From Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi) intertwines two compelling narratives to capture the Vietnam War at home and on the battlefield as well as, if not better than, any book yet written. The first narrative follows the soldiers of the army battalion the Black Lions, 61 of whom died in an ambush by North Vietnamese on October 17, 1967. The battle scene description is devastating, brilliantly compiled with painstakingly recreated details of the four-and-a-half-hour battle, unflinchingly drawn pictures of the damage modern ordinance inflicts and an equally unflinching record of the physical and psychological residue of battle. The second narrative centers on the October 18, 1967, riot at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when student protesters tried to stop Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, from recruiting on campus. Here Maraniss, a Madison native and a freshman at the university at the time, successfully depicts the complicated range of motives that led students to participate in the protest: many began the day as curious observers, and the riot radicalized them against the war. The author also re-creates the sense of loss, confusion and anger of the university administrators as they were overtaken by events that would change the fundamental relationships between students and faculty. The two narratives together provide a fierce, vivid diptych of America bisected by a tragic war: a moving remembrance for those who lived through it and an illuminating lesson for a new generation trying to understand what it was all about. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-For 40 years, the Vietnam War, and its effects on American society, has been a popular topic for authors. The best of these books tend to focus on a single aspect of the conflict, a certain group involved, or a specific period of time. In that tradition, Maraniss concentrates on two events that unfolded over two days in October 1967. On the first of those days, the members of the First Division's Black Lions battalion marched into a trap in the jungles of Vietnam and paid for it dearly. On the next, a large student protest at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemicals, the makers of napalm, turned into a battle of its own. By picking these moments in time, while looking at events in the U.S. and in Vietnam, the author shows how the war was affecting Americans, not merely with bullets and nightsticks, but with ideas and ideals as well. One might wish that Maraniss had shown a greater willingness to take on the larger questions posed by these two events, but by bringing these disparate occurrences together and placing them in context, he has provided one of the best books to date on the Vietnam War.Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DCCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
The only direct connection between the two incidents dramatized in this narrative is their occurrence within hours of each other. In South Vietnam near Saigon, a U.S. Army battalion was decimated in an ambush laid by a North Vietnamese regiment; while in Madison, Wisconsin, police bloodied a dozen university students obstructing recruitment by a company they denounced as a war profiteer. Maraniss magnifies the battle and the demonstration as moments when the war became unwinnable and when students became radicalized, and though his choice of tipping points is probably influenced by personal experience--he witnessed the demonstration in question--his reconstruction of events captures the white-hot polarization of the time. Built on the author's extensive interviewing, the juxtaposition of combat with protest unfolds almost breathlessly, second-by-second in the most intense phases. Buttressing the breakneck reading pace are Maraniss' biographies of the participants: he recounts the trajectories that brought the mostly working-class soldiers to their fateful search-and-destroy mission and the middle- and upper-class students to Madison. This is a concentrated, visceral remembrance of the Vietnam War in both its military and social dimensions. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
The New York Times Book Review 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.

Maureen Corrigan Fresh Air, National Public Radio My nominee for must-read nonfiction book of the year....They Marched Into Sunlight is that miraculous thing, a substantive, exhaustively researched work of history that reads like a novel.

The Economist A masterful work that brings the conflict back with a rush of cinema verité emotion and tension....Over the years, Vietnam has produced several classics, all of them different: Dispatches, by Michael Herr, and A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan. Here is another.


Review
Samuel G. Freedman Newsday The towering work of nonfiction this year....Maraniss' great achievement is to be epic and intimate at the same time.


Book Description
Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. They Marched Into Sunlight brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago. In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.


Download Description
"Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few tumultuous days in October 1967. David Maraniss takes the reader on an unforgettable journey to the battlefields of war and peace. With meticulous and captivating detail, They Marched Into Sunlight brings that catastrophic time back to life while examining questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues that are as relevant today as they were decades ago. In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together three very different worlds of that time: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. In the literature of the Vietnam era, there are powerful books about soldiering, excellent analyses of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and many dealing with the sixties' culture of protest, but this is the first book to connect the three worlds and present them in a dramatic unity. To understand what happens to the people of this story is to understand America's anguish. 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?""

ANNOTATION

Finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in History.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Here is the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties told through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. They Marched Into Sunlight brings that tumultuous time back to life while exploring questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth, issues as relevant today as they were decades ago. In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Are the battle and the antiwar melee profoundly linked because they occurred simultaneously? No...but what will now connect them forever is this book's inspired use of narrative cross-cutting to produce devastating culture shock. In adopting what is surely the most hackneyed and overused of storytelling techniques, too often a method of building fake suspense out of arbitrary connections, Mr. Maraniss succeeds in making adroit, wrenching juxtapositions.—Janet Maslin

The Washington Post

At its best, They Marched Into Sunlight is wonderful reporting. The military part, the story of the 2/28 (second battalion of the 28th infantry regiment) Black Lions walking into the ambush that day, recalls some of the very best nonfiction writing of the war...I consider We Were Soldiers the gold standard, the best nonfiction combat writing of the war. Maraniss's heartbreaking portrait of ordinary American grunts arriving in country, preparing for combat and finally being mauled just north of Lai Khe is of the same high order...He has added one more uncommonly readable book to what is already a rich literature of a difficult chapter in American life.—David Halberstam

The New York Times Book Review

Moving between the campus at Madison and the jungles of Vietnam, with side trips to Hanoi and Washington, the tale unfolds with a magisterial sweep that recaptures the war and its era, filled with moral ambiguity and moral conviction, with promise and dread, with hippie antics and weekly body counts.—Philip Caputo

Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi) intertwines two compelling narratives to capture the Vietnam War at home and on the battlefield as well as, if not better than, any book yet written. The first narrative follows the soldiers of the army battalion the Black Lions, 61 of whom died in an ambush by North Vietnamese on October 17, 1967. The battle scene description is devastating, brilliantly compiled with painstakingly recreated details of the four-and-a-half-hour battle, unflinchingly drawn pictures of the damage modern ordinance inflicts and an equally unflinching record of the physical and psychological residue of battle. The second narrative centers on the October 18, 1967, riot at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when student protesters tried to stop Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, from recruiting on campus. Here Maraniss, a Madison native and a freshman at the university at the time, successfully depicts the complicated range of motives that led students to participate in the protest: many began the day as curious observers, and the riot radicalized them against the war. The author also re-creates the sense of loss, confusion and anger of the university administrators as they were overtaken by events that would change the fundamental relationships between students and faculty. The two narratives together provide a fierce, vivid diptych of America bisected by a tragic war: a moving remembrance for those who lived through it and an illuminating lesson for a new generation trying to understand what it was all about. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal