They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss Page A

Asia, he had served nineteen years in the army, including nine with the Big Red One in Germany, without facing combat. He was one year from retirement but not ready to fade away. His military career would never seem complete, he believed, unless he did a Vietnam tour. When he at last reached the war zone in Lai Khe, he lost himself a bit, not unlike the C Packet boys on shore leave in Okinawa. “We’ve got First Sergeant Barrow,” Welch was told over the phone one night. He was expecting the new man to report, so he said, “Good, bring him up.” “You don’t understand,” came the response. Barrow was locked up. The sergeant had had too much to drink. The two men first caught sight of each other between the bars of the military jail.
    From the moment Welch arranged his release, Sergeant Barrow became his unfailingly loyal and effective top aide. As the company would fill out, Delta’s young platoon lieutenants all would outrank Barrow, but Welch left no doubt that his first sergeant was to take over if he became a casualty. Barrow would also serve as the company’s daily organizer (taking the morning report, assigning the day’s details), its best provisioner (he had a way of making sure there were morning pastries no matter where they were in the field), and father figure. During his days as a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he had kept a sign on his desk about tact: an ability to tell a person to go to hell and make him glad to be on the way. The men might not like to hear Barrow’s bark, but better his than the commander’s, and they would more often turn to him when they received troubling news from home or felt uneasy. He took pride in being pivotal to the operation, but it was also a heavy burden. And he had his own concerns about the alien world he was now in. On his first patrol in country, he fell asleep on an ammo box and awoke with a start when he felt something hairy running over his arm. Was it a monkey or a rat? He never saw it, but for that second he was “scared half to death.”
    Not much else scared Bud Barrow after that. He became the only person in Delta not intimidated by Welch, and thus the only one with the courage to rouse the commander in the morning. After starting the coffee and finding pastries, Barrow would approach Big Rock with a swagger stick and touch him very lightly two or three times while saying softly, “Lieutenant Welch, time to get up.” Then he would gingerly step to the side as Welch bolted upright and grabbed his gun, ready to shoot.
    The base camp that Welch and Barrow established for Delta Company was about the size of five football fields. It was situated entirely within a grove of mature rubber trees planted in perfect rows running east-west, with spaces of eight yards between rows. Welch planned to house his men in fortified tents jumbled unevenly among the rubber trees. He insisted that they not be set up in neat rows along the lanes because that would make them easier targets. The treetops formed only a light canopy overhead, allowing a cool breeze to blow through and sunlight to dapple the ground. When there was sunlight, that is: the camp was built during the rainy season. “There’s water everywhere (much more even than in Florida) and that means mud, mud, mud,” Welch noted in mid July. In a largely futile effort to keep their boots dry, they put down sidewalk planks made from baseboards and wooden ammo boxes. A concertina wire fence ran around the perimeter, and there were open areas for the sight line of mortars and M-60 machine guns.
    Division engineers paved a company street and put up three permanent structures—the mess hall, orderly room, and a little headquarters building, twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. Welch designed it himself. When you walked in the front door, the company clerk’s desk was to the left, First Sergeant Barrow’s desk to the right, and a hallway down the middle led to the commander’s office, which had