A White Man's War: Race Issues and Vietnam William M
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Vietnam Generation Volume 1 Number 2 A White Man's War: Race Issues and Article 1 Vietnam 4-1989 A White Man's War: Race Issues and Vietnam William M. King Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation King, William M. (1989) "A White Man's War: Race Issues and Vietnam," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 1 : No. 2 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol1/iss2/1 This Complete Volume is brought to you for free and open access by La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vietnam Generation by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Vietnam Generation A WhiTE M an's W a r : R ace Issues ancI V ietnam I V ietnam Generation Vietnam Generation was founded In 1988 to promote and encourage Interdisciplinary study of the Vietnam War Era and the Vietnam War generation. Thejournal is published by Vietnam Generation. Inc., a nonprofit corporation devoted to promoting scholarship on recent history and contemporary issues. Vietnam G eneration, In c VlCE-PRESldENT PRESldENT Secretary, Treasurer Herman Beavers Kan Tal Lawrence Hunter Vietnam Generation EdlTOR Kali Tal AdvIsoRy BoARd NANCY ANISFIELD PHIUP JASON TOM RIDDELL Champlain College US Naval Academy Smith College ARTHUR BLANK WILLIAM KING RUTH ROSEN Veterans Administration University of Colorado UC Berkeley KEVIN BOWEN MICHAEL KLEIN WILLIAM J.SEARLE William Joiner Center University of Ulster Eastern Illinois University University of Massachusetts GABRIEL KOLKO j a m e s c. s c o n JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN York University Yale University Vanderbilt University JACQUELINE LAWSON ROBERT SLABEY RICHARD FALK University of Michigan University of Notre Dame Cornell University DAVID MARR NANCY WEIGERSMA DAVID HUNT Australian National University Fitchburg State College William Joiner Center JOHN CLARK PRATT CHRISTINE PELZER WHITE University of Massachusetts Colorado State University Cornell University JOCK REYNOLDS Washington Project for the Arts All correspondence, including manuscript submissions, should be sent to Kail Tal, Editor, Vietnam Generation. 10301 Procter Street, Silver Spring, MD 20901. Style sheets may be ordered from the editor. If you wish your submission returned, please enclose SASE. Subscriptions to Vietnam Generation are $40. per year for individuals, and $75 per year for institutions. (Add $ 12 postage for subscriptions outside the US.) Single copies may be purchased at $12. per issue, or at $9 per issue for orders of over 10. All orders must be prepaid in US currency. Please notify us of change of address at least six weeks in advance; there is a charge for replacement of issues which are returned by the Post Office as undieliverable at the address shown. If claims for undelivered issues are made within six months of the publication date, we will replace the journal. We do not accept cancellations or provide refunds. Vietnam Generation Is published quarterly, in January, April, July, and October. Copies of the Vietnam Generation Newsletter and access to the Vietnam Generation bibliographic database are included in the purchase price of the subscription. Articles published do not necessarily represent the opinion of, and are not the legal responsibility of Vietnam Generation, or Vietnam Generation, Inc. or its editorial staff. Copyright © 1989, by Vietnam Generation, Inc. ISSN: 1042-7597 V ietnam Generation VoIume 1 SpRiNQ 1989 NuMbER 2 SpEciAl EdiTOR, WilliAM M. KiNQ 7 IlMTROduCTiON 6 C ontemporary AFr o -A m erican SiudiEs ANd t He STudy of t Ne V ietn am W ar Herman Beavers 14 PRojECT 100,000: IU e G reat SociETy's A nsw er t o MiliTARy M a n po w er INEEds iN VIETNAM Lisa Hsiao 78 S oldA dos Razos: Issu es of R ace iN V ietnam W ar D ra m a David J. DeRose 76 F orqotten W a r r Io r s: A m erican iNdiAN S ervice M en iN V ietnam Tom Holm 6 9 P erceptio ns of R ace ANd CIa ss A m o n q ChicANo V ietnam V eterans Lea Ybarra 9 4 "O u r M en iN V ie t n a m ": BUck MsdiA a s a S o u r c e of t Ne AfRO-AMERicAN E x p e r ie n c e In S o u t h ea st A siA William King 118 1, Too, SiNq A m e r ic a : V ie t n a m a s METAphoR in CoiviiNq H o m e Vemer D. Mitchell 129 B lo o d s REviEWEd John A. Williams 190 AIa m o B a y ANd t Me Gook SyNdROME Henry Laskowsky 140 THe Si Lent MAjoRiTy BAby B o o m e r s : CLa s s of 1966 iN a Sourh JERSEy T o w n Paul Lyons 191 BiblioqRAphiES 160 N o t e s on t He A u tHo r s iNTROduCTION Much of the writing about race during the Vietnam war (1964- 1975) focused on the two-front war fought by black American troops. One reason for this was simply the large number of black soldiers serving in Vietnam. A second reason is more complex, and involves the existential contradictions that arise when one is a black soldier in Vietnam, fighting to impose “democracy” on a colored people (who may not want it if the costs are too high) coeval with one’s inability to exercise one’s civil rights back in the United States. Third, there was that whole civil rights thing, followed by Black Power, which migrated overseas with each troop deployment. Coverage of the Civil Rights movement sensitized the press to coverage of the Black Power movement. What journalists and reporters saw in disproportionate black combat death rates. Article 15s, racist promotion criteria and rumbles between black and white soldiers, was the sometimes bitter fruit of the military’s attempts to integrate itself; to undo what it had done in segregating the post-Civil War militia into black and white branches. The concentrated attention of this coverage sometimes masked the fact that there were other peoples of color fighting the American war in Vietnam, as this special issue of Vietnam Generation is designed to show. Too, looking at the conflict in the context of the rise and fall of colonial powers, it was clear that what America was about in Southeast Asia was a white man’s war—a last ditch stand to preserve some of the myths engendered by insecure acting out in the name of control. Like the black soldiers, these other non-white warriors suffered their own peculiar brand of torment as a consequence of their involuntary or voluntaiy participation, and paid a great price for their citizenship. Our goal for this issue, A White Man’s War: Race Issues and Vietnam then, is to foster further research into some of the questions raised here; questions bom out of the different experiences of blacks, Native-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans during the period of active US involvement. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there are no “subcultures" in the United States. Each of the peoples cited here has some full- fledged scheme for making sense of their world, and a set of patterns to guide their conduct; that is what culture is. As we learn more about each of the cultures we embrace and profess, we set the stages for cross-cultural contrasts that might more effectively illuminate the 4 V ietnam Generation founding concepts of our society and its construction. Vietnam was the United States’ first integrated—though not racially balanced—war in quite some time. As a consequence, it raised anew the old questions about the meanings of freedom, equality, justice and liberty and forces us to consider how these meanings change as a function of one’s status in the American social order. For, as Harold Cruse has observed in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual “..-America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation dominated by the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques—both ethnic and religious. The individual in America has few rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another.”1 When any particular group, readily identified by some ascriptive criterion, falls out of favor, its members, by virtue of their relative powerlessness, get the short end of the stick. Lyndon Johnson wanted no wider war in Southeast Asia because it would interfere with his favored domestic agenda;2 thus, the war was done on the ethical cheap. Sons of the rich and powerful, and many of the sons of the middle and upper-middle class were afforded the easy out of college deferments. After the lifers and volunteers were used up in a bait-and-switch marketing strategy designed to attrite the enemy, the war came increasingly to be fought by the relatively powerless and dispossessed. When the skewed death rate of black combat troops began to raise a public furor back home, a simple answer was to thin them out by increasing the presence of other soldiers of color in the ranks. What before was a front-line unit that was 60% black, became a front-line unit only 40% black. Colored casualties might still be as high; but the impact of the numbers’ magnitude is masked by its spread among different groups whose existential pathways in America have been very different indeed. It would be wise to keep those kinds of notions to the front in moving through this issue of the journal.