Word: combative
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Must Win. More than anything, the performance of the Negro G.I. under fire reaffirms the success-and diversity-of the American experiment. Often inchoate and inconsistent, instinctively self-serving yet naturally altruistic, the Negro fighting man is both savage in combat and gentle in his regard for the Vietnamese. He can clean out a bunker load of Viet Cong with a knife and two hand grenades, or offer smokes to a captured V.C. and then squat beside him trying to communicate in bastard Vietnamese. He may fight to prove his manhood-perhaps as a corrective to the matriarchal dominance...
Even though 70% of all Negroes are rejected by the draft because of ghetto-bred ill health or non-education, the proportion of Negro army combat troops in Viet Nam is more than double the ratio of Negroes to whites in the U.S. population at large (23% v. 11%). That, according to the Negro G.I. himself and his officers, is because those who make it into military service are the "cream of the crop"-can-do, must-win competitors who volunteer for dangerous duty both for the premium pay and the extra status it gives them. "I get my jollies...
...demonstrators, men who marched on lunch counters and Washington itself to win equal rights for their race. Not surprisingly, Negroes pull a considerably higher combat death rate than whites...
Black-white relations in a slit trench or a combat-bound Huey are years ahead of Denver and Darien, decades ahead of Birmingham and Biloxi. "The only color out here is olive drab," says a white sergeant. Despite the foxhole comradeship of most G.I.s in Viet Nam, the war is not all interracial amity: vicious racist graffiti from both sides mar the walls of latrines in Saigon; whites and Negroes slug it out on occasion along the nighttown streets of Tu Do and in "Soulsville," the Negro's self-imposed ghetto of joy along Saigon's waterfront. Sometimes...
Gallant Gallery. Negro officers in key technical and diplomatic posts range from Major Beauregard Brown III, 31, of De Quincy, La., who supervises combat logistics in Westmoreland's headquarters, to Navy Lieut. Commander Wendall Johnson, 33, a former gunnery officer aboard the Viet Nam-based destroyer U.S.S. Ingraham, who is now one of Saigon's key contacts for Thai, Nationalist Chinese and other Allied cooperation with U.S. forces. They include a brace of other, unrelated Johnsons: Major Clifton R. Johnson, 31, of Baltimore, a chemical-warfare expert with the 173rd Airborne, who laid the smokescreen that kicked...