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From Frontline to Homefront

By Ron Betts (Reviewer)

They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
By David Maraniss
(Simon & Schuster, 2003)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss has written the definitive historical account of the travails of many members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "They Marched into Sunlight" is a description of two battles: one fought in Vietnam and another engaged by anti-war campus activists at the University of Wisconsin, both occurred on the same day in October 1967.

During a few autumn days in 1967, Lt. Col. Terry Allen, Jr., the battalion commander of the 2nd/28th Infantry Regiment — "Black Lions" — of the 1st Infantry Division ("The Big Red One"), sent two depleted infantry companies into battle against the VC 1st Regiment, which was waylaid in the area in a desperate search for rice. The vivid description of the ensuing battle highlighted the bravery and dedication of the soldiers of the 2nd/28th, but it also demonstrated the FUBAR nature of the division level command and control decisions that were made despite the on-the-ground advice from the combat-engaged company and battalion officers and NCOs.

Simultaneously, a few hundred students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison were determined to oppose the recruitment of students by the Dow Chemical Corporation because of its production of napalm for the Department of Defense. Their plan was simply to demonstrate for a day and then to actively obstruct the Dow recruitment during the following day. When the Madison Police Department was called in to quell the "disturbance," everything went FUBAR on the homefront as well: riot clubs were indiscriminately wielded and CN gas was liberally dispensed among all of the participants, including the police officers — none of whom had ever experienced tear gas deployment, even those few who had some minimal training in crowd control.

Meanwhile, the Johnson administration is depicted in the book as unable to achieve any consensus about how to either proceed or withdraw from what had become the sucking chest wound of their military involvement in South Vietnam and their bombing campaign over North Vietnam and Laos.

David Moraniss weaves several historic and highly personal stories into a fabric that is essentially a microcosm of what many members of VVAW went through, both when we were in-country and then later when we hit the streets all across America to protest against the same war we had fought in. In "They Marched into Sunlight," years of contradictions about fighting a war and then opposing it are summed up in a well-documented book about a single October day in 1967.