‘White Man’s War, Black Man’s Battle’: The Incredible Story of Black Soldiers in Vietnam | books

WHaygood’s new book, his tenth, is “The War Within the War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home.” He met in Washington, D.C., to discuss the matter, and from the pages produced a small Ziploc bag. Carefully, he pulls out a flyer, yellow and brittle with age. The text at the top is Vietnamese. Below is the English language.

It read: “Colored people! The South Vietnamese people, who are fighting for their independence and freedom, are friends with the American colored people who are falling victim to barbaric racial discrimination at home. Your battlefield is in the United States! Your enemy is the warlords in the White House and the Pentagon!”

“One of the soldiers I interviewed, Dr. Elbert Nelson, explained in the book that he found this flyer addressed to black soldiers,” Haygood says. “He was so moved that I tracked him down and said, ‘I want you to have this.’ He was from North Vietnam, and he was hanging on trees and walls. It just gave me chills.”

The War Within the War tells the stories of black Americans who served in or experienced Vietnam from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s: soldiers, Marines, airmen, doctors, nurses, officers, enlisted men, reporters, activists, cultural commentators, and more.

In saying “This is my most important book,” Haygood cites a great writer who pointed the way.

“We need to remind Americans who have very short memories of what James Baldwin said. I met Baldwin when I was starting my career in journalism. I was at the Boston Globe, he was a visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I was sent there to do an article about him. That was in 1985. I hadn’t written a single book, but I was dreaming. And now I have a quote from him at the beginning of my book. I’ll read that, if I may.”

In a quiet voice, Haygood recites the words that were first published in the black magazine Freedomways in 1967.

“Long before the Americans decided to liberate Southeast Asia, they decided to liberate me. My ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and I will too. A racist society can only fight a racist war – that is the bitter truth. The assumptions that are applied at home are also applied abroad, and every Negro American knows this because…he was the first victim of the Viet Cong. We were bombed first.”

“Haygood came across this quote early in writing it, and I thought to myself, ‘I have to use it at the beginning of the book, because it says it all.’ It brings together so much of what the feelings were like among many of these soldiers.

Haygood describes the racism faced by black soldiers, and the glaring flaws in conditions and outcomes back on American soil, a nation tortuously divided.

“Vietnam was the first desegregation war, the first large-scale engagement in the history of this nation, where blacks and whites had to depend on each other,” Haygood says. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, in its spirit, asks us to do that, to respect our fellow men and women. But too often, that doesn’t happen.”

Figures from the Library of Congress are stark: “Nearly 300,000 African Americans served in the Vietnam War. In 1965, African Americans filled 31 percent of Vietnam’s ground combat battalions, while the proportion of African Americans as a minority in the general population was 12 percent… African Americans saw combat at a higher rate and suffered casualties at a higher rate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the Vietnam War as a white man’s war, and a black man’s war as a fight.”

In his reporting days, Haygood went to war zones including Somalia and Liberia. Closer to home, a Washington Post article about a veteran White House staffer inspired The Butler, a 2013 hit starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey and directed by Lee Daniels. Previous book subjects include Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, artist Sammy Davis Jr., and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

His book on Vietnam grew from humble roots. Haygood “grew up in Columbus, Ohio, lived on North Fifth Street, and when I was in seventh grade, there was a guy who lived right across the street named Skip Dunn.”

“He was in high school, and he was like the neighborhood sports hero, and he would wave to me every morning. ‘Hey, Will.’ Then there was a period when I didn’t see Skip. And I asked my sister, who was at school with him, ‘Where’s Skip?’ And my sister looked at me and said, ‘Skip’s going to a place called Vietnam.’”

“The next year, the summer of 1968, my mother moved to the east side of the city, to an all-black housing project. We were very poor. That summer, there were rebellions and uprisings as a result of King’s assassination, so as a young child I found myself running away from National Guard troops and tanks that were sent to contain us all.”

King’s death was also a watershed event for black Americans in Vietnam, as 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese offensive that demonstrated that the war would not be won.

Nearly 60 years later, the war has been comprehensively studied. However, Haygood identified “a big gap when it comes to the experiences of black soldiers, because Americans are still so confused by that war, which is a scary war to talk about because it went on for so long…And so I started thinking about the man who lived across the street, Skip Dunn.”

“I came home. Skip died but I started talking to people, and there were five other people gone, five other black men, and I happened to know them all. So I said, ‘Sure it’s a book, now I can focus on my childhood experiences, and start traveling around the country, and find these soldiers to talk about the war.’

Dan is shown on the cover of Haygood, under a helmet, staring out at the reader. Inside, names in bold include Joseph P. Anderson, a West Point graduate and the subject of Anderson’s Platoon, a 1967 Oscar-winning documentary directed by Frenchman Pierre Schondorfer. There is also George Forrest, who fought heroically in the fierce battle of La Drange in 1965; Fred Cherry, an accomplished pilot whose plane was shot down that same year, tortured, and finally released in 1973; and Wallace Terry, the Time and Time correspondent who wrote Blood, an oral history published in 1984.

Haygood also takes into account Motown’s response to the war, with Berry Gordy releasing spoken word albums of dissenting sermons, and Marvin Gaye recording his breakthrough album What’s Going On as a partial tribute to his brother Frankie, one of thousands of Psych victims.

There’s Dorothy Harris, a nurse who grew up on Cu Chi in 1967 near Infantry Captain Riley Leroy Bates, then formed a supportive bond with his widow. There is the wonderful Philippa Schuyler, a mixed-race former pianist prodigy who went to Vietnam to rescue orphaned children, but died on May 9, 1967 when her helicopter went down near Da Nang.

“Schuyler could have gotten away with hiding her identity with the white soldiers,” Haygood says. But the black soldier said, “No, we know exactly who you are, and we know exactly what you’ve been running from.” And my dear, we need to inform you about what is happening in the world, in America and Vietnam.”

Shifts in political consciousness are evident in the book, among black soldiers who “surge” to express solidarity, in chaotic actions such as the deadly uprising in Long Binh Prison, where black soldiers disproportionately dominated.

Haygood continues: “Schuyler became very impressed by these black soldiers who wanted to give her lessons in black history and in history in general, in the truth of history. You can’t run from the facts. I know we’re in an age where people run from the facts, but we shouldn’t.”

His words are heavy. With the publication of “The War Within the War,” the Trump administration continues its war on black history, especially in the military, and deprives black soldiers of their honors. One of them appears prominently in Haygood’s book.

In 1966, at a US base in Cam Ranh Bay, Art Gregg was a lieutenant colonel in logistics. By the time he retired in 1982, he was the first black three-star general. He was in his 90s when, in the fraught summer of 2020, he discussed with Haygood the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the protests for racial justice that followed.

As of 2021, under Joe Biden and former Gen. Lloyd Austin, the first Black Secretary of Defense, the US military has attempted to come to terms with its racist past. In 2023, as part of a broader renaming initiative, Fort Lee in Virginia, named after a Confederate Civil War general, was renamed Fort Gregg Adams, in honor of Gregg and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams, the highest-ranking black woman in U.S. forces in World War II.

“This shows that the army has come a long way,” Gregg said at the time.

Greg died in 2024, aged 96. In 2025, amid a slew of primary renamings, the Trump administration revoked the honors for Gregg and Adams.

For Haygood, “It is inconceivable that a nation as large as ours, steeped in the history of slavery and the barbarism of Jim Crow, could reach a point where it would attempt to rewrite history.

“It was complete proof to me, in light of what was happening to black military history as the Trump administration was trying to erase all of these historical moments, that this was going to be my go-to book at the right time.

“This is the book that the literary gods at this point in life wanted me to write, because I firmly believe that writers and filmmakers will step up at this moment, amidst this effort to whitewash history. As long as I have a pen in my hand, I will fight the good fight.”