A Walk in the Sun

Richard Furlong Sutter was 21 years old when Frank Johnston made his photograph that afternoon at Nha Tho An Hoa, just south of the so-called Demilitarized Zone then dividing North and South Vietnam. The third of six children of an Atlanta insurance broker and his homemaker wife, he'd grown up comfortably middle class and Catholic, a kid brimming with charm and so much mischief – he once drove the family car over a cliff – that his father finally sent him to a military prep school for some ironing-out.

Nobody was surprised when Richard announced he'd dropped out of college to join the Corps. It was early 1966, the war was escalating, and the Marines offered a time-honored path to maturity. Indeed, it seemed to work for Richard. By June of 1967 – a month after the picture in the church – he was able to write his parents that though he was happy to be coming home "soon," the very idea now struck him as slightly "funny, for I'll have no idea of what to say."

Then, eloquently: "I left home at the age of 20 and I will return there close to the age of 22, but feeling quite a bit older in many respects. I wish I had never left, but I feel as though I have finally accomplished what I set out to do. I am now sure of one thing. I am a man."

A battle-weary Marine and a Vietnamese woman and child crouch outside a bunker near Danang under enemy fire in September 1967. (By Frank Johnston, Courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)

He even managed, in a P.S., to gently ding his father: "Daddy, I may be able to teach you how to shoot that .30-.30 now. I've had a little practice this past year with .30 cal. weapons."

He spared his parents the gruesome details – "Hell isn't the word for it," he'd written – but in a letter to a childhood pal, Doug Dromey, Richard described just one of many "routine" patrols: "Our battalion was helo-lifted into the mountain jungle [searching] for a suspected 200 Vietcong. As we left the choppers ... .50 cal. machineguns opened up along with .30s. You've never imagined as much havoc. ...

"For four nights and three days it rained and we were awake 90 percent of the time. No food for five meals, or water. No ponchos for protection. ... We walked through jungle so thick a machete didn't hardly help. Our bodies took a worse beating than any man should endure. ...

"Few men were bullet casualties, but we had to walk back [through] 10 miles of waist deep water (sometimes chest deep). No choppers because of foul weather. We suffered better than 45 percent casualties in my platoon from 'immersion foot.' ... Some were so bad their feet were a mass of blood. ...

Cradling a buddy in his arms, a Marine calls for a medic during intensive fighting on Hill 881-North on May 14, 1967. The Marines took possession of the hill and two others nearby. (By Frank Johnston, Courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)

"Have you ever seen a grown man cry? Probably not, well these men were crying while we were returning. It's hard to explain the pain unless you've felt it yourself ... but you learn to love a real man over here.

"These guys won't quit, Doug. We're Marines, and we're the best the USMC has ever known."

He was there 329 days.

It seems scarcely imaginable now, but Richard Sutter's tour in Vietnam began at a time – Aug. 27, 1966 – of great American innocence concerning the vast and violent enterprise on behalf of freedom in Southeast Asia that would end in ignominious defeat nine years later. As it ran its terrible course, the war would sunder the American nation in every way – squandering its wealth, impoverishing its spirit, diverting resources from cities aflame with racial unrest, bleeding and traumatizing an entire generation.

Though the war would destroy his presidency a mere eight months after Richard's combat tour ended, Lyndon Johnson was riding high on war rhetoric – Communist "naked aggression" must be stopped – when the young Atlantan had first stepped on the beach at Da Nang. There were 286,000 American troops in Vietnam then and, by the time Richard's picture was taken in the church, nearly 460,000: Though combat deaths already neared 10,000, a Harris poll published that same day – May 16, 1967 – showed 72 percent of the American people supporting the war.

"Maybe the Marine Corps is doing some good in Vietnam, but I don't think so," Richard had written as he boarded ship in San Diego with his freshly trained unit – Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines – for the voyage to Indochina. "These people have been at war too long to even think about peace."

As for LBJ, the new Marine dismissed his commander in chief as "just as bad as a Red Chinese or Russian party leader, hoping this war will keep them in the running."

A Marine escorts a suspected Viet Cong during a search-and- destroy operation southwest of Danang on June 21, 1967. (By Frank Johnston, Courtesy UPI/Corbis-Bettman)

He rarely mentioned politics again. As he settled into the exhausting routine of war – the ceaseless patrolling, night ambushes, "search and destroy" operations with names like Pawnee III and Chinook – his missives seem heartbreakingly normal, given the unthinkable savagery of his situation.

"I'm running late for an ambush," he scrawled in one hasty note, "so I must close."

"Mamma," he advised another time, "if anyone wants to send something tell them the best things are: 1) Kool Aid; 2) M&Ms candy (these stay fresh); 3) fruit; 4) pens-ballpoint; 5) cigarettes, and most important: 6) Love."

At first, he'd been lightheartedly dismissive of the danger. "My first night here, I was sniped at (bad shot) while on a listening post," he'd written. "I thought I'd get all shook up the first time, but it doesn't even bother me. ... These VCs are the worst shots known to mankind."

That opinion would change.

Even at war, Richard remained attentive to the swirl of family life back home. He penned loving words for sisters, graceful comments on nieces and nephews, yearning thoughts of the family's lake cottage, manful advice to his youngest sibling Robert, then 13 and struggling in school. "Athletics are one of the greatest things going," he counseled, "but so is knowledge." A number of girlfriends were mentioned.

Richard wrote with pride, too, of his promotion to corporal, which brought his monthly pay to a princely $168.60, plus $65 "hostile fire" and $13 "forward deployment" pay.

As time passed the tone of his letters shifted. They became more solemn, as if the full weight of the war was beginning to sink in.

"Thirty to 50 more days of combat and my nightmare will end," he wrote his older brother Lloyd, an Air Force officer. "I recall your writing, 'I am sorry I never had the opportunity to participate in the same sphere of the war as you.' Well, thank God you haven't and pray that you never will. ... So many new 2nd lieutenants arrive here with the attitude – 'Here is a chess game' – [but] it's not like the books or training. These same lieutenants either die young or shorten the lives of many of their men. This is a little rougher than football, and the touchdown is a man's life."

That was Richard's first letter home after his picture was taken in the church, yet he didn't mention the ordeal.

Maybe because he wasn't supposed to be in that church at that time. A month earlier, he'd been reassigned to Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines. On the afternoon of the photo, official records show, his platoon was in relative safety at a base camp 65 miles to the south.

In reserve.

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