Clark Welch and the battle of Ông Thanh
"Clark Welch is a man of competence, responsibility,
integrity, and courage. Few could match his strength of character
and self-possession. He gave his very best. On that day and in
that place, it was not enough." -- The Beast Was Out
There
I met Clark Welch at a high-school reunion in 1982 (he and my wife
were classmates). He didn't talk about his tours in Vietnam, nor the
terrible injuries he'd received there, and nobody at the reunion
thought to ask. So we missed the chance to hear the story of a hero.
The U.S. Army likewise forgot: Clark's records were lost when he
was med-evacked to Japan. Also lost were his efficiency reports, the
Distinguished Service Cross that had been pinned on him, and even the
fact that he'd been at Ông Thanh or served in the 2nd
Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment--the "Black Lions."
The battle of Ông Thanh
In short, part of an experienced and prepared American battalion
was ambushed at Ông Thanh on October 17, 1967. They were
outnumbered, eight to one, and they didn't know the enemy
was there until they were taking fire from three sides and from
the trees overhead. By the time the sun went down, 59 of them were
dead and 75 wounded--this from two half-strength companies and a
headquarters section, totaling fewer than 200 men. The dead included
the battalion commander, who in the over-controlling typical of
Vietnam combat was in the field with his men that day--a lieutenant
colonel commanding what really amounted to a single rifle company.
(Meanwhile a brigadier general was overhead in his helicopter, telling
a soldier on the ground how to use cigarette-pack cellophane to close
a sucking chest wound.)
Now two books have mended the oversight and brought Ông Thanh
back into the American consciousness.
The Beast Was Out There

The first was written by General James Shelton, a major at the time.
You've probably never heard of his book, and you won't see
it at your local bookstore or find it on Amazon.com. But it's
worth searching out. His account of the debacle at Ông Thanh is wonderfully
convincing--as it should be, coming from a soldier who was
near the scene, and who'd earlier served in the ambushed battalion.
He comes back to the action again and again, like a man with a
sore tooth (or like Norman MacLean in the magnificent
Young Men and Fire).
It's rewarding reading, though not
always easy. The book is backed up with detailed appendixes of
how the 1st Infantry Division operated in Vietnam--an eye-opener
for people like me who'd seen the war in earlier days. (Where
we wore soft hats and slept on the ground, the "Black
Lions" dug foxholes that resembled the sort of bunker you'd
see in a stalemated battle zone.)
They Marched Into Sunlight

The second book was written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, David Maraniss
(who also wrote a foreword to Shelton's book). Though not a best-seller,
it did very well indeed--No. 245 on
Amazon
as I wrote this review. You might prefer it. Maraniss tells the story as
a journalist would, which makes for easier reading at the expense of the
hard-nosed detail
that interests a soldier. More than that, he tells another story that
happened on the same day: students at the University of Wisconsin
protest the presence of Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. Maraniss
was among the students, so he finds the ruction of great interest, and
he gives it approximately equal space with the battle of Ông Thanh.
You may find this repellent--I did. I was especially annoyed by the
photos of the participants. Here's Jonathan Stielstra, "scrambling off
the Bascom Hall roof after cutting the [American flag] lanyard and
setting off firecrackers," as caption explains. And here's Clark Welch,
briefing senior officers the evening before the Viet Cong shot off his
left bicep. Whatever you think of American's misadventure in Vietnam,
or how the police handled anti-war demonstrators at home, it's hard to
think of these two young men as equals in anything but age.
I couldn't bring myself to read the University of Wisconsin
chapters, but had to skip through them, and I think Marching Into Sunlight
would have been a better book if Maraniss had omitted them. For a man
who never served in the army, he does a wonderful job of evoking military
life and the awful, bewildering, and random trauma of combat. There
are very few malpropisms in his Vietnam chapters, and no glaring
errors that I could see. I give him 5 stars for his account of the
Ông Thanh debacle, but knock it down to 4 for wasting my time
on the sophomoric japes in Madison.
You can buy
Marching Into Sunlight at Amazon.com.
Epilog
Clark Welch had a Distinguished Service Cross pinned on him in Vietnam,
but his records were lost when he was transferred to a hospital in
Japan. He couldn't wear the medal--the army's second-highest honor--until
he ran across James Shelton in Washington, and Shelton remedied
the oversight. Welch stayed in the army, retiring as a lieutenant
colonel--the same rank as his battalion commander, killed at Ông
Thanh in October 1967. With Maraniss, he returned to Vietnam in 2002
and met Vo Minh Triet, who had commanded the Viet Cong regiment that
ambushed the "Black Lions" 35 years earlier, and they toured their old battlefield
together.
Clark died in Leesburg, Florida, in April 2016.
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