Her alienation was nearly complete. She distrusted the United States government, waging a war that she did not believe in. She hated the military, fighting that war. She renounced her faith in the Catholic Church, which to her now seemed part of the establishment and hypocritical. She had been unfaithful to her husband, the fallen soldier. She had shocked El Paso society. One matron approached a Ponder relative and asked how “the family whore” was doing. An old military man who lived next door to Jean on Timberwolf Drive became so enraged that he perfected his golf swing by whacking Titleists against the side of her house. She was the scarlet-lettered woman of El Paso.
The funeral was Wednesday morning, the twenty-fifth, at Fort Bliss. Mass at Saint Michael’s Chapel was followed by the burial at Fort Bliss National Cemetery. The black hearse stopped near a fresh hole in the earth dug in section A, row O, not far from the roadway. Allen received full military honors, with taps and a twenty-one-gun salute. The American flag that had draped the coffin was folded with slow-motion precision and handed gently to Terry’s mother. The sorrowful scene was bathed in warm desert sunlight. Jean felt more like observer than participant. At the gravesite she looked at her three daughters, who seemed “still and very sad and strikingly solemn for such young children.” General and Mrs. Allen showed a “bravery and dignity” that she found heart-wrenching. Jean witnessed everything yet felt cut off from it and the people she loved, including her daughters. She felt she had “no right to even share their grief,” enveloped as she was in “a cocoon of shame that seemed quite dark and without any possibility of relief.” Yet at the same time she found herself feeling “very angry at the senselessness of Terry’s death.” From her perspective it was an outrage that no one made mention of the needlessness of the tragedy. It was a hero’s burial, and the eulogies were in the vein of LBJ’s letter, about a brave man fighting for a free society.
The campaign had begun already for posthumous awards. Harold Durham, the gutsy artillery liaison officer nicknamed Pinky who died calling in howitzer fire near his own position and warning Sergeant Barrow of an enemy charge, was to receive a Medal of Honor; most of the slain Black Lions were getting at least Bronze Stars; and Allen was nominated for a Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military award. After the fact, in private, Allen’s boss in the First Infantry Division, General Hay, was dismissive of the battalion commander’s performance. Hay told a military historian that Allen precipitated “the debacle” by “allowing his lead company to pursue the VC down the trail” instead of forming a perimeter and cloverleafing at the first sign of the enemy. It was a command decision for which he could not forgive Allen, Hay said, especially since everyone knew that a main force enemy unit was in the area.
Allen had made critical mistakes, but Hay’s analysis was superficial. He failed to take into account the cloverleafs the Black Lions had indeed conducted that morning, and the perfect silence of Triet’s force as it set the trap (not even the extraordinarily observant and cautious Clark Welch saw a sign of trouble until the trap was sprung), and the overwhelming numbers, and the long stretch without artillery fire as they waited for air support, and the pressure that was coming down all the way from Westmoreland to pursue enemy units relentlessly. But Hay placed most of the blame squarely on Allen. “If he would have survived, I would have relieved him of his command,” he told a U.S. Army historian.
Despite this blistering appraisal, Hay nominated Allen for the DSC. He did so, he explained later, “because of the story of Terry’s bravery and because he was General Allen’s son.”
Hay’s criticism of Allen, with his decision to nominate him for the Distinguished Service Cross anyway, takes on a deeper and more troubling significance in the context of his own involvement, or lack of involvement, in the battle, and the way that was described and honored later. Hay was in Saigon until the fight was just about over. The senior officers who were involved that day included Brigadier General Coleman, who hovered overhead and made the critical contact with Private Costello; and Colonel Newman, the brigade commander who arrived at the base camp and took over for the fallen Allen; and Major Holleder, who ignored Newman’s wishes and rushed fearlessly toward the battlefield and his death; and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Malone, the aviation commander, who was wounded in the right foot as he brought his helicopter down through the trees during the rescue; and Terry Allen, who responded calmly to the ambush and kept trying to hold his unit together after he was wounded. For whatever mistakes any of these officers made before and during the battle, they put their lives on the line and responded bravely. Hay, by all accounts, had little to do with it.
Yet according to records at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Major General John H. Hay, in General Orders Number 174, issued on February 24, 1968, was awarded the Silver Star. The orders read:
Major General Hay distinguished himself by gallantry in action against a hostile force on 17 October 1967 while serving as Commanding General, 1st Infantry Division, in the Republic of Vietnam. On this date, during Operation Shenandoah II, General Hay received word that two companies from one of his infantry battalions were heavily engaged with an estimated battalion of Viet Cong. He alerted the crew of his command and control helicopter and flew to the scene of the battle. Arriving over the area, General Hay immediately took charge of the situation. Despite heavy ground fire aimed directly at his aircraft, he had his pilot fly at a perilously low level while he adjusted artillery fire onto the insurgents and pinpointed targets for tactical air strikes. He also directed organization and redeployment of the troops on the ground, who were badly disorganized due to numerous casualties. His cool and calm approach to the situation instilled confidence in the infantrymen, and they regained the initiative over the insurgents…. His courage under fire, aggressive leadership and professional competence were responsible for the complete rout of the numerically superior Viet Cong force.
Even more than the inaccurate depictions of the battle concocted earlier by General Westmoreland and his MACV publicists, the Silver Star orders for General Hay described events that were unrecognizable to the Black Lions soldiers whose lives were forever shaped by that single bloody day. The documents supporting his Silver Star award are missing. The commanding general’s name does not even appear in accounts of the battle provided by high-ranking officers who would have been in closest contact with him. This was not Handsome John Hay’s finest hour. In retrospect his comments disparaging Terry Allen seemed graceless and hypocritical.
Allen was gone but the war was not, and even in places like El Paso, where military service and patriotism were considered synonymous, the burden of war was getting heavier. “Feeling the War,” read the headline over an editorial in the El Paso Times days after Allen’s death. “Every war in modern history has taken its toll of El Paso young men,” the editorial began, citing the two world wars and Korea:
Now the war in Vietnam is no different. We have seen stories and pictures in the local newspapers of our young men who have fallen in that far-off land. News came [recently] of the death in action of a member of one of our more prominent families—Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., son of a famous general in World War II, a man who has lived among us for a long time and who married an El Paso girl. Every war is brought home to us in one form or another. Our sons lose their lives. Others are wounded. We make sacrifices. Still wars go on and on.
Casualty lists do one of two things: Either they make a nation angry or they make a nation weary. We wonder what casualty lists in the war in Vietnam will do to the American people. Those lists are growing longer and longer. We in El Paso know that only too well.
Friends and family gathered at General and Mrs. Allen’s house after the burial. Jean came and was relieved that a few people were friendly to her: Kiko Schuster and Terry’s friend Maury Kemp and the Calhouns, a farm family. Bebe Coonly was amazed to see that Jean could plow into this crowd with a smile on her face. In midafternoon Jean left for an appointment
, leaving the three girls to stay with their grandmother. She drove to Channel 13, where she worked, and met with a production team from ABC News in New York, who were in town to report on the transfer of 437 acres of borderland known as El Chamizal from the U.S. back to Mexico. Vice President Humphrey was coming to El Paso the next day, and President Johnson the day after that.
It was the biggest political story in El Paso in years, and Jean Allen, who knew the local players because of her weekly television show, had agreed to help set things up for the network team. As the meeting started, she apologized if she seemed a bit distracted. “I buried my husband today,” she explained.
The production crew was baffled, to say the least.
THE WAVE OF DISSENT that had rolled from the West Coast across America the previous week was now ripping back, like a tide, from the East. Dow and napalm were the focus again of antiwar protests on several college campuses. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at about the time of Terry Allen’s funeral, four hundred students from Harvard and Radcliffe began an eight-hour siege in a conference room, where they held Dr. Frederick Leavitt, director of Dow’s eastern research labs, captive. There was no violence, no police charge, but Harvard administrators said the protest leaders would face a year’s suspension. At the University of Illinois in Champaign, the Dow recruiter never got to his appointments that day. He was blocked from entering the interview room by demonstrators, who were isolated and waited out by academic officials determined to avoid a replay of the Wisconsin disaster. In Minneapolis, at the University of Minnesota, twenty students began a peaceful sit-in at the campus placement office and announced that they would fast for forty-eight hours to “express compassion for the innocent victims” of napalm.
In Madison the action had moved to the courts, where plaintiff Paul Soglin, lawyer Percy Julian, and the Dow protest leaders were celebrating a minor victory. Federal judge James E. Doyle had temporarily restrained university officials from disciplining students involved in the Commerce clash until he could decide on the constitutionality of the school’s regulations on obstructive demonstrations. His decision did not affect the criminal cases being prepared against several students involved in the protest. Michael Oberdorfer, the Connections photographer, heard that the police were looking for him soon after he got back in town from the march in Washington. He asked his stepbrother to examine his apartment at 548 West Main Street to see if there was anything incriminating up there. The authorities had Oberdorfer’s name and address because he had told them explicitly how to spell his name and where he lived, all in the heat of the protest, in an attempt to show that he had more conviction about his actions than officers who refused to wear their badges had about theirs. Now the police were on their way to charge him with disorderly conduct for pushing an officer.
Curly Hendershot was back in Midland by then, telling Dow colleagues about his harrowing hours inside the Commerce Building. There had been more than a hundred campus protests against Dow in the year since the first were held in October 1966 at Wayne State in Detroit and the University of California at Berkeley, but the sit-in at Wisconsin caused by far the most reverberations; it marked a point where the tactics of protest changed. A line graph charting the number of stories written about Dow during 1966 and 1967 showed two jagged peaks—the first Wisconsin protest on February 22, 1967, and the second Wisconsin incident on October 18. Dow I, as the February protest became known, pushed the number of stories around the country over the thousand mark for the first time. Dow II marked an explosion of coverage, with nearly two thousand newspaper articles and editorials.
To Dow executives the publicity was considered an oddly mixed blessing. They were reassured by the fact that virtually all of the hundreds of editorials were positive about Dow, or negative about the protests, and in any case provided Dow what public relations director Ned Brandt called “fantastic visibility.” A public opinion survey that fall, conducted by Dow’s in-house marketing pollster, showed that 88 percent of the respondents had heard of the Dow Chemical Company, making it nearly as recognized as U.S. Steel. On the other hand, Dow’s increased visibility was tied almost entirely to napalm. Almost half the respondents now identified Dow as a supplier of napalm, a remarkable increase from 1966, when only one person in a hundred could make the connection. And one in five now thought Dow was interested only in war profits.
In the aftermath of the Wisconsin mess, Dow intensified its public relations effort, launching what Brandt called “Phase 2.” The first phase, aimed largely at trying to minimize the damage, included Brandt’s March 1967 visit to the Pentagon, at which he tried to persuade the Department of Defense to take responsibility for the napalm controversy. The second phase would be more aggressive.
Brandt and his team of publicists started publishing an internal newsletter called “Napalm News” that presented top corporate officials with detailed reports on the latest protests and other events related to napalm. Public relations men were assigned to accompany recruiters to campuses where demonstrations appeared likely, bringing along new press kits that included a revised policy statement on napalm, an annual report, a list of Dow officials and their telephone numbers, a pamphlet on Dow’s nine hundred products, and statements by the military about the necessity of napalm. Where before Dow officials sought to avoid napalm debates, they now looked for opportunities to tell their story. Herbert Dow Doan, the president, was pushed forward to serve as the company spokesman, and by necessity overcame his earlier reluctance to take a visible role in the napalm discussion. Doan’s byline was placed on an essay Brandt wrote explaining Dow’s position on napalm, a piece later published in the Wall Street Journal. His essay would be part of a double-barreled media attack, the other half being the release of the letter McNamara had signed back in March.
Dow also undertook an internal program to explain its napalm position to the company’s thirty-five thousand employees, of whom only a minuscule few dozen worked on the production of napalm. Discussion groups were formed in Midland to encourage new ways of thinking about the controversy, provoking a constant round of memos circulating through the corporate offices. “Short of ending the war, I don’t think it is possible to force a climax of this issue,” wrote William B. Seward, one of the public relations men sent out to the campus battlefields. “In considering napalm, I think we should look at it very realistically”:
Not during this war, but afterwards, napalm may join the weapons banned by international convention. Today, either by formal or informal agreement, gasses, poisons, dum-dum bullets, atomic weapons, and radioactivity…are banned. If you remember the international furor over some relatively mild gas used earlier in Vietnam, it’s plain these agreements carry some weight. The position that napalm is saving American lives doesn’t count for too much in the international forum. So I think we should recognize the distinct possibility this could be the last war for napalm, just as World War I was the last war for mustard gas, and that it may be condemned somewhat retroactively like the World War II air raid and incineration of Dresden.
To the idea proposed by others that Dow start running full-page ads in newspapers, Seward said this might invite “the worst situation—a response of full-page ads of napalmed children. I suppose we could respond with dying soldiers, but in the end our objectives wouldn’t be served. At the outset, the protesters would decry full-page ads as the brute economic strength of the military-industrial complex, but I have no doubt they would find ample funds to match us inch for inch.” Dow should try to find areas of agreement with the protesters, Seward argued. “Let’s draw attention to the theme, ‘Are you dedicated to change for the better? We are!’ Let’s not get trapped into fighting these issues: the Vietnam War, Napalm as a Weapon, Defending the Status Quo, The Military Industrial Complex. For one thing, it would be phony; I doubt you could muster a majority from the board of directors in support of any of those causes.”
One of the questions debated internally within Dow was whether they should conduct t
heir placement interviews off campus as a way of avoiding confrontations of the sort that erupted at Wisconsin. They decided to keep going to every campus to which they were invited and to play up that decision as a way of defining Dow. “We have resisted going off campus because we want Dow to be seen as a company with spirit and courage, not like a company that tucks its tail and runs,” said Ray Rolf, the manager of recruiting. “We want to show people that we have a winning atmosphere here…. The only type of person we might be losing is one who is weak and easily intimidated, and who retreats from conflict. A person without belief in right or wrong is the only type of person who might be missed because of the demonstrations…. We would miss far more good people if we didn’t support the placement office.”
From a historical perspective, the most interesting aspect of the controversy swirling around the Dow Chemical Company in October 1967 was that everyone might have been focusing on another chemical product. The controversy was all about napalm then. Napalm, the photographable monstrosity that clung unmercifully to human flesh as it burned at two thousand degrees, had become the brutal symbol of an unpopular war. But here was an instance where the passions of the moment faded with time and something else entirely—virtually ignored during the napalm protests—emerged as the more serious issue. In the long run the chemical product that did the most lasting damage was not napalm but the herbicide Agent Orange (and its cousin, Agent White), manufactured by Dow and six other chemical companies. The defoliants were sprayed in massive doses on much of Vietnam, including the jungles near the Black Lions in Lai Khe, to cut back the protective growth, flush out the Viet Cong, and destroy enemy rice crops. Use of the defoliants began in July 1965, but their heaviest use came in 1967, the year most of the men in this story were in Vietnam. According to later figures compiled by the Veterans Administration, about 4.88 million gallons of Agents Orange and White were dumped on Vietnam in that single year. The effects of the dioxin-laced chemicals were indiscriminate and plagued not only the citizens of Vietnam and their land but the troops on both sides of the war for decades thereafter. Seward, the Dow publicist, was right when he predicted that a company product might be banned from wartime use sometime in the future—but it was Agent Orange, not napalm.
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 61