American Lesion

Iread two books over the last month. They’re titled, The Good Shepherd and Uncommon Valor. Both deal with race in ways I think are admirable. Here’s the story:

American Rejection

I’ve always been fascinated by war and by warriors. I tried to enlist in the United States Marine Corps in 2000. The factors that precipitated that decision included that:

• I’d recently, and barely, completed high school but I hadn’t yet found my way to college.

• I thought, naively, that I might right the capsizing ship my life had become by testing my mettle in the crucible of combat.

Uncle Sam rejected me though. Religious fanatics hadn’t yet flown passenger jets into the Twin Towers. And the United States hadn’t yet developed its insatiable hunger for fresh boots to put on Middle Eastern ground. The Corps could still afford to be picky about whom it recruited. 19-year-olds, with criminal charges pending for drug-related crimes, and forearm tattoos, didn’t fit the bill.

I nevertheless retained an indomitable drive to learn and understand everything there is to know about military, military history, and combat.

The history of humanity = the history of warfare.

I took that axiom seriously and personally. During even the darkest moments, of the darkest years of my life, I understood my personal struggles through the prism of battle, the military, and humanity’s sordid military history.

American Intoxication

War is dramatic in a way stateside peace — and stateside violence, for that matter — can never be. War is the human animal in its most destructive permutation. War is the human animal in its most organized and efficient permutation. War is the human animal in its most altruistic and in its most barbaric permutations.

War is the human animal at both its most primitive and its most evolved.

There’s something intoxicating about that.

The Good Shepherd

The two books I read over the last month delivered all of those elements in spades.

The Good Shepherd tells the story of Commander Krause, a destroyer Captain in the United States Navy. The fictional, but decidedly reality-bound, novel is set in 1942, shortly after the United States joined World War II. It’s the Battle of the Atlantic.

At that early stage of the war, the Allied Forces were on their heels technologically and logistically. Britain was particularly hard pressed in its struggle to stave off Nazi invasion. The island nation depended on merchant shipping from the United States and Canada for materials vital to its survival, ranging from ammunition to oil to food.

The German navy, via its infamous fleet of U-boats (submarines), sought to starve Britain into submission by sinking merchant vessels bound for Britain. The allies combatted the U-boat threat by herding merchant vessels across the North Atlantic in convoys.

Merchant convoys were more-or-less safe from U-Boats while they were relatively close to their ports of origin, or relatively close to their destinations ports. Within those windows of safety, they were able to leverage U.S. air assets on the west side of the Atlantic, and British air assets on the east side of the Atlantic for effective tactical air cover.

But once a merchant convoy passed outside of the protective umbrella provided by aircraft, its only meaningful defense was the often less-than-sufficient defensive screens an team of destroyers and destroyer escorts could provide. These small, fast, and maneuverable vessels were U-boat killers, bristling with 5 inch guns and depth charges. They also sported the latest (but still woefully inadequate) U-boat hunting technology such as radio detection and ranging devices (RADAR), and sound navigation and ranging devices (SONAR).

Krause commands his own destroyer as well as a multi-national convoy which includes a second destroyer, two destroyer escorts, and 37 merchant vessels. The novel details Krause’s harrowing, relentless, 53-hour ordeal as his escort element shepherds the merchant vessels across the North Atlantic.

Uncommon Valor

Last month’s second book is about the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG or SOG). In this meticulously researched book, the author details MACV SOG’s, quite literally, heroic exploits during the Vietnam War.

SOG was a reconnaissance organization that operated alongside other special operations outfits like the Navy SEALs and Marine Corps Force Recon.

But SOG warriors were different from their spec ops cousins. SOG warriors undertook, by far, the most harrowing and risky assignments that military intelligence could dish out during the Vietnam conflict. SOG warriors’ missions were mostly “across the fence.” That is, the missions were typically illegal incursions into the officially (but not practically) neutral countries of Laos and Cambodia.

The U.S. government disavowed any knowledge of SOG’s missions. SOG warriors generally wore no military insignia at all. In SOG’s early days, its operators didn’t even carry American-made weapons typical of the era such as the M-16, M-14, CAR-15, or the M-79. They carried foreign-made weapons instead. It was paramount that the White House be able to plausibly deny American actions across the fence in the event a SOG warrior became a prisoner of war.

All-too-often, these swashbuckling, go-for-broke warriors ended their tours of duty killed in action or missing in action. 100 percent casualty rates were not uncommon among SOG units. Sometimes, entire SOG teams vanished altogether into the steamy Cambodian jungle.

American Division

These books are quite different from one another. They describe two fundamentally different wars, fought by two fundamentally different generations of Americans, who hailed from two fundamentally different Americas.

On one hand, the Japanese Imperial Navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, coupled with the United States’ concrete wartime objectives and robust wartime propaganda campaign, ensured that Americans overwhelmingly supported U.S. involvement in WWII.

On the other hand, the abstract justifications for the Vietnam War, and practically unfettered press access to the front lines, coupled with seismic cultural changes on the home front, ensured that Americans’ support for the Vietnam War was historically anemic.

Also, the America (and the Americans) that destroyed Nazi cult-fascism and Japanese cult-imperialism was very different than the America that bungled the Vietnam War. When the United States entered WWII, it was an isolationist, second rate world power, and unwitting ally to the U.S.S.R. By the time the United States entered the Vietnam conflict just 20 years later, it had transformed into a hegemonic superpower engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the only other superpower to survive WWII: the U.S.S.R.

The books themselves are also fundamentally distinct. The Good Shepherd is a fast-paced, thriller-style novel told by a semi-omniscient narrator from a third person perspective. Uncommon Valor, by contrast, is a detailed, biographical, and historical piece of nonfiction.

American Racism

Still, the two books are the same from the perspective that motivated me to write this article. That is, both authors depict faithfully the role of black people in the U.S. armed forces during both WWII and the Vietnam War.

Messmate

President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948. With that pen stroke, and against the backdrop of conservatives’ typically rabid resistance to justice, the American president commenced the decades long process of integrating the U.S. armed forces. Black soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen would, for the first time, serve shoulder-to-shoulder with their white countrymen.

The executive order did more, though, than simply integrate the U.S. armed forces. The order elevated, technically anyway, black servicemen to full membership in the military. Prior to that historic act of the Chief Executive, black folks were relegated to service roles. We shined white officers’ shoes. We cleaned crews’ quarters. We drove trucks. And we were “Mess Boys” who cooked and served white officers’ food.

We were deemed, via laughable pseudoscience, mentally and emotionally unfit to serve in combat roles or in technical roles. So, with the exception of a handful of all-black units (e.g., the Black Panther Division and the Tuskegee Airmen), black folks spent the war in the same position we occupied stateside — as a servile underclass.

Far more devastating was that the G.I. bill, which essentially constructed the American middle class from whole cloth after WWII, was designed and implemented in a way that deliberately excluded African Americans. That monstrous injustice has had lasting impacts on the black community in the United States. The achievement gap that persists between white Americans and black Americans reflects that impact.

Fucking bullshit.

“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me, ‘Nigger’”

There’s a fundamental irony that’s inherent to the experience of the African American fighting man:

He fights and dies so that citizens of far-off nations might be free even as he endures the indignity of injustice at home.

This incongruence was especially wrenching during WWII — a conflict in which black men and women died to liberate Europe from fascism only to return home to the de facto police state under which black Americans lived (and, in many ways, continue to live).

That sickening juxtaposition was no less true for black service members during the Vietnam War which, of course, was coincident with the dates traditionally associated with the Civil Rights Era. (I predict that historians in the far future will, with the benefit of perspective, regard the Civil Right Era to have begun with Reconstruction and ended … let’s just say at some time long after 2020).

Here again, black servicemen and women fought a war ostensibly to liberate a foreign nation from tyrannical, anti-democratic forces. Meanwhile, back in the land of the free, it required an act of Congress, and the national guard, to even begin to ensure those same rights for African Americans. This is especially true for African American veterans who have consistently been prime targets for white racist violence due to “their training in weapons, in organizations, in tactics: the skills of self-assertion.”

Fucking bullshit.

But the tale of rank injustice doesn’t end there.

By the time the U.S. military was engaging the North Vietnamese Army and Viet-Cong guerillas in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, it’s reticence to trust black folks in combat roles had vanished. That’s an understatement, in fact. Reticence was replaced with exuberance. While African Americans represented just 11 percent of the American population, we represented:

• 16.3 percent of all draftees.

• 23 percent of all combat troops.

• 25 percent of all combat deaths.

Those numbers did improve over the course of the war, but throughout the conflict, black troops were disproportionately assigned to combat units and disproportionately killed in the line of duty.

To be sure, the realities of small unit combat, coupled with evolving social mores, meant that some black troops bonded with some white troops. After all, when the 7.62×39mm rounds and the mortar shells and the RPGs are hurtling down, there are no black soldiers or white soldiers. All soldiers are army green and plastered to the bottom of their foxholes.

Still, black GIs serving in Vietnam faced persistent discrimination and de facto segregation. Black service members were disproportionately assigned menial duties, denied due promotion, and unfairly targeted for punishment. In point of fact, a 1972 Defense Department study found that black GIs received 25.5 percent of nonjudicial punishments and 34.3 percent of courts-martial during the Vietnam conflict. This trend of over-punishment persists today.

It’s no wonder then that black troops often lacked any sense of personal stake in the outcome of the war. This sentiment was widespread among American servicemen in Vietnam in general. Especially during the latter half of the war.

But it was particularly apparent among that cohort of troops — black troops — who were constantly denigrated by the military. The same military into which they were drafted to fight a war on behalf a country that refused to recognize them as full citizens.

Fucking bullshit.

American Justice

Over the course of my life, I’ve gorged myself on as much media related to the military and to combat action as I could get my hands on. Both in film and in print. My litmus test has always been realism and historical accuracy.

I’m disappointed by films that place, for example, WWI era rifles in the hands of WWII era paratroopers.

I’m annoyed by books that portray military tactics and protocols unfaithfully.

I’m upset when they portray famous battles poorly.

I’m full-on incensed by films and books which, in their attempts to keep white folks comfortable about the blood-stained horror show that is American history, rewrite that history such that black people are in combat roles or are duly respected by their white peers.

Neither The Good Shepherd nor Uncommon Valor make these colossal missteps.

These books are not about black soldiers, Marines, sailors, or airmen. Not specifically, anyway. Rather, both books tell rather typical military stories. But they stand out because they tell those stories while honoring — or at least not disparaging — the lived experience and legacy of the African American serviceman.

The Good Messmate

Commander Krause, the protagonist in The Good Shepherd, is attended by a messmate. In the book, the messmate is Filipino. But in Tom Hanks’ film adaptation of the novel, Greyhound, the messmate is black.

The Messman Branch of the U.S. Navy was responsible for feeding and serving naval officers. The branch was explicitly racially segregated and it was the only way African Americans could serve in the U.S. Navy during WWII. While messmates were generally mere servants to an all-white officer corps, when the boats on which they served engaged in active combat (were at general quarters), messmates became warriors.

The Good Shepherd and Greyhound portray the realities of that experience faithfully. The story goes out of its way to identify the messmate as non-white and declines to gloss over the injustice that that implies.

Respect.

A “Black” Staff Sergeant

While The Good Shepherd and Greyhound engage with race issues briefly through the messmate storyline, Uncommon Valor does no such thing. It is not at all a book about race.

Still, each time author Stephen L. Moore refers to a non-white SOG warrior, he identifies that warrior as such. A black Staff Sergeant isn’t just a “Staff Sergeant.” He’s a “black Staff Sergeant.”

Moore’s distinction really matters. The “I don’t see color” lie he correctly (if not purposely) eschews pervades books related to the Vietnam War. And it pervades white America generally. In both cases, it’s a deflection tactic that gives the White Moderate cover to think of herself as not racist while ignoring the systemic roadblocks that prevent the U.S. from living up to the values it espouses.

The reality is, of course, that we all see color. And our various colors are very much relevant in American life. Moore’s hat tip to that distinction is just that — a mere hat tip. Still, in the arena where artists and historians do or do not portray the black experience faithfully, small, thoughtful, and consistent recognitions can matter far more than comparatively clumsy grand gestures.

Respect.

American Lesion

Both The Good Shepherd and Uncommon Valor are departures from the stories typical of their genre.

Stories like these sometimes portray black service members fighting alongside their white counterparts; with white GIs clapping black GIs on the back as though white racism and de jure and de facto segregation were a non-issue.

Far more often though, these sorts of stories simply omit the black experience altogether. After all, the last thing American readers and moviegoers want is a reminder of how profoundly the U.S. has fucked over black people.

Such a recognition would imply the moral impetus for redress. Perhaps more to the point, such recognition would clarify that white America, explicitly and systematically, and legislatively, prevented black people (and especially black veterans) from the progress white America has enjoyed.

It would thus call into question everything white America likes to believe it achieved fair and square.

It would demand that white America drop its reliance on the just world fallacy and stop blaming black people for failing to thrive in an objectively, obviously, rigged environment.

You know what, fuck it. I’ma move to fucking Vietnam.

After all, no Vietnamese ever called me, “nigger.”