They Marched into Sunlight

American journalist and author David Maraniss’s non-fiction book, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2004), focuses on the Battle of Ong Tranh fought during the Vietnam War and an anti-war protest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that same month. The title comes from the Bruce Weigl poem "Elegy" in which U.S. infantrymen are ambushed by the North Vietnamese in battle. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, They Marched into Sunlight won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

The book jumps back and forth between three settings. The first is the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, an area of thick jungle where U.S. service members belonging to the 1st Infantry Division are led into a Viet Cong ambush. The second is the University of Wisconsin-Madison where students amass to protest the Dow Chemical Company's on-campus recruitment efforts because the corporation is responsible for manufacturing napalm used by the U.S. government to incinerate the enemy—but also plenty of innocents—in Vietnam. The third is Washington, D.C., where President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration struggles to reckon with the increasingly unpopular and deadly war effort.

On September 28, 1967, members of the 1st Infantry Division are airlifted into the Long Nguyen Secret Zone in order to disrupt the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong's (VC) efforts to rest and refit their troops following a series of assaults on the U.S. military. For the next two weeks, little contact is made with PAVN/VC troops. However, on October 16, two companies come across a heavily fortified VC bunker. Undermanned, the U.S. troops are ordered to pull back; Commander Terry de la Mesa Allen, Jr. begins to call in airstrikes to the area. Following the airstrikes, Allen's men re-enter the camp and a firefight ensues. Allen pulls back his men again, making plans to launch a full-frontal attack the following day.



Back at base camp, First Lieutenant Clark Welch advises Allen to call off the assault until they have more men at their disposal. However, undeterred, Allen assigns Captain James George to lead the assault, not Welch. At the same time, the Vietnamese soldiers call in reinforcements, planing to greet the American assault with a three-sided ambush. The next morning, Allen and George carry out the assault as planned but are met by the ambush. The Americans hold their position for a time but soon it becomes untenable to do so. As soon as they begin their withdrawal, the battle devolves into chaos. Sixty-four American soldiers are killed and seventy-five wounded out of the two hundred U.S. soldiers who participate in the assault, while less than two dozen PAVN/VC soldiers perish. Allen is among those Americans who die, struck by a burst of machine gun fire. The scene is horrific; so much blood is spilled, it causes rifles to jam.

Despite the fact that the Battle of Ong Tranh is clearly a defeat for the American troops, high-ranking officers spin the event as a victory for the U.S., and the battle's outcome is reported by the media as such. General John Hay claims that more one hundred PAVC/VC fighters were killed, but that number is grossly inflated. According to U.S. Army Brigadier General James E. Shelton, the catastrophic losses were due to faulty intelligence and Allen's overconfidence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison gather for a sit-in to protest the Dow Chemical Company, which is on campus recruiting. Dow manufactures napalm, a highly flammable gel used by the U.S. government in the war effort. Hundreds march into the Commerce Building where a Dow Chemical representative is scheduled to recruit students for his company. When the students pack into a hallway, blocking anyone from getting by, school officials order the protesters to disperse. The protesters refuse to leave unless the Dow Chemical representative is escorted off stage. What begins as a peaceful act of civil disobedience soon turns violent when police start beating the protesters with billy clubs.



Things worsen when the clash spills out of the building into an area where thousands of students have amassed to witness the protest. Angry at seeing their fellow students beaten and bloody, some members of the crowd begin to throw rocks and sticks at the police officers. Officers respond by setting off tear gas, leaving many in the area—including a number of people guilty of nothing more than attending class—with their eyes burning and stricken by uncontrollable vomiting. Seventy people are sent to the hospital, most of them unaffiliated with the protest.

Maraniss is careful not to make anyone involved in the demonstration and its aftermath into caricatures. Rather, many are tragic figures caught up in a tide of history they can't control. University of Wisconsin Chancellor William Seward, despite unleashing the police on the protesters, was stridently opposed to the war. Among those who witnessed the melee were two graduate students, Dick and Lynne Cheney, who themselves would become key figures in a much later military quagmire in Iraq. Maraniss quotes University of Wisconsin history professor George Mosse who says of Vietnam and those opposed to it: ''Even while continuing to honor the memory of the fallen, we must never lose our horror, never try to integrate war and its consequences into our longing for the sacred. . . . If we confront mass death naked, stripped of all myth, we may have slightly more chance to avoid making the devil's pact with that aggressive nationalism whose blood trail has marked our century.''

They Marched into Sunlight is a staggeringly well-researched snapshot of one of the most turbulent eras in American history.