THE WAR WITHIN A WAR

A sharp-edged account of the disastrous Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of its Black fighters.

The author of numerous books of Black history and biography, Haygood begins with the memory of his childhood block, where six close neighbors were dispatched to fight in Vietnam. That anecdotal evidence well illustrates the fact “that in the early years Blacks were disproportionately being sent to the front of the battle lines in Vietnam when compared with whites.” The pattern would continue throughout the war. Like the “Double V” campaign for civil rights during and after World War II, a resistance movement in Vietnam was paralleling events back home. One of his case studies is a young Black major who walked into a press briefing room in Saigon and read a statement that “the American military services are the strongest citadels of racism on the face of the earth.” For his defiant candor, he was forcibly retired from the service. The Black Power movement arrived at the front “with the force of a hurricane,” exemplified by the elaborate handshake called dapping, which began to worry the mostly white officers in charge, concerned that rebellion was being fomented in the ranks. They were right to worry: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On was spinning on the turntable, Black soldiers were growing their hair in afros and disregarding orders, morale was plummeting, and injustices were mounting. In this wide-ranging survey, Haygood relates any number of terrible stories: a Medal of Honor winner, suffering from PTSD and unable to find work back home, gunned down while attempting to rob a grocery store; a 15-year-old who lied about his age to join the Marines, the youngest American to die in Vietnam; the distinguished doctor whose days were ending in treatment for exposure to Agent Orange.

A searing history of the Black experience in Vietnam.