When war raged far from the battlefield

In 1998 the Library of America published two huge volumes of journalism, numbering 1,688 pages in all, under the title “Reporting Vietnam,” which for all their bulk barely paused to explore one of the war’s major reverberations: the antiwar movement that tore through America, ripping up politics, ideas and cliches, disrupting and transforming millions of lives and leaving a scorched, desolated and -- eventually -- regenerated landscape. You could understand the editorial judgment to seal Americans’ experience of the war off by itself, but it also enshrined the ‘60s political truism that the young men who fought in Vietnam belonged to a different nation than did the ones who fought at home against the war. Today, though the old truism hangs on like a sluggish shadow, it’s taken for granted that Vietnam not only divided a generation but also united it; that everyone of a certain generation misleadingly labeled “the baby boom” was tested and many were ruined by the brutal, relentless war; that American normality was ruptured whichever front you lived on; that while the Viet Cong wouldn’t be landing on the beaches of San Diego, the anguish -- and fog -- of war spilled onto this continent to stay.

It’s long past time for the journalism of Vietnam to explore the totality of the social upheaval that upended America on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. To treat the war and the antiwar together as two faces of a single historical moment is one of David Maraniss’ inspired achievements. The longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, best known for his biographies of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, has a feeling for character and for the way in which ideas, events and accidents leave human beings transformed when they collide. He has written a transoceanic montage that powerfully, grippingly folds together two events that took place during the same two days in October 1967. About 40 miles north of Saigon, a battalion of the 1st Infantry Division, under pressure to “search and destroy” and thereby show Gen. William C. Westmoreland that the U.S. forces could kill communist soldiers faster than the other side could recruit their replacements, marched into an ambush and left 61 Americans of Alpha and Delta companies dead among anthills in sweltering heat under the jungle canopy.

Meanwhile, in Madison, the antiwar center where Maraniss grew up and attended the University of Wisconsin, a militant demonstration to block a Dow Chemical recruiter from telling the university’s students why they should make a career at the company with the exclusive Pentagon contract to manufacture napalm was set upon by baton-swinging riot police who injured dozens of students. As the demonstration expanded into the nearby plaza, police fired tear gas for the first time in campus history. What took place in Madison was one of three major demonstrations in October that propelled the antiwar movement on a jagged route “from protest to resistance,” in the popular phrase of the time.

Maraniss takes hundreds of intense pages to set up the human cascade that poured into each event and left each world violently broken. He records the fumbling deliberations (if that is the right word) of President Johnson and his inner circle as they attempted to square the circle and to protect themselves from clear knowledge of what they had wrought. But Washington, which concocted the war, is not the epicenter of Maraniss’ attention. What he has written is principally the book of those who suffered from their leaders’ recklessness.

He is as interested in the lives of his protagonists as in the living, breathing detail of the battles they marched into. He knows how to set up the ache of suspense, when to intrude his judgment and when to restrain himself. Like his literary ancestor Stephen Crane, he is not a fancy writer, but he has a fine eye for character and place (down to the color of the soil) and the way in which both reveal themselves in action. It is no small help to his Vietnam sequences that he has something of a celebrity cast, the battalion having been led by Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr. of El Paso, son of a famous World War II general, and one of his reinforcements being former West Point football star Maj. Donald Holleder. But Maraniss takes the uncelebrated as seriously as the stars -- especially a former Green Beret from New Hampshire, Lt. Clark Welch, the Delta Company commander and a “soldier’s soldier” who believed in the war but knew when the brass was out of its depth in the jungle. Maraniss renders the intensity, the resolve and bewilderment of men encamped for war in the spirit of James Jones’ “From Here to Eternity.”

In Madison, the cast includes university administrators, faculty, students, police, Dow officials and bystanders of all persuasions. (Among the bit players are former graduate students Dick and Lynne Cheney, who disliked the antiwar movement but had, as Vice President Cheney said on a later occasion, “other priorities” than the war.) Maraniss centers on the liberal chancellor William Sewell, who as a sociology professor had voted against permitting Dow to recruit on the Madison campus; on antiwar activist Paul Soglin, who was beaten during the anti-Dow action and later became mayor of Madison; and on the nephew of a Dow executive, a Madison junior named Jonathan Stielstra, who had transferred from a conservative Christian college in Michigan and joined the fight against the war. Disgusted by what he witnessed, Stielstra cut the American flag down from a roof.

Maraniss’ account of the battle north of Saigon is excruciating, all the more so for the fact that the enemy gets to tell his crucial side of the story in the person of Viet Cong deputy commander Vo Minh Triet. In 2002, Maraniss accompanied Welch to meet Triet in Ho Chi Minh City. Triet recalled that his soldiers were famished but that he refused to shoot a solitary monkey high on the sole standing tree in the area. “Forgive it,” he said. “His life is miserable enough already. Let him live.” It is this sort of detail that brings the story alive. There are many of them. Maraniss is obviously a devoted listener. Many protagonists and their relatives trusted him with their letters, diaries and reminiscences. Hundreds talked to him, often in intimate detail -- even Allen’s estranged wife, who turned against the war and (not incidentally) against her husband and began living with another man in their El Paso home before Allen died.

About most of his protagonists, the men and women on the ground, Maraniss refuses to jam conclusions into a box and close the lid tightly on them. Antiwar activists, he shrewdly observes, numbered “the selfless and the self-involved, the peaceful and the reckless, the righteous and the contentious,” and “the culture was accepting, rejecting, co-opting, adapting, disapproving, and absorbing them at the same time, and the results were complex and contradictory.” As for the war’s movers and shakers, he leaves little doubt that those who ran the operation were devoted to self-delusions, misrecognitions and lies, fundamental and sweeping, top to bottom, coating everything the war touched.

At the hospital a few days after the battle, Westmoreland was pinning a Purple Heart on the pajamas of Delta Company’s wounded first sergeant. “Tell me, sergeant. What happened out there?” “Well sir, we walked into one of the damnedest ambushes you ever seen,” said the sergeant. “Oh, no, no, no,” Westmoreland replied. “That was no ambush.” It couldn’t be recorded as an ambush because Westmoreland believed he was winning a war of attrition. His men couldn’t be ambushed; not his men! They took the action to the enemy! They had inflated body counts to show for it! So the major general in charge, who wasn’t anywhere near the battlefield most of the day, was awarded a Silver Star, and the document certifying that award, Maraniss writes, “described events that were unrecognizable to the ... soldiers whose lives were forever shaped by that single bloody day.” Unrecognizable, like the self-hypnosis and lies pumping out of official Washington today.

In the days after the battle, the area was heavily bombed and defoliated by Agent Orange, manufactured by Dow among other companies. In the years to come, according to a Viet Cong farmer who had fought there, villagers were afflicted by terrible headaches. Dow got out of the napalm business. One American who survived the battle -- he was 18 at the time -- is on 50% disability; to this day he shakes.