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Wil Haygood, "The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home" (Knopf, 2026)
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- [00:00]
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Will Haygood
Network
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Michael Stout
hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Michael Stout and today I'm here with Will Haygood to talk about his new book, the War Within a the Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home, which is out now from Knopf. Will Haygood is an extremely accomplished journalist and award winning author who grew up in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Miami University in 1976 with a degree in Urban planning. Will's knack for storytelling, however, led him to journalism, beginning his career at the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before embarking on a long and storied career as a best selling author, including an article in the Washington Post that eventually became the film the Butler, directed by Lee Daniels and many other works of nonfiction. Among his journalism honors are the National Headliner Award, the New England Associated Press Award, the Sunday Magazine Editor's Award, the Paul L. Meyer Single Story Award, the Virginia Press Association Award, and the national association of Black Journalists Award for both feature writing and foreign reporting. And I'm happy to announce that just last week he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I could go on, but instead let's talk to Will about his new book. Will, it is truly an honor to welcome you to the show.
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Will Haygood
Thank you for having me Great to be here. Great.
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Michael Stout
Well, I'd like to begin by asking you how you came to this topic. So why a book about the experiences of black soldiers in Vietnam and why now?
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Will Haygood
Yeah. Well, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and directly across the street from me, Michael, lived a guy by the name of Skip Dunn. And I used to wave to him every morning. I was in the sixth grade. He was in high school. And I would say, hey, Skip, how you doing? He would say, hey, Will, how are you doing? And then one day turned into two days turned into two weeks when I didn't see Skip. And I asked my sister Diane, who was in high school with Skip. Where's Skip, Diane? And she said, he's going to a place called Vietnam. And so, of course, I only knew Vietnam from newsreel footage on tv. And I subsequently learned that five other young African American, young men from my very neighborhood, from my street, Fifth street, and the next street over, Sixth street, were all going off to Vietnam. Some were drafted, some joined. Skip joined the Marines. And so then my family moves to the east side of town just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And of course, there were urban. Urban rebellions, uprisings across the country. And I found myself running from tanks. Cause National Guardsmen were called out to. To tamp down all of the uprisings that were going on in various black communities throughout the country. So, years later, I became a writer and. And I'm looking back on the Vietnam War experience just because I've always been curious about it. And I said to myself, wow, I had two experiences as a kid with that war. One was I knew Skip Dunn, and I knew Larry Wilson and Charlie Bolden and Jimmy Bolden and Steve Collins and Robert Morris. Those were the six guys who I was familiar with. And I carried newspapers to their homes. That was one aspect of my little kid life. And the other was that I had been running from these tanks. National Guard tanks. We have National Guard troops on the street again in America today. And we're also fighting another war. And so that really was a large part of the impetus of why I wanted to do the book. And plus, Michael, to be frank about it, the black soldier experience rarely gets written about or shown in a cinematic fashion. So even though it's a big war, there are still chunks of the war that we don't know about. And this was one aspect of the war I wanted to fill in.
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Michael Stout
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Now that's. And that's really helpful because I think that there's. There's a Tension in your. That. That experience that you just mentioned is captured kind of in the title. It's called A War Within a War. What do you mean by that? What is the. This war within a war that black soldiers are experiencing?
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Will Haygood
Well, it was the nation's first racially integrated war.
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Michael Stout
And.
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Will Haygood
And so you had a lot of young blacks coming out of the segregated environments, and all of a sudden they were taken from the war in the 60s for equality on the streets of America. And it wasn't like they were not going to take their pride and their integrity over to Vietnam with them. And so in Vietnam, you had 98% of the officers were white, and a large number of that 98% were Southern trained military officers. And so now that's not to say that all of the white officers were opposed to into integration, because they were not. The American military had ostensibly been desegregated in 1948, but that mindset did not drill its way down into the military hierarchy until we were at a war that we might not win. And so it was to the advantage of the American military forces to integrate top to bottom. But the black soldier still had to fight and still had to face things like somebody putting a Ku Klux Klan cross outside of their tent in the middle of the night, even though they had fought bravely alongside soldiers who were white there. And Wallace Terry, a journalist who was covering Vietnam for Time magazine, came back to the States and ran into a general. And the general asked Wallace, Terry said, hey, Wallace, what is it like for the black soldier in Vietnam? And Wallace Terry said, well, they're fighting a war within a war. And he meant that they were fighting the same battle for equality in Vietnam that they had been fighting as younger teenagers in America. Right, right. Great.
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Michael Stout
Could you. Could you talk a little bit more about that experience? I wanted to ask about the characters that make up this story. It's such a rich study of all these different care. I think you call it seven soldiers, a piano player, and a journalist. Is that right?
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Will Haygood
Yeah, yeah.
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Michael Stout
So what are some of the ones that really stuck with you when you were. When you were kind of telling the stories you mentioned just now? The one about the person who is. Wakes up in the morning after he's featured on the COVID of Time magazine and he's got this cross being burned. Can you tell us maybe a little bit more about that one?
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Will Haygood
Yes. There was a guy named Sergeant Glide. And the military liked to brag about its efforts, its efforts to integrate, in its effort to promote. Promote black soldiers in as hard as they tried to do that, Michael, the military still became. It looked from the. It looked from the outside in, it looked like it was still somewhat segregated just because of the numbers. 47% of the infantry combat troops were. Were black, while the American Black population was 10%. So in the early years of the war, the black soldier, factually was carrying the heavy end of the law proportionately. That's just a fact, is why John F. Kennedy one morning looked around his staff and said, gentlemen, we have to be careful, because this is going to be seen as, quote, a white man's war. And Martin Luther King Jr. Later said, It's a white man's war quote in a black man's fight. And so those words were very, very sharply interpreted by members of the black community. As to my characters, I picked. I picked some. Just a wonderful assortment of people. There are three women who are major characters in the book, because, let's face it, in a lot of the Vietnam chronicles, we don't have women featured because women were not allowed to fight in Vietnam. But they did fight in their own way. You know, nurses, secretaries, they help keep soldiers safe. And that, of course, is always a part of the battle of war. One of the nurses, Dorothy Harris from Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the bravest women I've ever met. And I sat with her for long hours, and I so enjoyed her. She was a tomboy in her youth. And she said when she joined the military that. That toughness from her girl who had helped her in the Vietnam War. And she was one of the few black nurses in the war, mind you, During World War II, the Black nurses could only take care of black soldiers. Finally, she could be a nurse for anyone in Vietnam. And that filled her with pride. I asked her the toughest part of the battle, and she said it was when I would be in my tent, in my medical tent, and a soldier who had been shot up would be wheeled in. And she said the first thing they were asked. She said that they would ask, am I going to die? And she said that was heartbreaking because they were 18 and 19 years old, they were kids. And she would tell them, we're going to do everything we can to make sure that that doesn't happen. And. And she said even if they would have been at some of the best hospitals in the world in the lobby, they still were going to die because the, you know, because the bullet wounds were so. Were so severe. Now, she had a friend, he was Captain Riley Pitts, and he. And he worked in her base camp outside of Saigon, in a place called Cu Chi. And he wanted to be a general. He was black, he was an officer, low level officer, but he wanted to rise up the ranks. And he told her that he needed experience in the field. And she tried to talk him into not going out in the field. He worked in public relations. He was a good writer. But anyway, he went out there. He joined the infantry combat unit and went out there. And one evening, after they had finished one of his first firefights, he and his men are sitting around one evening, they're still in. In a war zone, and a. A hand grenade comes over the treetops and it lands right at the feet of Riley Pitts. And so everybody in that little circle was going to die. Riley Pitts and his men. Riley Pitts does something. He throws his body onto the grenade. So he's dead. All of his memories of childhood, his first, you know, his wife, his, his. His first loves, all that was going to vanish in the split second. Only a strange thing happened. The hand grenade didn't go off and it malfunctioned. Riley Pitts's men, who later that night said, we're going to nominate you for the Medal of Honor as soon as we get back. But the following morning, Riley Pitts walks out of his tent and shrapnel hits him right between the eyes and he dies instantly. And seven months later, he is invited to the White House. And he becomes the first black officer, not the first black man, but the first black military officer to receive the Medal of Honor. And so that's an example of, of, of, of how these lies were interconnected. Another figure who I wrote about, he was an Air Force pilot by the name of Fred Cherry. He was an officer. He was shot down over North Vietnam. Over North Vietnam. And he was taken. He was taken. He was taken as a pow. He was a prisoner of war. And Vietnamese say it. Let's, let's put Fred Cherry, the black pilot, let's put him in the cell with Officer Halliburton, who is a white man in the North Vietnamese thinking was, they'll kill each other. A black Southerner and a white man. They'll kill each other because of the roots and genesis of race in the usa. But a strange thing happened. A very beautiful thing happened. Fred Cherry would be tortured one day and brought back and thrown into the cell. And Halliburton would he return to his injuries. He would. He would help Fred Cherry. He would help him heal. He would bandage him up, he would soothe him. He would do. He would do whatever he could to keep Fred Cherry alive. Then the opposite would happen. Halliburton, the white man, would be taken out and tortured and. And he would be. He would come back and be thrown into the cell and Fred Cherry would tend to his wounds and do everything to keep him living. And so that was, you know, that was a wonderful, wonderful bonding friendship. Black and white. As I write in the book, Michael, white couldn't survive without black in the war, and black couldn't survive without white.
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Michael Stout
Sure, sure. Well, those kinds of stories that you're just describing in all this detail are one of the big contributions that you make with the book. It's amazing to hear all those things. Now, you mentioned interviewing Dorothy Harris as part of the process. Can you talk a little bit more about the research process? You know, how did you find all these stories? There's some. There's some oral histories involved. You know, just. Just walk us a little bit through how you were kind of constructing the book out of. Out of these individual lives.
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Will Haygood
Yeah. One of the things, Michael, that was very daunting for me was as I started the book and I spent five years on the book was how would I find these soldiers, officers who were black who came back from Vietnam and they still couldn't find jobs. They. They still couldn't find, in some cases, housing where they wanted to live, they didn't want to live, and, you know, maybe segregated areas of a city, but still, even though they had on their uniform and they had performed heroically, they still were being denied opportunities to live informally, you know, in all white areas of any city. San Antonio, Denver, Chicago, wherever. And so this gave them. They all became angry and many black soldiers just shut down and they just refused to talk about their experiences in the war because they were fighting a war within a war. And then they came back to the USA and they were still ill treated. And so there was this. And Michael, there were many memoirs written about Vietnam, but they were all written by white men who had served in the war. The black soldiers who wanted to write stories of their lives, they did not have. They did not have those opportunities as either fiction or nonfiction writers. There were some great novels by some great white writers that came out of the Vietnam War. And some of those books we continue to read today, they were. They are great books, but. But the scale was uneven. We only heard one book, and that's the book called Bloods by Wallace Terry, who is a major character in my book. His wife, who recently passed away, was a great source of information because I had a chance to talk with her, his widow. But so I knew going in it was going to be hard. So it kind of. Michael goes back to the butler. When the butler came out, there was an army general by the name of Dennis by who was in, he was in Huntsville, Alabama and he was the commander. He was a four star general. He was the commander of his base. He and his wife and went to see the butler and his staff, got in touch with me and asked me if I would come down, down to Huntsville, Alabama and talk to the troops about how I found the butler. And so I, I said, oh yes, I'd be honored to. So I went down there and had a wonderful time meeting his, his staff and his troops and he and I became friends. And then years later, when I decided to write this book about the Vietnam War, I call General Dennis Baghd, one of you know, he's a four star general, an African American as well. And anyway, I called him and told him that I was getting ready to embark on this book about the Vietnam War. And I asked him if he could help me open doors to finding some of these veterans. And he did. And so, goodness gracious, if I hadn't found him, it might have taken me another whole year just to find these veterans who were willing to talk to me. And many of them, Michael, when I, I would knock on their door and I would be sitting there for an hour and they would stop and they would have tears in their eyes and they would say, actually Will, even though I've never talked about many of these things, I think in a way I've been waiting on your knock at my door so that I would at least share these things for my kids, for my grandkids, and for the readers who will be reading, reading your book. There's another guy who I tracked down, George Forrest. And this is a fascinating story to me. George Forrest went to Morgan State, so he entered the military. He was a young black officer and one of his first stateside assignments was, was to go to the March on Washington in 1963. And he was told that there might be uprising and riots and shootings and looting by black folks. And that his mission, his unit's mission in D.C. that day was going to be arrest any, any lawbreakers. And his mother lived in Maryland and his mother and father were going to the March on Washington. And they knew their son, who was soon to be off to Vietnam. They knew their son had been given an assignment where he was supposed to arrest any unruly people. And he called his mother to make sure that she was all set. And he told her, he said, now, mom, now you can't get out of control because you'll be in trouble. And my orders are to arrest any troublemaker. And his mother said to him, quote, boy, if you try to arrest me
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Michael Stout
or
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Will Haygood
at the March on Washington, I will knock you out.
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Michael Stout
Incredible.
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Will Haygood
Obama said to the son, he told me that. He started laughing. And of course, as we know, it turned out to be a seminal day in the history of this nation. But the fact that George Forrest was there at the march on Washington, which started kind of our modern day fight for civil rights, and then he was in Vietnam fighting a second war, it was very powerful to, to find him.
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Michael Stout
Yeah, yeah. No, there's so much symmetry with those kinds of stories which are throughout the book. And it's amazing that you have those kinds of details in, in these things. It's also incredible that a past project, your work on, on the, the Butler and all that, ends up informing and helping you write this project. I think that's really amazing as well. I wanted to stay on the topic of writing just for a minute and ask a little bit more about the writing process. Is, were you doing, did the research come first and then the writing, or was it kind of a back and forth process? You know, did, did, did you get the structure early? You know, could you, could you talk a little bit more about, like, the book as like a, a piece of writing that you had to plan out and stuff?
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Will Haygood
Michael, that is a great question. Because I was afraid. Any writer, I think, any nonfiction writer, I think, would be afraid to start a book about the Vietnam War, because know that there have been, there have been some great books written. And so, and so whoever you are, you will be judged against those books as well. And so I knew one way to go into it was to find characters. Okay? I wanted to find, I wanted to find characters because after all, I'm a storyteller. I tell stories about this nation's history and some of the history. People, people, people seem fearful of, seem fearful of the truth. I mean, as we witness lately, the nation has been on this tear to ban books. And that's awful. We should, we should let people read books. It was Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War who said, I'm going to do everything to, to have, to have our libraries stay open. You know, we need to embrace knowledge. You know, if you, if you hide books, Michael, then you hide knowledge. If you ban books, you ban the opportunity of somebody to learn. And so I knew I had to find Certain characters. And I also. Michael, one of the big things that I think I had to overcome. I love Lyndon B. Johnson. I love President Johnson. He took on bigotry. He took on racism. He changed. He changed the landscape, at least via civil rights bills of this country. And yet he was beholden to some very influential Southern senators, such as Richard Russell of Georgia, who was a segregationist and did not want integration in this nation. And Lyndon Johnson signed off with Robert McNamara, his secretary of defense, with this program called Project 100,000. And you read about it in my book. And that project gave local state judges the opportunity, when a young person was sentenced to jail, to prison for a nonviolent crime, they gave them the opportunity to. To either not go to jail in lieu of joining the military. And so 47% or so of the project 100,000 people were young African Americans. So that was a disproportionate grab out of the black community. And then the project 100,000 rolled over four times. So it became 400,000 young men who were pulled into the military. And their test scores didn't have to be as high as everybody else. Test scores didn't have to be as high. And, you know, they were. They really weren't fit, mentally, to be in a war zone. It's one thing to be in the regular military and you're not fighting, but to be in a war zone where you got to read maps and you got to make quick decisions, you know, didn't score high enough on the test, and yet you're still pushed into that scenery, that's a tough road to travel. And, you know, many of them had to travel. Travel those roads. And I was able to track down some of the soldiers who knew that that was the program that they were brought into the military under. Yeah. And so all of these stories, in the end, Michael, sort of seem to be linked because writers in the past would not intertwine the civil rights movement with the Vietnam War. Because once you get into one tunnel, the civil rights tunnel, say you stay in there, because that's such a large tunnel, and it's a darkness in there, too. And you wouldn't necessarily, as a nonfiction writer, come out and go over into the Vietnam tunnel, because that's a big, dark tunnel, too. But I knew that the tunnels were linked. I knew that. That the tunnels were linked. For instance, another character, Marvin Gaye, the singer. The book is a very cultural book. It talks about the culture, the music culture, the cinema culture of the times. And Marvin Gaye had a brother, had A brother named Frankie. He went to the Vietnam War, and he came back, and he had all kind of mental problems. And Marvin Gaye wrote a seminal album, what's Going on? That came out that was about the Vietnam War and about civil rights as well, because some of the lyrics went like this. Brother, brother, there's far too many of you dying, Brother, Mother, war is not the answer. Only love can conquer hate. Oh, we got to find a way to bring some love in here today. Picket lines, picket signs, you know. You know, he intertwined both. And just listening to that album was very informative to me as I was writing the book. And so it's really, Michael, two mountains that I had to climb. The civil rights mountain and the Vietnam mountain. And then there's the women's rights mountain, because those three characters, Philippa Schuyler and Maud, the victor of the Veterans Administration in Nurse Harris. And so, you know, you had three big hills that I had to climb. And also Lyndon Johnson, who passed the civil rights bills but harmed the black community as he kept the Vietnam War going. When I first started the book, Michael, in the back of my mind, I said to myself, you know, I think the Vietnam War must have went. Went on for six or seven years. That's what I said. You know, somebody who reads books, who considers himself fairly learned. And then, no, it was 12 plus years. You know, sometimes I'll ask my students, how long. How long did the Vietnam War last? And they'll say, two years, three years, four years, five years. So that really tells me we don't teach history as well as we should.
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Michael Stout
Sure, sure, sure. Well, there's so much to unpack there. First of all, I'm thrilled that we captured you doing a rendition of what's Going on that's going to live in infamy, so to speak, on this podcast. But the other thing that you've captured there is. I mean, first of all, the characters are crucial. They're absolutely essential to, like, what's driving the story. But there's also, you know, you touched on it there. There's another element that felt really important to me as I was reading through it. And it's related to that conversation about Marvin Gaye, actually, because you talk about Motown's turn toward politics with the founding of the Black Forum record label. And you also talk about Maude de Victor and the effects of Agent Orange. Maybe you could tell a little bit more about that story, because that was one of my favorite stories from the book that I took away, was the way that we. We make these revelations through the work of. Of this woman who, as you say, is. She ends up contributing so much to what we know about the Vietnam War.
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Will Haygood
Yes, I fell in love with the. The three female characters who I write about. You know, they were brave, and I mean, they really, all of them went through great risk to. To, you know, to help our cause in the war. Maud de Victor was a veterans administrator worker B in Chicago. Many of the veterans who came to
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Michael Stout
her
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Will Haygood
started complaining about. About their bones that were aching, about eye rashes on their eye, about not being able to swallow, having trouble with their lungs, having trouble with their hearing. One guy had a son who was born, and the son was born with only three fingers. And so they were telling the. They were telling the counselors in the Chicago office, look, something is wrong with our bodies. And. And the administrators of the Veterans Administration in Chicago and other cities were saying, no, no, no, these are fake illnesses, and they're just trying to get more money in their checks, in their monthly checks. But Paul De Victor in Chicago said something is wrong, and it has to be related to chemicals, to something that they were either eating or swallowing. And Agent Orange was a chemical made by the military to make the leaves drop off of the trees, foliage so that the flyers, Air Force flyers, could see more easily where the North Vietnamese soldiers were walking or, you know, or where they're at. And in the. In the American soldiers thought that it was just. Just some kind of cooling droplets of water on them. And some of them would even stick their tongues out to have this cool liquid fall on their tongues. And so naturally, they would swallow it until they stopped doing that. And so Maude the Victor started making calls to chemical companies, and they would hang the phone up on her. And she knew right then that something was amiss. She knew. And so she got in touch with an investigative reporter in Chicago by the name of Bill Curtis. Bill Curtis, who's still very well known. And yeah, and I. I tracked down Bill Curtis and had a great talk with him, and he helped me understand what all Maud the Victor went through to tell this story. And it was just remarkable how this one black lady, a counselor, she was an early whistleblower. She was a whistleblower, Michael. That term hadn't been used then. But she went to Congress and she told them what was going on, and she was threatened with being fired. And she eventually left the VA in between. My hero to veterans causes. And of course, there have been lawsuits and there have been monies given to not nearly adequate funding for. They went through. But you know, she was one of the instrumental people who bought this story to, To Light. Right.
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Michael Stout
Because she tells Bill Curtis and then he writes a major story about it. Is that right?
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Will Haygood
Yes, he writes a story about it and it becomes. It was on the news in Chicago and then certain members of the House wanted to hold hearings after that in Washington about this, about this, about this eufolian called Agent Orange. And so she was very proud that she had helped soldiers. Black soldiers, white soldiers, Native American soldiers, Hispanic soldiers, all of them, all the soldiers who were getting there and who came to her. She really, she really went out of her way to help them. Yeah, yeah, right, right.
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Michael Stout
It's a great. I mean, that's again, one of the best stories in the book is this kind of conversation about how this, this person ends up revealing this major scandal and as you say, helping veterans get some, get some help for all of this stuff. Another question, kind of like a related, another big theme of the book is the way that the transformation in black soldiers experiences of the war. Could you talk a little bit more about how military service impacted black Americans lives, the effect of military service on individual soldiers?
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Will Haygood
Yes, Michael, There was nothing that made ministers and local communities more proud than to see a black service member walk into the church doors on Sundays. Because during the Vietnam War there still was a great battle for civil rights simultaneously. And so you could at least rise up the ladder in the military much quicker than you could rise at the Ford Motor Company or at some bank or at some retail outlet. The military did, did have a sense of meritocracy, talent. Talent. You would get noticed quicker in the military for talent than you would in all white corporate world in the 1960s. But it goes back to the Civil War in a way, because Frederick Douglass went to the White House and pleaded with Lincoln to allow blacks to join the Union. And Lincoln, of course, hemmed and hauled. But he finally said, you are right. We need black soldiers, Mr. Douglas, to help us win the war. And 200,000 black soldiers signed up. Black men signed up to help save the Union. The same Union, the same nation that had tried to crush their spirit in slavery. 200,000 of them signed up. And the bones of those 200,000 soldiers are rattling today because the Trump administration has been on a tear to try to demolish black bravery during all wars. They have, they have taken down markers, they have denigrated, they have maligned black heroism. This nation does not deserve that. Blacks and whites fought alongside together. In Korea, blacks went to France to fight with the French troops during World War I because America did not want blacks fighting alongside whites in World War I. But nobody should ever doubt black patriotism, least of all the Trump administration. They just should not do that. I mean, the record shows, this book shows how powerful that heroism and how undeniable it has been. And nothing to me is more beautiful than when blacks and whites coalesce, join hand in hand in the cause of liberty and justice. Nothing to me is more beautiful than that. We saw it at the March on Washington. We saw it during, we saw it during Freedom Summer when a lot of white college kids banded together with blacks to go down south to fight, to fight for voting rights, nonviolent fighting for voting rights. We saw it at Selma, Alabama. And so, and so we should not doubt what happened during the Civil War or during the Spanish American War or during World War I, or during the Korean War or during the Vietnam War or during World War II. We should not doubt the contributions of those who had to fight to be able to fight for a nation that didn't want them. I, you know, any way you look at it, it's a beautifully brave story, any way you look at it.
- [40:53]
Michael Stout
Sure, sure. Well, that gets us into, you know, you mentioned at the, at the end, there's a couple of things that are. That are kind of closely related to this. Maybe we can jump to your requiem for Art, Greg, that seems particularly poignant in terms of this, the conversation that we've just been having. Can you talk a little bit more about Art, Greg, and his contributions and maybe the way that they were for a moment under the Biden administration, memorialized
- [41:22]
Will Haygood
Art Greg was in the Korean War and the Vietnam War when I met him. He was 93 years old. He has since passed away. He went to Vietnam. He ordered a lot of the weaponry, a lot of the refrigerators, a lot of the pens and the pencils. He was one of those guys who wasn't in the field, but he kept the war going.
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Michael Stout
A logistics guy.
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Will Haygood
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, he kept, you know, he kept the train, so to say, running on time, and he rose up. He had important jobs at the State Department, you know, I mean, the Pentagon. And he was very much revered by soldiers, white and black alike, men and women. He was very much revered.
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Michael Stout
And
- [42:16]
Will Haygood
there were, there were many black soldiers, Michael, who did heroic things in these wars, who did not get their medals, who did not get their just rewards. And after the Vietnam War and later, there were officers, black and white, who banded together, who said, look, such and such should have got a medal for that battle. And we think the only reason he didn't get the medal is because of the color of his skin. So under Bill Clinton, they started to right some of those wrongs. And some of these soldiers, black soldiers who had loaned retired, were summoned to the White House and, and their heroism was acknowledged finally. There have been various military bases in this nation named after Confederate soldiers and generals. And these people, I don't know what you would call them other than enemies of the state.
- [43:24]
Michael Stout
Yeah, we could call them traitors.
- [43:26]
Will Haygood
Yeah, they were traitors. They fought against the UN they fought against the flag, and they created their own flag. I mean, it was an insurrection, just like we had in 2021, the Donald Trump. We had an insurrection. We had people who invaded the US Capitol armed. It was an armed mob that invaded the. The U.S. capitol. These are facts. These are just facts. It's not fake news. These are facts. These are real facts. I thank God that we have video to show that, because the many people now are saying, oh, it was just a tourist walk or walks through the capital. Nothing happened, and there was no one died. Well, yes, there did. There were deaths that day and thereafter. Uh, and so it was wonderful that Art Greg had a military base named after him. But the b. I mean, during Biden administration, we had an African American Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who I interviewed for this book because he had, he had relatives who served in Vietnam and they inspired his sense of duty. He went to West Point. And so. But under the Biden administrator, I mean, under the Trump administration, some of these names have been changed. There have been efforts, as I said, to. To make all but vanish the attention that the nation has gloriously paid to white and women, I mean, to black in women heroes who have served our military valiantly through the years. And, you know, it can't. You know, it is not a nation with only white heroes, white male heroes. It is not. We have had Native American heroes and Hispanic heroes and black heroes and women heroes and white heroes. You know, it's been a. A large, beautiful assortment of people who have fought for the flag, and we should not try to diminish any of their contributions. Sure, yeah, no doubt.
- [45:49]
Michael Stout
Now, the. Now speaking of Lloyd Austin, I wanted to you tell this great story about him, this profile where he has this picture of Henry O. Flipper on his wall. Who is Henry Flipper? Can you tell us a little bit about that and why he's so important to Lloyd Austin?
- [46:04]
Will Haygood
Yes, Henry Flipper. He came out of Thomasville, Georgia, and he was the first Black graduate of west point in the 1870s. And as you can imagine, no one, no white, spoke to him when he was at West Point. They didn't want him there. But he, you know, he became a. He became a iconic figure to every black who entered West Point. After he left Henry O. Flipper and he was run out of the military, he was accused of stealing money. By some white officers as his last post name. And it broke his heart. He traveled around the country and he found jobs, but he died a very lonely man, and his reputation had been ruined. And it was under Bill Clinton that Henry O. Flipper's record was expunged. And I asked Lloyd Austin, when I was interviewing him in his. His office at the Pentagon, why did Henry Flipper mean so much to him? And he said, henry O. Flipper and I came from the same town in Georgia. And he said I would ride past the street where he lived, and he said, how could I not be inspired by that, by. By Henry O. Flipper? And, I mean, it's interesting, Michael. I walked into his office and my back was to Henry Flipper's large picture. And I didn't see the picture until I stood up to leave, and I said, oh, my God, that's Henry. Old Flipper, you know, he must mean a lot to you. And that's when he told me the story of Henry O. Flipper, his hometown, and they both sharing the same hometown, and how Henry O. Flipper inspired him, Lloyd Austin, to apply to West Point.
- [48:25]
Michael Stout
That's incredible. Well, it's also such a powerful commentary about how public memory through monuments and statues can have such an enormous impact on how, you know, like what we revere about history, who we look up to, who we think of as our heroes. And it kind of puts into relief the question about these Confederate statues everywhere that. That we've been having such a conversation about recently.
- [48:48]
Will Haygood
Saying that, Michael, you are so right. That really. I mean, that really helps me even frame that history. You so right. It brings into relief all of these conversations that we have been having, especially since the death of George Floyd.
- [49:03]
Michael Stout
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Now, as we conclude, I wanted to ask. There was something I. It was sort of nagging at me as I was reading the book, and I wanted to know Vietnam was. Was an. Was a very unpopular war. How did your characters grapple with that? There's a story about that, like military service as a way through merit to. To rise. But then there's also all the. The controversies that. That black soldiers are experiencing in the military itself. And then there's also the fact that it's such an unpopular war. Did you have. Were there conversations about that kind of thing either when you're interviewing or seeing things in the record about that stuff?
- [49:45]
Will Haygood
Yes, it was, but I think I have to go back again to that word, true patriotism. An uncle or aunt or a niece or a nephew, if they saw a soldier walk through the door, that was an indication to them that the American black framework, the American black history, was being stitched a little more into the American flag. Okay. Yeah. It was a whole scale representation of what integration meant, why Martin Luther King died, why Rosa Parks sat on that bus, of why Medgar Evers wanted blacks. Medgar Evers, a veteran himself of the military assassinated in his front yard in Mississippi. Of why Medgar Evers never said a crossword about the military. Even many of these soldiers, they were angry at the way the nation treated them, but they held fire, Michael, when talking about the American military machinery, they held fire because I think they wanted their experiences to encourage other young blacks, other young women to join the military because like all, you know, they hated what was going on on the streets. You know, unfair treatment for their mother, their dad, unable to vote. Even after. Even after that, even after the Voting Rights Bill was still hard in some communities to vote and in the Vietnam War took away monies from civil rights law enforcement. You know, you know, the Vietnam War took away money for food, money for poor people, money for rental health. It just started to siphon off a lot of civil rights funding. That's just fact. And. But these soldiers to this day are very, very proud of their service in the Vietnam War, in the military. Now, they weren't proud that when they came back and they flew into an airport like San Francisco or a northern airport or some of the Midwestern airports that they would have to change out of their clothes so that nobody would spit on them. But south, they didn't. They weren't treated with that because most of the military bases in this country are down south, which is why a lot of my, my black veterans who retired, they. They lived in the South. They moved into homes in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida. And so, yes, yes, it is. You know, it's the war within a war that the nation once again seems to be fighting.
- [52:43]
Michael Stout
Right, Exactly. Exactly. Well, Will, this is an incredible book and it's been such a pleasure doing history with you, so thank you for your time.
- [52:51]
Will Haygood
I thank you very much for reading the book so closely and for filling the. What I think is the importance of this book and this story. Thank you so much, Michael.
- [53:00]
Michael Stout
Yes, of course. So for our listeners, the War within the War, the Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home is available now from the Knopf Publishers. You can find it wherever the very finest books are sold. Will I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [53:15]
Will Haygood
Thank you very much. Bye bye.