A Letter From The Publisher: Sep. 19, 1969

Wallace H. Terry II is hardly a stranger to racial tensions. As a TIME correspondent since 1963, he has covered the riots, marches and other news in Los Angeles, Detroit, Birmingham, Jackson, Miss., and Danville, Va. Five years ago in Harlem, where he was born in 1938, a brick slammed into Terry’s chest and left him gasping on the pavement. In 1963, he was with Medgar Evers the night before Evers was killed at his home in Jackson. For the past 22 months, Terry has been in our Saigon bureau, reporting the war in Viet Nam. Yet of all his assignments, says Terry, “the most fascinating — and in some ways frustrating — was reporting the new black militancy in Viet Nam for our story this week. The subject is clearly one of the military’s touchiest.”

To determine how widespread racial problems really are, Terry spent six months covering U.S. units in the field, traveling from the Demilitarized Zone in the north to Dong Tarn in the Delta. Says Terry, “These travels were often unofficially discouraged. In many places, white officers and sergeants looked on suspiciously as I drank, ate or talked with black Marines, soldiers and sailors in their barracks, mess halls, tanks and foxholes.” One black Army sergeant major urged him to tone down his Afro hair style before he met the troops; Terry discovered that the sergeant had ordered his men to cut their hair before the “TIME man” came to talk to them. Nevertheless, Terry interviewed well over 400 blacks; he talked with jet pilots who took him along on their strike missions, with airborne troops who carried him into the A Shau Valley assault that led to Hamburger Hill, with Marines on patrol in the DMZ, with the first black Army general of this war and with a black battalion commander who choppered him into firefights.

Nowhere did Terry hear that black militancy has reduced the combat effectiveness of either black or white troops. But, says Terry, “the military is dealing with a different breed of blacks from those I interviewed in Viet Nam for a TIME cover story more than two years ago.”

Terry took an A.B. in religion and the classics at Brown University in 1959. His interest in journalism began in high school (Indianapolis) where, as a 110-lb. freshman, he quickly broke a wrist playing football. A sympathetic English teacher suggested that writing about sports might be safer. Today, after his immersion in activities infinitely more lethal than football, Terry will become a student again, this time at Harvard. He has been awarded a Nieman fellowship, and will take a year’s leave of absence from TIME to study the economic and political struggles of underdeveloped nations, as well as urban problems.