They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss

showed me a simple book that a little girl was writing in. I read a little bit out of it and everybody giggled again and the little girl grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go while I walked around and looked at what the rest of the class was doing. A group of boys were reading out of what looked just like a Tarzan comic book. I picked it up and read and then turned the page and sure enough— Tar-san cac con truong, Tarzan, leader of all the animals…”
    Welch was soon surrounded by hundreds of children. He had heard a story once that if there were a number of little children around, you were safe, the VC wouldn’t try to shoot near you. “Well,” he wrote home, “I was the safest I’ve ever been in my life, because we were waist-deep in kids, we left the courtyard trailing a wake of yelling, waving little kids.”
     
    T WO MONTHS INTO HIS TOUR at Lai Khe, Welch was called to division headquarters. They were increasing the number of rifle companies from three to four, Welch was told. They wanted all the company commanders to be captains, but they had been watching Welch carefully and decided to make an exception. They wanted him to form and lead the new Delta Company of the 2/28 Black Lions. The day he was given the assignment, July 6, was the very day the USNS Pope departed San Diego, carrying many of the men who later would join his company. He couldn’t seem to stay anywhere for long, Welch wrote Lacy, “but this is almost an unbelievable thing. I’ll be able to choose a cadre of NCOs from units already here and then we’ll move into the woods, set up our tents, start building a place to live, eat, and work, and after a sixty-day training program I’ll have another infantry rifle company trained and ready to go.”
    For a soldier in Welch’s position to win a commission in the field was uncommon enough; for him to command a rifle company was extraordinary. He would be the only lieutenant with his own company in the entire First Division, one of only a handful in all of Vietnam. He considered it an honor and a challenge. When he began putting the company together, it amounted to nothing more than “one infantry Lt. (AC Welch) and a large section of rubber plantation,” as he described it to Lacy. Within a week he had a first sergeant, two tents, and a latrine, and soon he had a mess hall, an orderly room, and his first batch of soldiers—twenty veteran infantrymen from other companies handpicked with two thoughts in mind. First, Welch wanted men with combat experience who could steady the nerves of the FNGs, the fucking new guys, as new arrivals were called. And second, he was looking for soldiers with mechanical or electronic skills who could help him construct the Delta camp. There was no shortage of prospects. As word spread around Lai Khe that Big Rock was getting a company, men started volunteering. One night five jeeps pulled up to the orderly room and a band of men jumped out. They were looking for the new Delta commander. “I came out to see what the commotion was about,” Welch reported in a letter home. “It was Recon—all those little bastards—wanting to come with me to the new company. That really got to me.” Afraid to show emotion, Welch barked at a sergeant to take his men home “before the VC find out that Black Lions Recon are all in one bunch and send in a suicide squad to get us all.”
    His rise from the noncommissioned ranks left Welch with a deep appreciation of sergeants, whom he considered the forged steel of the army. He would go nowhere without the new first sergeant of Delta Company, Clarence (Bud) Barrow. Square of face, with a burr haircut and southern Indiana twang, Barrow was an army lifer. Back in 1948, before some of his buck privates were born, he had escaped from Bloomington and a difficult stepmother by quitting school at age sixteen and enlisting after forging his date of birth on the birth certificate. By the summer of 1967, when he received orders for Southeast