Bloods

by Wallace Terry

  No one, for instance, would tell me that I couldn’t go to the swimming pool in the officers’ club area. If I went with my group, no one ever paid that any attention. But if I went by myself, the people would start getting out. And I use to have fun making them do it.

  I remember I was in the band, and the band was going to New Orleans to play in the Mardi Gras. The bandmaster called me in and said, “I had an experience one time before where there was a black in the band we took to the Mardi Gras, and people threw things at us. I would suggest that you not go.” When I complained to the sergeant, he said, “Look, you are an outstanding cadet. But you are down in the South, and those sort of things happen. We are doing this for you. We are trying to protect you from incidents. We are not giving you an order, but I think you ought not to push this anymore.” And before I could do anything about it, they had gone.

  I was equally outspoken when I went to Advanced Technical Training School in Glen Cove, Georgia. Jerry Allen and I were the only black officers. Coming back from our dates one night, we were driving along and the police stopped us. We demanded to know why we were being stopped since we weren’t doing anything. The police threatened to break Jerry’s jaw. So when I got to the base, I went to the base attorney and asked him to file charges against the police for racial harassment. He said, “We don’t have jurisdiction over there.” Of course, the big problem was the base didn’t want to have any trouble.

  And when I was stationed in Meridian, Mississippi, the executive officer once asked me if I wouldn’t mind not coming to the officers’ club because they were going to have a lot of guests from town. Just like Pensacola, the request was made under the guise that they didn’t want me to be uncomfortable. Though I hadn’t planned on going, I made a point to go there that particular time.

  In 1963 I was on routine deployment into the Pacific. While we were in Japan, we received orders to go down to the South China Sea. I was on a carrier, the Ranger. None of us thought that much about it other than we were going south. We ended up in the waters off Southeast Asia. Because of the confidentiality of the mission, we were not to even mention what action we took even to other people on the ship. We were not to tell anyone back home, including relatives, that we were even in the area. I might add that although it was the initial stages of the Vietnam War, particularly for the involvement of our forces, at the time, most of us weren’t able to deal with it as a war as such. Most of us didn’t recognize the impact of what was happening or how it was developing. Only afterwards did we make the connection of what was taking place.

  I was in an airborne early-warning squadron. As the airborne controller, I was directly over a pilot, a copilot, the radar operator, and a technician. We would direct bombers to particular targets. The bombers we had were old, single-propeller aircraft and light attack jets. They were carrying light weaponry, 500-pound bombs or less, not the kinds of things that would cause tremendous damage. There was no napalm. Their mission was to destroy routes and roads, and stop the supplies coming in from the North to the South. Most of the missions were over into the Laotian area. At that time it was not identified as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Some of our people had had Korean experience, but most had never dropped anything or anything other than on practice targets. So there was a certain measure of excitement. And most of us didn’t envisage a great deal of danger. There was no air contact with the enemy. Occasionally, there would be some small-arms fire that you wouldn’t notice until after the plane was inspected. No one was being hurt. And no one was getting any battle fatigue, because these were not daily bombing missions. We would sometimes go three, four, five days without doing anything.

  When the intelligence people briefed us, we were told that we were trying to stop quote Communist insurgency unquote. That was the battle cry, and there was no real questioning of that. And the assumption was that the action would be over soon. By cutting off the main supplies to the guerrillas, they would be hurt severely. And we believed that they didn’t have any enclaves of friendly support in the South. It was a very simple operation. And in all candor, most of us looked at it rather simplistically. You are trying to support a friendly country. It was a limited engagement. We were not thinking about a war. War in Vietnam was associated with the French period.

  When I went back in January of 1965, we had a comparatively major situation. We were regularly assigning carriers to Southeast Asia. It was taking on the atmosphere of a combat zone. And we spent a great deal of time understanding the secret rules of engagement. There were specific conditions under which you could fire. We were told how far you could go in pursuit if anyone came after you. The MiGs would come out to test us and turn back in. But you could not go into hot pursuit of them into the North. We were in Cambodia and Laos, but you simply did not cross the DMZ. It was going to be a war fought under certain parameters. And it clearly was going to be limited. And that was somewhat of a comforting factor, because we thought that we had a clearly defined engagement, fighting for honorable causes, supporting a country that was being overrun by the neighbors from the North.

  In the intelligence briefings we were hearing more about the geopolitical aspects of what was happening out there. There was no question as to who the good guys were. The North Vietnamese were aiding and abetting a guerrilla group against the legitimate, elected government of South Vietnam. I saw this as typical efforts of Soviet aggrandizement. A war of national liberation was being extended south to take over the people against their wishes. It seemed to make sense that the national interests of the U.S. was to stop these kinds of efforts. That’s what I’d been trained to think, and it made sense.

  At first there were mild operations. Like checking fishing boats for guerrillas. And it was kind of fun, flying down low to take a visual look. If they looked suspicious, we’d call in a nearby boat to investigate. We would fly in support of some of the land forces, and occasionally the ships would go in for some shore bombardment as they were asked for it.

  The things started to intensify. The war became real.

  It started becoming real when they started putting heavier bombs on the planes. When they started loading napalm.

  It started becoming real when we started getting fewer and fewer “bingo” fields. Those were fields in South Vietnam where you could land if something happened to you and you couldn’t get back to the carrier.

  It started becoming real when we started putting more emphasis on escape and evasion.

  It started becoming real when the missions stepped up. When the targets of opportunity were getting closer and closer in the North, across the DMZ. And the more you started doing that, the more you faced the SAM emplacements.

  It became real when the first pilot didn’t come back.

  A guy we called Bush Bill as the first person I knew who didn’t come back. He was flying an A-6 off a carrier during night operations. We were in flight school together.

  In that early stage, the tendency was to treat those kinds of deaths like you would the accidents that always happen on a carrier. Every time you take off from a carrier and every time you land, there is danger. And there is just a macho feeling among pilots that these accidents will happen on a carrier. And we tended to list the people as MIA as opposed to KIA until we were absolutely certain. We held out hope that they would be recovered, captured, anything but dead.

  There was no feeling that we were in a war of attrition.

  When I returned in 1969, I had the role as electronics warfare officer and combat information officer in the combat center for Carrier Division 3. In essence, I was representing the flag commander, giving the order to fire, the order to pursue or to change the rules of engagement. From just bombing roads on my first tour, we had advanced to a major war. There were bombing raids now into the North. We were bombing Hanoi. Yet there were certain kinds of power dams you couldn’t touch.

  By now, I had gotten married, taught at the Naval Academy, and finished a degree in international relations
and national security policy. So I began looking at Vietnam from an academic view. I began questioning the rationale for what we were doing and the effectiveness of our efforts. It was no longer a war in which a few people were being killed. Large, large numbers of people were being killed. And everybody knew about it. It was in the papers, on television. And there were demonstrations against the war back home. I was seeing the war from a perspective that I had not seen it before.

  And now I was getting all the intelligence information. Our resources were so fantastic that we could listen to the North Vietnamese pilots talking to each other as they prepared to take off on their runways. You would really know what was happening everywhere.

  And in the command room, where four of us maintained a twenty-four-hour watch, you would have a tremendous quantity of time to think. And I would think and think and think.

  It was still clear to me that there was Communist aggression from the North. But it was less clear that it was an aspect of Chinese or Soviet orchestration than it was a matter of the North and South going at it in a struggle for unification. And I wondered if the war was worth the American effort. Worth the number of people I saw getting killed. Worth the attrition that was taking place in the country. Worth the protection of a government that was appearing to be increasingly corrupt. Was it a typical example of Communist aggression? Was it a war of national liberation in which the North was not aligned with any other country? Were the Vietnamese simply trying to get everybody out? Was the war part civil, part aggression?

  And I would get the feeling that we were going at what we were doing in a halfhearted way, not with any degree of confidence that we were fighting a winnable war using all the power that we had. The Communists were winning it guerrilla-style, but not because we couldn’t stop them if we wanted to.

  In all three tours I never once set foot in South Vietnam. I had made arrangements that last time to fly over to see my brother, Kenneth, to join him in Danang. He was working with a special intelligence group. A soldier’s soldier. But before we could get together, he got hurt. Hurt so badly he still has trouble walking to this day.

  I thought about him. Thought about all the people being maimed and killed. And you kept saying, Why?

  When my letter of resignation reached Admiral Zumwalt, he asked me to hold off and work with him in the whole area of improving conditions for people in the Navy.

  Zumwalt was really quite strategically oriented and an extraordinarily professional Naval officer. To the surprise of many people, he started asking questions about everything when he took over. He had commanded the naval forces in Vietnam and had lived with his family in the Philippines. So he had a great feeling for nonwhite people in general. I agreed to be his special assistant for minority affairs, but I didn’t have any high expectations that he was willing to go as far as I was wanting to go.

  Shortly after I arrived, we decided to have a group of black officers and their spouses come to Washington to talk about various problems that they had been experiencing in the Navy. We did the same thing with enlisted personnel. This was an opportunity for me to have them legitimize the recommendations I would be making.

  One of the admirals listening in began to talk about how much he loved his stewards as if they were his own children. At the time, the steward’s rates were closed to all but blacks and Filipinos.

  “This boy that I have working for me is just like a son and a close friend.”

  One particular wife said, “Admiral, how old is this boy that you’re talking about?”

  And he says, “Oh, he’s almost forty.”

  Zumwalt heard that.

  And he heard the senior officers snicker when the enlisted men talked about the black hair products they wanted placed in the Navy exchange. Or the need to wear their hair a certain length.

  Zumwalt was outraged.

  Afterwards, he said to me, “I was looking at those flag officers, and they did not understand any of what was taking place here. I think I made a serious mistake. I have put so much emphasis on trying to ensure that everyone would be treated equitably that I was losing track of the fact that there are some differences, such as cultural, which have to receive some special attention.”

  At that point he started getting an emotional involvement in what he had to do. And that made it easier to get changes made. But I wanted him to understand everything from a logical approach, to see the intellectual basis.

  Eliminating discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity seemed so right to him that he could not understand why others didn’t deal with it from a logical basis. Even if the whole world was full of bigots, he just could not understand how a senior military commander still wouldn’t be committed to equal opportunity and treatment because it made good sense from the point of view of mission effectiveness. Otherwise, you were not allowing your resources to develop. It was very simple.

  In less than three years, we instituted some 200 programs. We had a new Navy. The first ships were named after black heroes. The first black was promoted to admiral. Ten percent of our NROTC units were set aside for predominantly black colleges. We guaranteed that blacks would be on promotion boards, assignment boards, and would make their way to the command colleges. The steward’s rate was opened up to anyone, not just blacks and Filipinos. We opened all rates to women and welcomed them into the Naval Academy. And we relaxed the rules on haircuts and allowed beards.

  A lot of people didn’t like what was happening, and Zumwalt and I got called every name imaginable.

  The flag officers were especially resentful that I was so outspoken, just a lieutenant commander, and Zumwalt always supported me.

  One admiral did everything he could think of to block me or get me to quit. He would question the legal aspects of each new effort, unaware, of course, that I already had done so. He would offer me orders to this fabulous assignment, or he would try to find something he considered more important for me to do. Always, I said no. Finally he called me in to tell me that the Navy had been making some progress and now I was setting it all back by creating enemies.

  You know, I was always able to find out any information I needed about the effective implementation of our equal opportunity programs, about race relations or any race crisis. It was not because I had Zumwalt’s signature in my hip pocket. Not because I didn’t have the power to get a Naval investigation going. But because the admirals and senior people almost always talked in front of their stewards and drivers as if they didn’t exist. And the drivers and stewards would pass information on to me in a matter of hours.

  In spite of everything that Admiral Zumwalt was willing to do for me in terms of promotions and assignments, I decided to resign from active duty in 1973. I really did believe we needed a period of consolidating the gains. I was so much associated with change and a kind of bellicose manner. We had had to use a meat cleaver instead of a rapier at first to get everyone’s attention. And there were too many very, very senior officers who would love to have gotten me in a situation in which I was no longer with the CNO. And they never had any reservations about saying it.

  And so I went to work for Cummins Engine Company in the area of corporate action and responsibility.

  When I heard that Saigon had fallen, I felt angry. I’m sort of competitive. I don’t like to lose at anything. We had put all this effort and lives into this, and we lost. Then when I saw the people climbing over our Embassy trying to get out, I felt a certain degree of disgrace and sadness.

  Then I began to feel deceived, deceived by our foreign policy-makers. There was no question in my mind that if we were not prepared to go to the limit to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Communists, then we should not have done anything. We should have been willing to commit more resources. We could have bombed the dikes in North Vietnam, used stronger tactical weapons—not nuclear weapons. Gone to the heart of North Vietnam and bombed them. Maybe up until the Tet Offensive, we could have done a large quantity of things. And we didn’t have all
the daily media to inform us on how much was going on. After Tet, that kind of escalation I think would have caused rioting everywhere back home.

  Even when we pulled our forces out, I wondered, Why give up now? Even if we had had to maintain a permanent presence like we have in South Korea, that would have been a far preferable solution than the Communist takeover.

  I realize Vietnam was an evolutionary process, from our clandestine role, to a covert one, to the wide-open participation. But I think we muddled through because our policy-makers had the sense that there wasn’t the national resolve to fight the kind of war that would win. When it came time to take strong actions, it was too late.

  I think the people who were there, like me, were doing their duty as they understood it. We were fighting for the honor, the integrity, and the national interests of this country. What upsets me now and will always is that there were policy-makers with a perception based on a set of conditions that was not reality.

  I finally did get to South Vietnam. One of the first things I did when I became Zumwalt’s assistant was to tour all the Naval facilities throughout the world. When I went to Saigon, Danang, and other places in the war, I met with black soldiers, sailors, and Marines, and talked with them. I discovered a militancy of a nature that I’ve never seen before in anyone.

  These men belonged to a generation that was far, far more outspoken than any generation of black men before them. So they get over there, get introduced to the drugs, the killings, the uncertainty, and they still had to put up with racism within the service. They were there to kill and be killed. About ready to die. To do first-class dying. Yet in terms of their assignments and promotions and awards, they were getting second-class treatment. It created a special brand of bitterness.

  And many of them came back home with less than honorable discharges, caused by their anger and outspokenness. So they lost their veterans’ benefits, which weren’t so great anyway.