Bloods Read online

  “A portrait not just of warfare and warriors but of beleaguered patriotism and pride. The violence recalled in Bloods is chilling.… On most of its pages hope prevails. Some of these men have witnessed the very worst that people can inflict on one another.… Their experience finally transcends race; their dramatic monologues bear witness to humanity.”

  —Time

  “Terry’s oral history captures the very essence of war, at both its best and worst.… Wallace Terry … has done a great service for all Americans with Bloods. Future historians will find his case studies extremely useful, and they will be hard pressed to ignore the role of blacks, as too often has been the case in past wars.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Wallace Terry set out to write an oral history of American blacks who fought for their country in Vietnam, but he did better than that. He wrote a compelling portrait of Americans in combat, and used his words so that the reader—black or white—knows the soldiers as men and Americans, their race overshadowed by the larger humanity Terry conveys.… This is not light reading, but it is literature with the ring of truth that shows the reader worlds through the eyes of others. You can’t ask much more from a book than that.”

  —Associated Press

  “Bloods is a major contribution to the literature of this war. For the first time a book has detailed the inequities blacks faced at home and on the battlefield. Their war stories involve not only Vietnam, but Harlem, Watts, Washington D.C. and small-town America.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “I wish Bloods were longer, and I hope it makes the start of a comprehensive oral and analytic history of blacks in Vietnam.… They see their experiences as Americans, and as blacks who live in, but are sometimes at odds with, America. The results are sometimes stirring, sometimes appalling, but this three-tiered perspective heightens and shadows every tale.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Wallace Terry was in Vietnam from 1967 through 1969.… In this book he has backtracked, Studs Terkel-like, and found twenty black veterans of the Vietnam War and let them spill their guts. And they do; oh, how they do. The language is raw, naked, a brick through a window on a still night. At the height of tension a sweet story, a soft story, drops into view. The veterans talk about fighting two wars: Vietnam and racism. They talk about fighting alongside the Ku Klux Klan.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The good, bad and the ugly of that war in one finely edited work. Terry.… uses oral histories … to provide the most comprehensive vision of those who fought—and returned—that has yet been produced.… Almost any glowing adjective—or group of adjectives, for that matter—can be used to describe Bloods.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “This is an invaluable addition to the expanding legion of histories about the Vietnam War.… A graphically illuminating but disquieting collection of twenty personal accounts reflecting the black military experience in Vietnam … Through their recollections of the war, we see America’s internal racial strife set against a major conflict. ”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The soldiers’ descriptions of the war’s ugliness and that of Americans fighting and dying were so dramatically explicit a reader could visualize himself shivering in the monsoon rain, stalking through muddy swamps, and witnessing comrades cut the ears off dead Vietcong rebels to wear on their dog chains.… Bloods is an attention-keeper. It lets the reader relive the emotions and the turmoil of these men during the war and upon returning home.… Bloods recovers once-lost pages of the Vietnam War that should never be forgotten again.”

  —Nashville Banner

  “Although Bloods are what black soldiers called themselves in Vietnam, the title also suggests the racism, vileness and bloodletting they experienced in America’s most unpopular war.… But more than just a black view of the Vietnam conflict, the book is an absolute condemnation of war. If your eyes don’t mist during one of the chapters, your tear ducts don’t work.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  2006 Presidio Press Mass Market Edition

  Copyright © 1984 by Wallace Terry

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Presidio Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1984.

  PRESIDIO PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83358-7

  www.presidiopress.com

  v3.1

  I have an intuitive feeling that the Negro servicemen have a better understanding than whites of what the war is about.

  —General William C. Westmoreland, U.S. Army, Saigon, 1967

  The Bloods is us.

  —Gene Woodley, Former Combat Paratrooper, Baltimore, 1983

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Private First Class Reginald “Malik” Edwards

  Specialist 5 Harold “Light Bulb” Bryant

  Specialist 4 Richard J. Ford III

  Specialist 4 Charles Strong

  HM2 Luther C. Benton III

  Specialist 5 Emmanuel J. Holloman

  Specialist 4 Haywood T. “The Kid” Kirkland

  First Lieutenant Archie “Joe” Biggers

  Specialist 4 Stephen A. Howard

  Captain Norman Alexander McDaniel

  Sergeant Major Edgar A. Huff

  Staff Sergeant Don F. Browne

  Specialist 4 Robert L. Mountain

  Lieutenant Commander William S. Norman

  Specialist 4 Robert E. Holcomb

  Captain Joseph B. Anderson, Jr.

  Sergeant Robert L. Daniels

  Specialist 4 Arthur E. “Gene” Woodley, Jr.

  Radarman Second Class Dwyte A. Brown

  Colonel Fred V. Cherry

  Chronology of Major Events

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Introduction

  In early 1967, while at the Washington bureau of Time magazine, I received a telephone call from Richard Clurman, then chief of correspondents. Clurman wanted me to fly to Saigon to help report a cover story on the role of the black soldier in the Vietnam War. Already the war was dividing the Nation deeply. In the black community, highly popular figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cassius Clay were speaking out against it.

  I gladly accepted the assignment.

  The attention President Lyndon Johnson was giving to the Great Society and civil rights progress, which I was covering at the time, was being eroded by his increasing preoccupation with the war. The war was destroying the bright promises for social and economic change in the black community. I was losing a great story on the home-front to a greater story on the battlefront.

  At that moment the Armed Forces seemed to represent the most integrated institution in American society. For the first time blacks were fully integrated in combat and fruitfully employed in positions of leadership. The Pentagon was praising the gallant, hard-fighting black soldier, who was dying at a greater rate, proportionately, than American soldiers of other races. In the early years of the fighting, blacks made up 23 percent of the fatalities. In Vietnam, Uncle Sam was an equal opportunity employer. That, too, made Vietnam a compelling story.

  And finally, Vietnam was, as I told my worried wife who was concerned about my safety, the war of my generation.

  In May of 1967 I reported in Time that I found most black soldiers in Viet
nam supported the war effort, because they believed America was guaranteeing the sovereignty of a democratically constituted government in South Vietnam and halting the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. President Johnson called me to the White House to hear that assessment first-hand; he was pleased by my briefing.

  Later that year I returned to Vietnam for a two-year assignment that ended when I witnessed the withdrawal of the first American forces in 1969. Black combat fatalities had dropped to 14 percent, still proportionately higher than the 11 percent which blacks represented in the American population. But by that same year a new black soldier had appeared. The war had used up the professionals who found in military service fuller and fairer employment opportunities than blacks could find in civilian society, and who found in uniform a supreme test of their black manhood. Replacing the careerists were black draftees, many just steps removed from marching in the Civil Rights Movement or rioting in the rebellions that swept the urban ghettos from Harlem to Watts. All were filled with a new sense of black pride and purpose. They spoke loudest against the discrimination they encountered on the battlefield in decorations, promotion and duty assignments. They chose not to overlook the racial insults, cross-burnings and Confederate flags of their white comrades. They called for unity among black brothers on the battlefield to protest these indignities and provide mutual support. And they called themselves “Bloods.”

  In the last years of the American presence, both black soldier and white fought to survive a war they knew they would never win in the conventional sense. And, often, they fought each other. The war, which had bitterly divided America like no other issue since the Civil War, had become a double battleground, pitting American soldier against American soldier. The spirit of foxhole brotherhood I found in 1967 had evaporated.

  In the years since the collapse of the Saigon government to the victorious Communist forces, I have believed that America owed the black veterans of the war a special debt. There were no flags waving or drums beating upon the return of any Vietnam veterans, who were blamed by the right in our society for losing the war, and by the left for being the killers of the innocent. But what can be said about the dysfunction of Vietnam veterans in general can be doubled in its impact upon most blacks; they hoped to come home to more than they had before; they came home to less. Black unemployment among black veterans is more than double the rate for white veterans. The doors to the Great Society had been shut.

  Among the 20 men who portray their war and postwar experiences in this book, I sought a representative cross-section of the black combat force. Enlisted men, non-commissioned officers, and commissioned officers. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Those with urban backgrounds, and those from rural areas. Those for whom the war had a devastating impact, and those for whom the war basically was an opportunity to advance in a career dedicated to protecting American interests. All of them had won a badge of courage in combat, whether on a patrol boat or in a POW camp, on a night ambush or in the skies above North Vietnam, as medics and platoon leaders, as fighters pilots and grunts.

  These stories are not to be found in the expanding body of Vietnam literature; they deservedly belong in the forefront because of the unique experience of the black Vietnam veteran. He fought at a time when his sisters and brothers were fighting and dying at home for equal rights and greater opportunities, for a color-blind nation promised to him in the Constitution he swore to defend. He fought at a time when some of his leaders chastised him for waging war against a people of color, and when his Communist foe appealed to him to take up arms instead against the forces of racism in America. The loyalty of the black Vietnam War veteran stood a greater test on the battleground than did the loyalty of any other American soldier in Vietnam; his patriotism begs a special salute at home.

  Above all, his experience requires the special notice of history, as it judges and continues to judge the Vietnam saga. In any black soldier of Vietnam can be found the darkness that is at the heart of all wars. What the black veteran illuminates in these pages of his own humanity as well as racial perception will help complete the missing pages of the American experience, and add to the pages of universal understanding of man’s most terrible occupation.

  When my youngest child, David, was still a baby, I learned about the death of the youngest American soldier who would die in combat in Vietnam. I was visiting Hoi An. The soldier was a sixteen-year-old black Marine from a poor and broken family in Brooklyn. He had lied about his age to join the Marines and thereby earn money to help support his mother. I vowed then that one day I would see between the covers of a book the story of the sacrifice of such young black men and others in the rice paddies of Vietnam—10,000 miles from the heartbreak of American poverty and discrimination and injustice. This is that book.

  And now, as I write these words, that youngest child of mine is himself sixteen.

  —Wallace Terry

  Washington, D.C.

  January 1, 1984

  Private First Class

  Reginald “Malik” Edwards

  Phoenix, Louisiana

  Rifleman

  9th Regiment

  U.S. Marine Corps

  Danang

  June 1965–March 1966

  I’m in the Amtrac with Morley Safer, right? The whole thing is getting ready to go down. At Cam Ne. The whole bit that all America will see on the CBS Evening News, right? Marines burning down some huts. Brought to you by Morley Safer. Your man on the scene. August 5, 1965.

  When we were getting ready for Cam Ne, the helicopters flew in first and told them to get out of the village ’cause the Marines are looking for VC. If you’re left there, you’re considered VC.

  They told us if you receive one round from the village, you level it. So we was coming into the village, crossing over the hedges. It’s like a little ditch, then you go through these bushes and jump across, and start kickin’ ass, right?

  Not only did we receive one round, three Marines got wounded right off. Not only that, but one of the Marines was our favorite Marine, Sergeant Bradford. This brother that everybody loved got shot in the groin. So you know how we felt.

  The first thing happened to me, I looked out and here’s a bamboo snake. That little short snake, the one that bites you and you’re through bookin’. What do you do when a bamboo snake comin’ at you? You drop your rifle with one hand, and shoot his head off. You don’t think you can do this, but you do it. So I’m so rough with this snake, everybody thinks, well, Edwards is shootin’ his ass off today.

  So then this old man runs by. This other sergeant says, “Get him, Edwards.” But I missed the old man. Now I just shot the head off a snake. You dig what I’m sayin’? Damn near with one hand. M-14. But all of a sudden, I missed this old man. ’Cause I really couldn’t shoot him.

  So Brooks—he’s got the grenade launcher—fired. Caught my man as he was comin’ through the door. But what happened was it was a room full of children. Like a schoolroom. And he was runnin’ back to warn the kids that the Marines were coming. And that’s who got hurt. All those little kids and people.

  Everybody wanted to see what had happened, ’cause it was so fucked up. But the officers wouldn’t let us go up there and look at what shit they were in. I never got the count, but a lot of people got screwed up. I was telling Morley Safer and his crew what was happening, but they thought I was trippin’, this Marine acting crazy, just talking shit. ’Cause they didn’t want to know what was going on.

  So I’m going on through the village. Like the way you go in, you sweep, right? You fire at the top of the hut in case somebody’s hangin’ in the rafters. And if they hit the ground, you immediately fire along the ground, waist high, to catch them on the run. That’s the way I had it worked out, or the way the Marines taught me. That’s the process.

  All of a sudden, this Vietnamese came runnin’ after me, telling me not to shoot: “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.” See, we didn’t go in the village and look. We would just shoot first. L
ike you didn’t go into a room to see who was in there first. You fired and go in. So in case there was somebody there, you want to kill them first. And we was just gonna run in, shoot through the walls. ’Cause it was nothin’ to shoot through the walls of a bamboo hut. You could actually set them on fire if you had tracers. That used to be a fun thing to do. Set hootches on fire with tracers.

  So he ran out in front of me. I mean he’s runnin’ into my line of fire. I almost killed him. But I’m thinking, what the hell is wrong? So then we went into the hut, and it was all these women and children huddled together. I was gettin’ ready to wipe them off the planet. In this one hut. I tell you, man, my knees got weak. I dropped down, and that’s when I cried. First time I cried in the ’Nam. I realized what I would have done. I almost killed all them people. That was the first time I had actually had the experience of weak knees.

  Safer didn’t tell them to burn the huts down with they lighters. He just photographed it. He could have got a picture of me burning a hut, too. It was just the way they did it. When you say level a village, you don’t use torches. It’s not like in the 1800s. You use a Zippo. Now you would use a Bic. That’s just the way we did it. You went in there with your Zippos. Everybody. That’s why people bought Zippos. Everybody had a Zippo. It was for burnin’ shit down.

  I was a Hollywood Marine. I went to San Diego, but it was worse in Parris Island. Like you’ve heard the horror stories of Parris Island—people be marchin’ into the swamps. So you were happy to be in San Diego. Of course, you’re in a lot of sand, but it was always warm.

  At San Diego, they had this way of driving you into this base. It’s all dark. Back roads. All of a sudden you come to this little adobe-looking place. All of a sudden, the lights are on, and all you see are these guys with these Smokey the Bear hats and big hands on their hips. The light is behind them, shining through at you. You all happy to be with the Marines. And they say, “Better knock that shit off, boy. I don’t want to hear a goddamn word out of your mouth.” And everybody starts cursing and yelling and screaming at you.