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

uncommon for an enlisted man in the infantry, was called Professor by his bunkmates. He was assigned to carry the radio as an RTO (radio telephone operator), a job about which he had mixed feelings. “The job is rather risky in a fight since the radio is the first or second target, the other being the squad leader,” he wrote. On the other hand he would get to know what was going on, which he considered “imperative,” and “get familiar with tactics that may become useful in later parts of the war.” It also might help him avoid other annoying assignments like listening post, for which a few men sat outside the perimeter all night listening for enemy approaches. “The radio is rather heavy with its extra battery, being over 30 pounds, but I’ll bear it somehow,” Landon reported. “Just so long as we stay out of ambushes as much as possible I’ll be fairly safe. But that damned 10’ aerial is a dead giveaway.”
    Jack Schroder trained on the M-60 machine gun. His squadmates started calling him Machine Gun Red. In his letters home he alternated between trying to reassure Eleanor, by telling her that the training would keep him out of harm’s way for several weeks (and that after that he would try to get assigned to Lai Khe’s dental lab), and alarming her with increasingly hard-edged stories. One night, he said, VC mortars came in near the airstrip as he was making the long walk to Delta from the village. “I ran all the way back to base camp. I never knew I could run as fast as I did. Over here speed counts.” Another day he described walking through a rice paddy and finding himself “up to my ass in human waste,” which he said was used as fertilizer.
    The central themes of his letters became revenge, comradeship, and drinking, and the three seemed inextricably linked. He was undergoing the transformation of a soldier facing battle, his world shrinking from his country down to his division, then battalion, then company, then platoon, then squad, and finally the men he knew and lived with every day, the guys to the left and right of him. They were what he would fight for.
    In his first letter the enemy was the aggressor to be feared; now Schroder was the predator. “We had a beer party last night. I got drunk and they said I went hunting Charlie with the M-60,” he wrote. “I’m glad they found me. I am going to get Charlie one way or the other for he killed 7 of my buddies.” In another letter he said he was eager to go on patrol at the perimeter that night. “I am going to try to find me a Viet Cong,” he boasted, adding that the last VC they captured was skinned alive and had his throat slit. This was followed by an account of how a friend was killed by a mine and how they scooped up his remains and placed them in a bag.
    Sprinkled amid the bloody tales were comments about the delicious fudge that Sarge got from home, dreamy thoughts of meeting for an R and R in Hawaii, and requests for rolls of 126 color film and Kool-Aid, and then sign-offs about how much rougher it was than he had expected and how much he loved his wife and baby son and wanted to come home.
    Mere days in country and already many new Delta Company soldiers felt alienated from the world around them. “Nothing but bars and whores,” Mike Taylor told his parents after making his first visit to Lai Khe village. “Got a haircut and massage. They slapped the———out of my ass. That’s the last of those.”
    From the distance of his fourteen-man tent under the rubber trees, Greg Landon wrote to his brother, America seemed “very far away.” So far away that he wished he were “in Peoria, Illinois, right now.” But they were stuck in Lai Khe and the surrounding jungles. “What bothers me is that we will not be able to get to Saigon, ever. It’s off limits to the 1st Division now.” As for the fighting, Landon wrote, the Viet Cong had “the upper hand in this goddamned war,” and it seemed that “by one means or