Excerpt from They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The enlisted men were also stacked, floor to ceiling, row after row, seven berths high. The first few nights at sea were all rocking and rolling. Troyer's bunk felt like a stomach-turning amusement park ride. His feet would rise above his head, then his head would rise above his feet, up and down, all night long. "A lot of the men was sick during the night. The sea got plenty rough last night and has been almost all day," Schroder's July 8 entry began. "After chow almost everyone has been hanging over the sides vomiting." Doug Cron, from an Ohio dairy farm, had never been on a boat before. He felt queasy as soon as the ship left port and stayed sick most of the way, spending more time on deck than in the mess hall. Santiago Griego discovered danger at the rail. His first time there he looked up barely in time to duck vomit streaming down at him from a deck above.

Seasickness was what passed for excitement. The daily routine grew so tedious so quickly that Fort Lewis seemed hectic in retrospect. The soldiers went to movies, read paperbacks, prepared quarters for inspection, sunbathed when the weather turned hot, peeled their skin, began taking malaria pills, did more calisthenics, attended Vietnamese language classes, or skipped them, went to Bingo Night on Tuesday and Thursday, and jostled with the scruffy, tattooed marines. "Everywhere you go there are Marines, most of them are good men but there are a few that could stand to be thrown overboard," wrote Mike Troyer. They also played poker in the latrines, organized boxing matches, wrote letters and notes in journals, talked endlessly about what they would do on R&R or when they got back home, and slept. Lieutenant Grady, who under normal circumstances prided himself on the ways he could avoid physical exertion (he was one of the winded officers during the long-distance runs at Fort Lewis), became so bored that he started looking forward to physical training twice a day.

The only good part of the voyage, Grady told the troops, was that time aboard ship was subtracted from the one-year Vietnam tour. "Hey, look, it's not that bad," he often said, trying to raise spirits. "That's three weeks you don't have to spend there." With his gregarious nature, and without rigid regard for rank, Grady, who volunteered for the draft and was commissioned at officer candidate school, often talked freely to the kids in the packet and made friends among them. He grew especially fond of Michael Farrell, a nineteen-year-old draftee from New Orleans, who had a "bubbly and optimistic nature." Farrell was the sort of young buck who thought he was invincible. He confided to Grady that he wanted to be a machine gunner in Vietnam. "Why in God's name would you want to do that?" the lieutenant asked.

On the twelfth Jack Schroder wrote in his diary: "Well, today is my birthday, and what a place to be spending it out on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean miles from nowhere." Private Landon, who also kept a diary of the voyage, described the atmosphere that day as "battle ship gray all the way." He had been pulling guard duty on deck since they left port five days earlier and had "yet to see another ship." On the thirteenth, as they crossed the International Date Line, he spotted a small whale three hundred yards away. What he saw most often were sweaty, bored men in T-shirts and caps, overheated privates looking for places to catch a breeze but lounging in all the wrong places. "Constantly shooing troops off equipment etc. Tedious job," Landon wrote. "Other guards let the rule go to seed, making the job that much tougher. Hate having to be the son-of-a-bitch, but these privates stick together like glue."

Tom Colburn, another C Packet man with guard duty, was more lenient, allowing soldiers to sprawl on deck for five minutes or so before asking them to leave. Colburn, whose pals took to calling him Baby-san, was the youngest of the bunch, a high school dropout from Pontiac who had just turned eighteen and barely carried a hundred pounds on his five-nine frame. Faustin Sena, who guarded a freezer, was more substantial but also easygoing. He loved nothing more than to sit above the hatch chugging on liberated cans of Hershey's chocolate milk.

Copyright © 2003 by David Maraniss