They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  For thirty-four years, until the time I went to interview her in a Milwaukee suburb in the summer of 2001, Diane felt “hatred, denial, despair, depression” whenever she thought about Vietnam and her brother’s death. Then, in the aftermath of our conversations, she said she “was finally able to let go.” She ordered a bronze nameplate for Daniel Sikorski to be placed at Saint Adalbert’s Cemetery and a personalized brick with his name on it for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Veterans Park. In the summer of 2002 she felt ready, finally, to visit the Vietnam Memorial in Washington for the first time. She stopped at block 28 E of the sloping wall and left a memory box on the ground. Starting with Terry Allen in Row 25, fifteen rows in that single granite block are taken up by soldiers killed in the battle of Ong Thanh. Diane found her brother’s name in Row 31.

  On January 22, 2002, on my way to Vietnam, I stopped in San Francisco and met with Jean Ponder Allen Soto. I had interviewed her at length already, and this was more a conversation. The Soto in her name came from her second husband, whom she had married within a year of Terry Allen’s death. They both had worked as VISTA volunteers in the colonias of El Paso. Soto was a stepfather to the three Allen sisters, who had a difficult time with him, and eventually he and Jean divorced. Now she was living in Richmond, California, and finishing her doctoral studies at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley on sexuality and the Catholic Church. She and her three daughters all had obtained undergraduate degrees from schools in Boston. Of all the characters in my book, Jean was in many ways the most complicated for me. She had invested trust in me by telling me her story, with all of its unflattering details. I wanted to present her actions accurately, all the while realizing that many people would dislike her because of what she had done. But of course she understood that better than I; she had dealt with it for three and a half decades.

  It was not until many years after Terry Allen’s death that she was able to mourn him, she told me. The process began when his mother died and Jean went through her effects and found letters expressing grief at Terry’s death. “I surprised myself because I wept so at these,” she said. She began thinking about Terry and their relationship and the struggle of soldiers in Vietnam in a new way. Before, she had thought that “anybody who was in the war was a bad guy,” but now she realized how wrong that was, and she came to think of them as sympathetic figures in a national tragedy. This took her through another painful process, unearthing emotions that she had buried. One day, watching a documentary on the Civil War, she saw old veterans of North and South embrace, and she found the reconciliation a wondrous mystery and hoped that something similar could happen as the sides of war and peace from the Vietnam era reached old age. “We set these structures that we are so deadly serious about,” she said. “And they become issues of life and death and matters of betrayals and hatreds, and yet somehow, sometimes, that is what in the end creates the possibility of the two sides joyously embracing.”

  HERE WE SAT, across from each other at a long conference table in a quiet room inside the offices of the foreign ministry in Ho Chi Minh City: Clark Welch and I on one side, Vo Minh Triet and two interpreters on the other. It was eight thirty on the morning of January 30, 2002. Two days earlier I had given the Vietnamese press office Triet’s name, which I had seen on U.S. military documents: intelligence reports from the late 1960s and more recent reports regarding MIA searches in Vietnam. Now Clark and I were looking at Triet in the flesh, the officer who had commanded the First Regiment in 1967. I was afraid that he might not remember anything about the battle, and I wanted to learn as much as I could from him about his life and times anyway, so I asked him questions for the first few hours that had nothing to do with October 17,1967. Clark thought this was a waste of time, though he was polite enough to tolerate it.

  Then finally, after a lunch break, we pulled out our maps of the area north of Lai Khe in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, and I started to say a few things about the Black Lions and what they were doing on search- and-destroy missions that October leading up to the battle. Triet rose from his chair, examined the maps for a few minutes, which seemed like forever, and at last put his finger right on the coordinates of the battlefield and said something in Vietnamese, which was translated by my interpreter, Kyle Horst. The words gave me chills.

  “Of course I remember,” Triet said. “We weren’t supposed to be there. Let me tell you how it happened.”

  For the next two hours he talked about the battle and the days before and after, providing details that I later used to fill out the narrative. The more he talked, the more it seemed that Welch’s comprehension of Vietnamese, which he had studied briefly before being sent to Vietnam in 1967, came back to him. The two old soldiers were talking the same language, communicating, even when they did not understand everything the other was saying. At the end of the interview I asked whether Colonel Triet would be willing to ride with us the next day to the battlefield. He said why not, he had nothing better to do. He was seventy-two years old and retired; he spent his days now as a functionary in Ho Chi Minh City’s Ward 14, promoting population control.

  At eight the next morning our entourage piled into a van for the bumpy ride north up Thunder Road. Triet was there, and Clark Welch, and Consuelo Allen, and her friend Rob Keefe, and Kyle Horst, my guide and interpreter. Also my wife and I, and a driver and our Vietnamese minder, Madam Ha. Before the van pulled away from the Hotel Continental, Triet turned to Clark Welch, soldier to soldier, and said of that long ago battle on the ground we were revisiting, “No one won that day.”

  It was a statement with several levels of meaning, but above all, it was a grace note, a way of connecting men who had once tried to kill each other. Triet later made the same comment to Consuelo Allen.

  Kyle was fluent in Vietnamese and seemed to know everyone in the country, having lived there off and on since the early 1980s, when he worked on refugee issues for the United Nations. He had been to the battle area several months earlier on a scouting mission. Clark Welch had tried to get there a few days earlier, before I’d arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, and had gotten close but couldn’t quite find it. He did encounter a friendly family that farmed a small plot of land a few miles away. From them, using his basic Vietnamese, he learned that they had supported America and South Vietnam and had fled to the village of Chon Thanh during the war and that after, the father had been sent to a prison reeducation camp for many years.

  This time, executing a few turns at intersections that were not apparent on every map, we made it to an unmarked road closer to the battlefield. We drove down that road until it became impassable, then got out and walked. Our destination was the bamboo and tin house of Nguyen Van Lam, another local farmer. Lam had supported the Viet Cong during the war. He had served as a company commander in Rear Service Group 83 and fought in the October 17 battle. When we arrived at Lam’s, he was out. A son said he was attending a wedding, but Lam showed up shortly thereafter, the word having spread quickly about the appearance of the bearded American (Kyle) and some other strangers with big noses.

  Nguyen Van Lam had ten sons, the youngest ten years old. At the entrance to his house they kept squirrels in a cage. In a muddy little enclosed pond in the side yard, they raised eels. There were several framed portraits and certificates on the walls of his living area, some honoring Lam for his war service, others honoring his wife’s brother, who was considered a martyr, killed “opposing the Americans to save the country.”

  When Lam arrived from the wedding, Triet immediately recognized him, even though they had only been together for a few days thirty-five years earlier. “Oh my God,” Lam said. “You are still alive?”

  They hugged and sat down in the shaded opening to the house, clasping hands much of the time as they talked. When Triet heard that Lam had ten children, he chastised him. “You give birth like chickens,” he said, and asked whether Lam and his wife had ever heard of population control.

  Are you sick at all? Triet asked.

&nbs
p; No, Lam said. He had some hearing loss from air strikes and a cluster bomb pellet in his lung, but other than that he was fine.

  Do you have AIDS? Triet asked.

  Lam laughed. Triet was still ribbing him for his prodigious family.

  Soon we were off, walking tentatively across a creaking bamboo monkey bridge over the Ong Thanh stream, following a narrow path through the manioc fields, passing a herd of water buffalo, and moving south toward the battlefield. Our first stop was where the Black Lions had set up their night defensive position on October 16. There were still a few holes in the field, remnants of American bunkers. The open land we walked through next had been dense jungle in 1967. Clark Welch, checking his GPS location finder, said we were right on target, but he kept repeating, “It looks so different. Everything has changed.”

  Lam said that in the days after the battle, the area was heavily bombed and then defoliated so that there were no trees left. Years later everyone in the area started getting headaches, he said. Not long ago a few local people in their forties and fifties had terrible headaches for three days and then died. The villagers thought it was because of Agent Orange.

  As we moved closer to the battlefield, Triet and Welch seemed like they were in their own world again, the two proficient soldiers reliving the battle. They would walk off together and point and say a few things, describing the line of march of the American companies and the positioning of Triet’s three battalions. We stopped a few more times, once for Lam to describe a spot where a huge tree once stood. Was it the tree near where Donald Holleder was killed? Perhaps. We were near the area that the Americans called the draw, an intermittent stream. At our next stop Lam pointed to a depression in the ground and said this was where he and his men, on the morning after the battle, had found the torso of an American soldier that had been ripped apart by wild pigs. I wondered whether it could have been Hargrove or Fitzgerald, the two MIAs. What color was it? I asked. Hargrove and Fitzgerald were black. White, said Lam. So I presumed the torso was found by the American recovery party later that day.

  A hundred meters further, Clark checked his GPS and his maps and said we were nearing the ground of the battle. We had to move to our right, or east, a few hundred meters, he said, so we turned and walked that direction. In 1967 this had been dense jungle; now it was a government rubber plantation, a grove of medium-height trees planted in neat rows. It was refreshingly cool, away from the ninety-degree heat, and sunlight dappled gently through the grove. It felt as though we were walking into a cathedral. The ground was covered with dry brown leaves that crunched softly as we walked. And then Clark pointed to a spot that matched the coordinates of where Terry Allen and the battalion command were killed.

  An anthill happened to be right there, just as there had been during the battle. A different anthill, obviously, but it served as a symbolic memorial nonetheless. I asked our Vietnamese companions to keep quiet so we could pay our respects. Clark Welch bit his lip and winced, memories of that day cascading through his mind. Tears streamed down Consuelo Allen’s face as she studied the lonely spot where her father had died. The moment that he was killed and this moment, as she stood on the same ground, separated by thirty-five years, now seemed as one. Her mother had written a poem that she wanted me to read if and when we reached this spot. She called it “A Prayer for the Journey to the Battlefield.”

  Through this pilgrimage

  may you illumine

  the battle’s grace

  the noble face

  of those who fought

  May your footsteps

  where blood was found

  turn that ground

  to wide forgiveness

  And heal and free

  those left behind

  deep peace find

  that passes understanding

  Blessed are the peacemakers

  The next day while I was conducting interviews in Ho Chi Minh City, Clark, Consuelo, my wife, and the rest of our group walked through the city. As they passed a crowd of young boys selling postcards, someone, unseen, slipped open Clark’s fanny pack and stole his wallet. It was the only unkind act we encountered during our days there. On the following day Consuelo returned to the United States, my wife and I took a weekend flight to Hanoi, and Clark stayed in Saigon, awaiting our return. I had no qualms about leaving him alone. He had a way about him that made him an endearing figure in our little quarter of old Saigon near the Hotel Continental. Ha and Phuong, two charming and street-smart girls, adept in colloquial English—which they had learned by interacting with tourists, selling them postcards and books—took great care of Clark, guiding him on his ventures around the city. Little Ha, a four-foot-six teenager who looked hip in her black Nike stocking cap, had warned Clark to watch his wallet and had scolded him when she had learned that it was gone. They showed him where to eat, what to drink, and how to work the system. They poked his belly and pulled the hair on his big arms. The cyclo drivers loved him too. “Clark our friend, Clark our friend!” they would say, looking for him, holding his business card and lifting an arm high above their heads to depict the tall American.

  All of this at times overwhelmed Clark. He delighted in his friendship with Ha and Phuong and the cyclo drivers and felt “an extraordinary attachment” to the soldiers from the other side. “We once fought against each other; now we are becoming old soldiers together—on both sides,” Clark wrote later, looking back on his experience. “We together admire the toughness and bravery of our magnificent soldiers—on both sides. We together grieve for the terrible losses—on both sides.”

  The day after we returned from Hanoi, Clark and I drove north again up Thunder Road. Our first stop was Lai Khe. The American soldiers were long gone, but the village remained. Some women there told us that until a decade ago, some of the barracks had housed hundreds of Amerasian children, the progeny of First Division soldiers. They were all gone now. Most of them were in the United States. We saw the remnants of the old Big Red One ice cream factory and met two women who had worked at a bar in the village in 1967. Ho Thi Bang said that she was twenty-eight then, too old to be a bar girl, so she washed dishes. From there we drove up the highway and around the unmarked dirt roads again to Nguyen Van Lam’s house. There was too much else going on during our first meeting, as we toured the battlefield, for me to interview him, so now we sat down and talked. When we were done, he introduced us to his family—all of the boys, his wife, a daughter-in-law, and a grandchild. His seventh son was maimed, one hand cut off at the wrist. He had been weeding around the family rubber trees in their garden across the road, they said, and an old grenade from an American M-79 came out of the ground and exploded, shattering his right hand.

  There was still a lot of ammo around, Lam said. He pointed to a pile near the squirrel cage. “My, my, my,” Clark said, looking at a collection of bullets and pieces of shrapnel hidden under a banana tree. Lam reached down and picked up some shrapnel and said, “You left these behind.” Nearby was a live U.S. mortar round.

  When we finished our visit, Kyle Horst told me about something he had heard the last time he was in the area, something about a memorial not too far away. One of Lam’s sons said he knew where it was, so he came along with us. We got lost, stopped for directions, and backtracked twice, but finally found someone who could take us there. Our van stopped in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. There was a forest to our right, and we walked several hundred yards through the brush and the trees until we reached a small clearing, and there stood a large marker. It loomed several feet above us, shiny marble, with intricate maps and a battle flag and writings etched on both sides. Someone had put a lot of effort into creating the marker, but no one had bothered to maintain it. For all practical purposes, it was a lost memorial, with no guides, no signs telling people how to get to it, nothing. “You wouldn’t just stumble on it,” said Clark. The Vietnamese locals told us we were the first foreigners ever to visit this spot.

  One part of the marker read, in V
ietnamese: “From 4 P.M. 26 April 75 to 11:30 30 April 75, this HCMC [Ho Chi Minh Campaign] headquarters commanded a decisive battle to capture and liberate all of Saigon and the provinces of the Mekong Delta, concluding the historic Ho Chi Minh campaign, completing victory in the American imperialist war of aggression and completing the democratic national revolution in the entire nation.”

  Who could have guessed that here, only a few kilometers from where the Black Lions fought and died on October 17, 1967, the command of the North Vietnamese Army, eight years later, would organize the final battle of the long war.

  ON FEBRUARY 7, our last full day in Vietnam, we rode a Russian-built hydrofoil down the Saigon River to Vung Tau, the resort town on the South China Sea. A cabbie drove us across the peninsula to what was known as Back Beach. It was lined with restaurants and resort hotels, and if you didn’t look at the Vietnamese lettering, you could have thought you were at Port Aransas or Mustang Island along the Texas coast. We stopped in a parking lot, and Clark Welch walked with me toward the beach and pointed to the spot where he and Bud Barrow stood with their makeshift Delta Company flag, waiting for their new soldiers. Then we took a cyclo ride over to Nui Nho, the little mountain, and climbed to the top. The steep, winding path was lined with benches, each one donated by a Catholic parish in the States. There were hundreds more on the mountaintop, more than ever could be used. They were meant for the mind more than the body, reminders, connections, from past to present, there to here. Etched into each bench was the name of an American city, from Atlanta to West Chester, all the places where Vietnamese refugees had resettled when they fled their country after the war. Rising above the benches was a giant statue of Christ, his head encircled by a halo, his arms outstretched, facing the sea. This odd little mountain of Catholic belief at the entryway to a communist land.