My initial instinct was to laugh. But then they get right up in your face. That’s when I started getting scared. When you’re 117 pounds, 150 look like a monster. He would just come screaming down your back, “What the hell are you looking at, shit turd?” I remembered the time where you cursed, but you didn’t let anybody adult hear it. You were usually doing it just to be funny or trying to be bold. But these people were actually serious about cursing your ass out.
Then here it is. Six o’clock in the morning. People come in bangin’ on trash cans, hittin’ my bed with night sticks. That’s when you get really scared, ’cause you realize I’m not at home anymore. It doesn’t look like you’re in the Marine Corps either. It looks like you’re in jail. It’s like you woke up in a prison camp somewhere in the South. And the whole process was not to allow you to be yourself.
I grew up in a family that was fair. I was brought up on the Robin Hood ethic, and John Wayne came to save people. So I could not understand that if these guys were supposed to be the good guys, why were they treating each other like this?
I grew up in Plaquemines Parish. My folks were poor, but I was never hungry. My stepfather worked with steel on buildings. My mother worked wherever she could. In the fields, pickin’ beans. In the factories, the shrimp factories, oyster factories. And she was a housekeeper.
I was the first person in my family to finish high school. This was 1963. I knew I couldn’t go to college because my folks couldn’t afford it. I only weighed 117 pounds, and nobody’s gonna hire me to work for them. So the only thing left to do was go into the service. I didn’t want to go into the Army, ’cause everybody went into the Army. Plus the Army didn’t seem like it did anything. The Navy I did not like ’cause of the uniforms. The Air Force, too. But the Marines was bad. The Marine Corps built men. Plus just before I went in, they had all these John Wayne movies on every night. Plus the Marines went to the Orient.
Everybody laughed at me. Little, skinny boy can’t work in the field going in the Marine Corps. So I passed the test. My mother, she signed for me ’cause I was seventeen.
There was only two black guys in my platoon in boot camp. So I hung with the Mexicans, too, because in them days we never hang with white people. You didn’t have white friends. White people was the aliens to me. This is ’63. You don’t have integration really in the South. You expected them to treat you bad. But somehow in the Marine Corps you hoping all that’s gonna change. Of course, I found out this was not true, because the Marine Corps was the last service to integrate. And I had an Indian for a platoon commander who hated Indians. He used to call Indians blanket ass. And then we had a Southerner from Arkansas that liked to call you chocolate bunny and Brillo head. That kind of shit.
I went to jail in boot camp. What happened was I was afraid to jump this ditch on the obstacle course. Every time I would hit my shin. So a white lieutenant called me a nigger. And, of course, I jumped the ditch farther than I’d ever jumped before. Now I can’t run. My leg is really messed up. I’m hoppin’. So it’s pretty clear I can’t do this. So I tell the drill instructor, “Man, I can’t fucking go on.” He said, “You said what?” I said it again. He said, “Get out.” I said, “Fuck you.” This to a drill instructor in 1963. I mean you just don’t say that. I did seven days for disrespect. When I got out of the brig, they put me in a recon. The toughest unit.
We trained in guerrilla warfare for two years at Camp Pendleton. When I first got there, they was doing Cuban stuff. Cuba was the aggressor. It was easy to do Cuba because you had a lot of Mexicans. You could always let them be Castro. We even had Cuban targets. Targets you shoot at. So then they changed the silhouettes to Vietnamese. Everything to Vietnam. Getting people ready for the little gooks. And, of course, if there were any Hawaiians and Asian-Americans in the unit, they played the roles of aggressors in the war games.
Then we are going over to Okinawa, thinking we’re going on a regular cruise. But the rumors are that we’re probably going to the ’Nam. In Okinawa we was trained as raiders. Serious, intense jungle-warfare training. I’m gonna tell you, it was some good training. The best thing about the Marine Corps, I can say for me, is that they teach you personal endurance, how much of it you can stand.
The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. That’s what we got in practice. Kill, kill, kill. I remember a survey they did in the mess hall where we had to say how we felt about the war. The thing was, get out of Vietnam or fight. What we were hearing was Vietnamese was killing Americans. I felt that if people were killing Americans, we should fight them. As a black person, there wasn’t no problem fightin’ the enemy. I knew Americans were prejudiced, were racist and all that, but, basically, I believed in America ’cause I was an American.
I went over with the original 1st Battalion 9th Marines. When we got there, it was nothing like you expect a war to be. We had seen a little footage of the war on TV. But we was on the ship dreaming about landing on this beach like they did in World War II. Then we pulled into this area like a harbor almost and just walked off the ship.
And the first Vietnamese that spoke to me was a little kid up to my knee. He said, “You give me cigarette. You give me cigarette.” That really freaked me out. This little bitty kid smokin’ cigarettes. That is my first memory of Vietnam. I thought little kids smokin’ was the most horrible thing that you could do. So the first Vietnamese words I learned was Toi khong hut thuoc lo. “I don’t smoke cigarettes.” And Thuoc la co hai cho suc khoe. “Cigarettes are bad for your health.”
Remember, we were in the beginning of the war. We wasn’t dealing with the regular army from the North. We was still fightin’ the Viet Cong. The NVA was moving in, but they really hadn’t made their super move yet. So we were basically runnin’ patrols out of Danang. We were basically with the same orders that the Marines went into Lebanon with. I mean we couldn’t even put rounds in the chambers at first.
It was weird. The first person that died in each battalion of the 9th Marines that landed was black. And they were killed by our own people. Comin’ back into them lines was the most dangerous thing then. It was more fun sneakin’ into Ho Chi Minh’s house than comin’ back into the lines of Danang. Suppose the idiot is sleeping on watch and he wake up. All of a sudden he sees people. That’s all he sees. There was a runnin’ joke around Vietnam that we was killing more of our people than the Vietnamese were. Like we were told to kill any Vietnamese in black. We didn’t know that the ARVN had some black uniforms, too. And you could have a platoon commander calling the air strikes, and he’s actually calling on your position. It was easy to get killed by an American.
They called me a shit bird, because I would stay in trouble. Minor shit, really. But they put me on point anyway. I spent most of my time in Vietnam runnin’. I ran through Vietnam ’cause I was always on point, and points got to run. They can’t walk like everybody else. Specially when you hit them open areas. Nobody walked through an open area. After a while, you develop a way to handle it. You learned that the point usually survived. It was the people behind you who got killed.
And another thing. It’s none of that shit, well, if they start shootin’ at you, now all of a sudden we gonna run in there and outshoot them. The motherfuckers hit, you call in some air. Bring in some heavy artillery, whatever you need to cool them down. You wipe that area up. You soften it up. Then you lay to see if you receive any fire. An then you go on in.
I remember the first night we had went out on patrol. About 50 people shot this old guy. Everybody claimed they shot him. He got shot ’cause he started running. It was an old man running to tell his family. See, it wasn’t s’posed to be nobody out at night but the Marines. Any Vietnamese out at night was the enemy. And we had guys who were frustrated from Korea with us. Guys who were real gung ho, wanted a name for themselves. So a lot of times they ain’t tell us shi
t about who is who. People get out of line, you could basically kill them. So this old man was running like back towards his crib to warn his family. I think people said “Halt,” but we didn’t know no Vietnamese words.
It was like shootin’ water buffaloes. Somebody didn’t tell us to do this. We did it anyway. But they had to stop us from doing that. Well, the water buffaloes would actually attack Americans. I guess maybe we smelled different. You would see these little Vietnamese kids carrying around this huge water buffalo. That buffalo would see some Marines and start wantin’ to run ’em down. You see the poor little kids tryin’ to hold back the water buffalo, because these Marines will kill him. And Marines, man, was like, like we was always lookin’ for shit to go wrong. Shit went wrong. That gave us the oppurtunity.
I remember we had went into this village and got pinned down with a Australian officer. When we finally went on through, we caught these two women. They smelled like they had weapons. These were all the people we found. So the Australian dude told us to take the women in. So me and my partner, we sittin’ up in this Amtrac with these women. Then these guys who was driving the Amtrac come in there and start unzippin’ their pants as if they gonna screw the women. So we say, “Man, get outta here. You can’t do it to our prisoners.” So they get mad with us. Like they gonna fight us. And we had to actually lock and load to protect the women. They said, “We do this all the time.”
One time we had went into this place we had hit. We was takin’ prisoners. So this one guy broke and ran. So I chased him. I ran behind him. Everybody say, “Shoot him. Shoot him.” ’Cause they was pissed that I was chasin’ him. So I hit him. You know I had to do something to him. I knew I couldn’t just grab him and bring him back. And his face just crumbled. Then I brought him back, and they said, “You could have got a kill, Edwards.”
The first time we thought we saw the enemy in big numbers was one of these operations by Marble Mountain. We had received fire. All of a sudden we could see people in front of us. Instead of waiting for air, we returned the fire, and you could see people fall. I went over to this dude and said, “Hey, man, I saw one fall.” Then everyone started yelling, “We can see ’em fall. We can see ’em fall.” And they were fallin’. Come to find out it was Bravo Company. What the VC had done was suck Bravo Company in front of us. ’Cause they attacked us and Bravo Company at the same time. They would move back as Bravo Company was in front of us. It was our own people. That’s the bodies we saw falling. They figured out what was happening, and then they ceased fire. But the damage is done real fast. I think we shot up maybe 40 guys in Bravo Company. Like I said, it was easy to get killed by an American.
The first time I killed somebody up close was when we was tailing Charlie on a patrol somewhere around Danang. It was night. I was real tired. At that time you had worked so hard during the day, been on so many different details, you were just bombed out.
I thought I saw this dog running. Because that white pajama top they wore at night just blend into that funny-colored night they had over there. All of a sudden, I realized that somebody’s runnin’. And before I could say anything to him, he’s almost ran up on me. There’s nothing I can do but shoot. Somebody get that close, you can’t wait to check their ID. He’s gonna run into you or stop to shoot you. It’s got to be one or the other. I shot him a bunch of times. I had a 20–round clip, and when he hit the ground, I had nothing. I had to reload. That’s how many times he was shot.
Then the sergeant came over and took out the flashlight and said, “Goddamn. This is fucking beautiful. This is fucking beautiful.”
This guy was really out of it. He was like moanin’. I said, “Let me kill him.” I couldn’t stand the sound he was makin’. So I said, “Back off, man. Let me put this guy out of his misery.” So I shot him again. In the head.
He had a grenade in his hand. I guess he was committing suicide. He was just runnin’ up to us, pullin’ a grenade kind of thing. I caught him just in time.
Everybody was comin’ congratulatin’ me, saying what a great thing it was. I’m tryin’ to be cool, but I’m really freak in’ out. So then I start walking away, and they told me I had to carry the body back to base camp. We had a real kill. We had one we could prove. We didn’t have to make this one up.
So then I start draggin’ this body by the feet. And his arm fell off. So I had to go back and get his arm. I had to stick it down his pants. It was a long haul.
And I started thinkin’. You think about how it feels, the weight. It was rainin’. You think about the mist and the smells the rain brings out. All of a sudden I realize this guy is a person, has got a family. All of a sudden it wasn’t like I was carrying a gook. I was actually carrying a human being. I started feeling guilty. I just started feeling really badly.
I don’t feel like we got beat in Vietnam. We never really fought the war. People saying that America couldn’t have won that war is crazy.
The only way we could actually win the war was to fight every day. You couldn’t fight only when you felt like it. Or change officers every month. Troops would learn the language, learn the people, learn the areas. If you’re gonna be fighting in an area, you get to know everybody in the area and you stay there. You can’t go rotate your troops every 12 months. You always got new people coming in. Plus they may not get to learn anything. They may die the first day. If you take a guy on patrol and he gets killed the first day, what good is he? See, if you have seasoned troops, you can move in and out of the bush at will. You get the smell of the country on you. You start to eat the food. You start to smell like it. You don’t have that fresh smell so they can smell you when you’re comin’. Then you can fight a war. Then you can just start from one tip of South Vietnam and work your way to the top. To China. Of course, if we had used the full might of the military, we’d be there now. We could never give the country back up. Plus we’d have to kill millions of Vietnamese. Do we want to do that? What had they done to us to deserve all that? So to do it would have been wrong. All we did was give our officers the first combat training they had since Korea. It was more like a big training ground. If it was a real war, you either would have come out in a body bag or you would have come out when the war was over.
Sometimes I think we would have done a lot better by getting them hooked on our life-style than by trying to do it with guns. Give them credit cards. Make them dependent on television and sugar. Blue jeans works better than bombs. You can take blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll records and win over more countries than you can with soldiers.
When I went home, they put me in supply, probably the lowest job you can have in the Marines. But they saw me drawing one day and they said, “Edwards can draw.” They sent me over to the training-aids library, and I became an illustrator. I reenlisted and made sergeant.
When I went to Quantico, my being black, they gave me the black squad, the squad with most of the blacks, especially the militant blacks. And they started hippin’ me. I mean I was against racism. I didn’t even call it racism. I called it prejudice. They hipped me to terms like “exploitation” and “oppression.” And by becoming an illustrator, it gave you more time to think. And I was around people who thought. People who read books. I would read black history where the white guys were going off on novels or playing rock music. So then one day, I just told them I was black. I didn’t call them blanco, they didn’t have to call me Negro. That’s what started to get me in trouble. I became a target. Somebody to watch.
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. And a suspended BCD. 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. So one day I was just tired of them, and I hit the duty warden. I ended up with a BCD in 1970. After six years, eight months, and
eight days, I was kicked out of the Corps. I don’t feel it was fair. If I had been white, I would never have went to jail for fighting. That would have been impossible.
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 got 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.
I rose up into the ranks. I was an artist immediately for the newspaper. Because of my background in the military, obviously I was able to deal with a lot of things of a security nature. And eventually I took over the D.C. chapter.
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