “a minor hassle” as he made his way through campus with his stacks of computer data cards.

  The first picketers stationed outside Music Hall on the bottom of Bascom Hill were not teaching assistants but John Pickart and Everett Goodwin, the strings section pacifists who had witnessed the events inside Commerce. The music school “in its typical manner kept right on rolling along, oblivious to the real world,” Pickart reported in a letter he wrote later to his friend and fellow cellist, Pam Crane. “Even so, we really shook it up some.” Before class they walked inside and talked to students and professors, explaining why they were striking, then walked out and picketed the entrance. The music school held its weekly all-school convocation that day, a one-hour session that music majors were required to attend every Thursday, and Pickart and Goodwin and several allies marched in and stood in the aisles holding signs. “Music students are inventive, and we had some good signs, although somewhat irrelevant to the question,” Pickart reported to Crane. “Johannes Brahms Not Tear Gas Bombs,” “Mahler Not Mauler,” “Hammerklavier Not Well-Tempered Students,” and “Music Strikes Keys and Classes” were mixed in with signs deploring police brutality.

  “Of course, being a radical in the music school is not without its dangers,” Pickart noted, citing several ugly incidents. A professor, he said, “threatened to beat up” one student picket, and the school secretary angrily ripped apart a picket sign, and Pickart was accused of being “a dirty communist pig,” and several musicians who played in the university band were called in for a lecture “on the evils of the New York Commies etc. who organized the strike.” Pickart also told Crane of a teaching assistant “who is being brought before a committee” for refusing to take class attendance that day. Pickart himself refused to take attendance in orchestra (he was the orchestra manager, a work-study job for which he was paid), though he did play his cello in that class.

  In a university of more than thirty thousand students, the strike call that first day was in numerical terms only minimally successful. There were virtually no pickets and no noticeably greater absentee rates at the engineering and agriculture schools. The boycott was more keenly felt at the College of Letters and Sciences, home to about seventeen thousand students. Statistics kept that day by the office of Dean Leon Epstein indicated that history, philosophy, and sociology—Chancellor Sewell’s old department—were the heaviest hit, and that in all perhaps four thousand students were reported absent, compared to the usual thousand.

  Jane Brotman, although she did not carry a picket sign, supported the strike and stayed away from her French literature class, which meant that she was absent for the six-weeks exam. It had been only one day since she had taken her position as a curious bystander outside the Commerce Building and watched the police march in, but it seemed to her that she was now on the way to becoming a different person. She felt a great awakening. There was still something about the way the student leaders looked and presented themselves that turned her off, but she felt open, for the first time, to hearing the antiwar point of view. Before she had trusted in authority and believed that her government and her university would never lie to her. The possibility that her trust had been misplaced now roiled her mind. She “wanted to know more and more and more and couldn’t get enough,” she would say later. Her hunger to learn about politics, power, and foreign policy became insatiable. Dow had “opened the world” to her. Rather than take the French literature exam, Brotman instead sat at her favorite table in the back of the Union Rathskeller and wrote a long letter to her father the dentist in Maplewood, New Jersey. It was, in a sense, her six-weeks essay test. “You tell me that I’m here to STUDY—to stick my head in big fat books but to ignore the world around me,” she began.

  Well, there’s a basic principle which you have overlooked, and that is there is more to an education than learning from books.

  College is a big investment. For quite a lot less money I could have easily gone to the University of Maryland or another school close to home. I could have read the same books I read here, and for all practical purposes, I could have gotten a decent education there, too. So why did I have to go all the way to the U. of Wisconsin?

  One of the major reasons for coming to this campus was due to the great diversification of the student body, and thus to the variations of existing ideas. In other words, I want to learn, I want to weigh every idea, I want to open my eyes to everything so I can make the best possible judgments.

  As for today’s incident—I won’t be able to respect myself for not standing up for what I believe in. Would you be able to respect yourself? I know what I saw, and I can’t allow that to happen again. I know you don’t want me to get hurt or involved (I’m not going to get hurt), but I must take a stand. And in this case, my stand coincides with the students involved in the protest….

  I want to make something clear: today’s student strike had nothing to do with the left, the right, or the conservatives. It was merely a general consensus of a great deal of the student body in reaction to the police brutality which took place on this campus yesterday. I honestly feel that if you had seen the unwarranted brutality that I witnessed, there would be no doubt in your mind as to the only possible action to take.

  There is something else you must realize objectively. I respect your ideas and opinions very highly, for I realize that you have experienced many things during your lifetime. Yet I cannot possibly accept every one of your ideas, goals, or whatever, simply because you feel they are right. I must think about your ideas along with other ideas and evaluate them to the best of my ability. Then, and only then, can I accept or reject an idea (be it yours or someone else’s). For I am a human being, too; I have a head and I want to make use of it. You can’t possibly ask me, or demand, that I believe in something that I don’t. That lies with me. Can you understand what I’m saying, or am I lacking clarity?

  In order to operate as a functioning citizen in society, one must question and, if necessary, one must stand up for what he believes in and make himself heard. According to what you believe in, the Germans under Hitler acted in a justifiable manner—they didn’t question and they didn’t stand up to make themselves heard. They accepted something without thinking about it.

  Does this mean that I am a liberal? A communist? A left winger? I don’t think so. I would rather think that I am a responsible individual who is ready to grow up, and trying to do so.

  I miss you a lot and love you,

  Jane

  At about the time that Jane Brotman was writing home instead of attending her French literature exam, President Johnson began an hour-long conversation in the Oval Office with Robert
Manning, a former State Department public affairs officer who edited The Atlantic Monthly. Press Secretary George Christian sat in and took notes.

  Manning said his magazine had decided to devote an entire issue to “what’s happening in this country because of Vietnam.”

  The president, as recorded in Christian’s notes, said that he could guess the results. “He mentioned a 1951 poll showing that while 81% of the people favored our entry in Korea in June, 66% said in January that we should pull out and only 20% said stay in. The president said this has been the pattern throughout American history, mentioning difficulties in the Revolutionary War, the Mexican War and the Civil War, and the 202 to 202 vote which extended the draft in 1941.”

  The thought of an entire magazine issue devoted to the war sent Johnson’s mind spinning in several directions.

  He thought about his critics from the left and said: “One of our weaknesses is that every hippie tells us of the evils of war, but we won’t let those who have been there say anything about it.”

  He thought about his critics from the right and said they had to be careful not “to get the country on an anticommunist binge” because it would undermine the gains being made in relations with the Soviet Union.

  People become inflamed during wartime, LBJ said. As examples, according to Christian’s notes, “he related incidents in World War I involving his father, who helped defend against an oppressive anti-German bill in the Texas legislature, and his uncle, Judge Martin, who was indicted for speaking up for a German in Fredericksburg [Texas] who got drunk and said he hoped that the Kaiser would win.