Free They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss

league all-star game, a memorable contest won by the National League on Tony Perez’s home run in the top of the fifteenth inning. That was something to talk about. But the last thing he had read at the airport before saying good-bye to his parents was a front-page account that by eerie coincidence focused on the medics of the 2/28 Battalion of the First Infantry Division and how dangerous their jobs were. That was nothing to talk about at all, and in fact enough to make Hinger fib to his parents, telling them not to worry about him because he would be safe in Vietnam, working at a hospital. On the way over, the plane stopped in Hawaii and Okinawa, and Hinger noticed that on each leg of the trip the meals got sparer and the stewardesses older.
    Joe Costello, an eighteen-year-old Alpha Company grenadier from Long Island, the son of a Manhattan insurance executive, arrived at Bien Hoa Air Base by civilian jet late on a summer’s night. As flight attendants instructed him to lock his tray table and put his seat back in the upright position, he could see flashes of gunfire in the darkness and explosions in the distance. Before he enlisted, Costello had never traveled farther from home than Pennsylvania. Now this: first rocket fire, then overpowering smells, a jangling bus ride, straw hats, pajamas, bare feet, women carrying wares on perfectly balanced poles, the company out on maneuvers at Lai Khe, someone taking him to the enlisted men’s club, where soldiers tell grisly war stories about something called Operation Billings. Wow, is it going to be like that? Then another soldier escorting him to the plantation and demonstrating how they harvest rubber, cutting a diagonal slice through the bark and watching the fluid run down the slit like white sap or milkweed, or some sort of purified blood.
    Michael Arias, a Mexican-American from Douglas, Arizona, was delivering laundry detergent and mouthwash door to door in Phoenix when he got drafted. He flew from Phoenix to Oakland to Anchorage with a final stop in Japan on his way to Bien Hoa that March, then was sent up to Lai Khe to join Alpha Company, which was out on Operation Junction City in War Zone C when he arrived. They tried to keep him occupied at jungle training school, which was thought to be a last, safe transitional interlude before going out in the field, but he and Jesús Razo and Ralph Carrasco quickly found themselves in a tense standoff with some other Black Lions when they tried to take a few beers that were stashed in a Coke machine. M-16s were locked and loaded, bayonets at the ready, until cooler heads prevailed.
    Steve Goodman, a Black Lions mechanic from Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish milkman and the grandson of a pasta salesman, flew TWA to Vietnam on a bouncy, seemingly endless trip from New York with stops in California, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Long Binh. The entire journey “scared the shit” out of him, but that was nothing compared to his first encounter at Lai Khe. He reached Headquarters Company just as they were “hoisting down an American GI’s body” from the watchtower. When the lifeless soldier neared the ground, “his insides came out and were all over the ladder and everything else and just slopping down on the ground—red, purple, black.” He had been killed by the unfriendly friendly fire of a Big Red One comrade, plugged with twenty rounds as he was jokingly screaming, “I’m Ho Chi Minh! I’m Ho Chi Minh!”
    Three hundred sixty-four days to DEROS.
    Whatever bonds the soldiers made with comrades on the way over were usually broken as soon as they reached the replacement center at Bien Hoa and were assigned to different divisions, brigades, battalions, companies. Doc Hinger had been seated next to Jerry Saporito and shared stories with him for seventeen hours, then saw him again only once more in his life. Here was a paradox of army life. So much effort was put into stripping men of their individualism to make them