They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss Page B

a map table, desk, bookshelf, and what looked like a clothes closet but actually was a private entrance to Welch’s hideaway sleeping area. There were phones next to the desk and bed “so I can always be on top of things no matter where I am.” Further down the hall were the operations room and library, and it was only a few steps out the back door to an underground TOC (tactical operations center) and command tent.
    By July 26 Welch and his skeleton crew had consumed their first full day of meals in the mess hall. “BREAKFAST: bacon, eggs, french toast, pancakes, toast, french pastry breakfast rolls, butter, honey, jams, jelly, coffee, orange juice, milk (awful). LUNCH: fried ham, potato, rice, beans, corn, bread, hot rolls, salad, butter, jams and jelly, peaches with whipped cream, coffee, iced tea, milk (awful), Kool-Aid. DINNER: hamburger, cheeseburger, french fries, lima beans, rice, hot toasted buns, bread, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, ice cream! Cake! Coffee, iced tea, Kool-Aid.” The next day a truckload of weapons arrived. “We’ve got quite an arsenal here,” he reported to Lacy. “A rifle company is really a powerful force! I’m really looking forward to getting these people and the equipment together and ready so we can get out and help fight the war.”
    Big Rock had lost twenty-five pounds since he arrived in Vietnam and had gone through one bout of pneumonia, but now he felt well fed and healthy and raring to go. Two days later he and Bud Barrow hopped on a C-130 and flew down to Vung Tau to meet the soldiers of C Packet.
     
    “W E ARE CALLED the Black Lions,” Jack Schroder wrote home to Eleanor in one of his first letters from the Delta Company base camp amid the rubber trees. “We have a 500 piaster bounty on our heads for any member of the Black Lions. Charlie loves to cut your ears off and your Black Lions patch. We found a medic that had been completely skinned alive and hanged by his heels and had the patch cut off and [stuffed] in his mouth—not a pretty sight.”
    Not an entirely factual one, either. It took only a few days of hanging around the war-hardened soldiers of Lai Khe, drinking with them and listening to their stories, for the quiet dental technician to take on the bravado of his environment and send it along to his unsuspecting young wife back in the States. Everything Schroder reported in that gruesome account had some truth to it—the bounty, the cut ears and patches happened at some point somewhere—but not during his first week there. It was part of the lore of Lai Khe, spread night after night, month by month, in the bars and hooches, an expression of that part of human nature that adjusts to a frightening situation by mixing mythology and reality. Mike Troyer wrote home to his parents in Ohio with another version of the same legendary story. “The unit I am in is called the Black Lions. I’ll send you one of the patches that we wear on our left fatigue shirt pocket. The V.C. are so scared of us that they have a bounty on us of some 30 piasters…to collect it they have to take the Black Lion patch and a left ear as proof that they have killed a famed Black Lion. No big thing because Charlie is so scared to mess with us, whenever we are out on patrol he would just as soon leave us alone.”
    Things were rough enough and would get worse than the new soldiers could imagine, yet still there was an odd sense of comfort in embellishment. In Jack Schroder’s new world, as he transformed it in his letters, the rain fell nonstop for six months during the monsoon season, in the dry season the temperatures ranged from 120 to 140 degrees, and every night they were taking mortar hits from the Viet Cong that were killing five or ten or fifteen of his buddies—all stretches of fact that reflected his absorption of a fundamental truth, one that he related in his first letter home. “They aren’t playing games over here,” he wrote. The most threatening of the events Schroder