They Marched Into Sunlight (28 page)

Their landing zone was in the jungle of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, about twelve miles to the northwest of Lai Khe near the Cam Xe stream and a Michelin rubber plantation. It was in this same region, eight months earlier, on February 12, 1967, that the First Infantry’s chemical division conducted what its commanding officer later called “the largest CS [tear gas] attack of the Vietnamese war, and possibly of any war.” They had flown a fleet of Chinooks over the Long Nguyen jungles that February day and dumped 25,000 pounds of powdered CS gas on Viet Cong targets. The gas, actually a fine powder, almost like talc, was expelled from fifty-five-gallon drums, 80 pounds of agent per drum. The choppers held fifteen drums on each side, thirty in all, for about 2,400 pounds per helicopter. Bombardiers on either side fed the drums out at a rate of one every three seconds. This massive use of CS gas, said Lieutenant Colonel Alvin Hylton, was an effective way to harass the enemy by contaminating base camps, rice storage facilities, supply routes, and road crossings. But what had the largest gas attack of the war accomplished? Reports now indicated that the Long Nguyen was thick with base camps and enemy forces. Triet’s First Regiment was said to be in that jungle, somewhere.

It was expected to be a “hot LZ,” meaning a landing zone where the enemy might be lurking, but there was only one spray of gunfire and the rest of the day was quiet. So quiet, in fact, that a crew of print and television journalists (including a striking woman in a flamboyant black jumpsuit—could it be Oriana Fallaci?) who had come along to chronicle the action, left before nightfall, bored and disappointed. The battalion had spent most of the day trying to find a place to dig bunkers—a task made more difficult by the soggy ground—and preparing the night defensive position for what was expected to be a long stretch in the field.

On the morning of October 9 two companies left camp on a search- and-destroy mission, Delta in the lead, Bravo behind. Battalion commander Allen monitored the scene in an observation helicopter. They moved slowly and kept coming across fresh tracks and trails. At 12:35 Sergeant Mike Stubbs, leader of the point platoon, quietly called back to Welch on his radio and reported that he saw three Viet Cong and was certain they had not seen him. As Welch moved forward, an enemy soldier popped his head above a large anthill. Stubbs shot and killed him, and an intense firefight began. It seemed to the soldiers that it lasted two hours. In fact, according to radio logs, it was thirteen minutes.

“I have never been in anything like that before. I thought for a moment that somehow we had gotten in the middle of an air strike!” Welch wrote in a letter the next day. “The bullets were knocking down leaves and bark off the trees and kicking up dust so much there was just a cloud of dust and dirt all around. There were about 50 VC in trenches right in front of us and about 10 VC tied up in trees right above us. In the initial burst of fire 4 men were hurt, but the whole company kept firing. We expended our entire basic load before it was over.” Once again Welch struggled to explain precisely what it felt like in the heat of the battle. “I just can’t describe what it was like—I’ve been in firefights and other battles but this was 10 times any of those. There was so much noise we couldn’t use the radios. The VC in the trenches were shooting low through the grass—you could hear those shots kicking through the grass and ricocheting off the ground. Some VC were hiding behind ant hills and trees—their fire was mostly going over our heads. You could hear them cracking and snapping and breaking off branches and leaves. But the worst was the firing coming from the trees. That was just driving down on top of us and thudding into the ground.”

Welch yelled for the men behind him to fire up into the trees. “And right then 3 VC fell down dead about 25 feet in front” of him. They had been tied into the trees, and “when they were shot, they just fell down the length of the rope and hung there in mid air.” When the battle ended, Welch counted 13 dead Viet Cong, all apparently members not of Triet’s regiment but of a rear services group in the region. One of Welch’s Vietnamese scouts was hit in the leg, and six Delta soldiers were wounded, including Sergeant Stubbs, one of Welch’s best fighters. Stubbs had been shot in the neck near the beginning of the firefight, yet had continued to direct his battered troops until they made their way to safety. He carried some of his wounded himself, ignoring his own more serious condition. The wounded were evacuated swiftly. They seemed to be in relatively good shape as they were dusted off. Stubbs, despite his wound, snapped a salute to Welch as the helicopter lifted; Welch made a note to himself that his sergeant’s actions were worthy of a medal. He was overwhelmed by how well not only Stubbs but the whole company had responded. “They did everything I wanted or asked of them, and then more. When I’d call to one of the platoons to move up on the flank, they’d just say, ‘Already moving, sir.’”

It had been two months since Welch, at the beginning of training in Lai Khe, had roused his men to shouts and cheers when he told them they would be the best damn company in the Big Red One. Now they had endured their first battle, and they had not disappointed. They had found some measure of “success in combat.” They had come away with a sack of enemy weapons while leaving nothing behind except the boots of Private Cook; medics had cut them off to work on his wounded feet. A day that had begun in surprise ended in victory. “We ran into Charlie,” Jack Schroder wrote home to Eleanor afterward. In his rhetoric he had been chasing Charlie since the day he got off the USNS
Pope.
But the reality of the battle, as opposed to his earlier boasting about hunting down the VC to gain revenge for fallen buddies, left him with a different feeling. “For a lot of the men, this was their first firefight, they hope the last, too,” he wrote.

On new stationery handed out to the men in the field after the battle, another Delta soldier, Ray Albin, a member of the mortar platoon, wrote home to his girlfriend Rhonda Sue Ruick at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. He told her where he thought they were (“About 10 miles east of the Cambodian border. If you have a Vietnam map and know a little about maps, I’ll give you the coordinates of our location and then you can see where we are. The coordinates are 658-557”) and the name of the operation (“Oh, the name of this operation is Shenandoah II. In case you read about it in the papers you can tell your friends that PFC RR Albin, a fan, sincere admirer, and close friend of yours is or was there.”) He also told her that they had “paid the price” for finding a VC base camp, with six men wounded. “But that’s the way this war and all wars are, Rhon.”

The soldiers of Delta knew more was ahead. Word came down that they would stay in the field for seven more days of search-and-destroy patrols. Their commander, at least, felt they were ready for anything. “They’re some good men, Lacy,” Clark Welch wrote that night, recalling in his mind’s eye the scene of his tired troops trudging out of the jungle after the battle on their way back to the night defensive position. “I wish you could have seen them. Every one—whether they were walking or being carried—saluted me and said ‘Black Lions, sir’ as they came by.”

Chapter 10

Guerrilla Theater

I
T WAS ON
the very next day, the tenth of October, thousands of miles away in a markedly different world, that the San Francisco Mime Troupe hit the road for a national tour through the universities of the Midwest and on toward New York. First stop, Minneapolis, then down to Madison, retracing a route they had followed the year before. Few institutions were more evocative of the counterculture than this spirited ensemble, yet by that fall, in the effusive wake of the Summer of Love, the troupe and its director, Ronald Guy Davis, seemed eager to get away from the hippie ambience of the Bay Area and focus on political action.

Davis, who founded the troupe in 1962, became a noted figure in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement when he was arrested in a San Francisco park in August 1965 for performing what the park commission deemed to be an obscene version of an Italian farce. By the summer of 1967, as young people around the country were getting their first heady whiff of the counterculture, Davis had been through it all and was becoming concerned about contradictions he saw emerging. He felt the tension between free and easy do-your-own-thing egalitarianism, which was the attitude of the moment, especially in San Francisco, and artistic excellence. His political seriousness, as he later wrote, “made no headway against a tide of long hair, electronic music” and “the democratic notion of amateuristic total participation.” He was also struggling to keep the San Francisco Mime Troupe afloat financially, with more and more people hanging around, calling themselves members, and pushing their version of freedom, which was free everything. As a way of easing his artistic frustrations and money problems, he purged the troupe of thirty-five actors and stagehands that summer. Those cut loose tended to be more social than political, and they were eager to transform the troupe into a leaderless commune.

That attitude, as Davis saw it, was a threat to effective guerrilla theater. While he kept a few superior actors who happened to be more into the Haight-Ashbury scene than he was, including Peter Cohon, who later made it in Hollywood as Peter Coyote, he worried about a valueless aspect to hippiedom that he considered as inane in its own way as the larger American entertainment culture. “The greatest error of the hippie movement is its amateurism, its innocence, and its ignorance,” he argued in a statement of purpose that he wrote to himself. “The result I presume of allowing everyone a creative soul. A good assumption under a strict artistic rule—but a bad one where all rules are discarded and all discipline, art, creation or tension are thrust away. The hippie generation with its acceptance of all with no values, no judgments, is impossible, nay stupid. To attempt to make no judgments is to deface oneself into a mere potato—just as the style of culture called entertainment does. The object is to produce mashed potatoes for mashed potato heads. All soft, thickly packed, soft gooey and heavy. Where there are no standards or comparisons or judgments we achieve no style, we receive trash called art, superficiality called inspiration.”

The issues Davis contemplated in 1967 were philosophical questions that in various forms stayed at the center of the sixties debate for decades thereafter. Where did the unfettered individualism of the hippie movement take you? Davis from the Marxist left and conservatives on the right might agree that it led to a seeming lack of values. But while conservatives would call it a rejection of the American way, Davis saw it as the opposite; he considered it just another byway wending through that insipid land of “capitalistic middle America,” differentiated in this case only by hip language. Most of society operated in a dull haze, he believed, so in that sense merely dropping out was different only in style, not substance. He believed it was necessary to “step away” from bourgeois society, not drop out. To transcend mediocrity, he wanted to act as “a great man,” and he wanted his actors to be in the same mold. Only then, with will and talent, could they change the world. If this called for a certain elitism that ran counter to the democratic rhetoric of the movement, so be it.

He was driven by an ideal—no stars in the ensemble, but each actor a total performer. Ronald Davis wanted the San Francisco Mime Troupe to be the best damn company in alternative theater no less than Clark Welch wanted his men of Delta to be the best damn company in Vietnam.

Audiences who had never seen the mime troupe perform often assumed that they would be watching variations of the silent white-face routines made famous by Marcel Marceau. But this mime was something else entirely, an extremely verbal mode of acting that was also overtly physical and broadly comic. The signature method of the San Francisco Mime Troupe was to reconfigure old commedia dell’arte plays and stage them as modern farces laced with political commentary about racism, capitalism, authoritarianism, and the Vietnam war.

The main play for the Midwest tour in October 1967 was a revision by Joan Holden of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century melodrama
L’Amant Militaire.
In its barest outline the plot involved a Spanish army that was occupying Italy to protect Italians from their own rebellion. From that alone it was obvious how the material could be transformed into a tragicomic story of Vietnam. Davis played the role of Generale Jesús Maria José Álvaro Diego Garcia y Vega, an amalgam of MACV commander William C. Westmoreland and President Johnson, and Peter Cohon took the role of Pantalone, the greedy mayor of Spinachola, a sort of Nguyen Van Thieu character who profited from the war. Sandra Archer, regarded by critics as the best actor in the ensemble, played the dual role of maidservant and pope. Darryl Henriques, a comic talent who also later went to Hollywood, played both the servant Arlecchino (backflipping his way onstage) and the puppet Punch, who operated inside a cardboard box, offstage and apart from the script, a sarcastic commentator and cheerleader for the audience. The rest of the cast included the stock characters of farce, a beautiful daughter played by Marilyn Sydney, and three soldiers from the Spanish army: Alonso, a lieutenant played by Arthur Holden, Sergeant Brighelle, played by Charles Degelman, and Corporal Espada played by Kent Minault. It was a wild and talented cast playing around with a rollicking script.

“You’re looking good, José, but what’s going on with the war?” Pantalone asks in the opening scene.

“The tide of the war has definitely turned,” responds Generale Garcia, echoing some of the optimistic words of General Westmoreland that October. “Allied forces have seized the initiative. We now control most of the cities and towns, and our pacification teams are sweeping the countryside. The rebels are being rolled back, they’re scattered, they’re on the defensive, as is proved by the growing number of attacks.”

The Vietnam analogy was obvious throughout the script, designed to draw whoops of recognition from antiwar audiences. Davis played the
generale
with a heavy Spanish accent, except for the end of one scene, where he rode off stage on a mock horse, wearing a Texas cowboy hat and mimicking LBJ’s Hill Country twang.