They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Defeats can be caused by troop fatigue, poor morale, inferior weaponry, poor training, a lack of preparation, but in this case Cash’s interviews indicated that none of those factors was decisive. The information he gathered pointed in other directions, toward mistakes in tactics and communications that allowed the battalion to be surprised, surrounded, and badly outmanned. Terry Allen, as the battalion commander, had to absorb much of the blame. He took even more than he might have deserved because he was dead and could not defend himself or explain away points of contention the way his superior officers were able to do.

  As the day progressed, Cash jotted down a preliminary list of lessons learned and other themes he picked up among the “scuttlebutt and complaints” from Delta soldiers:

  1) We knew they were there and their general location. Air and artillery should have been used a lot more before we went in, to disrupt their organization, etc…. The artillery that precededus on 17 October amounted to nothing.

  2) The companies were nowhere near their normal combat strengths, or what they are expected to be.

  3) The smoke located our center of mass to any VC. Smoke can be seen hundreds of meters away. It also obscured our vision. Most of the smoke was coming from the battalion CP [command post]. There was definitely too much smoke used.

  4) Personally, I don’t believe the battalion commander belongs with the men on the ground.

  5) Bn CO [Allen] goofed. He should have let us pull back after we’d retrieved A Co’s wounded for them. Instead, we waited around for 40 minutes and that gave Charlie time to horseshoe us and zap us.

  6) No mortars were fired at all. I heard the mort. Plat. sgt say “we were aching to go. I’ve still got it plotted on my board what we could have done. It’s a damned shame.” Mortars had been used very effectively by Lt. Welch the day before. On that day they fired mortars constantly on both sides going out there.

  At division headquarters Brigadier General Coleman, who had watched the disaster unfold on the seventeenth, outlined his own summary of lessons learned. His intent was not to assess blame but rather to assure that such a disaster would not happen again, yet his long list unavoidably served as a catalog of battlefield mistakes. Among his lessons were: never withdraw leaving wounded; stress to all leaders the proper tactics of conducting a withdrawal; establish a positive succession of command through fire team level; provide backup RTOs and security forces for command groups; designate key individuals to carry red smoke to mark positions of enemy contact; strive for accurate and timely reporting at all levels; improve accuracy and content of journals and logs and perhaps use tape recorders on command [radio] nets; provide workable chainsaws, axes, and machetes in NDP ready for chopper delivery; and at division headquarters record the location of all jungle litters and plastic bags for the dead so they can be delivered to the field as necessary.

  There was no mention in Coleman’s list of the lesson that ranking officers in helicopters should think twice before check-firing artillery against the advice of commanders on the ground.

  At the Twenty-fourth Evacuation Hospital Jim George was still reliving the battle in his sleep. He could hear the gunfire and smell the cordite and hear guys yelling “I’m hit!” over and over again.

  Three months earlier, in one of the letters he had written home to Jackie from aboard the USNS Pope, he had told her that he would try to be a good soldier, gentleman, lover, and Christian, but now he was struggling with all but the last of those. He thought he had been fighting in a just war, that he had done the best he could and was following orders, but the nightmares persisted. In some ways he felt that he had let his soldiers down, because although he had told them that they “needed to kill as many Viet Cong as they could,” he thought his major mission was to get them home safely, and it was hard for him to comprehend the number of casualties. The wounded Alpha captain was overcome by what he called “a powerful love for God and for the soldiers” but had a harder time feeling love for his wife and kids. He knew that he loved them, but the trauma of the devastating event had temporarily diminished his capacity to feel strongly about many things. “Each day’s light brings with it more hope, trust & humanity,” he wrote to Jackie. “I feel better today. Still haven’t had a good night’s sleep but that scar will take longer to heal. I finally went to sleep at about 3 this morning. I prayed myself to sleep.”

  Late that afternoon Major General Hay traveled down to the evacuation hospitals to visit the wounded and hand out more medals. An aide came through the recovery ward ahead of time and briefed Joe Costello, who was to receive a Silver Star. When they ask your age, make it older than eighteen, he instructed the young Alpha grenadier from Long Island who had turned around during the retreat in the jungle and helped save soldiers left behind. “Don’t give us any grief on that,” the aide said.

  Costello was unaware until then of a controversy involving the number of eighteen-year-olds getting wounded and killed in Vietnam. When Hay came in with a press entourage, Costello said he was nineteen. “I understand you did a great job out there,” Hay said to him. “I want to present you with this Silver Star. You earned it.” Before leaving, Hay added, “If there’s anything I can do for you, soldier, now or in the future, I want to know about it.”

  There had been a time, Costello remembered, when he had a chance to get out of the field by volunteering for a clerk’s job but didn’t because he was not sure that he could type fast enough. That was not going to happen again, he said to himself now.

  “Sir, there is,” he found himself saying to General Hay. “You can give me some other sort of job. I don’t mind working hard, but I saw a lot of my friends go down the other day and I’d like not to see that again.”

  Hay glanced at an aide, who was taking notes. “Okay,” the general said, and moved on to the next bed.

  SOMEWHERE IN OHIO the excited conversations lapsed into silence, and by two in the morning, as the peace buses negotiated the darkened mountain curves of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, most of the passengers were asleep. Dave Wheadon, seated near the driver, glanced at the speedometer and blanched at how fast they were going. The buses reached Washington at Saturday dawn and stopped near the Washington Monument. They were all on their own now until the marching was over, with instructions to regroup that night in the parking lot of a Marriott hotel in Arlington, where they would find the buses for the long ride back to Madison.

  Steiner and her friends roamed the Mall in the morning sunlight. Wheadon helped people unload protest signs and banners from trucks, then rested under a tree, where his picture was taken by a London newspaper and he was interviewed by a local radio station. He was wearing his finest black linen coat, believing that he should contribute a mature presence to the vibrant scene. Kent Smith crossed the river to Virginia and strolled through Arlington National Cemetery until he found the eternal flame at the gravesite of John F. Kennedy. Jonathan Lipp, a senior at Madison Memorial and, like Steiner, a member of Students for Social Justice, was picked up by prearrangement and driven to someone’s house in a vehicle that disoriented him. He expected it to be “a hippie van,” but instead they rode in “this very Republican-looking” Ford Galaxy rental car, which struck him as odd because he looked at the world as “the establishment versus everyone else” and the car was “such an establishment thing.” After breakfast at Matthews’s house, Judy Genack went to Union Station, where she met three friends who had taken the train from Chicago, then walked toward the Mall, past the museums toward the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, disappearing into “the sea of humanity.”

  The scene was friendly and serious, Genack thought, teeming with people who were there because they cared about their country. In that moment she felt more connected to America than she ever had before. Mike Oberdorfer was feeling something different. He had arrived on the Mall that morning from his mother’s house in Bethesda after attending a Friday night gathering of alternative newspaper journalists from New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Ber
keley, Boston, Madison, and other seedbeds of the counterculture who had been drawn to Washington for the march. It was a sweet, sun-splashed Indian summer day, but Oberdorfer was not interested in good sensations or mere expressions of solidarity. He thought this was going to be another event like Dow, with massive resistance against the authorities. Those who wanted to stop the war, he believed, now had to be single-minded in that effort and play with a new set of rules.

  Two days earlier, in reporting to President Johnson and the Cabinet, Attorney General Clark had estimated from FBI reports that fewer than thirty thousand protesters would attend the rally, but now perhaps four times that number were assembling below the Lincoln Memorial. Here was the typical wide array of American dissent: all ages (though mostly students), moderates and radicals, flower children and hippies and businessmen and mothers and ministers, Marxist-Leninists, socialists, Trotskyites, liberals, Quakers, believers in nonviolence and adherents of physical resistance. To many the war had taken a great nation in the wrong direction; to others it was their own government that had become the enemy. Che Guevara’s romanticized visage as the beret-wearing revolutionary martyr could be seen bobbing up and down on posters scattered amid the masses, near signs that read “LBJ the Butcher” and “Beat Army.” It was President Johnson, Dr. Spock told the crowd, “who has stubbornly led us deeper and deeper into a bloody quagmire in which uncounted hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children have died—and thirteen thousand young Americans.”

  A mile away at the White House, LBJ and his men continued their “business as usual” performance, more show than reality. George Christian, the press secretary, later acknowledged that the place was enveloped by “the feeling of siege.” For the second day in a row, Johnson hosted Laos’s Souvanna Phouma for lunch. As the meal ended, the president called his secretary, Juanita Roberts, “and asked if there was any news he should know about—concerning the Antiwar demonstrations taking place in the District,” as the scene was recorded in the White House Daily Diary. “Juanita told him no news other than what had already been given him.” At about that time at the rally David Dellinger, the old radical, was predicting that the event marked the “beginning of a new stage in the American peace movement in which the cutting edge becomes active resistance.”

  At the University of Wisconsin the cutting edge of resistance had been met by the thump of police clubs earlier that week. Now, at the same time that the rally in Washington was unfolding, about two thousand antiwar protesters who had stayed in Madison were turning away from the tactic of physical resistance, instead filing out of the Library Mall to participate in a “funeral procession” up State Street. The decision to hold a peaceful march to the Capitol had been announced the day before, but it nonetheless provoked a two-hour debate beforehand on this Saturday morning. The student activists leading the rally, including Paul Soglin and Ira Shor, a senior from the Bronx, had urged the group to partake in another act of resistance and march up the hill and occupy Bascom Hall. The fact that it was a weekend and the doors might be locked was an obstacle that could be overcome easily, since several teaching assistants had keys to the building. Some sympathetic faculty members strongly opposed that idea and thought even the march up State Street would be too dangerous. They recommended holding another afternoon of discussions about the war.

  That idea was dismissed by the crowd without a vote, rejected with shouts from the crowd of “No guts!” and “Out of order!” A vote was held on the other two alternatives, and rather than count hands or use a voice vote, Soglin and Shor, standing atop the balustrade of the State Historical Society, asked the participants to divide, one side for the sitin, another side for the march. The vote was “incredibly close,” Soglin said later. “Ira and I kind of huddled on the thing for a minute or two, seeing if we both had the same impression, and we were both pretty sure that the crowd that wanted to go up State Street was a little larger than those that sat in.” Jane Brotman, among the tenderfoot protesters, voted with the moderate majority.

  They wore black armbands and marched single file or in pairs up the sidewalks on both sides of the street, forming a long ribbon of orderly protest that trailed back six blocks. Along the way they passed football fans in town for the Iowa game who were spilling out of bars and restaurants and walking in the other direction, toward Camp Randall Stadium. “Go back to New York!” some shouted. The provincial sensibility that the turmoil on campus was caused by out-of-state students seemed stronger than ever in the aftermath of Dow. When the marchers reached the State Street entrance to the Capitol, they sat down in rows on the cement path. Soglin and Shor walked up the steps and taped a set of demands to the statehouse door: No police or military recruiters on campus. Amnesty for the protest leaders. “We are speaking today to the slogan of police brutality,” Soglin told the crowd. “But this is merely a symbol of a society that has tried to ignore the fact that there are serious wounds in all parts of its body.” The movement, he added, needed to increase its numbers to “be sure that our legitimate grievances and demands be heard.” The protest ended as quietly as it began.

  In Washington the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial were ending and part of the huge throng now rumbled south across the Arlington Memorial Bridge to “confront the warmakers” and encircle the evil Pentagon. Leading the way was a brigade of a few hundred radicals who were sympathetic to the other side in the Vietnam war, marching under the red, blue, and gold banner of the National Liberation Front, a posture that infuriated antiwar moderates from mainstream peace organizations. Bands of resistance-oriented activists were scattered about, some in organized units, some congealing extemporaneously, all determined to breach the security ring of bayonet-carrying soldiers and get arrested, but most of the protesters were less confrontational. It took more than three hours for fifty thousand demonstrators to cross the bridge. Mike Oberdorfer was about a third of the way back. Once he reached the other side and saw a few thousand soldiers with bayonets on their rifles, he realized that this was not going to be another Dow. There was no way demonstrators could reach the Pentagon with the army in the way.

  Many of those in the rear of the line had no idea what was going on up front. Judy Genack was back there, overcome by the experience. It reminded her of the day that summer in Jerusalem, after the Six-Day War ended, when she had awakened at four in the morning and gone with a cousin to participate in the massive Shavuot holiday pilgrimage to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, which had been liberated by Israeli parachutists. She had felt so calm that day, one individual among a quarter-million, weaving through the Old City on the way to the wall to pray. And she felt that way again now, marching with other Americans across the bridge toward the Pentagon. As distinct as the two events were, they had the same “unifying” effect on her. Judy Genack did not feel insignificant, her voice too soft for the world. She felt strong, her voice amplified by the realization that she was “thinking and feeling what thousands of other people were thinking and feeling.”

  The government, in issuing permits for the demonstration, had corralled the protesters into two assembly areas on the Virginia side of the Potomac: a large grassy triangle below the Pentagon and the massive structure’s north parking lot. Protesters who broke free of the perimeter and tried to storm the Pentagon were arrested. Hour by hour that afternoon there were thrusts and skirmishes. Two thousand storming from one end, three thousand from another, all repulsed. The sweet autumn air soured with the sting of tear gas. There were taunts, songs, curses, whispers, eggs and bottles tossed, students thrown to the ground and roughed up by wedges of U.S. marshals, scores of protesters suffering minor to moderate injuries, ten soldiers and thirteen marshals among the injured as well; 681 people were arrested before it was over, Norman Mailer among the first, charged with the technical violation of crossing a police line and hauled to a corrections center in Occoquan fifteen miles away, where he spent the night in a jail cell with the linguist Noam Chomsky.

  Secreta
ry McNamara watched much of it from his office window, feeling what he later described as an odd mix of terror and exasperation. He was frightened by the mob yet could not help critiquing the tactics of the peace crowd. They did it all wrong, he thought. Had he been in charge, he would have imposed some discipline, and with Gandhi-like peaceful civil disobedience “shut down the whole goddamn place.”

  In the swarm below, Abbie Hoffman, the hippie pied piper, tripping on LSD and wearing an Uncle Sam hat, was feeling what he would later call “a sense of integration” for pissing on the Pentagon—“combining biological necessity with emotional feeling.” His flower brigade was trying to ring the building in an effort to levitate it and rid it of evil spirits:

  Ring around the Pentagon, a pocket full of pot

  Four and twenty generals, all begin to rot.

  All the evil spirits start to tumble out

  Now the war is over, we all begin to shout.

  Alison Steiner, a face in the crowd, watched young men and women dance up to soldiers and stick flowers in their gun barrels. She knew that some in the antiwar movement believed that “those who didn’t resist were doing something wicked,” but she did not feel that way herself. There was a banner that said “Bring All the GI’s Home” and that is how she felt; the war should end to save everyone, including them. Jonathan Lipp started out the day thinking of the soldiers as the enemy. The Madison Memorial senior stood in the crowd taunting them, calling them “monsters and baby killers and all that stuff.” But as he looked into their eyes, he realized that they were his peers, only a year or two older. Some of them were afraid, even crying. He watched a sergeant pull a shaky young soldier out of line and replace him with a new face. He had never thought of soldiers as people before, but it all changed in that moment. They were victims too, he suddenly realized. They all were victims. Lipp walked away not sure whom he was angry at anymore.