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Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 14:30:47 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: War Within War
http://guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4256062,00.html
The Guardian (UK)
September 15, 2001
The Vietnam war saw countless numbers of America's young men
-- both black and white -- thrown into combat. They were
there to fight the Vietcong but, as tension grew in their
ranks, they turned on each other. James Maycock reports on
how racism, prejudice -- and Black Power -- were transposed
to the battlefield.
War Within War
By James Maycock <james.maycock@guardian.co.uk>
At the height of the Vietnam war in 1969, John Lee Hooker
recorded I Don't Want To Go To Vietnam. In the song, he
moaned grimly, "We've got so much trouble at home," before
adding simply, "We don't need to go to Vietnam." But the
black American soldiers already in Vietnam, trudging
tirelessly across that country's saturated rice fields or
creeping through its elephant grass and sticky, airless
jungles, were understandably more explicit in expressing
themselves. Wallace Terry, the Vietnam correspondent for
Time magazine between 1967 and 1969, taped black soldiers
airing their anger in the summer of 1969. Throughout the
recording, their rage is tangible. Speaking about his
team-mates, one black soldier declares, "What they been
through in the bush, plus what they have to go through back
in the world [America], they can't face it. They're ready to
just get down and start another civil war." Another adds,
"Why should I fight for prejudice?" When Terry inquires,
"Tell me what you think the white man should be called?" a
chorus of "devil... beast" erupts from the group.
Although President Johnson predicted that the Vietnam war
would create a political nightmare, he neglected to foresee
the racial one. The ongoing domestic conflicts between black
and white Americans were reflected and exacerbated over in
Vietnam, principally because the very apex of this
increasingly unpopular war, between 1968 and 1969, coincided
explosively with the rise of the Black Power era in America.
In these years, there was a surge of inter-racial violence
within the US forces in Vietnam. Discrimination thrived and,
as in America, a racial polarisation arose out of this
tension. Black soldiers embraced their culture as well as
the emerging Black Power politics and its external symbols.
In fact, the war in Vietnam was America's first racially
integrated conflict. Black soldiers had fought in all of
America's preceding military engagements, but in segregated
units. Although President Truman put pressure on the US
armed forces to integrate in 1948, some units in the Korean
war were still divided by race.
Prior to 1967, racial animosity had been negligible within
the US armed forces in Vietnam because the black men
stationed there were professional soldiers seeking a
permanent career. Generally, if there were racial slights,
they were quietly ignored by these men. On his first
exploratory trip to Vietnam in the spring of 1967, Terry
today concedes that he sensed "democracy in the foxhole --
'same mud, same blood'." Within a year, however, his
feelings had been transformed.
At the beginning of 1965, there were about 23,300 US
servicemen in Vietnam. By the end of 1967, this number had
jumped to a phenomenal 465,600, the result of Project
100,000, initiated by Johnson in 1966. This dramatically
increased the number of US troops in Vietnam by dropping the
qualification standards of the draft. Many black Americans
who had received an inferior education and, consequently,
had evaded the draft, discovered, like Muhammad Ali, that
they were now eligible. Of the 246,000 men recruited under
Project 100,000 between October 1966 and June 1969, 41% were
black, although black Americans represented only 11% of the
US population. With a bitter irony, the other group that
Project 100,000 condemned was the poor, racially intolerant
white man from the southern states of America.
In a country riddled with institutional racism, the draft
boards were naturally infected. In 1967, there were no black
Americans on the boards in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi
and Louisiana. In fact, Jack Helms, a member of the
Louisiana draft board, was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux
Klan. In one fatuous outburst, he described the NAACP
(National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People), the highly respected and conservative black civil
rights group, as "a communist-inspired, anti-Christ,
sex-perverted group of tennis-short beatniks." Although a
poll in 1966 established that three out of four black
Americans supported the draft, by 1969 56% of the black
American population opposed the Vietnam war.
In 1967 and 1968, indignation against the war accelerated
among both black and white Americans. Some thought the draft
was simply a covert mode of genocide instigated by the US
government, while others watched aghast as monstrous sums of
money that could ease the impoverished black communities
such as Watts in Los Angeles, were pumped into the war
machine. The Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver, denounced
these repellent contradictions, stating that black Americans
"are asked to die for the system in Vietnam, in Watts they
are killed by it."
The perception that the Vietnamese were parallel sufferers
of white colonial racist aggression also flourished in the
late 1960s and was reflected in a comment made by Muhammad
Ali on the TV programme Soul! "They want me to go to Vietnam
to shoot some black folks that never lynched me, never
called me nigger, never assassinated my leaders." Before his
murder in 1968, Martin Luther King also damned America's
foreign policy. He charged the US government with being "the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", and urged
those against the draft to seek the status of conscientious
objectors.
Although the image of a white hippy tentatively depositing a
flower in the barrel of a rifle is one of the most potent
icons of anti-war sentiment from the 1960s, black Americans
also fought against the draft. Groups such as the Black
Panthers and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee) denounced the war, black Americans burned their
draft cards in public and one man escaped to Canada,
exclaiming: "I'm not a draft evader, I'm a runaway slave."
Robert Holcomb, one of those interviewed in Bloods, Terry's
oral history of the war by black veterans, describes how,
after being hounded by the FBI, he was "sworn into the army
in manacles." Like other young black Americans, he diagnosed
the Vietnam war as "an attack on minority people, minority
people being used to fight each other."
Robert Holcomb perhaps personified what Terry describes
today as "a different breed of black soldier entering the
battlefield" in the latter half of the 1960s. Terry adds
that these hostile black recruits were "veterans of the
civil rights movement or the urban upheavals, the riots in
the streets. They were being told by judges: 'You'll either
join the Marines or go to jail.' " In 1969, during a
conversation with Terry, a black naval lieutenant stationed
in Vietnam also characterised these black men forced to
fight in southeast Asia as "a new generation." He added:
"They are the ones who ain't going to take no more shit."
In the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination on
April 4, 1968, black Americans rioted in more than 100 US
cities. But in Vietnam many white soldiers flagrantly
applauded his murder. At Cam Ranh Bay, a group of white men
wore Ku Klux Klan robes and paraded around the military
base. At another compound, the Confederate flag, so symbolic
of racial persecution, was hoisted for three days. Don
Browne, a black staff sergeant in Vietnam, overheard a white
soldier protesting that King's image was always on TV. "I
wish they'd take that nigger's picture off," the soldier
said, a moment before Browne granted him "a lesson in when
to use that word and when you should not use that word -- a
physical lesson." King's demise was, of course, a pivotal
incident in the 1960s because it represented the switch from
the nonviolent civil rights movement to the more militant
and aggressive Black Power era. James Hawkins, a black
soldier in Vietnam, understood this: "Dr King's death
changed things, it made a lot of people angry, angry people
with weapons."
At this stage, with the extraordinary increase of mostly
reluctant troops -- black and white -- to Vietnam, covert
and overt racism was now rife. The fledgling black American
conscript was expected to endure the sight of the
Confederate flag painted on Jeeps, tanks and helicopters,
and sometimes encountered menacing graffiti, such as "I'd
rather kill a nigger than a gook", scrawled on the walls in
the latrines of US bases. Other grisly practices, such as
cross burnings, were uprooted from Alabama and Mississippi
to the war theatre of Vietnam, and some commanders tolerated
Ku Klux Klan "klaverns" on their bases.
Young black soldiers also discovered that white soldiers,
notably at Da Nang, repeatedly refused to pick up exhausted
black soldiers in their Jeeps and that army barbers were not
trained to cut black hair, although the merest hint of an
Afro was penalised. In Terry's recording from 1969, one
black sailor describes how, "when they caught a brother with
an Afro, they just took him down to the brig and cut all his
hair off and throw him in jail. All these beast
motherfuckers walking around with their hair looking like
goddamn girls and we can't wear our hair motherfucking three
inches long." White officers were either sympathetic to or
simply disregarded white soldiers who printed "Fuck the war"
or "Peace" on their helmets, yet black Americans were
disciplined for comparable offences. One black soldier was
ordered to remove a "Black is beautiful" poster from the
inside of his locker.
The post exchanges and libraries on the bases did not stock
black hair products, tapes of soul music or books on black
American culture and history. Magazines such as Ebony and
Jet were also scarce, as one black private grumbled: "Every
time a soul brother over here gets an Ebony or Jet, there is
a waiting line of at least 30 to 50 soul brothers waiting to
read it." Terry once stated, "If blacks can account for up
to 22% of the dying, they should at least have 22% of the
jukebox or the music on Armed Forces radio." Yet black
American music was neglected by the Armed Forces Radio
Network and in the enlisted men's clubs in preference for
country music.
Today, Terry comments, laughing: "I find it amusing to see a
Vietnam movie and the white guys are popping their fingers
to black music. That just didn't happen. This is
revisionism." In fact, Terry Whitmore, the author of
Memphis-'Nam-Sweden: The Story Of A Black Deserter,
witnessed a minor riot in the Freedom Hill post exchange at
Da Nang after the manager of the beer garden, irritated by
the number of black marines socialising there, promptly
withdrew all soul music from the jukebox. But such incidents
weren't confined to land. Off the coast of Vietnam, on the
USS Sumpter, Captain JS Keuger also banned the music of the
Last Poets, whose recordings included When The Revolution
Comes. The affronted black sailors subsequently signed a
petition, a fight erupted and they were charged with mutiny.
Dissension over music resulted in a multitude of other
brawls and Jet magazine reported that a white officer was
killed in Quang Tri after ordering black soldiers to turn
down their music.
Military justice in Vietnam was also rarely racially
impartial. Black servicemen were frequently sentenced to
longer terms than their white counterparts and, once inside
a military prison, black Muslim inmates were refused copies
of the Koran. During this period, one black marine pointed
out, "The Corps says it treats all men just one way -- as a
marine. What it actually has done is treat everybody like a
white marine." But, most disturbingly, black Americans were
dying at a disproportionate rate and this only inflamed
their indignation, as one black private remonstrated: "You
should see for yourself how the black man is being treated
over here and the way we are dying. When it comes to rank,
we are left out. When it comes to special privileges, we are
left out. When it comes to patrols, operations and so forth,
we are first."
Their predicament was aggravated by a weakening in the chain
of command. Many of the very young, naive white officers
were incapable of diffusing the racial tension and, at
times, white privates informed their superior black
officers, including Allen Thomas, that they "weren't going
to take orders from a nigger."
But, as the naval lieutenant informed Terry back in 1969,
these black soldiers were "the ones who ain't going to take
no more shit." The black Americans who were drafted from
1967 to 1970 called themselves Bloods, and many were
influenced by the teachings and politics of Stokely
Carmichael, the Black Panthers and Malcolm X.
Terry explains: "They would wear black amulets, they would
wear black beads, black gloves to show their identity and
racial pride." Some wore "slave bracelets" made out of boot
laces and walked with "Black Power canes", sticks with the
nub carved into a clenched fist. To offset the oppressive
ubiquity of the Confederate flag, these soldiers flew black
flags from their patrol boats and Jeeps. Another group of
black servicemen, who were followers of Ron Karenga's US
(United Slaves), created a flag that asserted in Swahili "My
fear is for you." The "dap", a complicated ritualised
handshake that changed from unit to unit , was also common
among black personnel in Vietnam. Black privates and
officers, too, acknowledged each other in public with a
Black Power salute.
One black soldier, drained by the tense racial atmosphere in
the enlisted men's clubs, commented: "Chuck's [euphemism for
a white man] all right until he gets a beer under his belt
and then it's nigger this and nigger that, and besides, to
be honest, Chuck ain't too much fun, you dig?" Indeed, by
the late 1960s in Vietnam, black and white soldiers were
socialising in separate bars and clubs. In Saigon, the black
servicemen congregated in the Khanh Hoi district and,
sometimes, protected their preferred venues with signs that
warned "No Rabbits [white soldiers] Allowed."
To increase their racial solidarity, some black troops also
started semi-militant bodies. Blacks In Action, the
Unsatisfied Black Soldier, the Ju Jus and the Mau Maus were
just some of these groups that, as Terry explains,
"supported each other and studied black history and talked
about events in America and were willing to support each
other in an enlisted club over black music. If they wanted
something in the post exchange, they would collectively
request it."
The tension between the races, though, was not tamed before
it erupted into violence. White officers who didn't offer
lifts to black marines were attacked, there was a major riot
at the principal military prison, the Long Binh Stockade, in
October 1968, and a critical inter-racial clash on the Kitty
Hawk aircraft carrier in October 1972. At China Beach, some
white soldiers started flinging rocks and abuse at black
servicemen. Soon, the two racial groups were nervously
facing each other with loaded weapons.
However, most assaults involved only a few participants,
generally in a deserted corner of an army base at night.
Such conduct was wholly advocated by members of the Black
Panthers in America. Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of Eldridge
Cleaver, urged black soldiers: "Right inside of the US
imperialist beast's army, you are strategically placed to
begin the process of destroying him from within." Huey
Newton, the founder of the party, also suggested that black
army personnel turn their weapons on white officers.
"Fragging" was the term used to describe either wounding or
killing an officer by rolling a fragmentation grenade into
his tent. But both black and white soldiers were involved in
this and only some of these attacks were racially motivated.
A few black soldiers chose to desert, and while some, like
Terry Whitmore, were smuggled through the USSR to Sweden,
most fugitives hid within Vietnam. By 1971, about 100
deserters were living furtively in a district of Saigon
nicknamed "Soul Alley", beside Tan Son Nhut airport.
Understandably, though, some of the young black troops
cracked. Robert Holcomb recalled in Bloods: "This black
soldier had taken some drugs and he just sort of went crazy.
A lot of his anxieties and hostilities came out. He got an
M-16 and he sprayed a sergeant, killed him and two others."
The Vietcong were quick to detect and exploit the racial
conflicts within the US forces. They dropped thousands of
propaganda leaflets on the battlefields. A typical one read:
"If you go AWOL because you don't want to fight or because
you can't put up with the army racism, the NFL will get you
out of the country." But authentic images of US policemen
beating black civil rights workers were also scattered
across the war zones to undermine the black soldier's
morale. Today, Wallace Terry recalls that, bizarrely, the
Vietcong sometimes screamed, "Go home, soul man", at the
black soldiers during combat and Browne, who was interviewed
in Terry's Bloods, described how, "to play on the sympathy
of the black soldier, the Vietcong would shoot at a white
guy, then let the black guy behind him go through, then
shoot at the next white guy." Other black servicemen,
including the deserter Whitmore, reported identical cases.
But the huge number of black soldiers killed in action and
the maltreatment of black prisoners of war was ample proof
that the Vietcong and the NVA were simply manipulating the
racial discord within the American ranks.
Amazingly, though, it was in these very war zones that the
antagonism between black and white infantrymen dissolved, as
the black soldier James Hawkins admitted: "In the jungle,
you don't think in terms of black and white." Another said:
"When I'm out in the bush carrying a grenade launcher, no
white man is going to call me nigger." Arthur Woodley, a
black long-range patrolman interviewed by Terry, explained:
"No matter what his ethnic background is, or his ideals, you
start to depend on that person to cover your ass."
In fact, Woodley rescued a wounded member of the Ku Klux
Klan in his unit who had been discarded by his white
team-mates. The man was forced to re-examine his bigotry
and, throughout the war, there were other examples of white
men whose racial prejudices were shattered by the selfless
acts of black soldiers. Although, in 1969, one black
lieutenant commented somewhat cynically that the "threat of
death changes many things, but comradeship doesn't last
after you get back to the village", the disparity in
inter-racial hatred at the rear army bases and in the war
theatre itself was immense.
Initially, white army officials reacted aggressively to both
the potent exhibition of black unity and to the racial
turmoil within the US army in Vietnam. They ordered crowds
of black servicemen to be broken up, a few symbolic
gestures, such as the "dap", were banned, numerous soldiers
were disciplined and the more radical militants were
presented with dishonourable discharges that subsequently
disqualified them from financial aid back in America.
Ultimately, however, the military authorities were compelled
to confront the deepening crisis, and in 1969 General
Leonard Chapman conceded: "There is no question we've got a
problem." Surprisingly, and to its credit, the army
responded with impressive speed and instigated myriad
reforms. It investigated and addressed each field in which
discrimination and prejudice had thrived, from the post
exchanges to the dearth of black officers. Mandatory Watch
And Action Committees were introduced into each unit, and
today, Terry confirms, the US military authorities "make it
clear to their top officers that racism can cost you your
career." He adds: "I call it the last civil rights movement.
It started in the armed forces in Vietnam, and it spread
into revolts on the high seas on certain ships and then to
air force bases in the States and army bases in Germany."
In fact, in 1972 Wallace Terry was hired by the US Air Force
to examine parallel racial predicaments in Germany; and
today he is adamant that "Colin Powell would not have become
chairman of the joint chiefs had it not been for those black
kids protesting in Vietnam. You can draw a direct line."
But although the defiant black servicemen in Vietnam at the
end of the 1960s created a robust and positive legacy for
the next generation of black soldiers and sailors, it was,
of course, forged at a price. If they survived their tour of
duty, they returned to a frigid, indifferent America, the
country for which they had risked their lives. Sadly, the
extraordinary unity that Terry had witnessed among the black
soldiers in Vietnam crumbled. "They didn't come home
together, they went to different cities and they returned at
different times." Forty per cent of black veterans suffered
from post-traumatic stress disorder, compared with 20% of
white veterans, and in the early 1970s Richard Nixon's
policy of "benign neglect" was dismantling the progress of
the civil rights movement. One black veteran with an
administrative discharge said bitterly,"I've got friends
who've robbed liquor stores who can get jobs easier than
me."
Arthur Woodley had enlisted in the US army to "escape from
my environment and get ahead in life." On his return to
America, he worked sporadically in miscellaneous jobs
throughout the 1970s but, when interviewed by Terry in the
early 1980s, he was unemployed. He had recently met, quite
by chance, a South Vietnamese man he had befriended during
the war and who was, years later, residing in Baltimore.
"He's got a business, good home, driving cars, and I'm still
struggling," he reported angrily. "Living in America in the
1980s is a war for survival among black folks, and black
veterans are being overlooked more than everybody."
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