Nation: BLACK POWER IN VIET NAM

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Violence has reached such a peak in the Danang area that lights have been installed on the streets of Cap Tien Sha to curb roving bands of white and black sailors who were attacking each other at night. At Dong Tam in the Delta and Dien Hoa north of Saigon, bands of black soldiers still waylay whites. A white officer in Danang was critically injured when a black Marine rolled a grenade under his headquarters. At the officer's side was a black sergeant with a reputation for not tolerating Afro haircuts and Black Power salutes.

Unrest among the blacks often turns on real discrimination or the failure of the military to accept the trappings of black soldiers bent on "doing their thing." Promotions, awards and coveted rear-area assignments are too often slow in coming the black soldiers' way, however well they fight or however high their proportion of casualties. Some 13% of battle deaths are black, while Negroes make up 11.1% of the American population and 9.2% of the military.

For all that, the black soldier in the bush still helps his white comrade and wants his help as well. At Phuoc Vmh, a black 1st Cavalry trooper recently dragged a wounded white from a rocketed hootch when no other black or white dared to venture in. A black Navy medic who had been in Viet Nam only two weeks fell on a grenade near Danang to save a white Marine and lost his own life. When black Lieut. Archie Bigger was three times wounded capturing enemy artillery pieces, eleven whites held, him aloft above the suffocating napalm smoke until a rescue chopper arrived. On Hamburger Hill, a white paratrooper tried vainly to breathe life into a fallen black medic.

Yet the violence at home and in "the Nam" leaves the black man with radically divided loyalties. Thus, says Lieut. Colonel Frank Peterson, the senior black officer in the Marine Corps, "the average black who has been here and goes back to the States is bordering somewhere on the psychotic as a result of having grown up a black man in America—having been given this black pride and then going back to find that nothing has changed."

Personal interviews conducted with 400 black enlisted men from Con Thien to the Delta provide a measure, though by no means a scientific sample, of the attitudes of black men in Viet Nam:

> 45% said they would use arms to gain their rights when they return to "the world." A few boasted that they are smuggling automatic weapons back to the States.

> 60% agreed that black people should not fight in Viet Nam because they have problems back home. Only 23% replied that blacks should fight in Viet Nam the same as whites.

> 64% believed that racial troubles in Viet Nam are getting worse. Only 6% thought that racial relations were improving. "Just like civilian life," one black Marine said, "the white doesn't want to see the black get ahead."

> 56% said that they use the Black Power salute. Only 1% condemned its use.

> 60% said they wear their hair Afro style. 17% wanted to, but said their commanders refused to let them. One Marine reported that he had been reduced in rank for refusing to get his hair cut closer.

> 55% preferred to eat their meals with blacks, 52% preferred to live in all-black barracks.