They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss

his new assignment, S-2 for the battalion, which meant chief intelligence officer. Looking back on that posting with his self-deprecating humor, he would call himself “the worst intelligence officer in the history of the U.S. Army,” which he certainly was not, but he was on the mark when he called himself “green as grass” and “an intelligence officer who didn’t know a thing.” That was part of the reality of the United States Army in Vietnam in the summer of 1967, when men were pouring in faster than seasoned officers could be found to lead them, a situation greatly exacerbated by the Pentagon policy of rotating not only enlisted men but officers out of Vietnam after twelve months. Grady was fortunate that as soon as he reached the field that day, he ran into Big Jim Shelton, the battalion’s S-3, or operations officer, a former football lineman at the University of Delaware who had been in Vietnam only a few weeks himself but radiated confidence and could outtalk anyone in the division. “Look, you work for me, and this is what you do,” Shelton began, and Grady was more than glad to listen.
    While Grady stayed back at the night defensive position (NDP) that afternoon, George went with the two companies and command unit on a search-and-destroy mission, which proved uneventful, though the day did not. When they returned from the march, the battalion commander directed George to go tell the Alpha Company commander to pack his gear and report back to headquarters, he was being fired and replaced by George. “The commander I’m replacing has only had the company for four weeks and is being relieved, so I really hope I can cut it and put the co. squared away,” George wrote home to his wife. Serving as a battalion or company commander in the Big Red One during the Vietnam years was a hardship unto itself, the more dangerous equivalent of trying to manage the New York Yankees under George Steinbrenner during the early years of his ownership. Officers were constantly being moved and fired. In eight months, since the beginning of 1967, the Black Lions had already been through three battalion commanders, three Headquarters Company commanders, three Alpha commanders, three Bravo commanders, and two Charlie Company commanders. It was, said Jim Shelton, “the ass-chewingest place you’ve ever seen.” In any case, George thought the Alpha commander hardly seemed surprised, as though “he knew that the axe was coming.”
    The surprise came a few hours later, when a squad of Viet Cong guerrillas slipped past the listening post and the ambush squad and launched a surprise attack on the NDP with machine gun fire and claymore mines, killing one soldier, who had been sitting atop his bunker rather than inside it, and wounding eight others. It was George’s first test. “Well, I earned my CIB (combat infantry badge),” he wrote afterward. “I assumed command of the company at 1900 and at 2200 had an attack…. It was really something. I coulda reached out and touched the live tracer rounds. Thank God I didn’t freeze and was able to make the right decisions. We had a dust off (med evac) which was hairy. I conducted it and had to help the wounded to the copter. The company did OK. The battalion CO was there but didn’t do much.”
    The next morning the field operation was moved to a new location north of old Dog Leg Village. It was a dispiriting day, with soldiers exhausted, stung and angered by the surprise attack, the ground a mess of mud, a monsoon rain drenching them, and in the midst of this scene here came Major General John Hancock Hay Jr., the division boss, who swiftly fired the battalion commander. Two officers canned in two days. The resupply helicopter that night brought in the next leader of the Black Lions. He was a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate named Terry Allen Jr., who had served briefly as the battalion’s operations officer earlier in his tour. “He should be real good,” Clark Welch