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265 20 FIGHTING ON The flames burned in riot-torn Watts for five days, occupying 100 fire brigades and almost 14,000 National Guardsmen, called up to supplement police amid widespread violence and looting. The incident that ignited the rioting was a traffic stop, in which a white California Highway Patrolman had stopped a black driver whom he suspected of being intoxicated. Onlookers gathered, the crowd became hostile, then violent, and in minutes the scene exploded into a disastrous nightmare. Jet and Ebony reporters on the scene over the ensuing week likened it to a war zone in some distant country. Ironically, that’s exactly where I was, having just landed in Vietnam for a firsthand look at how black soldiers were faring. It was my first of two trips to the Southeast Asian warfront over the next nine months. When I arrived there, upwards of 800 black military and civilian personnel were in the country in strategic roles, often in serious trouble spots. I set out to learn who they were, where they hailed from, what they were doing, and how they were being treated in the military. My first attempt almost turned out to be my last, as suggested by the headline, “Jet’s Booker Narrowly Escaped Vietcong Sniper.”1 I was visiting marine outposts with two other reporters, Hank Miller of the Deseret News (Salt Lake City) and Jim Mullin of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, in a jeep driven by Marine Sgt. Benny Marrufo of Deming, New Mexico. We had just left a battalion stationed in a mountainous area eight miles west of Danang, and were riding along a dirt road en route to visiting another group of marines when we ran into a rifle and mortar clash between Vietnamese troops and Vietcong raiders up ahead. Suddenly spotting a Vietnamese soldier cross the road and fire his gun less than 200 yards ahead, Sgt. Marrufo ordered us to duck into the rice paddies parallel to the road while he stood lookout. The whole episode lasted twenty minutes, during which we three newsmen crouched low in the swampy muck. I wondered if the rest of my stay at the warfront would include more of the same, and then brushed the thought aside, concluding correctly that it would probably get worse. Fighting On 266 The “hooks” or story lines I was seeking for Jet articles were blacks who were in some way “unusual” either by virtue of their assignments, accomplishments, heroism, or other distinction. The marine press officers I encountered on this first trip were not at all “hip” to what that meant in the context of the civil rights movement back home. The blacks they produced in response to my request were invariably outstanding mess sergeants! An army, as has been said, may travel on its belly, but such stories were not about to inspire anybody in Harlem to enlist in the marines. Another anomaly I reported was that the air force currently had no black helicopter pilots in-country—not a single one—while the army had six. The air force lamely tried to explain the disparity by claiming a lack of interest among younger black men, while subtly implying the lack of ability or ambition. I found scores of black airmen handling ground operations in multiple roles, and one, Danang base crew chief Sgt. Alfred Jackson of Satellite Beach, Florida, an eleven-year veteran keeping the bombers in shape, told me, “Nothing makes me happier than to see a brown face in a plane around here.”2 I suggested in Ticker Tape that the NAACP and other national organizations visit Vietnam, noting that thousands more Negro troops would soon be at the warfront, and it was still early enough to work with military commanders who thus far had managed to keep racial problems to a minimum. The Vietcong propaganda machine was well aware of the problems black GIs faced back home, and made the most of it, taking two approaches. On one side, they unleashed attacks on the treatment of Negroes in the U.S., while on the other, they published leaflets charging that “Negro troops are inferior, won’t fight, and have no sustaining power.” I was told that when attacking troop convoys, the VC would shoot at whites, and not blacks, seeking to drive a psychological wedge between the troops. Apparently, a conference about it was held at a high level, and one remedy suggested was that whites blacken...

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