Nation: BLACK POWER IN VIET NAM

(2 of 4)

White pinups have been replaced by black ones. One all-black hootch in Danang sports more than 500 such photographs. "I don't want any stringy-haired beast* broad on my wall. Black is beauty." In a Saigon "soul kitchen," blacks greet each other over spareribs and chittlins with 57 varieties of Black Power handshakes that may end with giving the receiver "knowledge" by tapping him on the head or vowing to die for him by crossing the chest, Roman legion style (see chart).

Many of today's young black soldiers are yesterday's rioters, expecting increased racial conflict in Viet Nam and at home when they return. Elaborate training in guerrilla warfare has not been lost upon them, and many officers, black and white, believe that Viet Nam may prove a training ground for the black urban commando of the future. As in America, the pantheon of black heroes has changed. The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins is a "uniform tango"—military phonetics for U.T., or Uncle Tom—and Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke is an "Oreo" cookie —black on the outside, white on the inside. "The N.A.A.C.P., Urban League and Martin Luther King were good for their time and context," says Marine Corporal Joseph Harris of Los Angeles, "but this is a new time." King and Robert Kennedy, once among the young black soldier's idols, have died violently, Says Wardell Sellers, a rifleman from New York: "They were trying to help the brothers—you can see what that got them." Now many blacks see the case of Edward Kennedy as a plot to remove one more hope. "Just like King and Bobby Kennedy," says Pfc. Carl Horsley, 19, "They gon' try to hang Teddy 'cause he was on the side of the brothers." To most black soldiers, Nixon doesn't even bear discussion. "If he were a brother," says Ronald Washington, a black sailor from Los Angeles, "he'd be the number one Uncle Tom."

In the jungle lies death for a cause that many black soldiers don't understand or dismiss as white man's folly. "Why should I come over here when some of the South Vietnamese live better than my people in 'the world'? " asks a black Marine. "We have enough problems fighting white people back home."

Black racism is strong, but so are provocations by white soldiers. Soon after Martin Luther King was killed, crosses were burned at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay. Confederate flags still fly from barracks and trucks, and are even worn as shoulder patches on the uniforms of helicopter pilots stationed at Phu Loi. Black soldiers at Con Thien grimace when whites call a Negro sergeant "brown boy" and a mongrel puppy "soul man." Base club operators who accept country and western but not soul music from their entertainers have paid a toll. Clubs were wrecked in Chu Lai, Qui Nhon and a dozen other places in the past twelve months. Two white sailors were recently tried for inciting a riot at the Tan My Club.