Selected Quotes from "Bloods: An Oral History of Vietnam by Black Veterans""You know, they decorated me in Vietnam. Two Bronze Stars. The whiteys did. I was wounded three times. The officers, the generals, and whoever came out to the hospital to see you. They respected you and pat you on the back. They said, 'You brave. And you courageous. You America's finest. America's best.' Back in the States the same officers that pat me on the back wouldn't even speak to me. The racial incidents didn't happen in the field. Just when we went to the back. It wasn't so much that they were against us. It was just that we felt like we were being taken advantage of, 'cause it seemed like more blacks were in the field than in the rear... We went to church on the Sunday after the (visit to the Vietnam Veteran's) Memorial thing. I was doing pretty good about Vietnam the last five years, 'cause I was active a whole lot. If I ever sit down and really think about it, it's a different story. My sister's husband was with me. He got shrapnel in his eye. His vision is messed up. There were 2,000 people in the church. and the pastor gave us space to talk, 'cause we were the only two that went to Vietnam. My brother-in-law is a correction officer at the jail. So we've always been kind of aggressive. Ain't scared that much. But we got up there to talk, and we couldn't do nothing but cry. My wife cried. My children cried. The whole church just cried. I thought about Louis and all the people that didn't come back... I really feel used. I feel manipulated. I feel violated."
"Right after Tet, the mail chopper got shot down. We moved to Tam Ky. We didn't have any mail in about three weeks. Then this lady by the name of Hanoi Helen come on the radio. She had a letter belong to Sir Drawers. From the chopper that was shot down. She read the letter from his wife about how she miss him. But that didn't unsettle the brothers as much as when she got on the air after Martin Luther King died, and they was rioting back home. She was saying, "Soul brothers, go home. Whitey raping your mothers and your daughters, burning down your homes. What you over here for? This is not your war. The war is a trick of the Capitalist empire to get rid of the blacks." I really thought - I really started believing it, because it was too many blacks than there should be in infantry."
- Spec. Richard Ford III, U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division (1967-68)
"Well, there was this riot on base, and I got busted. It started over some white guys using a bunch of profanity in front of some sisters. I was found guilty of attack on an unidentified Marine - five months in jail, five months without pay... In jail they didn't want us to read our books, draw any pictures, or do anything intellectually stimulating or what they thought is black. They would come in my cell and harass me... With a BCD, nothing was happenin'. I took to dressin' like the Black Panthers, so even blacks wouldn't hire me. So I went to the Panther office in D.C. and joined. I felt the party was the only organization that was fighting the system. I liked their independence. The fact that they had no fear of the police. Talking about self-determination. Trying to make Malcolm's message reality. This was the first time black people had stood up to the state since Nat Turner. I mean armed. It was obvious they wasn't gonna give us anything unless we stood up and were willing to die. They obviously didn't care anything about us, 'cause they had killed King. For me the thought of being killed in the Black Panther Party by the police and the thought of being killed by Vietnamese was just a qualitative difference. I had left one war and came back and go into another one. Most of the Panthers then were veterans. We figured if we had been over in Vietnam fighting for our country, which at that point wasn't serving us properly, it was only proper that we had to go out and fight for our own cause. We had already fought for the white man in Vietnam. It was clearly his war. If it wasn't, you wouldn't have seen as many Confederate flags as you saw. And the Confederate flags was an insult to any person that's of color on this planet."
- PFC Reginald Edwards
"I could smell the hate. Some of them (North Vietnamese) had pistols. Some guns. Some shook knives at me, shovels even hoes. They motioned for me to stand up. then they inched forward. About 50 of them. Communist militia, like popular forces. And just plain folk, too. All pointing guns at me. They looked to see what I had and took my .38. they made me strip down to shorts and T-shirt. They took off my boots. They tied my hands behind me. Then they marched me about 100 yards, right down this hill to this hut. Then around to the backyard. There was a large hole, like a pit. They motioned for me to get into that. I hesitated. Then they pushed and shoved me into it. I thought I was going to be executed. I said to myself, this is it. I guess I was in a state of shock. I wasn't afraid. I just thought my time had come. It was July 20, 1966. Just seven days short of my twenty-ninth birthday. I had come a half world away from Fayetteville, NC - the son of sharecroppers - to die in Vietnam at the hands of peasants. When I was growing up, Fayetteville was no different from most of the other cities in the South and some in the North. You couldn't go in restaurants. you rode in the back of the bus. And there were separate sections and toilets for the black people in bus stations and train stations. I went to a segregated elementary and high school about 15 miles from our home..."
- Capt. Norman McDaniel, Fayetteville, NC; U.S. Air Force, 432nd Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Thailand (March 1966 - July 1966) P.O.W. (July 1966 - February 1973)
"Four years after the start of American involvement in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr. issued his first statement on the conflict. Addressing a crowd at Howard University on 1 March 1965, King uncharacteristically concluded his talk with a discussion of the Vietnam War, calling for a negotiated peace settlement. King formally announced his opposition to the war during the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in August 1965.
On 4 April 1967, King made his most public and comprehensive statement against the War. Addressing a crowd of 3,000 people in Riverside Church in New York City, King delivered a speech titled 'Beyond Vietnam.' King pointed out that the war effort was 'taking the young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.'"
1961-1973 - Black Americans who served in Vietnam numbered 275,000 (10.6%) of all forces. Hostile deaths were 5,711 (12.1% of the total) and non-hostile deaths came to 1,530. (Buffalo Soldiers National Museum)
Larry Burrows famous image of a first-aid center south of the DMZ, Vietnam; published in Life magazine, 1966
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