- The war in Vietnam was the first in U.S.

history fought by a fully integrated military.

But today's guest says that the challenge beyond the battlefield was that American society was not as fully integrated as the fighting force that served it.

He's Wil Haygood this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, and my guest this week is Wil Haygood, a remarkable writer and journalist whose latest book is "The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home."

He's joining us today from Washington, D.C.

Wil, thank you so much for being with us today.

- It is great to be here.

Thank you.

- It is our privilege to have you, and I have to say congratulations on "The War Within a War."

This is a remarkable piece of reporting and history and storytelling.

It retraces that interplay between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the actual conduct of the war in Vietnam.

What led you to write this book?

- Well, I grew up on a quiet street in Columbus, Ohio, and I had six older friends, guys who I would play with at the playground.

We would play basketball and softball and throw horseshoes.

They were sort of my heroes.

They were sports figures in the neighborhood.

One of them lived right across the street from me.

His name was Skip Dunn, and he was a senior in high school, and I was in the fifth grade, and I would wave to Skip every morning as he was going off to school.

And then there came a time when I didn't see Skip anymore.

One day turned into a week, turned into two weeks, and I asked my sister, who went to high school with Skip, and she said, "Skip's gone to a place called Vietnam."

I didn't quite know what that meant.

And... I later learned that five more guys his age were sucked out of my neighborhood, my older heroic friends, and they were also going off to Vietnam.

So in 1968, my mother moved to the segregated east side of the city, and we lived in a housing project, and Martin Luther King Jr.

had been assassinated.

And all of a sudden there were tanks, uprisings, the streets were on fire.

And I found myself as a little kid running from these tanks during the riots.

So at a young age, I had experienced two epical moments in American history: Vietnam, in as much as six of my friends had gone off to the war, and the Civil Rights Movement, in as much as I was a young kid running from the tanks because the cities were on fire.

So those two things really stayed with me throughout my life.

And as a writer, I always look for stories that haven't been told, and there just didn't seem to be a big narrative to look at those twin things, Vietnam and civil rights in the Black world that had to deal with both of those things inside of the USA.

- It's kind of remarkable that here we are, you know, 60 years hence from the events you're describing in the book, that there isn't that kind of account there.

I've read enough history about the Vietnam War and that era, and there's often a reference to each element of those epics.

But why do you think nobody has tried to actually do what you've done here, which is address them both in the same book?

- Yes.

I think if you are a writer and you get into the tunnel of Vietnam, it's so complex.

It's so epic.

It's so jaw-dropping that you tend to stay in that tunnel.

If you're a civil rights historian, it's so epic, it's so monumental that you tend to stay in that tunnel.

To go back and forth between the two takes a lot of work because there are a whole lot of incidents that you have to keep in the air.

And for me, somebody who has covered war, who has been in war zones, who has traveled throughout the American South, who has interviewed a lot of the great civil rights leaders, John Lewis, et cetera, in this nation's history, it just seemed a perfect melding of where my interests lie.

- Well, you do a tremendous job of navigating those different elements of the narrative.

You make it clear, though, that events back in the United States, whether we're talking about Selma or the riots in Watts, or we're talking about MLK coming out against the war or King's assassination a year later, every one of those moments you trace to events that are happening in Vietnam.

Explain for the audience, if you would, what that interplay is like, the dialogue essentially that takes place between events in the United States, Vietnam, and then back again.

- Yes.

Well, you had soldiers who were Black, who were 17 years old, 18 years old, 19 years old, very young, and they would be in a war zone.

And they often came out of an environment that was segregated back in the USA.

Even though we had passed the civil rights bills, those bills hadn't seeped into the consciousness of everyone in this country.

So there was still a lot of blowback against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

And so these young Black men who already came out of areas that were on fire because they weren't treated fairly, or their mother couldn't vote, or their uncle couldn't find a place to live in a particular neighborhood, their brothers and sisters and family members would write them letters, and they would explain what was going on back in the states.

So just think of this: a young soldier who is 19 years old, who maybe came out of Cincinnati or Philadelphia or Newark, has been sent to war to fight for a nation that is keeping his family down, and he's being asked to kill to keep the system back in his hometown in play.

So that had to stay on the soldier's mind.

He had to ask himself, "Why am I over here and my family doesn't have freedom back in the USA?

Why am I fighting to keep that form of government going?"

And I think it played on a lot of their minds.

It was hard for the U.S.

government to talk about racism during the war because racism is a tough topic to talk about when you're talking about patriotism.

And that's war.

War happens to be patriotism.

If you're patriotic, then you're going to go to war to fight for your country.

And there was no group of people more willing to fight for freedom in this country than the Black soldier, because in their mind, maybe if we prove to society that we will fight this war that we really can't explain, maybe people will start to treat us much better if we prove our loyalty to the United States.

- And that's a refrain that runs through America's conflicts throughout American history.

You think about even just the other wars in the 20th century: the First World War, the Second World War, Korea.

But by the time we get to the Vietnam War, this is the first time the U.S.

military is fighting as an integrated force where you don't just have Black units and white units; you have integrated units.

What did that mean practically on the battlefields of Vietnam?

- It meant a lot because it was the first time, Jim, where Black and white soldiers were forced to form a bond.

Now, there were many heroes who were white who wanted this racial experiment to work.

And there were very many Black soldiers who, of course, wanted it to work as well.

So they formed bonds over there at a time of war.

When you go into war and you're fighting and there are guns going off and then there are bombs going off, you really want to save your butt.

You really want to save your friend, be they Black or white.

You all really want to get back home.

You had a year tour of duty in Vietnam and you wanted to get through that 12 months; some people had 13 months, but you really wanted to get back home.

Now, it was extremely hard for a soldier who's Black, who's in his tent and comes out of that tent in the morning and spots a KKK flag or symbol outside of their tent.

Because there were a lot of Southerners who had been born and raised in segregation that they didn't take easily to the military being integrated.

And so it was a constant struggle.

There were uprisings, and it came to a point where the same civil rights struggle that was going on in the USA was simply transported over to Vietnam.

So much so that the North Vietnamese would drop leaflets.

And those leaflets would say, "We want to tell the Black American soldier that your fight is not with us.

Your fight is in your country for equal rights."

These were leaflets that the Black soldiers would find in the bush that were taped to trees.

So you can imagine what that did to their mindset.

- It's, you know, with some of the statistics that you cite in the book, sort of speak to this point.

And they left me pretty staggered.

So in 1965, Black Americans made up 12% of the population of the nation as a whole, but 25% of the military and more than 30% of the ground combat units.

But were 80% of the population at Long Binh Jail, which was a U.S.-operated jail in Vietnam for soldiers who had committed offenses of varying degrees.

At the same time, only 2% of the officers in Vietnam were Black.

So, you know, you could get into this in some detail and looking at some specific cases of American service members, Black American service members serving in Vietnam, navigating that.

But how do those sorts of inequities, those disconnects in those data points, how do those manifest themselves in the way an individual soldier might conduct themselves with the pressures they might feel in the face of a battle on a battlefield?

- Well, if you were Black in Vietnam and you were a soldier, your chances of seeing a Black officer were very slim.

They were just very slim.

So all of your orders, for the most part, came from whites.

It got better as the war went on.

But to the soldier who was Black, he all of a sudden had to relive things that he had experienced in his own hometown.

And so there was this constant ruling within their own mind: how can I rise in the military if I'm seeing some of the same racist practices here that I might see in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Houston?

And so there would be these incidents, and sometimes they were small incidents and sometimes they were big.

For instance, if a Black soldier, if his Afro was too long and he was told about it more than once, he might get sent to jail.

If a white soldier's hair was too long, he might not get sent to jail.

So that's why you had more Black soldiers in Long Binh Jail than you did white soldiers.

And of course, the Long Binh Jail erupted in an infamous riot that didn't get a lot of national news back in the USA because the Army just didn't want that news out.

It was amazing when I started this book four and a half, five years ago, that there were not a lot of news stories that came out of Vietnam about the racial clashes.

Some papers covered it, but... it was seen as a story idea that we might not want to touch.

And so it just wasn't written about, partly ever, all of the racial clashes.

- One of the stories that you tell is about George Forrest, a young American officer in the Ia Drang River Valley, fighting in that battle.

And one of the lessons that emerges from that, I thought, was that the color of somebody's skin sort of became less important when the enemy was shooting at you.

And we see that again and again in the stories they tell George Forrest, but also Fred Cherry.

Can you talk a little bit about that experience in either of those cases?

- Yes.

I fell in love with both Fred Cherry and George Forrest.

These were really true heroes.

George Forrest was sent on a rescue mission to some men, to a unit that had been trapped.

And he had to run back through enemy fire to save some of his men, white and Black.

And he did it, and he did it, And his men were just in awe of him that he kept running along this line to check on his men.

Very interesting.

He had been a football player in college, and he told me, he said, "I was a tight end.

And when I was running back to save my men, I was back on the football field.

And I knew that I had to get through all of the fire, all of the bullets that started whizzing by me."

He said, "So I just kept running and running."

Just a phenomenal story.

Fred Cherry was the first Black officer taken as a POW in North Vietnam.

He was a pilot, he was in the Air Force, and the North Vietnamese put Fred Cherry in a cell with the white officer from the USA.

The North Vietnamese thinking was that this Black man and this white man would be at each other's throats.

Just the opposite happened.

They both formed a wonderful bond and they both ended up saving each other's life in their own way, be it helping them heal their wounds or helping them stay psychologically alive.

And they both made it out of the war.

And they both became lifelong friends.

It's an amazing, wonderful story.

- That's amazing.

So when we did our little pre-interview, Wil, I said, is there one particular experience in the book that you wanted to be sure that you relayed?

And you mentioned the example of Dorothy Harris, an Army nurse, and Captain Leroy Pitts.

Do you want to tell that story now?

- Yes, Dorothy Harris, she came out of Cincinnati and she wanted to join the Army, and she did.

And of course, during the time of Vietnam, women weren't fighting.

And so she became a nurse.

She was in Saigon.

And one day she met a guy named Leroy Pitts.

He was a captain and he was very charming, and he would bring the nurses Coca-Colas every day.

He worked in public relations and he kept telling the nurses, he said, "I really want to be a general, so I have to go out into battle.

I have to fight."

And the nurses said, "Leroy, don't go into battle.

You're doing a good job here.

It's very dangerous fight."

And he said, "No, no, no, I have to go into battle."

And so he did.

He went into battle.

He was an officer.

One day, he's sitting in camp at night and a small grenade is thrown into the fireplace.

Leroy Pitts jumps over onto that grenade to save his men.

His men knew he was gonna die.

"He's dead.

He saved our life."

Only the grenade malfunctioned and didn't go off.

And they told Pitts the next morning, and they said, "When we get back to camp, we're going to put you in for the Medal of Honor.

What you did for us was astonishing."

He brushed it off.

A week later, he stood up in camp, getting ready to go off to another zone to fight, and he was killed.

There was a mortar attack that hit him right in the head.

Dorothy Harris and the other nurses were crushed.

Dorothy Harris serves her time in the military and she's happy in that Leroy Pitts gets the Medal of Honor back in Washington, D.C.

And 20 years passed, and she can't sleep.

She has PTSD.

Her therapist tells her that there's something that she isn't dealing with in life.

And she says, "I think I know what it is.

I need to go to Oklahoma to visit Captain Pitts' gravesite."

And so she did.

She drove by herself and she went to his gravesite.

Then she went to meet his widow, Mrs.

Pitts, and Mrs.

Harris and Mrs.

Pitts have remained friends to this day.

An astonishing thing happened.

There was some news footage that was found of Captain Pitts about four months ago in Vietnam, and his two small kids at the time that he went to Vietnam, now they're grown, but some of their memories of him had started to fade.

And so they see this news footage four months ago that nobody had ever seen.

And they start crying, of course, and I get in touch again with Mrs.

Pitts.

And of course, it's a very moving moment for the family.

And Mrs.

Pitts told me, she said, "Wil, all the medals that he got were wonderful, but we would rather have our captain back."

It was very touching, very touching.

- The book is full of that kind of poignancy and just, just tremendously... I don't think we can talk about the Black experience in Vietnam and not talk about the impact of Agent Orange on the veteran community, generally speaking, in Black veterans in particular.

What is the legacy of that element of the war for Black Americans?

- Very haunting and, you know, very tragic.

A lot of those veterans came back from the war and they were still in these tough urban areas and they felt mistreated at the Veterans Hospital.

And they had to fight to get what they thought was fair treatment.

And of course they had to file lawsuits with the white soldiers.

But there's a character in this book by the name of Maude DeVictor from Chicago, who made it her mission to help these soldiers.

But she was Black.

So she sensed, she sensed that the Black soldiers had a higher hill to climb to get fair treatment.

And she took it on as her mission.

I mean, she was treating all of the soldiers as well as she could.

But she teamed with reporter Bill Kurtis, who I interviewed, and they put out a special documentary about the effects of Agent Orange.

And it got a lot of attention.

She got a lot of attention.

She was eventually driven out of the Veterans Administration.

But that's one more, an example of a Black woman and a white man forming an amazing bond to do what was right for the soldiers.

And there are a lot of examples like that in this book.

I really think the Vietnam War, for all of the horrors of that war, it brought Black and whites together in a way that wasn't happening in the USA on the streets.

It really did.

Because it's war, it's intense.

You have to sit down, you have to look over maps together, you have to eat together, you know, and it just created a bond that you couldn't run from.

You were at war, you know, and the more time you spend around somebody and talk to them, then you get to hear about their hometowns, their families, their sons, their daughters.

And it's just amazing.

There was a soldier.

There was a soldier from Kentucky.

- In about 30 seconds, Wil.

- Yeah, and he's white.

And he had been used to using the N-word.

He went to Vietnam, made a lot of Black friends.

And the first thing he told his children when he got back to Kentucky was, "Never again will the N-word be used at this dinner table."

And that was a direct result of having been in Vietnam.

- Wil Haygood, it's a remarkable accomplishment, "The War Within a War."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but you can find us online or on social media, and you can always catch up on previous episodes.

Thank you for watching.

I hope you'll join us again next week for more "Story in the Public Square."

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