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trust. Fences encircled the local village, which was swallowed whole by the larger oval of the military base. Who the fences were supposed to protect, or keep in or out, was never obvious. Villagers worked for the Big Red Brothers, washing laundry, cleaning rooms, burning shit, cutting hair, serving drinks, providing sex, but many were quietly supporting the other side, the Viet Cong. The French managers of the Michelin plantation rarely showed up, though they seemed to have scouts who knew everything; if rubber trees were cut down to give mortars a cleaner arc into the nearby jungle, an invoice was sure to arrive soon thereafter billing the First Division a few hundred dollars per felled tree. While damning the French, the Americans took full advantage of the splendid remains of the colonial plantation; the officer corps occupied a resortlike villa of white stucco and red tile houses complete with recreation center and swimming pool. That some of the larger buildings came with oversized basins once used for rubber experiments was but a minor inconvenience.
    Slicing vertically up the center of Lai Khe was Route 13, an unpaved highway made of rocky red laterite soil that ran from the outskirts of Saigon, some thirty-two miles to the south, to the Cambodian border, another forty miles north. Thunder Road, as the Americans called the highway, was a critical supply line that the First Division spent considerable firepower trying to control, with limited success. Like much of that section of Vietnam, it tended to belong to the South during the day and the Viet Cong at night. Big Red One engineers, protected by rifle companies, worked on the road relentlessly, clearing it of mines and using wooden planks to make passable stretches that had been ravaged by monsoon-season craters. Before a massive repair job in 1966, an engineering report said that it “looked as if the whole road would shortly sink into the swamp.”
    Within the uneven perimeter of Lai Khe, a loop approximately three miles long and a mile wide, division, brigade, and battalion headquarters were situated to the west side of Route 13, or to the left of the road driving north, as were the village, the helicopter pads, the aviation units, known as the Robin Hoods of Sherwood Forest, and several rifle companies, including Alpha Company of the Black Lions. A perforated steel airstrip ran south-north on a parallel line less than a hundred yards to the east of the highway. It was also on that side, up on the far northeastern section of the perimeter, that Clark Welch set up base camp for his new Delta Company, a good two-mile hike from division headquarters and the village. Though it was not entirely within his power to decide where to locate his men, it certainly was appropriate for Welch to be apart from the crowd.
    There was no one comparable in the Black Lions regiment, few in the entire First Division. Long and sinewy at six foot two and 160 pounds, his frame always tilting forward slightly, ready to move, with his rough-hewn face topped by crew-cut black hair, his deep authoritative voice and fierce blue-eyed gaze softened by a sheepish smile, Welch was a soldier’s soldier in the most elemental sense. He was an innate leader who earned his own rifle company by sheer ability in the field. It was not out of West Point that he became a lieutenant, nor officer training school. His only academic degree then was from Oyster River High in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1957. After excelling as a Green Beret sergeant, he was commissioned as an OBV2 lieutenant on December 15, 1965, with his father, a retired Corps of Engineers colonel, administering the oath. The acronym meant that he was an obligated volunteer who could serve as an officer for two years but was not guaranteed anything more. “In other words, ‘Don’t plan on keeping it,’” is how Welch half jokingly defined his lieutenancy.
    The last thing Welch expected was to become a line commander in an infantry