The Vietnam war era, in many ways, mirrored and was the beginning of the racial and political turbulence and divisiveness we are experiencing today. By tracing the lives of a group of Black men and women—soldiers, doctors, nurses, journalists—who experienced the battles in Vietnam as well as the socio-political war raging at home in America, Wil Haygood brilliantly contextualizes the racial strife that dominated so much of life in those years and still dominates it today. The most important book to deal with this subject since the bestselling Bloods.
DR. ELBERT NELSON: A Black doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts racial riot in Los Angeles, but soon found himself in the midst of Black Soldier protests; FRED CHERRY: Air Force pilot who became the first Black military officer captured by the North Vietnamese, becoming a hero to twenty million Black Americans; JOE ANDERSON: The first Black cinematic star of the war after his exploits in Vietnam inspired the academy award winning film The Anderson Platoon; DOROTHY HARRIS: A nurse stationed at Cu Chi, thirty miles from Saigon, where one particular death would haunt her forever...; WALLACE TERRY: An Ivy League grad who became the most visible Black reporter in Vietnam, determined, more than anyone, to investigate the racial dynamics of the decade-long conflict; GEORGE FORREST: The gauntlet he ran through enemy territory during the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang to get back to his men became the stuff of legend; HENRY REED: A marine officer feared by the North Vietnamese, and who came to stand up against the racism in the Marine Corps; PHILIPPA SCHUYLER: A biracial concert pianist who went to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and who died fleeing Vietnam with some of those orphans.
These are the central characters Haygood uses to examine the role of Blacks in Vietnam and at home during and immediately after the war. Through the prism of their lives as well as many other crucial figures of that era—Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy, Dwight Johnson (a war hero, who is shattered and ultimately destroyed by his experiences), Maude deVictor (who took up the cause of Agent Orange on behalf of veterans), Lyndon Johnson, William J. Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and still many others, Haygood reveals the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and the cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.
