Experiences of African American Soldiers in Vietnam

(gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] During the Vietnam War, African American soldiers heeded the call to duty. - I hadn't been anywhere but Morristown all of my life. - I volunteered for the draft, 1968. - If you were going to 'Nam you knew there's a possibility that you are not coming back. - The last thing you have time to do in a middle of a war is grieve. You're too busy trying to make sure that no one's grieving for you. - [Narrator] Now, A True American, on East Tennessee PBS. (upbeat instrumental music) (gentle instrumental music) (gun firing) - It's hard to talk about it with my son, and my son has asked me several questions about what I did in the war, and I won't tell him. - If it wasn't monsoons, it was 120 degrees. You stayed wet all the time. A lot of people got jungle rot. Your feet stayed wet all the time. - Not knowing what we're trying to accomplish was a big problem, and then when you return back to the United States, it didn't make no difference whether you were there not. Life went on, and that was it. - I think what angered me, and probably hurt me more than anything else, was the welcome home we didn't get. - August the 7th, 1967. (murmuring) (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] The 1960s were a time when gainful employment was sometimes difficult to find in East Tennessee. For many young men, their job search would be hampered by the draft. - People wouldn't hire you 'cause they knew chances are you were gonna have to go to the military to be drafted. So that was hanging over your head. - The draft tended to fall more heavily on those of lower status, lower incomes, and particularly the South, which was a poorer part of the country was more affected by this discrepancy, and so draft calls hit more deeply into Southern rural areas and Southern cities than they did necessarily in the north and the west of the country. - I got drafted March 1967, two weeks before my 25th birthday. - If I got drafted it would be three years. If I volunteered for the draft, it would be two years, so I volunteered for the draft, 1968. (murmuring) - [Narrator] However, many young men saw military service as an appealing option. Despite the dangers of service during the Vietnam War, the military offered financial opportunities African Americans could not get at home. - I was working on a farm, and I knew I could do better than that, so I just went and joined the army. - The ones that volunteered were sorta looking for a career or somewhere to be, 'cause like I said, most of your outlying areas were poverty stricken, you know, around here to certain extent, and they were getting a paycheck every month. - The military services, which were formally integrated by Harry Truman back in the late 1940s, were in effect seen by many African Americans as far more open to upward mobility than many other avenues in American life. (murmuring) - Everybody was young and hadn't kept up with the political parts of it and didn't have any idea really what we were doing. - It started out as a patriotic thing. I wanted to fight for my country. It took me a while to realize that there were two sides to the country, and I was on the wrong side. (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] New recruits left everything they knew behind, heeding the call of duty. - It was different, leaving Morristown and going to boot camp, 'cause I hadn't been anywhere but Morristown all of my life. - [Narrator] At training bases in the deep South, soldiers prepared for combat in Vietnam. - On the fort, everything was integrated. Louisiana was not integrated in most cases. Native American and African Americans could not be served in and around Fort Polk, Louisiana. - Exercise-- - Your boot camp experience is limited because you were scared. You was a young man. You're scared, and 99% of the guys that were there never had been away from home. - You know that once you got through with your advanced training, if you were going to 'Nam, you knew there's a possibility that you were not coming back, and that's the hardest part to accept. It took me a long time to accept that. - I wrote a four page letter to my mom and my brothers and sisters and said, I'm off to see the wizard. (gun cocking) (upbeat instrumental music) (plane engine running) - [Narrator] Many new arrivals landed at Cam Ranh Air Base for in processing. There, American soldiers would get their first taste of life in Vietnam. New troops received additional training. - They carried you through a two week training of firing your weapon, getting you acclimated to working in the bush. - [Narrator] After orientation, the soldiers received their orders and were assigned jobs in the field. - Grunt, ground pounder, I got assigned to the 11th Army Cav. - I was a tanker over there. I went in as a 24 corps, as a tanker. - 560 flight maintenance, I volunteered and asked to be in maintenance, a mechanic. - I get to Qui Nhon, and I get dropped off at Graves Registration, so I'm thinking, I get to type the toe tags, which is not enjoyable, but I think there might have been two white guys in there. Everybody else was black. - You had a large number of troops in the supply areas, in functioning behind the lines, and this is where racial conflict was most severe, was behind the lines in Vietnam. Racial conflict, segregation, hostility, some of the worst instances of unrest happened behind the lines, and was not in actual combat infantry where soldiers had to rely on themselves to stay alive. (murmuring) - [Woman] Hi there, this is (murmuring). - [Narrator] The North Vietnamese targeted black American soldiers through radio propaganda. - We had a radio station, and at night, Hanoi Hannah would break in on the frequency and talk about the black soldiers, wanting to know why we was over there fighting. "You need to come to our side." (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] Although some G.I.s experienced racial discrimination in Vietnam, many found a kinship with their fellow soldiers that transcended skin color. - When times got hard, you just had to depend on whoever you was with, and racial problems was the furthest thing from your mind at that time. (gentle instrumental music) - My best friend, his name was Robert McCarter. He's white. I'm black, and we had talked about going into business together. He and I both met and became good friends because he was from Knoxville, and I was from Knoxville. That was unusual. - [Narrator] But tragedy would strike when a group of Hollywood actors wanted to see the jungle. - And believe it or not, we had a lot of entertainers to come over. The Rat Patrol came over. Rat Patrol was a sitcom back here in the States, and it was about World War Two soldiers, and they wanted to be in one of those jeeps with the 60 caliber on it, like they did in film back here. And we were running down the road with them, performing successive leaps and bounds with them, and all heck broke loose. - [Narrator] The troops escorting the actors came under attack by Viet Cong guerilla fighters. The soldiers moved quickly to protect the entertainers. (guns firing) - They got those guys out there, got a couple of guys killed behind that, and Robert McCarter was one of them. He took a direct hit to a PC. They found him two weeks later. - [Narrator] Knoxville native, Robert McCarter, had only been in Vietnam three months when he was killed, two weeks before Thanksgiving, 1967. He was 20 years old. (gentle instrumental music) Sanford Cumberson worked as a crew member on a tank in Dong Hoi, just below the Demilitarized Zone. - I was a gunner at first, and then I got to be a spotter, and if we was in the field, we would fight at nighttime. You could see for miles, but we just had to use a lot of infrared and night vision and all that stuff. Some of those tanks would go four or five miles and rounds, so you know, they would just give us a grid, and we would just set up and fire. I seen a few direct hits. Then the next morning after you get in a firefight, the next morning there's people laying everywhere. (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] William Isom, Sr., found that being a vehicle mechanic in Vietnam could be a hazardous profession. - We were there to the fix equipment, but everything that came back was destroyed, so there really wasn't much maintenance work to be done. So they selected the maintenance people to be guards for the convoy to go to Tuy Hoa and bring supplies back to An Khe. As the trucks went though, we just emptied our guns up through there 'til the trucks got by to keep them down 'til we could get where we were going, you know. Yes, it was scary. That was the worst part, just seeing the people that they would kill and leave laying on side the road to put fear in us, you know, as we came through. (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] 19 year old James Cook received a disturbing introduction to his job in Graves Registration. - There's this guy comes skipping through the tent, and he goes, "The cav is coming tonight. "The cav is coming tonight." And I said, what's the cav? He sais, "The first cavalry." I went, oh. He says, "Yeah, we're having a party tonight," and I says, yes, and about four o'clock that afternoon I heard (murmuring), there's a reefer van, big truck out front. He says, "Come on, the party's starting," so we go running out, and the guys kind of formed a half circle, and they're going, "Let the newbie let them out. "Let the newbie let them out." So I'm the newbie. - [Men] Let the newbie let them out. Let the newbie let them out. Let the newbie let them out. - I go running up to the door, and I grabbed the door, and I yanked it open, and I remember I fell on my knees and screamed for my mother. It was bodies. First cav, I think we had a bunch in from An Khe. (gentle instrumental music) (murmuring) - [Narrator] On January 28th, 1968, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched a massive, coordinated attack on U.S. and South Vietnamese bases. The Tet Offensive had begun. - Some of the guys ran into human waves, and human waves is when they're charging at you, and you're fighting, and the more you bring down, the more they sent at you. (helicopter engine running) - The choppers and the planes were deployed all over because there was fighting going on all over south Vietnam, and it was hard to get help if you were in combat. If you were fighting, it was hard to get help, so you became expendable. We were in Ho Nhi village fighting, and we couldn't get no help, and finally, finally, (helicopter engine running) but if they hadn't of came, I don't know what would have happened. You're on your own. You've got to fight your way out. The word got to us, you got to fight your way out. - [Narrator] The Tet Offensive left over 500 Americans dead. The North Vietnamese dead numbered over 45,000. - [Narrator] After processing dead American soldiers for three months at Graves Registration, James Cook had had enough. - I grabbed my duffel, grabbed my rifle. I walked down to the end of the air strip, and I remember a Major pulled up, and his driver asked me, said, "Which way is grave registration?" And I pointed, and he said, "Don't you know how to salute an officer?" And I said a few kind words, and the officer got out, and he said, "Son, what unit are you with?" And I looked at him, and I said, I was with Graves Registration. I'm not going back. He put me in his Jeep and had me transferred the next day. (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] On April 4th, 1967, Civil Rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out against the war in Vietnam. Exactly one year after his speech, troops in Vietnam received bad news from back home in Tennessee. Dr. King had been assassinated. Army leadership feared black soldiers would revolt. - The Chaplain came by, gave us a heart to heart talk about not worrying about what's going on back in the world, as we called it, because we couldn't do anything about it, and a lot of the guys, a lot of the white guys, would walk up to the black soldiers and say, "Well, it wasn't me. "It wasn't me." I guess they were thinking that we were going to turn on our fellow soldiers. (foreboding instrumental music) - [Narrator] Viet Cong guerilla fighters sympathized with communists in North Vietnam. The Viet Cong were civilians during the daytime and secret soldiers at night. Their brutal sabotage and surprise attacks were a constant threat. During one firefight, Robert Minter discovered the enemy was also his barber. - The guy that cut my hair one time, back at base camp, I brought his shoes home. They was made by U.S. Royal, and I wore them as house shoes for years. That tells you what you were up against. (insects chirping) - [Narrator] Fear of enemy attack made sleep a luxury the G.I.'s could not afford. - The fear factor was where sleeplessness come in. They're shooting at you at night. That's when most of the action was, when they thought we were sleeping. I guess in the back of your mind, if I'm awake I can get away, but where were you going to get away to? There wasn't nowhere to go. - [Narrator] Even as the soldiers' tours in Vietnam began to draw to an end, constant vigilance was the only way to stay alive. - We were in a situation where 24/7 your life was on the line. So you had to be on the alert at all times. There was no relaxing moment, the whole time you were in 'Nam. The moment you relax, you were in a body bag. (murmuring) (foreboding instrumental music) - [Narrator] James Cook had only one week left in Vietnam when his friend was sent to replace him on guard duty. - Swish was kind of an outcast. He was the white guy that hung with the brothers and was outcasted by the other white guys. Swisher grabbed his gear, got on the truck. About four o'clock in the morning, we felt the ground shake, and it was like I just knew what it was. We got down there and found what was left of Swisher, and it was kind of crazy. (siren ringing) He was the only one killed. - [Man] Roger, six, two, seven. (plane engine running) - [Narrator] Once their tours of duty were complete, soldiers left Vietnam to return to their lives back home. Many found their homecoming would not be what they expected. - I didn't have any problems of people spitting on me, or anything like that. I did run into one problem. I had my duffle bag and my uniform on, and I'm walking down Gay Street, and I got to the fire house The KKK was demonstrating, and there was one or two guys standing on State Street. I dropped my duffel bag and turned and looked at them, and they took they hoods off and started running. I never will forget that, and the guys, firemen, didn't know what to do. They started laughing, and they said, "I hope you're not going "to pull anything out your duffle bag, solider." - They got me back to the States, and then when I got out I felt like it was just over, you know, and I found out that nobody even really cared that you was even in there, you know, and back then nobody even talked about it, you know. - I think the real issue was the indifference of Americans toward their sacrifice, that hostility. Indifference is hard to take, especially when you've sacrificed like that, in comparison to the World War Two veteran and the celebration of service, and that indifference I think is something that many Vietnam vets felt deeply. (gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] But for many Vietnam veterans, the war would follow them home. Some began showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. - Well, when I came home, I couldn't sleep with my wife for probably four to six weeks. I had to sleep by myself 'cause you wake up running, fighting, or doing anything, you know. It was just flashbacks. - The time I was over there I slept maybe 10 minutes a night, didn't do no sleeping, and when I go home I didn't sleep none. It was years, I guess, 20, 30 years, before I got to where I could sleep. - [Narrator] For some, their experiences in Vietnam had devastating consequences. - In 1968, I attempted suicide. It was like that was the first time that Vietnam caught up with me, and I woke up in Walter Reed Army hospital in a straitjacket doing the Thorazine shuffle. I had been there for three days, and I had no idea why, and the doctor told me, says, "You hung yourself," and I said, I did what? He says, "You hung yourself." I said, you're joking. - [Narrator] An acclaimed martial artist, Cook relied on this discipline to help his recovery. - I would get up and go to the end of the bay area, and I'd just run martial arts forms up and down the bay area, and I'd do it 'til maybe three, four o'clock in the morning, get a couple hours of sleep. - The problem for governments with PTSD, and those kinds of traumas, is that the people we want to think of as warriors, and as our supporters, and the people who fought for us, come back often damaged in a way that indicts the war itself. That's not the story that governments want to tell about warfare, and so what people who suffer these kinds of traumas in many ways are telling us is the unofficial history about what warfare really does to them and others. (birds chirping) - [Narrator] But for many Vietnam veterans, even talking about their experiences can be traumatic. (car engine running) - I remember going to see one of my first psychologists, counseling session, and he was a young guy, and he asked me what I did, you know, and I'm telling him about grave registration, and he looked at me, and he said, "So why does body bagging bother you?" I grabbed him. It took three corpsmen to get me off of him. I'm like, have you even ever picked up a dead rat? A dead squirrel? A dead dog? You know, and, people want to know why vets don't want to talk about it. (gentle instrumental music) - Here I am at the later years of my life, and I'm just now beginning to cope with it, to talk about it. I don't go to fireworks. New Year's Eve, I used to go to church. I quit doing that because I found myself laying on the floor, even at the house, when the fireworks go off. You hear those guns going off, and I don't care how old you get. Once you have been in combat your first reaction is to hit the floor. I crawled up under the pews, and it's kind of embarrassing 'cause a lot of folks don't understand what you've been through. (gentle instrumental music) - And it'll eat you up if you let it, and I have a problem with PTSD now, and I know what triggers it, and I know what it is and where it's coming from, but I just try to keep pushing out of my mind, you know, 'cause you can let it destroy you and everybody around you if you dwell on it. (water sloshing) - [Narrator] The Vietnam War was the first major conflict in American history in which the military was fully integrated, and whether they were draftees or volunteers, African Americans once again proved their valor on the battlefield. - This is one of the things that has always amazed me about African Americans, and that is that, regardless of how this country has treated us, we have volunteered for every war this country has ever fought, every single war, and many times enthusiastically. That was also true during Vietnam. There is a tradition of proud military service among black men in this country. - One of the ARVNs, the South Vietnamese, regular soldiers, wanted to know why I was over there fighting when I was not free at home, and at that time I didn't have an answer for him, and as I reflect back on it now, you know, and if I met that same soldier again, and I would tell him that I'm a true American. (gentle instrumental music) (upbeat instrumental music) (singing) (upbeat instrumental music)

Transcript for:Experiences of African American Soldiers in Vietnam

Transcript for:
Experiences of African American Soldiers in Vietnam