Pulitzer Prize winner and Madison native David Maraniss brought to life a violent 1967 October afternoon at the University of Wisconsin for a Spotlight Series lecture at Memorial Union Wednesday night.
Mixing wrenching stories from the Vietnam War with a few moments of humor, Maraniss tied together the events of an ambushed American battalion in Vietnam, student protestors at UW and government leaders in Washington, D.C., into his lecture on war and peace.
“In 1967 everything was up in the air,” Maraniss, the associate editor of the Washington Post said. “Soldiers were facing a situation when they didn’t know who their friends were and who their enemies were.”
Maraniss told the half-student, half-middle-aged crowd of approximately 200 about his own experiences as a freshman during the turbulent Oct. 18 day when UW protestors, enraged at chemical company DOW’s manufacturing of napalm for the war, proceeded to march up Bascom Hill in what soon erupted into a violent melee at Commerce, which is now Ingraham, Hall.
Maraniss said police marched in and students came out with wounded heads as the sting of pepper spray ripped through the campus for the first time.
He said the event — paralleled by the Vietnamese ambush on the same day that killed 60 U.S. soldiers and injured 60 more — was the starting point for his new book, “They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America, October 1967.”
In one scene, Maraniss described a distraught student who witnessed the violence on Bascom Hill and ran to Memorial Union and called his father. “Dad, dad,” Maraniss recalled, “Can you do something? They’re beating the hell out of those kids.”
Maraniss relayed another story of how just 17 hours earlier in Vietnam, a company commander’s “best soldier” pleaded with the commander not to leave a jungle post for another via the way they came in. But Maraniss said former president Lyndon Johnson’s “search and destroy” style of battle was such that the American battalion marched unknowingly into the ambush and called the battle a “blip” that no one would ever hear about.
An older man said in a question-and-answer session following the lecture that when he saw the riots on the hill, he thought to himself, “We’ll give you protestors 15 minutes to get off the hill … and then we’ll drop you off in the battlefield to see what you’d do.”
The man said he has since rethought his views and thinks the right to protest is important.
Maraniss said he does not think students are much different these days in voicing protest, but he did say a striking difference for the cause of student activism was the draft.
“Everyone in my generation was consumed by the draft,” Maraniss said. “What would you do, go to Canada or go to jail? I don’t honestly know what I would have done if I was drafted.”
UW senior Christine Maxon said she attended the lecture because she is interested in recent political events and what happened in Madison during the Vietnam War. She said she liked Maraniss’ honesty and the facts he reported to the audience.
“I found him fascinating,” David Glisczinski, a member of the Wisconsin Union’s Contemporary Issues Committee, said. “I wanted to find the comparison between now and then.”