By Don Valentine
America’s first racially integrated conflict was the Vietnam war. Blacks had fought in all of America’s preceding military engagements in segregated units. President Truman’s executive order in 1948 mandated the integration of the armed forces. Implementation was slow due to racial biases and some units in the Korean war were still segregated. The Vietnam war had Blacks and Whites fighting together, but fighting each other.
A 1969 Time Magazine article quoted a soldier who described most Black soldier’s views, “Why should I come over here when some of the South Vietnamese live better than my people?… We have enough problems fighting White people back home.” 1965 marked one hundred years since the Emancipation, yet the malignant cancer of racism still divided our powerful military. The heralded UK Guardian newspaper noted, “The ongoing domestic conflicts between Black and White Americans were reflected and exacerbated over in Vietnam, principally because the very apex of this increasingly unpopular war, between 1968 and 1969, coincided explosively with the rise of the Black Power era in America. In these years, there was a surge of inter-racial violence within the US forces in Vietnam.”
President Johnson implemented a draft objective labeled “Project 100,ooo.” The standards were significantly lowered to allow anyone with a pulse into the ranks. These soldiers were called “New Standards Men.” A historical recount by vietnamwar50th.com wrote, “New Standards Men generally have less education, and they are disproportionately southerners and African Americans.” That managed to relocate the Jim Crow South’s racial friction to a war zone in Vietnam. The result was a cauldron of poor, racially intolerant White men, blended in with uneducated Black men, who were both used to the pervasive racial caste system.
Stateside there was subdued news about all the racial violence amongst the troops in Vietnam. Nonetheless reports about a brutal inter-racial clash on the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in October ‘72 were recorded. Black and White sailors attacked each other with chains and pipes, resulting in the arrest of twenty-five Black sailors, though no White ones. Military justice sided in favor of the White soldiers in every racial altercation.
Dr. King’s assanation in ‘68 and the influx of new Black soldiers from the States sparked a momentum of Black solidarity. It created a handshake known as the “Soul Brothers Handshake.” The sobriquet and handshake evolved multiple times. Its current incarnation is called “Dap.” The Smithsonian Folklife Magazine noted, “Scholars on the Vietnam War and Black Vietnam vets alike note that the dap derived from a pact Black soldiers took in order to convey their commitment to looking after one another.”
Black Vietnam vets had the highest medical need for PTSD trauma. The constant stress of being killed by “Charlie” [Viet Cong,] or lynched by a White soldier, was a reprehensible mental blight.
