Book Review - They Marched Into Sunlight

Since I am on a blogging blitz, and I won't be posting much next week with Oracle World (Oracle's big conference for the year), I thought I'd tell you about a book I just finished. I've read a bunch of Vietnam stuff over time, probably the best being A Bright Shining Lie. I also liked We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. They made a Mel Gibson movie of that one. The latest was They Marched Into Sunlight. It has a very interesting twist, which is to blend together a major battle (or rather ambush) in Vietnam in 1967 with the story of antiwar protests going on at the same time in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. Sounds a bit convoluted, but it is done very well. I really never knew much about the war protests (being all of 11 in 1967 of course). It's a fascinating story. When you read one of these books, you get the up close and personal story from the individual perspective, but it's mixed in with the reality of history as seen in hindsight. Of course, the people going through it at the time are just experiencing it in real time. To me, I see these guys in Fallujah, and you know they're just a bunch of kids just like these guys in 1967 in Vietnam. They're all there for different reasons, and they come from incredibly different backgrounds. They all sure as hell want to get back! The flip side, the protesters' story, is similar in surprising ways. They're organizing protests to prevent Dow Chemical, maker of napalm, from recruiting on campus. They're just kids, coming from all kinds of different backgrounds, too. Many have never seen anything outside of their parents' hometown and world. The administration, which is by and large antiwar also, still has to run a university. At the same time, the book brings you into Johnson's kitchen cabinet meetings, where these two events intersect. Johnson is telling Westmoreland and MacNamara to "pour the steel on," and these guys in Vietnam end up being the grunts on the ground to do it in their "search and destroy" missions that were popular at the time to up the infamous body count. Still, Johnson is incredibly bothered by the unrest at home, and the events in Madison played a big part in it. We know the rest. In 1967 there had been 13,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, 55,000 by the time it was over. Johnson resigned.

Anyway, it was a good book. It's an appropriate thing to read and think about as you see the realtime events and decisions unfold in Iraq.