Douglas Greenlaw grew up in a steel-mill family on the shore of Lake Michigan, about an hour from downtown Chicago. He lied about his age to work double shifts in the mills at sixteen, and he learned early that he was hard to kill: at four he was sucked out of a moving car at 65 miles an hour, and at thirteen he was struck by lightning at a family reunion. After a rocky year and a half at Indiana University, he went home to the mills and was drafted. The Army noticed his test scores and sent him to Officer Candidate School, where he finished as student company commander and stayed on for a year training new officers. His first rule for them was simple: forget the gold bar, find a seasoned sergeant, and learn from him.
In 1967, Doug arrived in Vietnam alone and joined the 196th Infantry in the mountains west of Da Nang, taking over a platoon whose last leader had been killed two days earlier. His men ran 90-day search and destroy missions through triple-canopy jungle, carrying 70-pound packs and watching for tripwires. He took off his insignia, told them to call him “Law,” and refused to rush them into danger to satisfy officers in the rear. On Thanksgiving Day, 1967, the helicopters dropped his platoon a thousand yards too far, at the edge of a North Vietnamese battalion. It was 45 men against roughly 400. Doug was wounded almost immediately, called in air strikes close to his own position, and fought for five hours, including a desperate fight inside an enemy tunnel. He received the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.
In January 1968, at 23, Doug took command of a 158-man company patrolling the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Tet Offensive. That April, on a night patrol he joined to show his men he’d never ask them to do what he wouldn’t, a booby-trapped artillery round went off. It killed the three men in front of him and one behind him. Doug’s throat was cut open, his skull was fractured, a shard of bamboo pinned his arm to his chest a quarter inch from his heart, and his leg was shattered. He remembers thinking that dying wasn’t so bad. He survived Da Nang, a body cast to Yokohama, and rehab at Fort Sheridan, and he never got an infection.
Doug says Vietnam took his fear and his religion and gave him a confidence he has never lost. He went back to Indiana University and made straight A’s on the GI Bill, then built a career in media: radio ad sales in Indianapolis, building The Family Channel, taking MTV to Madison Avenue, and leading Multimedia Inc. through its sale to Gannett. Today he’s 82, married more than fifty years, the owner of the Greenville Journal, and the author of Forged by Lightning: From Boyhood to the Battlefield to the Boardroom, an anti-war memoir about the average kid who gets sent to war. “To this day, I’m the luckiest man you will ever meet,” he says. After hearing his story, it’s hard to argue.