On March 11, 1968, two strangers sat atop a Vietnamese hillside discussing what they would do when they returned to America.
Perhaps they’d join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People's Campaign. Although King’s criticism of the war made him one of the most unpopular people in white America, Cpl. Isaiah R. McMillan and Sgt. Thomas J. Davis were 20 years old. Thanks in part to King and the Voting Rights Act, they would be able to vote in the election that year.
King’s friend, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was preparing to enter the presidential race. But to win the Democratic nomination, Kennedy would have to defeat one of the most popular politicians in the country, the patriotic Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Even if Kennedy won the nomination, he’d have to face two extremely “honest” and patriotic candidates who were more popular than King:
Richard Nixon and George Wallace.
Born and raised in the American South, McMillan and Davis had never seen the so-called “democracy” they were supposedly fighting for. If they wanted to stop an oppressive, authoritarian government from massacring its people, they could’ve just fought in Orangeburg, S.C. They could’ve gone to Wilmington, Del., to stop a military occupation. If they were pining for armed conflict, they could have grabbed their guns and fought in Cleveland.
McMillan was a 20-year-old newlywed who volunteered for the Army one month after graduating from high school. He had just married his high school sweetheart and had a son. Davis, also 20, was one of the newest enlistees. The ink had barely dried on his enlistment paperwork when he was deployed. As McMillan and Davis’ country negotiated the terms of their citizenship, their radios crackled with the kind of news that interrupted their conversation.
An ambush.
As part of a six-man mortar team patrolling a hilltop, they were informed that two platoons had walked directly into an ambush below them. They ran down the hill and waded through a rice paddy to help. Thankfully, the message was wrong. There was no ambush.
Until the mortar team arrived.
The so-called “ambush,” as Davis later recounted it with the measured calm of a man who has made peace with the absurd, was probably just one soldier with an AK-47. Had he possessed slightly more patience or experience, one man could have ended things right there. Instead, Davis opened fire too early, revealing his location to the waiting enemy.
When Sgt. Porter Calloway went down under enemy fire, McMillan told Davis they couldn’t leave anyone man behind. Disregarding his own broken ankle, Davis ran back into the rice paddy and carried his wounded comrade out, as McMillan provided cover.
This is the part of the story where someone is supposed to say “valor,” “heroism” and “above and beyond the call of duty.” And all of that is true. But what it actually was, stripped of the ceremonial language, was one young Black man from America deciding that his friend’s life was worth more than his own safety. That is not a military value. That is older than any army. Davis said it plainly:
“You never leave behind a friend. Ever.”
They made it to the tree line. They were nearly out of ammunition. The Viet Cong found them anyway, flushed out with gas grenades, dragged from the brush—Calloway severely wounded, Davis on a possibly broken ankle, McMillan knocked unconscious by the gas.
They were bound to trees and marched, under active American fire, for three days. Calloway did not survive the journey.
McMillan and Davis would not see home for 1,832 days.
This is the story of the two men who survived, and how they remember the men who didn’t.
