Terry quoted one soldier as saying, “Why should I come over here when some of the South Vietnamese live better than my people?… We have enough problems fighting white people back home.” In 1969, TIME Magazine correspondent Wallace Terry conducted a survey of 400 Black soldiers on the ground and found that 60% of them believed that Black people should not fight in Vietnam because of inequality in the U.S. In 1970, the Marine Corps alone reported 1,060 violent racial incidents. At Long Binh Jail, a military prison where more than 50% of the incarcerated men were Black, prisoners overthrew the guards and destroyed many of the buildings. Fights between Black and white soldiers broke out across the country. “Things fell apart rapidly,” Harry Humphries, a veteran who served as a military advisor on Da 5 Bloods, recalls. was assassinated in 1968, news of which reaches the soldiers in Da 5 Bloods during one particularly stirring scene-and in response, white soldiers burned crosses at Cam Ranh Bay and flew confederate flags at Danang. For many soldiers, a major tipping point happened when Martin Luther King, Jr. These new draftees often had little understanding of the war’s purpose and were increasingly disenchanted by their role in it. By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population. Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000, implemented in 1966, pulled hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war- 40% of them African American. “Soldiers were still dealing with those deeply rooted perceptions about who they’re fighting next to,” Jeffries says.Īs the fighting dragged on, ugly statistics revealed how African Americans were being disproportionately affected by the war. “But when you got back to base camp, you had what you’d call de facto segregation.” In Saigon, Black troops often spent their time off in a section of the city that would come to be known as Soulsville meanwhile, their white counterparts were being promoted at a higher rate. “Out in the field, everyone had to depend on everyone,” Duery Felton, a veteran, says. These structures persisted overseas, even if Black and white soldiers had to fight side-by-side. “The racism was there: it was real and felt between soldiers.” “Although we’re talking about an era after the Civil Rights Act, officers and soldiers had deep Southern racist roots,” Jeffries says. But many Black soldiers were immediately faced with discrimination and racism during basic training, which typically took place in the Jim Crow south. In 1964, American troops began arriving in Vietnam in large numbers following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, with the new integration policies a source of optimism. Black soldiers were receiving inadequate training and resources.” “It’s also important to understand that even though it was segregated, it wasn’t equal. “They were in service positions they were mostly put in positions to do the grunt work,” he tells TIME. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a professor of African-American history at Ohio State University, says that before Vietnam, African-American soldiers were on the bottom of a rigid caste system. Bill was constructed in a way that denied benefits to many Black soldiers-and only increased the gaps in wealth and education between white and Black Americans. In 2016, a study released by the Equal Justice Initiative that found that between 18, “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than Black veterans.” After World War II, the G.I. The Vietnam War was the first American war in which its troops were fully integrated, a development that was supposed to turn the page on a ghastly history of institutional racism in the military. “We have enough problems fighting white people back home”
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