Watched a Brilliant Book Review today on CSPAN 2 of They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967, by David Maraniss. Here's a synopsis.
In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together three very different worlds of that time: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. In the literature of the Vietnam era, there are powerful books about soldiering, excellent analyses of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and many dealing with the sixties' culture of protest, but this is the first book to connect the three worlds and present them in a dramatic unity. To understand what happens to the people of this story is to understand America's anguish.
In the Long Nguyen Secret Zone of Vietnam, a renowned battalion of the First Infantry Division is marching into a devastating ambush that will leave sixty-one soldiers dead and an equal number wounded. On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, students are staging an obstructive protest at the Commerce Building against recruiters for Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm and Agent Orange, that ends in a bloody confrontation with club-wielding Madison police. And in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson is dealing with pressures closing in on him from all sides and lamenting to his war council, "How are we ever going to win?"
Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the story unfolds day by day, hour by hour, and at times minute by minute, with a rich cast of characters -- military officers, American and Viet Cong soldiers, chancellors, professors, students, police officers, businessmen, mime troupers, a president and his men, a future mayor and future vice president -- moving toward battles that forever shaped their lives and evoked cultural and political conflicts that reverberate still.
They had one of the Student leaders on who went on to become Mayor of Madison, Wisconson for 12 years. He said his real regret was that they didn't get control of the "crazies" during the demonstrations in the 60s. He broke them into two groups. The Revolutionaries who believed that they were overturning the Government, and the ones who were just in it for the destruction. He had obviously learned a lesson from it.
The man you felt sorry for was the Infantry Captain who took 61 casualties in the ambush. He recently received the DSC for the action, 36 years late. He is still trying to get medals awarded that never got acted on. He had several troopers who called in.
He recently found out that the Division General had himself awarded a Silver Star for that action. He was nowhere near it. |
