They Marched Into Sunlight
“Maraniss…is a writer with a masterly sense of narrative pace…The tale unfolds with a magisterial sweep that recaptures the war and its era…The book fulfills its ambition to evoke political, social, and cultural quakes whose aftershocks are felt to this day…Maraniss’ account of the two-day battle is as horrific and gripping as the now famous first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan…The section dealing with the war against the war…are equally arresting.”
New York Times Book Review
In the Long Nguyen Secret Zone of Vietnam, a renowned battalion of the First Infantry Division is marching into a devastating ambush that will leave sixty-one soldiers dead and an equal number wounded. On the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, students are staging an obstructive protest at the Commerce Building against recruiters for Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm and Agent Orange, that ends in a bloody confrontation with club-wielding Madison police. And in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson is dealing with pressures closing in on him from all sides and lamenting to his war council, "How are we ever going to win this war?"
Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the story unfolds day by day, hour by hour, and at times minute by minute, with a rich cast of characters as they move toward battles that forever shaped their lives and evoked cultural and political conflicts that reverberate still.
Praise