Black Valor

Colin Powell's favorite story about the modern American Army goes something like this: It is the eve of Desert Storm. While interviewing soldiers, Sam Donaldson asks a young black soldier, "How do you think the battle will go? Are you afraid?" The soldier, according to Powell's autobiography, My American Journey, says, "We'll do OK, we're well trained. I'm not afraid." The members of his tank platoon--men and women of all races--shout, "Tell him again! He didn't hear you!" The soldier then says, "This is my family, and we take care of each other." By late last year, the U.S. helped overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan with a mix of air power, Special Operations Forces and technology. And the tactical victory came courtesy of a fully integrated military--something inconceivable as recently as 50 years ago. Today the U.S. military is one of the most progressive institutions in the country. In a few short decades it has made an about-face from its racist, segregated past. In the Gulf war, 20 percent of American troops were black (compared with 12 percent of the general population). For many underprivileged black Americans, the military is a source of opportunity and education. Witness the rise of Colin Powell, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is now secretary of state. He, and thousands like him, are part of a rich tradition worthy of celebration.

The history of blacks in the American military is equal parts epic and tragedy. Today, the most identifiable black patriot of early American history is Crispus Attucks, the first man killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre. But exploits of black fighting men in the Revolution, the Civil War, the Indian wars and the Spanish-American War were known and celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries by historians such as William Cooper Nell and George Washington Williams. Blacks fought at Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. In fact, Continental Army ranks were completely integrated--midway through the Revolution, black soldiers represented about 15 percent of Washington's Army (he called it his "mixed multitude"). By the end of the Civil War, 10 to 12 percent of the Union Army was black. Thanks to the movie Glory, many Americans know that free black men from the North fought for the Union. Less known is the fact that ex-slave Union soldiers from South Carolina single-handedly captured Jacksonville, Florida, or that fugitive slaves in Kansas fought Confederate Indians. And during the Indian wars, black "Buffalo" soldiers made up one fifth of the Indian-fighting Army.

Unfortunately for black soldiers, the politics of Southern revisionism--the political, historical and philosophical expression of white supremacy--permeated America during World Wars I and II. By the 20th century, revisionism ruled American culture, high and low, from Jim Crow laws to minstrel shows. Revisionists had history rewritten and saw it taught in American public schools until the civil rights battles of the Sixties. It was as if black military feats and the men who performed them had never existed. Revisionism was concerned with propagating the myth of the "happy slave"--black soldiers were out of the question.

Black American combat soldiers in World War I fought with French weapons, in French uniforms, under the French flag. By the time the Americans arrived, the French already had two generals, four colonels, 150 captains and countless lieutenants who were black, plus Senegalese troops who famously proved their heroism in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne. They also had Eugene Jacques Bullard, a childhood runaway from Georgia, who saw more war than any other American. In 1914, at the age of 20, he joined the special Friends of France battalion of the French Foreign Legion. When the Legion returned to Africa in 1915, Bullard joined the French Army and won the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire at Verdun. With a leg wound that made him unfit for the infantry, he joined the French Air Corps on a bet. As the first black fighter pilot in history, he made an unconfirmed but reported kill of a German triplane in November 1917. He was a Paris fixture between the wars, as a boxer and host of Le Grand Duc, a Montmartre nightclub frequented by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Thanks to his knowledge of French and German, Bullard was recruited as a spy by French intelligence in 1939. In May 1940 he was wounded and decorated in his second French war when he joined other old World War I vets at Orleans, the last French stand against the Germans. He escaped to America via Lisbon a month later. In 1959 the French made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor, and the following year at a reception, General Charles De Gaulle embraced him in his Foreign Legion uniform. At the time, Bullard was working as a Rockefeller Center elevator operator.

In Pearl Harbor, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a character based on Dorie Miller, the first American hero of World War II. The first man mentioned in Navy dispatches on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Miller was a messman on the West Virginia. (At that point the only types of duty in the Navy open to blacks were as messmen and stewards--neither was permitted or trained to use weapons.) When the West Virginia was attacked, Miller first carried his wounded captain to safety, then manned a gun to bring down at least three Japanese planes. The Navy was embarrassed that its hero was black, so Miller was originally described as an "unidentified Negro messman." An official white hero was found on December 9 in Navy pilot Captain Colin Kelly (Colin Powell's boyhood idol). Ultimately, after much black protest, Miller became the first black to win the Navy Cross. He died in the Pacific a year later, when the Liscome Bay went down with all hands.

In 1941 there were 5000 black enlisted men. By the end of the war, the number was 900,000. World War II saw the first black fighter pilots, paratroopers, armored combat units. Marines, Navy officers and women in uniform. Black troops were segregated into all-black battalions. Approximately 75 percent of the personnel were shunted into service and supply units, particularly in the Navy and the Marines (the last branch to accept blacks). The most action was seen by members of the Army Air Corps and the Army. By V-J Day the bravery and perseverance of these men and women were a powerful argument against segregation and banning these troops from combat.

The most glamorous fighting troops were members of the Army Air Corps. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr.--West Point's first black graduate in the 20th century (class of 1936) and the son of America's first black general, Benjamin O. Davis Sr.--led the 332nd Fighter Group. These first black American pilots were known as the Tuskegee Airmen, after their segregated training field in Alabama. Captain Lee "Buddy" Archer became the first black ace. In 1945 Captain Roscoe Brown Jr., another black fighter pilot, became the first American to down a new German jet. Flying more combat missions than any other unit in Europe, the 332nd saw action in Sicily and as fighter escorts in Western Europe and the Balkans. They were the only American escort group in those theaters never to lose a bomber. "Real patriotism has only one race," said Lieutenant Glenn Rendahl, pilot of one of the B-24s for whom the Tuskegee Airmen flew cover.

The 761st Tank Battalion, the first black armored tank unit, saw heavy action in France and Germany. Among the eager volunteers in the 761st was E.G. McConnell, a "very patriotic" Queens Boy Scout who went to basic training wearing his first long trousers. General George Patton himself chose the 761st to fight for him. McConnell will never forget how Patton welcomed them to Normandy on November 2, 1944 in typical blood-and-guts style: "Men, you're the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches." Afterward, Patton climbed aboard Private McConnell's tank to examine the new 76mm cannon. "Listen, boy," Patton said. "I want you to shoot every damn thing you see--little children, old ladies, everybody you see." McConnell replied "Yes, sir!" McConnell won a Purple Heart in France. In conversations nearly 50 years later he (continued on page 160)Black Valor(continued from page 72) vividly recounted a story that typifies his best and worst experiences with white soldiers. A two-star general visiting the hospital where McConnell was recovering passed all the beds and greeted each man. At McConnell's bed, the general said, "What's wrong with you, boy? Got the clap?" McConnell was too surprised and angry to respond, but a white 26th infantryman in the next bed said, "Hey, General, if he got it, he got it from your mother."

Solidarity among the races was growing. Popular white Captain David Williams II of the 761st A Company described himself as "a young punk out of Yale who changed as the action went along." He considered himself a "most unlikely candidate" for black troops. (Many all-black units were led by white officers.) "But I got my manhood with them," Williams told The New York Times. "These guys were better than heroes because they weren't supposed to be able to fight, and they were treated worse than lepers. I can tell you, it took a rare sort of character to go out there and do what they did. I used to ask myself, why the hell should these guys fight?" In 1997 a posthumous Medal of Honor went to A Company Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers. Williams had first recommended him for it in 1944. (No Medals of Honor were awarded to blacks in World Wars I and II prior to 1997--even though they had won them in every war before and after. Seven Medals of Honor were awarded that year, the result of a mid-Eighties campaign by the military to recognize black military valor. The only living recipient, then-Lieutenant Vernon Baker, had first been recommended for the Medal in 1945. "I was an angry young man," Baker told interviewers when asked about military racism. "We were all angry. But we had a job to do and we did it.")

Despite the heroic exploits of black soldiers, die-hard racists at home were furious at the possibility of armed blacks fighting in an integrated Army. Consequently, blacks fought two different wars on two different fronts. Witness this letter written in December 1944 by Robert Byrd, future U.S. senator from West Virginia. "I am a typical American," Byrd wrote to Mississippi's notoriously racist Senator Theodore Bilbo, "a Southerner, and 27 years of age, and never in this world will I be convinced that race mixing in any field is good. I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, but I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels." Unlike the black soldiers with whom he would "never submit to fight," Byrd didn't serve in the military in World War II.

Meanwhile, the Battle of the Bulge marked a change in the military's attitude toward integration: It was now a matter of necessity. Following heavy casualties during the initial German assault in December 1944, black soldiers were asked to volunteer to reinforce the front lines. Although the plan was to insert individual black soldiers to fight in white units, blacks were ultimately kept in small groups with white platoon leaders and squad leaders. Still, it was a radical new plan.

Bruce Wright, an Army medic, was one of thousands to volunteer for duty in the Bulge. He had already earned a Purple Heart on Omaha Beach on D day, and in the aftermath of the Bulge he'd earn a second Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. At the front line he was called a nigger by a captain--a common experience for these pioneers. But in general, integration was successful. (Before the experiment, only 33 percent of white Army officers were in favor of integration. Afterward, 77 percent favored it.) Even as a decorated veteran after the war, Wright was exposed to bigotry. As he boarded a troop ship to go home wearing all his medals, he heard a white Navy officer say, "I didn't know that niggers were fighting." Wright turned around and went AWOL to Paris. Only lightly punished because of his combat record, he still came home to America in chains. (He later entered New York University Law School on the GI Bill and became a New York Supreme Court justice as well as an author and poet.) Every man in the integration experiment was a combat veteran, entitled to a trip home and a 30-day furlough before being sent back into combat. But as soon as the fighting stopped, men were returned to labor battalions scheduled for shipment to the Pacific. In 1998, five veterans of the experiment who had lobbied to have their ranks restored and combat service entered into their records were awarded Bronze Stars.

In 1948 President Harry Truman, a man of compassionate pragmatism, officially desegregated the U.S. military by executive order. However, the military wasn't truly desegregated until halfway through the Korean War. (While the new Air Force swiftly and quietly integrated its ranks, the Army tried dancing around the order with plans for "separate but equal" units.) In August 1950 Private First Class William H. Thompson of the segregated 24th Infantry became the first American to win the Medal of Honor in Korea. Honored posthumously, Thompson died at his machine gun. He had laid down covering fire until the last of his company had withdrawn, and until he was mortally wounded. Cited for actions in August 1950, he was not officially recommended for his Medal until January 1951. Thompson's commander had at first refused to submit the recommendation.

The next president to make major military changes was John F. Kennedy, who, like other younger World War II officers, believed segregation was both immoral and inefficient. Sweeping the last vestiges of organized racism out of the military, he insisted that commanders oppose discrimination against personnel and dependents both on and off base. Southern military bases in the early Sixties were often islands of integration in the midst of Jim Crow seas. And Vietnam became the first war since the Revolution that was integrated from the outset.

Things looked different in 1965. Then Captain John Cash, like Colin Powell and many other black officers, believed there was no better place for a confident young black man in America than in the military. According to Cash, military morale was "tremendous," and the racial atmosphere was "sweetness and light." There was only one color: Army green. "It was a great Army," Cash said. The Army that was great in race relations and morale was also great in idealism and courage. It all came together in 1965 at the Battle of Ia Drang, the first major confrontation of the war. The 1965 Army is called the "Kennedy Class" in Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway's account of Ia Drang, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Echoing Kennedy in his inaugural speech, the 1965 Army asked what it could do for its country. "John F. Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery," wrote Moore and Galloway. "In time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us." By 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the idealism was gone. American streets and Vietnam jungles weren't far apart; an unfair draft united them and drugs were ubiquitous in both locales. So were anger against racism and anger against the war. Military soul brothers insisted on being black, not green--though, as in all wars, there were as few racists in foxholes as there were atheists.

The new crop of Vietnam veterans was different from those of previous years. They were survivors of a problematic war and a disastrous defeat. Yet vets managed to seize personal victory from the jaws of defeat. Throughout 1965, George Brummell, then a young sergeant at base camp near Cu Chi, heard the sound of digging under U.S. positions--but his superiors ignored reports of what became the famed Cu Chi tunnels. In 1966 Brummell was blinded by an antitank mine. Grateful for both an understanding family and Army rehabilitation, today he is an officer of the Blinded Veterans' Association. Duery Felton, who was turned down by the Navy because of a heart murmur, joined the Army in 1967. After being seriously wounded, he returned home and eventually became curator of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Collection. Wayne Smith went to Vietnam as an Army medic in 1968. The former altar boy from Providence turned against the war and lost his faith but signed up for a second tour because he didn't want to leave the men. "Nobody wanted to die alone in Vietnam," he told me. "The men always said, 'Doc, stay with me.' " He is now the executive director of the Justice Project, a research and advocacy group for veterans.

After the war the Army itself said, "No more Vietnams." A young Kennedy Class Vietnam officer named Colin Powell was one of the men drafted to create the New Army--all-volunteer and race-and-gender neutral. Once the most racist public entity in America, the Army turned itself around in the Seventies and Eighties after the debacle of Vietnam. It called for people of all colors and both sexes to "Be all you can be." The poster person for the slogan was, of course, General Powell. Jimmy Carter appointed the first black secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, who opened the general officers' list to Colin Powell. Ronald Reagan made Powell the first black national security advisor, and George Bush made him the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The story of Colin Powell, whose color is almost irrelevant to his fame, is crucial to the black military story. Powell himself said that he didn't believe in separating his race from his nationality. With Operation Desert Storm, the antidote to the Vietnam syndrome, the military came full circle. Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Calvin Waller was second in command to General Norman Schwarzkopf, and the first American to down a Scud missile over Riyadh was a black woman, Lieutenant Phoebe Jeter.

Black Americans have fought in Afghanistan, and blacks have died. These days, though, it is not the color of their skin that is significant, only the tragedy of their loss. The images from halfway around the world of black and white men and women are not censored. The names of our black heroes are no longer banished.

In January, when an American KC-130 refueling plane crashed in Pakistan, Sergeant Jeannette Winters of Gary, Indiana was one of seven Marines on board. She was the first servicewoman to die in the war. Her story was reported throughout the nation not because she was black or a woman, but because she had died for her country.

It's important not to dwell on past evils to the exclusion of celebrating how they were overcome. Black military history is a success story because it produced from its ranks so many successful men and women, all of whom believed that real patriotism has only one race. In fighting their country's enemies at home and abroad, they were also fighting for their country to be true to its own best promise. Their stories are as important for white Americans as blacks. This is not just the black view of history--this is the completed view.