They Marched Into Sunlight: War And Peace, Vietnam And America, October 1967 (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
I picked up this book because I thought it was a big picture strategy examination of U.S. political-military performance in Vietnam. It is, however, 2 books--one on the battle of Ong Thanh, and one on the simultaneous protests against Dow Chemical recruiting on campus at the University of Wisconsin. As a career military officer I was looking forward to the former narrative; as a graduate of a midwestern university, I found myself nodding a lot at the latter, as well. I liked the way Maraniss set the stage for the UW events--describing the intellectual climate there in 1967, where they were making analogies between the abolitionists and the anti-war movement by citing Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison. The faculty was working deep philosophical issues about "educational policy and the question of whether a university could ever be neutral. They hungered for connections between imperialism and modern American foreign policy." Professors who had studied totalitarian regimes in the USSR and Nazi Germany (and, like the law enforcement officials interviewed, many were WWII vets) were describing military cemeteries as enablers for "the cult of the fallen... a masking of death... a call to domination and revenge." While I don't think this observation applies well to the United States, it certainly explains the mindset that would mobilize students to question decisions made both in the administration building and in Washington, DC. The reader is introduced to both the leaders of the student protest movement and the policemen who were mobilized to handle it--a couple of which are reminiscent of the sort of cynical working-class authoritarian detectives encountered in James Ellroy's novels. The book's title is derived from Bruce Weigel's moving poem "Elegy," which starts off Book Three and First Lieutenant Clark Welch getting his new company into shape at Lai Khe base camp; it also kickstarts the series of events leading to the tragic deaths of Welch's battalion commander (Terry de la Mesa Allen, Jr., whose marriage was falling apart back in El Paso and whose father was one of the most famous combat generals in WWII) and the brigade operations officer (Don Holleder, star athlete at West Point and fast mover on the First Infantry Division staff, whose proven leadership style on the football field may have killed him during the firefight at Ong Thanh). The allegations against the M-16 rifle, covered in depth in C.J. Chivers' amazing book "The Gun", and its early unreliability in the field, are related again here side-by-side with General Westmoreland's "Why send a man when you can send a bullet?" philosophy and the Body Count metric so often featured in books on America's experiences in Vietnam. Both Senator John McCain and Dick Cheney appear in the narrative (one ejecting from an A-4 into captivity at the Hanoi Hilton, the other as a UW grad student carrying boxes of IBM punch cards around the campus). For those of us who weren't present at either of the violent events described, it would be easy to simplify and generalize, but Maraniss deftly and subtly influences the reader into reflection. What would you do in the middle of an ever-shrinking perimeter, when your weapon keeps jamming and rounds are thunking into the bodies of your medics and leaders from three directions? What would you do if you're trying to go to class and end up caught between a phalanx of riot policemen and guys wrapping their belts around their knuckles? In narrating these stories, though, I think that the author, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, successfully retains his objectivity. He doesn't disclose until the epilogue that he was on campus during the UW event, and it's a bit of a surprise given his previous approach. "Connections are what fascinate me," he writes, "the connections of history and of individual lives, the accidents, incidents, and intentions that rip people apart and sew them back together. These interest me more than ideological formulations that pretend to be certain of the meaning of it all." There's little doubt that these two violent events on opposite ends of the world in 1967 influenced Senator McCain and Mr. Cheney; they also certainly influenced 1968's Tet Offensive and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I think Maraniss has done a fine job here seeking out "the connections", and would recommend this book to anyone interested in American society during this tumultuous era. (The corresponding PBS "American Experience" episode was absolutely worth watching after finishing this fine book--it's available in its entirety on youtube.)
They Marched Into Sunlight is a fascinating, rich, and moving work of history.The conceit is unusual. Maraniss focuses on two events from the 1960s which occurred at about the same time. On October 17, 1967, Viet Cong troops ambushed a United States force. On October 18th a group of University of Wisconsin students protested Dow Chemical recruiters, and were attacked by Madison police (one link). They Marched Into Sunlight explores both of these events in painstaking, sensitive detail, then slowly works the connections between them, building up a snapshot of American life during the Vietnam war.This is a deeply human book, identifying hundreds of individuals: American soldiers, students, president Johnson, police, medics, spouses, children, provosts, guerrillas, farmers. Maraniss situates each one in the moment, describing their role in either Ong Thanh or Madison, while establishing their personal backstories and subsequent lives. They Marched Into Sunlight reads like an ambitious Russian historical novel, and I mean that as high praise. It's compelling to read the book tracing people's lives as their opinions form, meet reality, change, then evolve further, while intersecting with other people/characters. The details are exhaustive. We see American soldiers join the army (after learning about their childhood and teen years), train, ship across the Pacific, get situated in a new units, serve in various ways, then participate in one very bad battle described down to the minute. Then we follow the survivors as they react, recover, continue being soldiers, and some return to the USA. Similarly we track students as they go to classes, engage with the protest, react to it, create lives afterwards. Each person is embedded in larger networks of power and causality. Those soldiers entering a Vietcong ambush, for example, do so after we learn of pressures exerted from the White House through the US Pacific Command on down to local generals.Although neither of these events was world-shaking, they appear in webs of connection that inform our broader understanding of the period. The Dow protests, for example, occur during a rising tide of student unrest. We see a west coast guerrilla theater group ride to Madison to play a role in sparking the Dow action, then follow radicalized students as they head east to march more famously on the Pentagon. Units and policymakers around Ong Thanh act, knowingly or otherwise, on the path to the decisive January 1968 Tet Offensive. I was particularly fascinated to see Maraniss make connections to subsequent history. Dick and Lynne Cheney appear around the Madison protests, for example. LBJ's decision to not run for reelection stems from this period. I also enjoyed many small details, like the Vietnamese referring to American movements as "Maori music", because of the color and loudness. Or the eerie coincidence between one soldier's good luck habit (knocking on wood) and the Vietnamese commander's attack signal (knocking on wood).The cumulative effect is very powerful. The ambush is a nightmarish experience for the American soldiers, a bitter and unacknowledged defeat. Maraniss does a fine job of presenting battlefield complexity in an accessible way. The Dow protests, while obviously less violent, nonetheless impressed me as a lifelong academic.The title of the book comes from a Bruce Weigl poem, "Elegy". American literature of the Vietnam war is rich and powerful, criminally underappreciated in the academy. Here's the text: Into sunlight they marched, into dog day, into no saints day, and were cut down. They marched without knowing how the air would be sucked from their lungs, how their lungs would collapse, how the world would twist itself, would bend into cruel angles. Into the black understanding they marched until the angels came calling their names, until they rose, one by one from the blood. The light blasted down on them. The bullets sliced through the razor grass so there was not even time to speak. The words would not let themselves be spoken. Some of them died. Some of them were not allowed to.
What do You think about They Marched Into Sunlight: War And Peace, Vietnam And America, October 1967 (2004)?
I have a friend in the St Vincent de Paul Society who always wears a purple heart recipient baseball cap. He said he was involved in this battle and they wrote a book about it. The book is heavily laden with detail, which didn't bother me on the Viet Nam portions, but which I found a bit overwhelming on the UW Madison side. It took me a long time to read, but by the time I finished, the book owned me. I was completely absorbed in the issues of the time. The most meaningful part of the whole book was one of the photos which shows one of the lower level American officers and his Viet Cong counterpart 35 years after the battle standing on the battlefield sharing experiences and mourning their losses. Such a sad part of our history.
—Marie Ryan
This is a book well worth reading. It's a funny thing, you know. That fact that I graduated from high school in 1965, just in time for the escalation of the Vietnam "war" "police action" "conflict". We were hauled off by the busloads to the nearest military base for our draft physicals within months of walking down the aisle in our caps and gowns. I joined the Navy on the east coast. After completion of boot-camp we each had the honor of filling out our "dream-sheets". This is where we got to write down our top three choices of where we would like to serve our military time. My three were: 1. USS John F. Kennedy... a ready-to-be-commissioned aircraft carrier headed on a cruise around the world followed by a tour-of-duty in the Tonkin Gulf (Vietnam). 2. USS New Jersey... a ready-to-be-recommissioned battleship headed for the Tonkin Gulf. 3. Duty somewhere in Vietnam.They call it a "dream-sheet" because you're dreaming if you actually think they'll let you go where you ask to go. I was placed on the USS Chukawan (AO100)... an oiler in the Atlantic Fleet. I asked for duty stations that were going to be a part of the Vietnam war because I felt a real allegiance to my country. And many of my friends were headed there... some to die... some to return to tell about, so why shouldn't I. Well, now I'm sixty-six years old, and believe it or not I STILL feel that I missed something in my life that I shouldn't have. I wasn't there to fight alongside my buddies. Not because I didn't want to be. But because they chose to send me in another direction. Please don't ask me why it seems to have left such a big hole in my life. No one should have died there... on either side. But many did... and I wasn't given the opportunity. I lost some friends there. I had friends come back that were nowhere near the same person they were before they fought in the jungles. But I wasn't given the opportunity to either die... or live to tell about it.The parts of "They Marched Into the Sunlight" that I tried to live in my mind were the chapters surrounding the bloody battle at Lai Khe. For some reason... although I'm now opposed to war measures... I had a hard time connecting with the chapters dealing with the University of Wisconsin protests. I certainly oppose use of such things as Napalm, and know of the horrors it poured upon the Vietnamese people. But I didn't know those things back then. Today I would choose for no one to go into battle. Yet, for some reason or reasons, I feel like I let my buddies down for not being there with them. For me the most powerful of all in this book is the epilogue. THIS is what brought tears to my eyes. The coming together of people from both sides of the battle at Lai Khe. Walking the landscape of the battle together... remembering, together, what they went through as they faced each other that horrible day in October 1967. I've always longed to visit Vietnam, to visit where it all happened... where I lost my buddies... where I feel I should have been when it mattered. Chances are I'll never get there. That part of my life will remain... not with the remnants of a bullet hole... but a hole of emptiness none-the-less. Otherwise, my life has been full and well worth living. I hope to continue that trend for many years yet to come. Something I may not have been able to say had I been shipped to Vietnam in 1968.
—Gary Grubb
David Maraniss explores simultaneous events that occurred during October, 1967, one in Vietnam, where a horrendous ambush of an American battalion by the Viet Cong scars the survivors forever, and the other of demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin against the Dow Chemical Company. He interviewed over 100 people from Vietnam veterans to former students and went to Vietnam to cover the VC angle. An impressive work. One horrible weekend in the scope of America's longest war, (or is it? How long have we been in Afghanistan?) Interesting class questions arise from the spectacle of the working class in Vietnam and the middle class in college in Madison.
—David Bales
