Free They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss Page A

effective parts of the killing machine, so much emphasis was placed on the fraternity of the squad and platoon, so much faith and trust was invested in the relationships of buddies on the fighting line, all of this was indisputably essential and true, yet each man also moved through Vietnam in his own distinct world, hundreds of thousands of individual overlapping years, each with its own beginning and unique end, a serial number and a date eligible for return.
Last name: Sikorski
First name: Daniel
Home of record: Milwaukee
State: WI
Sex: Male
Race: Caucasian
Marital status: Single
Branch: Army
Rank: SP4
Serial number: RA16889558
DEROS: March 8, 1968
     
    Danny Sikorski was another gunner in Delta Company, an experienced hand who helped teach Jack Schroder how it was done. Machine Gun Red and Ski, as his army buddies called Sikorski, were the same age, twenty, with connections to Milwaukee and a tendency to drink to ease their boredom or anxiety. Sikorski, in country since March, was one of fifteen Black Lions transferred from Alpha to Delta to help train the new guys from the ship. “The only good thing about it is we stay out of the field for 15 days training this new company,” he reported in a letter to his sister Diane. Otherwise it was an uneventful assignment. “Well, there isn’t too much to talk about because we aren’t doing anything except training these new fellows. I sure am drinking a lot of beer lately. Our club opens at noon and closes at 10 that’s where I spend half of my day. P.S. Please send the Booze.”
    Diane Sikorski, two years younger than her brother, cringed when she read the P.S. In every letter home since Danny had arrived in Vietnam, he had begged or demanded that she send him a bottle of rum. Diane loved her brother deeply. When he wrote in one letter that she should call WOKY “and ask them to play a request for a boy in V.N., I want them to play Mercy Mercy, I really like that song,” she was happy to oblige, but sending him rum was a different matter. Back during his last year at home on Eighth Street on the south side of Milwaukee, after their mom had died and she became the “homemaker,” her tasks included cleaning his upstairs bedroom each week. On the floor behind his bed she had come across stale vomit of rum and coke that made her gag and she had screamed at him that she never wanted to see or hear the word rum again.
    Each soldier with his own story, yet if there was a prototype of the young men from Wisconsin who fought in Vietnam, it might be Daniel Patrick Sikorski. He was a third-generation Polish immigrant, the son of Edmund Sikorski, himself one of twelve children born to Joseph and Stella Sikorski, who came to Milwaukee from Krakow. Edmund Sikorski quit school after sixth grade and went to work, spending most of his career as a filler on the assembly line at Miller Brewing Company. He married Stella Kubiak, another southsider, and together they raised Danny and Diane in the familiar patterns of the Polish working class. They had a dog named Penny, vegetables in the backyard, a color portrait of Jesus in the living room, and latch hooks on the side door. There was a little cottage on Lake Lucerne up in Crandon where they enjoyed a two-week vacation every July and where Danny and Diane swam and fished, climbed the watchtower, and fed the deer. At Christmas they hung stockings on the fake fireplace, attended midnight mass and shared the oplatek, the blessed Polish wafers. Danny and Diane broke bread and exchanged good wishes and held their breath as they kissed cheeks and toasted with Mogen David wine. They went to church at Saint John Kanty and attended parish school in the early years. No one called him Ski on the south side. There would be no way to tell him apart from anyone else. His classmates in eighth grade were Tarczewski, Kucharski, Mikolajewski, Arciszewski, Mrochinski, Badzinski, Odachowski, Banaszynski, Kumelski, Benowski, Kitowski, Witowski, Szapowski,