They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967
By David Maraniss
Simon & Shuster, 572 pages, $29.95
David Maraniss’ brilliant book “They Marched Into Sunlight” carries us back to October 1967, when this country was descending into hell. If you lived through those years, the effect here is more chilling and more heartbreaking than the real experience because, as with Barbara Tuchman’s “March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam” (1984), you can see the mistakes in full relief and sense the disaster impending. For those too young to remember that time, you must read this book to understand where your country has been.
“All was aflame that October,” Maraniss writes. “The war, the antiwar, the fields and jungles of Vietnam, the halls of Congress, the campuses of America.” There are two main stories here. The first is set in Vietnam, the second in Madison, Wis. The first is the story of the war itself, and the second is the story of the domestic war against the foreign war. Both stories end disastrously, and oddly enough on successive days in the middle of the month. The title, taken from a poem about U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, is heavily ironic. In Vietnam and in Wisconsin, the characters are actually marching into ambushes. Although the author is too deft to say so directly, it was the country as a whole, filled with good intentions but burdened with horribly faulty judgment, that was heading toward an ambush by history.
Maraniss is an associate editor for The Washington Post and author of, most notably, a superb biography of former President Bill Clinton and “When Pride Still Mattered,” a first-rate biography of the late Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi. Those two tales were ones of triumph. This is a tragedy in which Maraniss, with painstaking research, documents the myriad ways the U.S. was pulled to pieces by Vietnam.
It is of course the part of the book set in Vietnam that is the most moving and most terrifying. Maraniss assembles his characters with meticulous care, recording their lives prior to their military service, recounting just how they came to be in Vietnam, and producing portraits of the men and of their families back home. He has used letters the men wrote and received, official military records and scores of interviews to produce an astonishingly realistic re-creation. By the time they begin the military maneuver that is the focal point of the book, the reader knows these people well enough to hope for their survival.
The climactic battle takes place not far from Saigon and is a classic example of the military strategy known as search and destroy. In what was an essentially anti-colonial guerrilla war, there were no firm battle lines, no capturing and holding of enemy territory. There was only killing, with the macabre and usually false arithmetic of body counts by which to keep score. The massive American army, more than a half-million strong, was walking around in the jungle with its only strategy being to kill enough of the enemy and hope that the enemy would give up.
“Truth and falsehood,” Maraniss repeats as he recounts the October events. Even the warriors see the falsehoods being told, because they know the truth. In a letter home before the main battle, one officer writes:
“Most of the time I guess they really bend things around so it seems like we always come out on top. . . . I don’t like being a part of `lying.’ “
After the disastrous battle, the Army dressed up defeat in the fine raiment of victory. Under instructions from Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander, to spin the battle as anything but an ambush, the generals told the press in Saigon that it had been ” `a severe engagement which was fought on the enemy’s terms.’ ” They announced that by ” `conservative estimate’ ” 103 Viet Cong fighters had been killed, leaving that regiment ” `as close to destruction as it has ever been.’ “
In fact, the Viet Cong casualties were light. They hadn’t even intended to engage the U.S. forces and withdrew quickly after the battle to move on to another assignment. Fifty-eight Americans had died, including the battalion commander, the son of a heroic World War II general who raised his boy to be a soldier and whose wife had left him earlier because she hated the war. In the field, one of the U.S. soldiers told The Associated Press the truth about the ambush. ” `They were set up and waiting just like a cat getting ready to jump, and that’s what they did,’ ” the soldier said.
No one dies in the Wisconsin battle, but the participants–student protesters, university administrators and the police–are just as trapped by their own circumstances as are the troops in Vietnam. The students in Madison are reacting to the events across the Pacific, but the focus of their anger is Dow Chemical Co., maker of napalm, the jellied gasoline used in incendiary bombs. The good citizens who run the company believe they are doing their patriotic duty and, despite warnings of trouble coming, are intent upon exercising their constitutional right to recruit on the university campus.
The members of the liberal Establishment running the university hate the war as much as the students do, but they also have a conservative state Legislature looking over their shoulders and attempt to rein in the promised protest against Dow. The cheerful and sympathetic campus security chief tries to keep things cool, but the Madison police have a strong dislike for the long-haired protesters at the university. The protesters themselves are the classic collection of self-styled radicals bent on making trouble but worried about being expelled from school.
Maraniss found the report of an undercover police officer who infiltrated a meeting to plan the protest against Dow. That account of the kids from Students for a Democratic Society debating the kids from the Young Socialist Alliance, debating the kids from the Committee for Direct Action and a group the officer couldn’t identify, is hilarious. They shout, maneuver and try to decide whether to be “obstructive” or “educational.”
In the end they are “obstructive,” with a group taking over a university building. The police (“pigs” in the parlance of the time) are called and they wade in, billy clubs swinging. Kids and cops wind up in the hospital, and the demonstration and its consequences make the evening news all over the country, just as the sad results of the battle in Vietnam are being reported to the nation.
Woven between the foreign and domestic tales are descriptions of what was taking place in Washington, where President Lyndon Johnson and the engineers of the war were making the decisions that ensured the horrible results of the two main narratives. Johnson was trapped, too, in his case by the notion that to stand down in Vietnam would bring him down politically. Maraniss tells the story of historian and White House aide Douglass Cater lecturing New York Times columnist James B. Reston on the wrongheadedness of a piece in which Reston was dead-on accurate in his analysis. Reston had written that LBJ was addressing ” `the politics rather than the policy’ ” of Vietnam. Another time, Reston told Johnson directly that the problem was that the president was just trying to save face in Vietnam. ” `I’m just trying to save my ass,’ ” Johnson tellingly replied.
Maraniss writes in an afterword that what fascinates him are the little connections that tie disparate events together. His detailed reporting shows these connections, and they make his book a rich and textured piece of history. Present at the demonstration that day in Madison was Susan McGovern, daughter of the U.S. senator from South Dakota who, the next summer in Chicago, would try to pull together the anti-war forces in the Democratic Party. He (and others) failed, even as the Chicago police made the battle of Madison seem small beer. The anger in the streets helped elect Richard Nixon, who claimed he had a plan to end the war. The war did not end, and four years later, McGovern’s father would run for president against Nixon. McGovern’s landslide defeat incapacitated the Democratic Party’s liberal wing for decades. And the war went on for three more years.
Also present in Madison, but certainly not present at the demonstration, were graduate students Richard Cheney and his wife. They wanted no part of the protests and disruptions. The two became conservative powers in the Republican Party, with Cheney, of course, now vice president and a major advocate of the war in Iraq.
Maraniss’ epic account of the events of October 1967 carries a lesson, even though he gracefully declines to point out the obvious. The war in Vietnam was fought with a noble intention: to stop communism. The battle in Madison was precipitated by another noble intention: to stop the war in Vietnam. Neither struggle succeeded. Instead they produced death and injury and ruined lives and a historical legacy the nation still hasn’t digested. There is no battle in America’s streets now, but there is a war being fought in Iraq. As with the battles recorded by David Maraniss, its consequences are most likely to be not what was intended.
