Beleaguered Patriotism and Pride

By Paul Gray

BLOODS: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR BY BLACK VETERANS by Wallace Terry; Random House; 311 pages; $17.95

There was a time when historians laboriously gathered and sifted evidence before beginning to write. The invention of the tape recorder offered a short cut. By pointing a microphone at enough people and asking them to reminisce about something, would-be chroniclers could now simply market their research. Hence oral histories, an important-sounding term for a form with some serious drawbacks. These include impressionism (not what happened but how it felt) and the notorious unreliabilities of memory. The speakers in such books may represent a true cross section of their society at large; they may also have been chosen because they were available and willing to chat. And oral histories can never be better or more significant than the talk that went into them.

By this measure alone, Bloods is superb. The 20 blacks who discuss their experiences while serving in the Viet Nam War are uniformly eloquent. Editor Wallace Terry covered the fighting during the late 1960s as a TIME correspondent in Saigon and came away convinced that black combatants carried some unique burdens. They were, particularly during the earlier phases of U.S. involvement, doing a disproportionate amount of the dying. They were bearing arms against nonwhites in a cause that was increasingly dividing blacks as well as the entire U.S. And they came home not to acclaim (few Viet Nam vets received that) but to reminders that racism was still a fact of American life. Terry decided that this story should be told and that the blacks involved should tell it. He chose his narrators carefully: grunts, noncoms, officers, from all four branches of the armed services, from backgrounds both urban and rural. The composite that emerged after years of interviewing is a portrait not just of warfare and warriors but of beleaguered patriotism and pride.

The violence recalled in Bloods is chilling: the slow torture of a North Vietnamese army officer by a company of U.S. infantry; the unspeakable ordeal of a white American soldier who had been half-flayed by the Viet Cong and staked to the ground; he begged for death when his countrymen found him three days later. But the horrors perpetrated in Viet Nam, that most reported and televised of wars, are by now familiar. More surprising and heartening is the sense of affinity that blacks remember toward the people they were assigned to protect or slaughter. Says an Army interpreter: "I think blacks got along better with the Vietnamese people, because they knew the hardships the Vietnamese went through. The majority of the people who came over there looked down on the Vietnamese. They considered them ragged, poor, stupid. They just didn't respect them. I could understand poverty."

Remarkably, this understanding left few of the witnesses estranged from their native land. Says a Marine: "As a black person, there wasn't no problem fightin' the enemy. I knew Americans were prejudiced, were racist and all that, but, basically, I believed in America 'cause I was an American." An Air Force P.O.W in North Viet Nam tells interrogators he will not be used for propaganda: "My color doesn't have nothin' to do with it. We have problems in the U.S., but you can't solve them." Another captured airman takes the same stand: "Although black people are kind of behind the power curtain, we have just as much claim to this country as any white man. America is the black man's best hope."

Although the witnesses are markedly different, common threads run through much of their testimony. They seem united in the conviction that the U.S. could have won the war: "With all the American G.I.s that were in Viet Nam, they could have put us all shoulder to shoulder and had us march from Saigon all the way up to the DMZ. Just make a sweep." Those who raise the subject agree that racism vanished on the front lines: "In the field, we had the utmost respect for each other, because when a firefight is going on and everybody is facing north, you don't want to see nobody looking around south." Away from the fighting, relations got stickier. The sight of Confederate flags brandished by some white servicemen still rankles: "An insult to any person that's of color on this planet." But the enforced isolation in a strange and dangerous country seems to have made both sides from the U.S. try harder: "See, when the rednecks got together and started to stomp and holler, you either had to go over there and pour beer on the floor and do your little jumpin' up and down, or you stay out of it. That was their thing, and we had our thing. It was good to do it together, 'cause we were all in the war together."

Peace proved to be a different matter. Nearly everyone quoted in Bloods reports a difficult journey back home: "I had left one war and came back and got into another one." This speaker joined the Black Panthers, but disillusionment set in: "All we wanted to do was kick whitey's ass. We didn't think about buying property or gaining economic independence. We were, in the end, just showing off." A few got in trouble with the law; others stayed in the service or became active in counseling other veterans and lobbying for their benefits.

Some came back maimed. One man who lost a foot began competing in track meets sponsored by the U.S. Amputee Athletic Association; he now holds two world records at different distances and can run 60 meters "just about two seconds slower than Herschel Walker." Another, minus a hand, looked for a job unsuccessfully, gave up and relied on benefits that are harder and harder to keep: "Maybe Social Security thinks I've lived too long." He goes on: "It's funny. When I see the Vietnamese who came over here, I just wonder how they start so fast. Get businesses and stuff. Somebody helpin' 'em. But the ones that fought for they country, been livin' here all along, we get treated like dirt."

This is a minority report in a book about a minority. On most of its pages, hope prevails. Some of these men have witnessed the very worst that people can inflict on one another; they were among the offenders abroad and the victims where they were born and raised. With such unique knowledge, they persist in believing that life need not be as grim as they have seen it. The vision they have earned by their experience finally transcends race; their dramatic monologues bear witness to humanity.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt "The first thing happened to me, I looked out and here's a bamboo snake. That little short snake, the one that bites you and you're through bookin'. What do you do when a bamboo snake comin' at you? You drop your rifle with one hand, and shoot his head off. You don't think you can do this, but you do it. So I'm rough with this snake, everybody thinks, well, Edwards is shootin' his ass off today.

So then this old man runs by. This other sergeant says, 'Get him, Edwards.' But I missed the old man. Now I just shot the head off a snake. You dig what I'm sayin'? Damn near with one hand. M-14. But all of a sudden, I missed this old man. 'Cause I really couldn't shoot him."