Last week was the 36th anniversary of a riot at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The police use of tear gas to subdue rebellious college students made it memorable, but at the heart of the event was a different chemical: napalm. The Dow Chemical Co ("Our position on the manufacture of napalm is that we are a supplier of goods to the Defense Department and not a policy-maker") had sent a recruiter to the campus. His very presence was enough to set off a violent uproar. His name was William Hendershot, known as Curly. He had brought a ham sandwich for lunch.
The method of David Maraniss' towering They Marched Into Sunlight is to build an account of this showdown from the ham sandwich up, so to speak. He has assembled a vast array of participants and witnesses (as a college freshman, he was close enough to smell the tear gas). And he has woven their memories into a potent, humanizing mixture of the epochal and the mundane.
He takes the same tack in describing -- no, reliving -- a furious battle in Vietnam that killed 61 soldiers. The level of detail is such that one officer -- Clark Welch, known as Big Rock, whom the book follows closely -- describes the incomprehensible sight of his own biceps muscle lying on the ground. And a distressed Vietnamese laundress does not know what to do with the freshly cleaned clothes of so many men who will not come back to claim them.
Are the battle and the antiwar melee profoundly linked because they occurred simultaneously? No, although the timing makes for an uncanny coincidence. But what will now connect them forever is this book's inspired use of narrative cross-cutting to produce devastating culture shock. In adopting what is surely the most hackneyed and overused of storytelling techniques, too often a method of building fake suspense out of arbitrary connections, Maraniss succeeds in making adroit, wrenching juxtapositions. They bear out a theory expressed by George Mosse, a prominent Wisconsin professor of that time: "What man is, only history tells."
The author's painstaking comprehensiveness, which at times can create the impression of extreme slow motion, leads him to follow a group of soldiers from the first stages of their trip to Vietnam. ("On the way over, the plane stopped in Hawaii and Okinawa, and Hinger noticed that on each leg of the trip the meals got sparer and the stewardesses older.") He quotes from countless ingenuous letters from soldiers, and his book is too dignified and understated to signal which of these men will not make it home. "Grandma," one man writes, "I don't know what I ever done to deserve the hell that I am in."
Maraniss' extraordinary breadth of reporting also encompasses the North Vietnamese buildup to the battle. He learns from Vo Minh Triet, the deputy in charge of a regiment stalled in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, that his troops were headed elsewhere but had moved off course to search for rice. By deadly coincidence an American contingent was only a kilometer away and would soon march into an ambush in heavily canopied jungle. "The trees are moving," one sergeant radioed to his company commander. "And I think someone's in them."
Meanwhile back in Wisconsin, in the days when smoking marijuana with a towel under the dorm room's door passed for dangerous activity, the student body still reveled in panty raids and the Young Republicans was the largest club on campus, a different kind of turmoil was brewing. Maraniss describes it as if creating an inventory for Noah's Ark.
There were strait-laced, apolitical students. There were the kinds who waxed rhapsodic over the Marxist government of Albania. There were girls who arrived with matched wardrobes and never touched them after the first glimpse of a Guatemalan poncho. There was the campus security chief who found himself denounced as "part of the society this movement is going to negate."
They Marched Into Sunlight gives a step-by-step account of how the anti-Dow protest became so combustible and of how the school's chancellor ("lost, haunted, the well-intentioned man immobilized by events beyond his imagination") found himself presiding over this debacle. Maraniss also describes the event as a turning point, with previously neutral students now radicalized in their antiwar, anti-authority positions.
In both Wisconsin and Vietnam, he pays particular attention to those who had their decisions made for them by the tiniest, most O. Henryish accidents of fate. While it may seem trivial for Maraniss to devote space to the ingrown toenail of a squad leader named Gerald Thompson, the book eventually shows this to have been a matter of life or death.
If They Marched Into Sunlight strives for evenhandedness, it does not achieve that. The author seems skeptical about the extremes of student rhetoric, but he is unwaveringly respectful of soldiers who cannot speak for themselves. And he is less interested in either distinct side of this story than in the way the sides overlap. "Connections are what fascinate me, the connections of history and of individual lives, the accidents, incidents and intentions that rip people apart and sew them back together," he writes. "These interest me more than ideological formulations that pretend to be certain of the meaning of it all."
Thirty-six years' worth of hindsight makes those connections that much more illuminating. This is a book that takes familiar chapters in recent history and turns them into something we have not seen before.
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