Black Soldier on okinawa with a bayonet lugged carbine

[DaveHH]

I was raised in Petaluma, Calif. It was a small town just north of SF. I had never spoken to or shook hands with a black person. There were none around. When I was drafted in 1965, I met a few black folks and there were 3 in my platoon. I got along well with them,they were just like the other guys, some good, some not so good. When I went to 5th Inf in Colorado, I was seeing the first signs of discrimination and wondered why this was happening. It was kind of disgusting to see a new black Lt trying to get through a company full of sleepy soldiers at revelly. I had been in the army for 6 months and it was good infantry cadre at Ft Ord, I knew that someone was supposed to call everyone to attention and salute the officer. None of these lifer bozos was about to do the right thing so I just did it for them: a private E2 in a sea of lifer sergeants. The poor shavetail was relieved to find someone to do it right and I just thought that two years of these lifer dopes was going to be a chore. I guess to thank me for my service, they put me in a room with 5 black guys and I was just fine with that. These guys were from the deep south and were just the nicest people to be around. We went to a Jimmy McGriff concert at Colorado Springs and I was the only white guy in the place, a speck of salt in a bowl of pepper.
Six months later and I'm in Vietnam. The unit was 52% black and the shoe was on the other foot. There was plenty of racism from both sides. There were fights, stabbings and enough racism to turn a good attitude into a bad one. The guys from Chicago and NY were lazy dangerous people. If you've ever seen Platoon, the way they went after each other was what our battalion was like. I couldn't wait to get away from that place and the fools white and black . I see our present situation and it is familiar: scared white folks washing the feet of black folks while they rob and burn our cities. It's a movie I've seen too many times, same people doing the same sh.. for the same reasons. God help us.