They Marched Into Sunlight (38 page)

Peter Miller was a few yards away, and as Captain Jones was dragged back from the point where he was shot, his lifeless body brushed against the rifleman who had been drafted out of the soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts. For weeks Miller had been telling himself that he was ready for action. He burned to get into a firefight and be the John Wayne character that he imagined he could be. But then the captain’s dead leg brushed against him in the jungle, and he never thought of war the same way again.
Holy shit,
he said to himself.
This is a freaking war.

When they reversed directions, Bravo led the way back with Delta trailing. Bud Barrow, the first sergeant, was the last man out. He heard one of the platoon leaders, Lieutenant David Stroup, call out from behind an anthill, “Hey, Sarge, move back,” so he jumped up and started to run toward the anthill and halfway there tripped over a root and fell flat on this face. His first thought was that he had been hit. When he realized what had happened, he was embarrassed but relieved, and he pulled himself up again to run for safety.

What a strange and macabre procession back to camp that was. Medic Lovato had been right. He needed the two stretchers to carry the wounded. The Vietnamese irregulars, shaken by the loss of the American captain, walked two by two, hoisting their fallen leader on their shoulders. Clark Welch asked to carry him part of the way. It was the first man he had lost in battle in Vietnam, although Jones technically was not one of his. He had never carried a dead man before. He was shocked to realize that there was next to nothing to Jones now. When he threw the body over his shoulder, the waist virtually disappeared. It was like toting a saddlebag.

Further down the line some of Welch’s men, at his order, were bringing back two dead enemy soldiers, hauling them by their feet. Welch was not bloodthirsty. He did not cut off ears, nor did he allow his men to mutilate bodies in any way. It was uncharacteristic of him to bring back these bodies; something out of the ordinary had to compel him to do it, and that something was the uncertainty of his relationship with his boss, Terry Allen.

At the end of an earlier patrol in the secret zone, Welch had reported to Allen that his men had killed three enemy soldiers.
Are you sure?
Allen had responded, offhandedly. Welch had taken it as a challenge to his integrity. If he said they killed three, they killed three. What he heard Allen saying, in effect, was,
I don’t believe you. Why don’t you bring them back?
Now he was returning with two, their dead heads dragging against the undergrowth.

A
QUARTER CENTURY EARLIER,
Terry Allen was the boy of thirteen in El Paso, darting through the neighborhood near Fort Bliss with his pals, pretending they were fighting the Nazis in North Africa, just as his dad was fighting them for real, the Old Top who wrote home to his beloved Sonny and sent him tennis shoes, a battle flag, and the words to the First Division Song: “No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great / Our duty to the nation is first, we’re here to state.” Now, no matter how earnestly he tried to be his own man, he could not avoid the pressure of measuring up to a famous father. Ten years earlier he was that debonair bachelor officer dashing about Colorado Springs in his T-bird convertible with polo boots and mallet in back. Now how could he push the agony of his collapsing marriage out of his consciousness, his wife living with some rodeo clown in the same house with the three little Allen daughters, Consuelo and Bebe and baby Mary Frances, back in El Paso on Timberwolf Drive? Seven months earlier he had arrived in Vietnam with much to prove, a rising officer with dreams of making general. Now his ambitions had changed, but the pressure still flooded over him.

Welch and the other officers in his battalion respected Allen. He was not a martinet. He seemed neither timid nor foolhardily macho. He cared about his men and did not convey the impression that he was there only to get his ticket punched. Alpha’s Jim George thought “he was a good leader.” Bill Erwin of the recon platoon said there was no doubt that Allen “commanded, he was in charge.” But the tension Allen had been absorbing during that operation in the secret zone was sometimes apparent to his officers. Tom Reese, a fellow West Point graduate who had just taken over Charlie Company, had a long discussion with Allen before his unit was sent to guard the artillery base near the village of Chon Thanh. Reese, struck by how preoccupied the lieutenant colonel seemed, speculated that perhaps his job was on the line. Gerard Grosso, the S-3 air (forward air operations officer) for the battalion, who was monitoring radio transmissions that week, heard a dissonant symphony of terse and difficult conversations, some between Allen and his superiors at the brigade and division level, others between Allen and his own company commanders. For most of those communications, Allen was airborne in his little command-and-control helicopter.

Helicopters were an enormous boon to the American army in Vietnam, but they could be a mixed blessing when commanders used them to direct search-and-destroy operations; helicopters gave them a better perspective but also made it easier for them to cross the fine line between helping and interfering. The technology, in Grosso’s opinion, gave senior officers “a sense of personal presence, influence, and accountability that was both false and disruptive” in a setting where, even though they might be only a few hundred feet above the fight, the dense terrain cut them off “from the real points of decisive action.” In the secret zone it often appeared to Grosso that the command situation from air to ground had “some of the earmarks of a Chinese fire drill.” Not long after the patrols went out in the morning and entered the dense jungle, Allen began calling down at regular intervals ordering his company commanders to pop smoke grenades so he could know precisely where they were. This was a minor but constant irritation to Welch and the others, who had more pressing concerns and worried that the smoke might reveal their positions to the enemy.

When the shooting started, Grosso noticed, Allen’s requests for situation reports became more frequent and he had “a tendency to sound a little overwrought, particularly when he started to get the same sort of treatment” from his superiors at brigade and division level—Colonel Newman and Brigadier General Coleman—who were also monitoring the action. The tension was particularly evident to Grosso on the sixteenth, even as Welch and Kasik and their companies had a successful day in the field. At one point during the firefight Grosso served as a “radio middleman,” relaying messages between Welch and Allen, and then between Allen and Newman and Coleman, who were second-guessing his decisions. When the Black Lions began pulling back after the fight, Grosso was riveted as Newman and Coleman “blew up at Allen on the radio and ordered him to meet at the NDP.” Helicopters touched down and the big brass walked into camp to meet with the battalion commander at his command post.

Newman barely knew Allen and had never before dealt with the 2/28 Black Lions. He ran the First Brigade, stationed in Phuoc Vinh, and Allen’s outfit was normally attached to the Third Brigade in Lai Khe. But ass chewing was the Big Red One’s specialty, and Allen got his chewed now. The words are forgotten, but the message was clear:
Get out of that helicopter, get down on the ground with your men, and go back in there and find ’em and fix ’em and kill ’em. Do what your old man would have done. Tomorrow, walk.

A
ND NOW HERE CAME THE TROOPS
in from patrol, first Bravo, then Delta, trudging back to the night defensive position, out of the jungle and into the late afternoon haze, bullets still snapping behind them, not close enough to worry about, but enough to keep them moving, the Vietnamese irregulars carrying Captain Jones, other soldiers dragging the two Viet Cong. One horrible loss of his officer friend, but otherwise “a wonderful day,” Clark Welch was thinking. In war it was possible for someone to hold those impossibly contradictory thoughts at the same time. When they reached the perimeter, Lieutenant Colonel Allen was there.

“Well, Welch, how many are you going to claim today?” he asked.

Welch burned inside. “Sir, I think I killed twenty”—seventeen confirmed—“and I brought two of them back to show you.” His soldiers walked up with the two bodies and dropped them near the lieutenant’s feet.

Allen was unimpressed. Battalion commanders by then had received the policy reminder Westmoreland’s office had sent out after the October 9 CBS report. Troops were not to cut off ears or mutilate enemy dead in any way. “You take care of these bodies,” he told Welch.

Welch led a small party across the draw again, some two hundred yards east of the perimeter, and buried the enemy soldiers in a shallow grave. Not six feet deep, because the diggers would hit water well before that.

When he returned, Welch walked from bunker to bunker in the Delta area, debriefing his men. Then he was called to a meeting with the visiting brass: Coleman and Newman and Donald Holleder, who was the brigade S-3, Newman’s operations officer. Holleder was a strapping crew-cut bull of a major, a former All-America end and quarterback for Red Blaik at West Point. Maps were taken out and the group talked briefly about what had happened. Verland Gilbertson, a military photographer for the division who came along to record the Black Lions’ missions that week, stood a few yards away, capturing the scene.

Click: They are in the clearing, a few scattered trees in the scrubland behind them, the rotary blades of a command-and-control helicopter visible above their heads, a few shirtless Delta boys seated in the background to the right, resting in the brush. Welch, with his characteristic forward lean, stands at the right edge of the huddle, his pictograph map stashed in his side pants pocket, gesturing now with his hands. Coleman is next to him, listening intently, followed by Holleder, Allen, and Newman. The bespectacled Allen’s helmet is off. His hair is thinning and gray. His arms are at his hips, and on his left wrist one can see his Omega Seamaster watch. (On the watch’s back, etched in gold plate, an engraving reads “J.P. to T.A.” on top and “Oct. 2 1961” below—a wedding present from the wife who has left him, Jean Ponder Allen.)

“Tell me about today,” Coleman said to Welch at one point. The division’s deputy commander had been keenly interested in the new Delta companies of the First Division since they had been formed during the summer. He had visited Welch’s base area in the rubber trees of Lai Khe several times and had developed a warm relationship with him.

Welch responded in his clipped style. These were not local guerrillas, he said. They were regulars. He saw the shoulderboards on the uniform of an officer.
God damn, sir. We got ’em. We got ’em. We know where they are now. I saw where they ran. I saw where they carried off their wounded. Jesus Christ.

As the huddle broke up, Coleman took Welch aside. An aide handed him a piece of cardboard with a Silver Star attached to it. The general plucked the medal off the cardboard and pinned it on Welch. Another little side drama of pride and tension. Coleman had chewed out Allen, and Allen had dealt coolly with Welch, and now here was Coleman pinning a medal on Welch’s chest.

“We lost Captain Jones today,” Welch told Coleman. “My friend.”

“Yes, yes, my friend too,” Coleman said. An aide came running and told the general that it was time to leave. Coleman started walking toward the helicopter, then turned and saluted and Welch saluted back.

The Vietnamese scouts approached Welch to say good-bye. They were leaving. They had paid final respects to Captain Jones by digging a hole and burying his equipment, except a pistol, which they gave to Welch. The body was gone, on its way to Graves Registration in Lai Khe, first stop on the lonesome journey down to the morgue at Long Binh and across the ocean and over the mountains and all the way back to Coalton, West Virginia, and now the Vietnamese irregulars intended to vanish as well. No way they were staying without Jones. “Beaucoup VC out there,” they kept saying before they left. “Beaucoup VC.” One of Jim Kasik’s lieutenants heard them muttering and approached his commander and said, “Damn, sir, those guys are scared shitless and glad to be leaving. They say there’s a shitload of VC all over the place.”

Welch had time to clean up and take a catnap, then he reported to Terry Allen’s tent, the field headquarters, for the battalion command briefing. These were the last moments of sunlight. It was a small white tent, with room enough for three rows of chairs. Allen sat in front, facing the others, and at his side was Major John F. Sloan, the battalion’s new operations officer. Less than two weeks earlier, Sloan had come in to replace the previous S-3, Big Jim Shelton, who had been moved up to serve as deputy operations man at division headquarters. His promotion was a huge loss for Allen. Shelton, who had been Allen’s closest friend in the battalion, had a fluid conversational style that kept the lines of communications going in every direction. Now he was gone, and through no fault of Sloan’s, issues of command seemed harder. In the first row sat the battalion captains, all Jims—Jim George, Jim Kasik, and Jim Blackwell, the intelligence officer. Behind them were lieutenants Welch and Erwin and Sergeant Major Francis Dowling.

One of Terry Allen’s habits was to take off his glasses and rub his eyes with his knuckles. When he did, Jim George could see the fatigue. But his voice and words held steady. He gave a brief summary of what had happened that day. No soldiers lost except Captain Jones, who didn’t count against the battalion.
We’ve got them where we want them,
he said.
Tomorrow is going to be a great day for the Black Lions.

Then he unveiled a map and let Sloan run the briefing. Sloan wanted Erwin’s reconnaissance platoon to walk due south to scout the area where they thought the enemy base camp was. Two companies would patrol to the west. Allen interrupted. No, they weren’t going to do it that way. The main two-company patrol would march south toward the base camp and recon would go in another direction. Erwin looked at Sergeant Major Dowling. It was the second time in a week that Allen had changed his route.