Nation: BLACK POWER IN VIET NAM

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> 41% said they would join a riot when they returned to the U.S. However, a nearly equal number, 40%, said they would not.

> 28% said they believed that weapons would help the black cause back home, while 35% thought that they would be harmful to it. "What the beast has done for me which is going to screw him," said a black Marine, "is teach me how to use a weapon. The Marines taught me how to improve."

Combat inevitably sharpens both emotions and rhetoric. It is an incendiary combination to be young, black, armed, 10,000 miles from home and in persistent danger of death in "a white man's war." When the men return to "the world," their perspective may shift, and doubtless many black soldiers will become so busy with their own affairs that their militance will fade somewhat. Even in Viet Nam, 53% of the black men interviewed said that they would not join a militant group such as the Black Panthers when they return to the U.S. Says Major Wardell Smith: "A lot of what they say they will do, they just won't. They won't be so closely knit, and they will have girls, wives, families and jobs to worry over." Nevertheless, a significant number seems likely to continue to believe that the U.S. owes the black soldier a debt both for his service in Viet Nam and his suffering at home. These men are a new generation of black soldiers. Unlike the veterans of a year or two ago, they are immersed in black awareness and racial pride. It is only this fall and winter that they will be returning to civilian life in the cities. If they find that nothing has changed there, then they could constitute a formidable force in the streets of America, schooled and tempered in all the violent arts as no generation of blacks has ever been.