They Marched Into Sunlight
War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967
Chapter One
Sailing to Vung Tau
The soldiers reported one by one and in loose bunches,
straggling into Fort Lewis from late April to the end of May
1967, all carrying orders to join a unit called C Packet. Not
brigade, battalion, or company, but packet. No one at the
military base in Washington State had heard of C Packet until
then. It was a phantom designation conceived by military
planners to meet the anxious demands of war.
The early arrivals were billeted on the far northern rim of
the army base in a rotting wooden barracks with flimsy walls
known derisively as "the pit." Many of them checked in at
night after long flights and bus rides from forts in Louisiana
and Texas or home leaves in the Midwest, and for them morning
sunlight revealed an ethereal vision. Out the window, in the
distance, rose majestic Mount Rainier. But after gaping at the
snowcapped peak, they had little to do. Some were attached
temporarily to an engineering battalion, the 339th, but they
had no duties. A captain named Jim George, trim and handsome,
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