They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
by David Maraniss
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MaranissBrand: PBS
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09-28
ISBN: 0743261046
Number of pages: 572
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
Book Review: "Into Sunlight They Marched..."
Summary: 5 Stars
So begins Bruce Weigl's searing "Elegy," the poem from which David Maraniss took the title of this poignant, powerfully evocative, brutally honest, and scrupulously balanced telling of two days in October 1967 and how they figured in the larger social, economic, political, and military contexts of the Vietnam War, both on the home front and in the jungles and armed enclaves of Southeast Asia. This is history beautifully written and brilliantly conceived and executed, reconstructing pivotal events in lapidary detail, from many points of view, as they played out in four locales: Binh Long Province, Republic of Vietnam; Madison, Wisconsin; Washington, D.C.; and Midland, Michigan.
Maraniss organizes his research around two incidents that transpired on the 17th and 18th of October 1967: an ambush in which a Viet Cong regiment mauled two companies of the U.S. First Infantry Division in a jungle battlefield some 40 miles north of Saigon, and a violent encounter between police and antiwar protestors, the culmination of a two-day protest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison against Dow Chemical, the controversial manufacturer of napalm and a regular on-campus recruiting presence. Maraniss, interviewing almost 200 participants and drilling down into archives, military records, press morgues, and unpublished letters, diaries, and scraps of memorabilia, vividly captures an epic cast of characters, including many of the heroic, ill-fated members of the 2/28 Infantry--the "Black Lions"--of the Big Red One, an all-American football player, a Viet Cong regimental commander, Dow executives and plant workers, the starched, conventional commander of U.S. forces, UW-M students who went on to become congressmen, a U.S. vice president (and his wife), a nationally known television reporter, a daughter of a Presidential candidate, a mayor of Madison, and many many others.
As the Vietnam conflict retreats into the dim recesses of memory, it becomes more and more difficult to recall the passions or the vitriol that fueled the antiwar movement, even as the United States finds its young men and women once again deployed in large numbers to a hostile foreign environment. Today, when pundits cavalierly draw comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, those who participated in, or simply lived through, the events of the 1960s and 1970s struggle, as I have, to recall their own views at the time, their "consciousness" of the earlier war and its effects on their families, towns, campuses, or workplaces. The miracle of Maraniss's strenuously objective account is that it provides a template for memory, evoking not only the events and the decisions and the place names, the views of the politicians and staffs and the campus administrators and the police, the perspectives of the corporation executives and their salaried foot soldiers, but also the language and the sensibilities of the time, the very faces of battle, and the names...oh, the names...and the stories, stories you'll recognize, American stories, perhaps your own or that of a friend or loved one, of those who fell and those who lived to tell the tale.
This is another of those historical accounts, written by a master journalist, that reads like a well-plotted dynastic novel. It literally hurtles ahead, and I had to resist the temptation to flip forward and discover the outcomes of lives in which I'd become so intimately involved. Maraniss manages his long, complicated, shifting story with dazzling facility, weaving one strand into another, deftly handling transitions between disparate locals and societies. If the narrative grip and emotional weight of the whole cannot be sustained with 100-percent consistency from front to back, it is because the Vietnam passages are so viscerally powerful and true that any attempt to balance or parallel them is doomed to fall short. This is not to demean the protests, activists, and their great impact, but there's simply no comparison between walking point and shaking an anonymous fist at the university chancellor from the middle of a crowd, or between a rifleman's life-and-death stakes in a company-level firefight and a freshman's anguished decision to cut French early in the term "to see what all the commotion is about." Maraniss also accepts without question the sincerity of the protestors; human nature and personal experience teach us that Vietnam era protestors were, to say the least, variously motivated.
Those are quibbles. I cannot recommend this book too highly. For those who have forgotten, remember. For those who were born afterward, learn. This is the story of a democracy gone to war--which, yes, even democracies will do when the perceived stakes are sufficiently high--and a democracy deranged by war, set at odds with itself. But we have known for 2500 years--from Thucydides, the first chronicler of war and the open society--that the passions democracies ride into war are difficult if not impossible to sustain over long stretches of time. As Thucydides quotes Pericles as observing: "In our state, few can decide, but all may judge." It is incumbent upon all citizens--those who have a say and may judge--to consider their own views responsibly. For this task, Maraniss's great work is not only a template for memory but also a template for responsible citizenship.
ELEGY
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 the 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.
- Bruce Weigl
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