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In this dramatic history of race relations during the Vietnam War, James E. Westheider illustrates how American soldiers in Vietnam grappled with many of the same racial conflicts that were roiling their homeland thousands of miles away. Over seven years in the making, Fighting on Two Fronts draws on interviews with dozens of Vietnam veterans - black and white - and official Pentagon documents to paint the first complete picture of the African American experience in Vietnam.
In this book James E. Westheider explores the social and professional paradoxes facing African-American soldiers in Vietnam. Service in the military started as a demonstration of the merits of integration as blacks competed with whites on a near equal basis for the first time. Yet as the war in Vietnam progressed, many black recruits felt isolated and threatened in an institution controlled almost totally by whites. Consequently, many blacks no longer viewed the military as a professional opportunity, but an undue burden on the black community.
"The Vietnam War differed from previous American wars of the twentieth century. It was an undeclared and limited war that divided the country and was fought disproportionately by minorities and working-class whites, many of whom did not want to serve. This is the story of the men and women who participated in this generation-defining conflict overseas and stateside -- a war of search-and-destroy missions and combat with an ill-defined enemy, but also a war of drug use, fragging, and antiwar protests ... James Westheider captures the many dimensions of what it was like to fight in the Vietnam War"--Page 4 of cover.
Drafted into the Army in 1968, Gillam transformed from an uncertain sergeant to an aggressive soldier, serving in Vietnam and Cambodia. As a regular point man and occasional tunnel rat who fought below ground, the killing became close range and brutal. Gillam left the Army in 1970, and he was once again a college student and destined to become a university professor.
"Integrating the US Military is an edited collection that examines the US Army's role and place in progressive social change through the lens of the military experience of African Americans, women, and gays since World War II. By making this long overdue comparison, the editors argue this anthology demonstrates how the challenges launched against the racial, gender, and sexual status quo in the years after World War II transformed overarching ideas about power, citizenship, and America's role in the world. This anthology's major contribution is synthesizing recent scholarly work on the history of minorities and women in the US military. It does so by examining connections between GIs and civ...
Richard Moser uses interviews and personal stories of Vietnam veterans to offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. Although the Vietnam War was the most important conflict of recent American history, its decisive battle was not fought in the jungles of Vietnam, or even in the streets of the United States, but rather in the hearts and minds of American soldiers. To a degree unprecedented in American history, soldiers and veterans acted to oppose the very war they waged. Tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans engaged in desperate conflicts with their superiors and opposed the war through peaceful protest, creating a mass movement of dissident or...
During the Vietnam War, young African Americans fought to protect the freedoms of Southeast Asians and died in disproportionate numbers compared to their white counterparts. Despite their sacrifices, black Americans were unable to secure equal rights at home, and because the importance of the war overshadowed the civil rights movement in the minds of politicians and the public, it seemed that further progress might never come. For many African Americans, the bloodshed, loss, and disappointment of war became just another chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Lawrence Allen Eldridge explores this two-front war, showing how the African American press grappled with the Vietnam War...
In Selma to Saigon Daniel S. Lucks explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Through detailed research and a powerful narrative, Lucks illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as lesser-known Americans in the movement who faced the threat of the military draft as well as racial discrimination and violence.
Essays discuss America's strategy during the Vietnam War, what it was like to fight there, the role of the press, the antiwar movement, and American guilt over the war
War and Words is a sweeping study of the profound, painful, and most significantly, defining cultural moments. Working from Homer through to Hemingway and in all traditions, some of the nation's best scholars of literature illustrate how literature and language affect not only the present but also future generations by shaping history even as it represents it. This powerful collection affirms that the humanities remain a site of the most profound reflection on human experience and historical events that have, for better and worse, shaped world civilization.