Nation: BLACK POWER IN VIET NAM

ONLY two years ago, the U.S. military seemed to represent the most integrated institution in American society. In many ways it still does. But the armed services, made up of so many conscripts and “volunteers” escaping conscription, are mirrors that reflect and sometimes exaggerate the divisions of the entire society. While traditional military discipline remains an overwhelming control, the combination of domestic turbulence, an unpopular war and the new spirit of black militancy has produced ugly incidents in which American fighting men turned upon one another.

At Camp Lejeune, N.C., about 30 Negro and Puerto Rican Marines attacked 14 whites in July. One of the white Marines died. At Fort Bragg, N.C., racial antagonisms erupted into a brawl between 200 white and black soldiers. At Hawaii’s Kaneohe air base, some 100 black and white Marines, just returned from Viet Nam, fell upon one another after a colors ceremony. Seventeen were injured.

Disturbing Decay. Earlier this month, Marine Commandant Leonard Chapman issued a message to all Marine commands, ordering, among other things, that officers hear complaints of discrimination promptly. Chapman dictated that the clenched-fist gesture of Black Power be permitted as a “sign of recognition and unity,” but not as a gesture of defiance of authority.

Chapman claimed that racial problems “are almost unheard of among Marines in combat.” He was at least technically correct. Neither Marines nor members of other services have been at one another’s throats in the battle lines —survival requires total attention. Outside of the war zone, there has been a disturbing decay in racial relations among U.S. troops. To probe how deeply the new militance runs in the military, TIME Correspondent Wallace Terry spent six months interviewing black troops in Viet Nam. His report:

Before the war went stale and before black aspirations soared at home, the black soldier was satisfied to fight on an equal basis with his white comrade-in-arms in Viet Nam as in no other war in American history. But now there is another war being fought in Viet Nam —between black and white Americans. “The immediate cause for racial problems here,” explains Navy Lieut. Owen Heggs, the only black attorney in I Corps, “is black people themselves. White people haven’t changed. What has changed is the black population.”

When an American force stormed ashore south of Danang this summer, young blacks wore amulets around their necks symbolizing black pride, culture and self-defense. They raised their fists to their brothers as they moved side by side with white Marines against their common Communist enemy. “Ju Ju” and “Mau Mau” groups have organized to protect themselves against white prejudice and intimidation. In remote fire-support bases near the Cambodian border, blacks register their complaints as a group. Tanks fly black flags. At Danang, Black Power Leader Ron Karenga’s followers have designed a flag: red for the blood shed by Negroes in Viet Nam and at home, black for the face of black culture, and green for youth and new ideas. Crossed spears and a shield at the center signify “violence if necessary,” and a surrounding wreath “peace if possible” between blacks and whites.

White pinups have been replaced by black ones. One all-black hootch in Danang sports more than 500 such photographs. “I don’t want any stringy-haired beast* broad on my wall. Black is beauty.” In a Saigon “soul kitchen,” blacks greet each other over spareribs and chittlins with 57 varieties of Black Power handshakes that may end with giving the receiver “knowledge” by tapping him on the head or vowing to die for him by crossing the chest, Roman legion style (see chart).

Many of today’s young black soldiers are yesterday’s rioters, expecting increased racial conflict in Viet Nam and at home when they return. Elaborate training in guerrilla warfare has not been lost upon them, and many officers, black and white, believe that Viet Nam may prove a training ground for the black urban commando of the future. As in America, the pantheon of black heroes has changed. The N.A.A.C.P.’s Roy Wilkins is a “uniform tango”—military phonetics for U.T., or Uncle Tom—and Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke is an “Oreo” cookie —black on the outside, white on the inside. “The N.A.A.C.P., Urban League and Martin Luther King were good for their time and context,” says Marine Corporal Joseph Harris of Los Angeles, “but this is a new time.” King and Robert Kennedy, once among the young black soldier’s idols, have died violently, Says Wardell Sellers, a rifleman from New York: “They were trying to help the brothers—you can see what that got them.” Now many blacks see the case of Edward Kennedy as a plot to remove one more hope. “Just like King and Bobby Kennedy,” says Pfc. Carl Horsley, 19, “They gon’ try to hang Teddy ’cause he was on the side of the brothers.” To most black soldiers, Nixon doesn’t even bear discussion. “If he were a brother,” says Ronald Washington, a black sailor from Los Angeles, “he’d be the number one Uncle Tom.”

In the jungle lies death for a cause that many black soldiers don’t understand or dismiss as white man’s folly. “Why should I come over here when some of the South Vietnamese live better than my people in ‘the world’? ” asks a black Marine. “We have enough problems fighting white people back home.”

Black racism is strong, but so are provocations by white soldiers. Soon after Martin Luther King was killed, crosses were burned at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay. Confederate flags still fly from barracks and trucks, and are even worn as shoulder patches on the uniforms of helicopter pilots stationed at Phu Loi. Black soldiers at Con Thien grimace when whites call a Negro sergeant “brown boy” and a mongrel puppy “soul man.” Base club operators who accept country and western but not soul music from their entertainers have paid a toll. Clubs were wrecked in Chu Lai, Qui Nhon and a dozen other places in the past twelve months. Two white sailors were recently tried for inciting a riot at the Tan My Club.

Violence has reached such a peak in the Danang area that lights have been installed on the streets of Cap Tien Sha to curb roving bands of white and black sailors who were attacking each other at night. At Dong Tam in the Delta and Dien Hoa north of Saigon, bands of black soldiers still waylay whites. A white officer in Danang was critically injured when a black Marine rolled a grenade under his headquarters. At the officer’s side was a black sergeant with a reputation for not tolerating Afro haircuts and Black Power salutes.

Unrest among the blacks often turns on real discrimination or the failure of the military to accept the trappings of black soldiers bent on “doing their thing.” Promotions, awards and coveted rear-area assignments are too often slow in coming the black soldiers’ way, however well they fight or however high their proportion of casualties. Some 13% of battle deaths are black, while Negroes make up 11.1% of the American population and 9.2% of the military.

For all that, the black soldier in the bush still helps his white comrade and wants his help as well. At Phuoc Vmh, a black 1st Cavalry trooper recently dragged a wounded white from a rocketed hootch when no other black or white dared to venture in. A black Navy medic who had been in Viet Nam only two weeks fell on a grenade near Danang to save a white Marine and lost his own life. When black Lieut. Archie Bigger was three times wounded capturing enemy artillery pieces, eleven whites held, him aloft above the suffocating napalm smoke until a rescue chopper arrived. On Hamburger Hill, a white paratrooper tried vainly to breathe life into a fallen black medic.

Yet the violence at home and in “the Nam” leaves the black man with radically divided loyalties. Thus, says Lieut. Colonel Frank Peterson, the senior black officer in the Marine Corps, “the average black who has been here and goes back to the States is bordering somewhere on the psychotic as a result of having grown up a black man in America—having been given this black pride and then going back to find that nothing has changed.”

Personal interviews conducted with 400 black enlisted men from Con Thien to the Delta provide a measure, though by no means a scientific sample, of the attitudes of black men in Viet Nam:

> 45% said they would use arms to gain their rights when they return to “the world.” A few boasted that they are smuggling automatic weapons back to the States.

> 60% agreed that black people should not fight in Viet Nam because they have problems back home. Only 23% replied that blacks should fight in Viet Nam the same as whites.

> 64% believed that racial troubles in Viet Nam are getting worse. Only 6% thought that racial relations were improving. “Just like civilian life,” one black Marine said, “the white doesn’t want to see the black get ahead.”

> 56% said that they use the Black Power salute. Only 1% condemned its use.

> 60% said they wear their hair Afro style. 17% wanted to, but said their commanders refused to let them. One Marine reported that he had been reduced in rank for refusing to get his hair cut closer.

> 55% preferred to eat their meals with blacks, 52% preferred to live in all-black barracks.

> 41% said they would join a riot when they returned to the U.S. However, a nearly equal number, 40%, said they would not.

> 28% said they believed that weapons would help the black cause back home, while 35% thought that they would be harmful to it. “What the beast has done for me which is going to screw him,” said a black Marine, “is teach me how to use a weapon. The Marines taught me how to improve.”

Combat inevitably sharpens both emotions and rhetoric. It is an incendiary combination to be young, black, armed, 10,000 miles from home and in persistent danger of death in “a white man’s war.” When the men return to “the world,” their perspective may shift, and doubtless many black soldiers will become so busy with their own affairs that their militance will fade somewhat. Even in Viet Nam, 53% of the black men interviewed said that they would not join a militant group such as the Black Panthers when they return to the U.S. Says Major Wardell Smith: “A lot of what they say they will do, they just won’t. They won’t be so closely knit, and they will have girls, wives, families and jobs to worry over.” Nevertheless, a significant number seems likely to continue to believe that the U.S. owes the black soldier a debt both for his service in Viet Nam and his suffering at home. These men are a new generation of black soldiers. Unlike the veterans of a year or two ago, they are immersed in black awareness and racial pride. It is only this fall and winter that they will be returning to civilian life in the cities. If they find that nothing has changed there, then they could constitute a formidable force in the streets of America, schooled and tempered in all the violent arts as no generation of blacks has ever been.

* “Beast,” a term that originated with the Black Panthers, is rapidly replacing “Chuck” as the black soldier’s standard epithet for the white man.