David Maraniss

Focuses on a crucial two-day battle in Vietnam that was also marked by an ill-fated protest by University of Wisconsin students at the Dow Chemical Company, in an hour-by-hour narrative.

War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967

They Marched Into Sunlight

Bryan Alexander

They Marched Into Sunlight is a fascinating, rich, and moving work of history.

The conceit is unusual. Maraniss focuses on two events from the 1960s which occurred at about the same time. On October 17, 1967, Viet Cong troops ambushed a United States force. On October 18th a group of University of Wisconsin students protested Dow Chemical recruiters, and were attacked by Madison police (one link). They Marched Into Sunlight explores both of these events in painstaking, sensitive detail, then slowly works the connections between them, building up a snapshot of American life during the Vietnam war.

This is a deeply human book, identifying hundreds of individuals: American soldiers, students, president Johnson, police, medics, spouses, children, provosts, guerrillas, farmers. Maraniss situates each one in the moment, describing their role in either Ong Thanh or Madison, while establishing their personal backstories and subsequent lives. They Marched Into Sunlight reads like an ambitious Russian historical novel, and I mean that as high praise. It's compelling to read the book tracing people's lives as their opinions form, meet reality, change, then evolve further, while intersecting with other people/characters. 

The details are exhaustive. We see American soldiers join the army (after learning about their childhood and teen years), train, ship across the Pacific, get situated in a new units, serve in various ways, then participate in one very bad battle described down to the minute. Then we follow the survivors as they react, recover, continue being soldiers, and some return to the USA. Similarly we track students as they go to classes, engage with the protest, react to it, create lives afterwards. Each person is embedded in larger networks of power and causality. Those soldiers entering a Vietcong ambush, for example, do so after we learn of pressures exerted from the White House through the US Pacific Command on down to local generals.

Although neither of these events was world-shaking, they appear in webs of connection that inform our broader understanding of the period. The Dow protests, for example, occur during a rising tide of student unrest. We see a west coast guerrilla theater group ride to Madison to play a role in sparking the Dow action, then follow radicalized students as they head east to march more famously on the Pentagon. Units and policymakers around Ong Thanh act, knowingly or otherwise, on the path to the decisive January 1968 Tet Offensive. 

I was particularly fascinated to see Maraniss make connections to subsequent history. Dick and Lynne Cheney appear around the Madison protests, for example. LBJ's decision to not run for reelection stems from this period. 

I also enjoyed many small details, like the Vietnamese referring to American movements as "Maori music", because of the color and loudness. Or the eerie coincidence between one soldier's good luck habit (knocking on wood) and the Vietnamese commander's attack signal (knocking on wood).

The cumulative effect is very powerful. The ambush is a nightmarish experience for the American soldiers, a bitter and unacknowledged defeat. Maraniss does a fine job of presenting battlefield complexity in an accessible way. The Dow protests, while obviously less violent, nonetheless impressed me as a lifelong academic.

The title of the book comes from a Bruce Weigl poem, "Elegy". American literature of the Vietnam war is rich and powerful, criminally underappreciated in the academy. Here's the text:

 Into sunlight they marched,
 into dog day, into no saints day,
 and were cut down. 
 They marched without knowing 
 how the air would be sucked from their lungs, 
 how their lungs would collapse, 
 how the world would twist itself, 
 would bend into cruel angles. 

 Into the black understanding they marched 
 until the angels came
 calling their names, 
 until they rose, one by one from the blood. 
 The light blasted down on them. 
 The bullets sliced through the razor grass 
 so there was not even time to speak. 
 The words would not let themselves be spoken. 
 Some of them died. 
 Some of them were not allowed to.

They Marched Into Sunlight War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967

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