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

News from the outside world arrived in a shipboard newspaper known as the Pope Pourri, which had a twelve-man staff of editors, reporters, and illustrators and included wire reports from the Armed Forces Press Service and United Press International. It was a straightforward sheet, with little attempt to propagandize. Day after day came reports of deadly race riots in Newark, the arrest of segregationist terrorists in North Carolina, the difficult aftermath of the Six-Day War in the Middle East, fighting in the Congo, the debate over a national tax increase, and of course the news about Vietnam. On the Saturday morning of July 15, the men of C Packet read the latest unsettling figures: 282 Americans had been killed in battle during the previous week, the third-highest weekly total since the war began. The trend seemed to be more of the same. "More Troops to Vietnam -- LBJ," read the banner headline that day over a story noting that President Johnson, after two days of meetings with his generals at the White House, had decided to send more battalions into the war.

Considering where the soldiers were coming from, and where they were going, it was inevitable that tensions would play out aboard ship. There were fights every day, mostly minor scrapes. But on the nineteenth Landon reported "a small riot on the deck, drawn along racial lines." Not surprising, he thought, since fires of black rage were burning in so many inner cities that summer. "This tied in with the concurrent unrest in Newark, N.J. The problem grows with the length of the trip and as the climate grows hotter and thicker. Thank God for the air conditioning in the compartments."

That last sigh of relief was something that Captain Jim George could not utter. He was stuck in a small cabin with three other captains, a room without air conditioning that soared above one hundred degrees and was unbearably sticky even on windy days. George was fastidious about washing his underwear but was warned by the ship captain that they were using too much water and might have to start rationing. Some officers played poker at night, but George did not know how. He consistently lost at bingo, but at least won at Monopoly once. For George, who prepared for an officer's career at Wofford College in his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, the long trip was another reminder of the occasional frustrations of the military bureaucracy.

First the army cut short his command of a tank company in Germany to rush him to Vietnam, then they made him wait and do nothing at Fort Lewis for two months, and then they put him on this slow voyage across the Pacific. "I just feel as though I've wasted so much valuable time and also the taxpayers' money just sitting around," the earnest officer wrote home to his wife, Jackie. "I'm not doing much and ready to get on with the task at hand." He was a bright officer, only twenty-five, with two young sons, John and Jay, and a wife whom he dearly missed. In one letter home to Jackie at 155A Pine Grove Manor in Spartanburg, his mind drifted back to their first apartment and how they "worked together to prepare it for a happy marriage"; and to the day he rode a motorcycle up on the porch of their little house on Vernon Street and how Jackie "raised H -- -- L" with him for buying it; and to the first night in their apartment in Germany and little John's afternoon naps; and to all the good times they'd had in five married years "even though outside factors such as college, money, parents and the Army" had put some pressure on them "from time to time."

These wistful daydream remembrances were welcome interruptions to the sounds of war rumbling in his brain. In spare hours he read books about combat, first The Last Battle, a narrative describing the final Allied push toward Berlin in World War II, then Dateline: Vietnam, an account by Scripps-Howard war correspondent Jim G. Lucas of the fighting zone to which George was headed. During nightly bull sessions in the airless cabin, the captains talked about what to expect in Vietnam and how they would fare in battle. George wanted to command his own infantry company in Vietnam and was surprised to learn that some officers had no desire to lead troops into combat.

Copyright © 2003 by David Maraniss