Read Online They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss - Free Book Online

wrote about, the mortar attacks, truly happened, beginning on the first night he stayed in Lieutenant Welch’s new camp, though the casualties were fewer than he reported.
    A more subdued account came from Greg Landon, the Amherst dropout. “Mud is everywhere and so are the V.C., I am told,” he wrote after a few days in Lai Khe. “We have mortars every night and sometimes a few injuries…. We have a covered trench next to the tent which we jump into when attacked by the mortars.” A week later Landon was reeling from the hyperbolic stories coming at him. “I really don’t know what to believe over here. People just in from the field say that the 1st battalion 16th infantry just had 100% casualties. Must have meant a company (rather than a larger battalion) and 200 men in a company killed or injured is fantastic in itself.”
    Sometimes the truth stretching was so over the top that word got back to the commander. “One had written his mother that he’d been a point man on 50 patrols and been wounded 4 times and was now in the hospital—he said that his C.O. had visited him in the hospital and said to recover quickly because they needed him back as a point man,” Welch recounted in a letter to Lacy. “He told his mother he was ready to give his life for his country but he was getting a little tired of always being a hero. This kid has been an assistant cook (handles gravy + salad + cold drinks) since he got here, has never left the perimeter, and the only time he’s been near the hospital is when he goes on sick call (about twice a week)!! His mother wrote to me to ask if he hadn’t done his share and couldn’t he please come home instead of going back to war. I wrote a letter to her today, saying that her boy had done ‘a good job in his specialized area and was quite an asset to our company. We need him right in the job he’s in now and couldn’t let him come home early because the company couldn’t train a replacement that quickly.’ I wrote some more like that and showed the letter to the boy. He’s writing a letter tonight to tell his mother something a little closer to the truth so she won’t worry so much. After he shows me the letter tomorrow—we’ll mail both of them.”
    Since he only picked up 93 men at Vung Tau instead of the 140 he had been expecting, Welch was allowed to pluck some more experienced troops from other units in the division to reach his full complement of soldiers. For his four platoon leaders—three rifle platoons and the weapons (mortar) platoon—he had two battlewise officers and two untested young lieutenants. He tried to keep that same half-and-half ratio down through his squad leaders, but troop demands in Vietnam were so strong that summer, and the supply of experienced infantrymen so depleted, that he ended up short nine sergeants. Who wants to be a sergeant? he had asked at the end of the first day in camp. It would not be an official promotion, he could not pay them any extra, but at least they would get to eat in the sergeant’s mess tent. A few of his pseudosergeants were too young to vote.
    Working from a division handbook, Welch and his cadre of seasoned men trained the newcomers in jungle warfare: how to board helicopters, how to respond to enemy fire from the left or right, how to set an ambush, how to recognize booby traps and pungi sticks, and how to dig the famed DePuy bunker, named for the former division commander, which featured a berm in front and rifle holes angling left and right so that enemy attackers faced interlocking fire. Welch was a stickler about where to locate the bunkers at NDPs (night defensive positions), often moving them two or three times before the arrangement felt exactly right. His men eventually learned to mark temporary locations with their rifles and sandbags and not dig in too deeply until their finicky commander had walked the perimeter several times and given his final approval.
    Greg Landon, with his Amherst background,