where are the navy seals called men with black faces during the vietnam war era

“Soldiers were still dealing with those deeply rooted perceptions about who they’re fighting next to,” Jeffries says.Īs the fighting dragged on, ugly statistics revealed how African Americans were being disproportionately affected by the war. “But when you got back to base camp, you had what you’d call de facto segregation.” In Saigon, Black troops often spent their time off in a section of the city that would come to be known as Soulsville meanwhile, their white counterparts were being promoted at a higher rate. “Out in the field, everyone had to depend on everyone,” Duery Felton, a veteran, says. These structures persisted overseas, even if Black and white soldiers had to fight side-by-side. “The racism was there: it was real and felt between soldiers.” “Although we’re talking about an era after the Civil Rights Act, officers and soldiers had deep Southern racist roots,” Jeffries says. But many Black soldiers were immediately faced with discrimination and racism during basic training, which typically took place in the Jim Crow south. In 1964, American troops began arriving in Vietnam in large numbers following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, with the new integration policies a source of optimism. Black soldiers were receiving inadequate training and resources.” “It’s also important to understand that even though it was segregated, it wasn’t equal. “They were in service positions they were mostly put in positions to do the grunt work,” he tells TIME. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a professor of African-American history at Ohio State University, says that before Vietnam, African-American soldiers were on the bottom of a rigid caste system. Bill was constructed in a way that denied benefits to many Black soldiers-and only increased the gaps in wealth and education between white and Black Americans. In 2016, a study released by the Equal Justice Initiative that found that between 18, “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than Black veterans.” After World War II, the G.I. The Vietnam War was the first American war in which its troops were fully integrated, a development that was supposed to turn the page on a ghastly history of institutional racism in the military. “We have enough problems fighting white people back home”

Where are the navy seals called men with black faces during the vietnam war era