Black men fought both the Viet Cong and the White Klansmen in Vietnam
| Honoring Our Black Veterans on Memorial Day |
More than 300,000 Black Americans served in Vietnam, but it reminds me of what Muhammad Ali said when he refused to be drafted. Ali said “No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger.” Black men who fought in Vietnam also battled the Ku Klux Klan there. It was as though racism followed Black men from Chicago and Detroit and Mississippi to Vietnam. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, White soldiers burned crosses in Cam Ranh Bay and flew Confederate flags at Danang. “Things fell apart rapidly,” said Harry Humphries, a veteran who served as a military advisor on Da 5 Bloods, a feature film about Black men serving in Vietnam. Fights between Black and White soldiers broke out across the fraught country. 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. In 1970, the Marine Corps alone reported 1,060 violent racial incidents. African American troops were punished more harshly and more frequently than White troops. A Defense Department study released in 1972 found that Black troops received 34.3% of court-martials, 25.5% of nonjudicial punishments, and comprised 58% of prisoners at the military prison Long Bình Jail. The study further remarked, “No command or installation…is entirely free from the effects of systematic discrimination against minority servicemen.” Black troops were also almost twice as likely as White troops to receive a punitive discharge. In 1972, African-Americans received more than one-fifth of the bad-conduct discharges and nearly one-third of the dishonorable discharges. In the Vietnam War, African American troops initially had a much higher casualty rate than other ethnicities, though this declined somewhat throughout the course of the conflict. In 1965, nearly a quarter of troop casualties were African American. By 1967, it had fallen to 12.7%. In total, 7,243 African Americans died during the Vietnam War, representing 12.4% of total casualties. The refusal, by some southern communities, to bury dead African American soldiers in unsegregated cemeteries was met with outrage by African American communities. Though only about 12% of the U.S. population, Black servicemembers made up 16.3% of the armed forces, and up to 25% of enlisted men in the Army, but only 2% of officers across all branches, according to War History Online. The proportional increase of Black servicemembers in combat roles was a shift from earlier conflicts. Because of this over-representation, the casualty rate for Black troops was disproportionately higher. The presence of American troops in Vietnam increased drastically during the late 1960s, from 23,000 in 1965 to nearly 500,000 just two years later. Video: Black-American Vietnam Soldiers Interview, on Racism |