Excerpt from They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The troops who scrambled off that morning stumbled back up the gangplank on their afternoon return. Lieutenant Grady said he never saw so many drunk kids in his life, almost every single one dead drunk. One smacked an officer and ended up in the brig. Another sauntered aboard toting a cheap guitar case, which when searched contained not an instrument but a fifth of whisky. A third pulled up in a taxi and stumbled out naked, claiming he had gone swimming and someone had stolen his clothes. Another wobbled halfway up the plank and keeled overboard. How's the water? some buddies yelled down. Just fine, he answered, squirting an arch of spray from his mouth, and with that a few jumped overboard to join him. The officers were for the most part sympathetic: Just get these kids back in, Grady said. They know where they're going. Let's not make this any tougher than it is.

Captain George had spent six hours in port. He wrote to Jackie that it was dirty and smelled "worse than Germany." Even though he was impressed by the low prices of clothing in the PX, he passed them up, but he could not resist buying a Japanese steel string guitar for only ten fifty, which he would strum until his fingers went raw. He also went to a geisha house with the other captains and got a bath and a massage for a buck eighty, an enjoyment he described to his wife without hesitation: "It was real unusual. The woman started by walking up and down our backs."

Schroder wrote in his diary that he stayed away from the bars, choosing instead to go swimming. He got cut by coral, managed to avoid the jellyfish, but could not avoid his sloshed compatriots at the end of the day. "There were a lot of fellas they were so drunk they had to be carried back. 90% of them. There were several fights. A fight here in the compartment, two men on one. They beat him up while he was asleep in bed, he got messed up pretty bad he got kicked in the face. Nobody would break it up, so I broke it up, don't like the odds 2 against one."

As the ship steamed down into the South China Sea, the weather turned from torrid to unbearable. One hundred degrees during the day and one hundred at night. The air conditioning system broke, which was when many soldiers first realized that the ship had air conditioning. Although sleeping on deck was prohibited, the rule was obliterated by necessity, and for a few nights a thousand or more men slept in the open air. "As many as could fit went up there," Landon noted. "It looked like we were boat people."

The morning sunrise was soothing, the water a shade of dark blue the soldiers had never imagined and perfectly smooth. "I've never seen Indian Lake as calm as what this water is," Mike Troyer reported to his parents, referring to a small Ohio lake of his boyhood. Flying fish were everywhere, and occasional whales. Four days past Okinawa, the ship reached Da Nang, Vietnam, where the rest of the marines off-loaded, leaving the mess hall at last to Schroder and the GIs. Jim George heard "artillery or mortar fire" when they pulled into Da Nang, but "it was about 10 or 15 miles away and I think it was ours." Peter Miller stood at the rail and watched the marines march away, and surveyed the harbor with its exhilarating bustle of ships and boats, a riot of smells and colors, and here came barefooted Vietnamese men unloading cargo. It all seemed exotic to him, nothing like the soap line at the factory in Quincy. "Hoo boy," he said, taking it in. "This is a different world."

Two days later, after a final leg south at the end of the six-thousand-mile voyage, the ship came to a stop a few hundred yards from the beach at Vung Tau, an old resort town known during colonial days as Cap St. Jacques, about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Late that night Faustin Sena saw bright lights in the distance and remarked that it must be a big city out there. The lights were not from a city, he was told. Those were the lights of war -- bombs and tracers. A chill went up his back. "Oh, mama," he whispered.

Copyright © 2003 by David Maraniss