Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America's Wars. - book review

Parameters, Summer, 2002 by Robert L. Bateman

Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America's Wars. By Robert B. Edgerton. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001. 271 pages. $25.00. Reviewed by Major Robert L. Bateman, Department of History, US Military Academy, West Point, New York.

According to the "about the author" section of this book, Robert Edgerton is the author of "more than 20 other books on a variety of sociological, anthropological, and historical topics." He is currently a professor of anthropology at the UCLA School of Medicine. Based upon the evidence of this book, as a historian Edgerton is a pretty good sociologist. Despite that faint praise, this book is a fairly well rounded, if extremely limited, contribution to the field of military history. It does not, however, break any new ground in the sub-field of the African-American experience of military service.

In the acknowledgments and introduction, the author states that the reason he wrote this book was to address an issue not dealt with in any depth by previous works on this topic: the racist contention and stereotype that blacks were "natural cowards," and thus unfit for service. Although Edgerton runs through a litany of the most recent works of military history on the topic, he almost immediately dismisses them. Hidden Heroism, Edgerton claims, moves beyond these mere works of military history because it places the African-American military experience within the larger social and cultural context of the history of race relations in the nation as a whole. By doing so the author states that he can explain how the "natural coward" stereotype came to be and why it was sustained.

This, unfortunately, is somewhat superfluous. Other books have not addressed the broader American social and cultural context when dealing with the military experience of blacks for two reasons. To begin with, the military side of the story alone is huge, and deserves much more space than the average publisher is willing to allot. The second reason is due to what, for lack of a better term, might be called the "Homer Simpson Critique." Through much of US history American society suffered from racist influences. The military, constituting a subset of American society, reflected this generally racist makeup. To quote, then, Homer Simpson: "Doh!" Sometimes one does not need an entire book to state the obvious.

Still, Edgerton might have been on to something. I can see how the US military experience of African-Americans, taken within a larger societal whole, could be a worthy topic for a book of 1,000 to 1,200 pages. One could hardly do the topic justice in fewer. In fact, that is what Edgerton has done here.

Hidden Heroism starts off with an apology that should make any historically savvy reader pause when picking this book off the shelf. Edgerton says, "Because Hidden Heroism spans more than two centuries of warfare under changing social and cultural conditions, it proved impossible for me to consult all the primary documents in any systemic fashion." The fact is, although he may have consulted some of the primary source documents (the very foundation of any quality work of history) he never uses more than a handful in the entire book. For example, in the first chapter alone, a chapter that ranges from the American Revolution through the end of the Civil War (covered in 31 pages), of the 137 endnotes no more than four are from primary sources. The rest rely on secondary sources--what somebody said about what somebody else said about an event. That's not the most sound methodology. There are good reasons why historians striving to write sound history demand a reliance on primary sources. How else can one strip aw ay the filters of previous authors?

Edgerton provides, in a later chapter, a perfect case study for this. In discussing the experience of blacks fighting in the Vietnam War, Edgerton recounts the story of Arthur E. Woodley, Jr., "a black paratrooper with the 5th Special Forces Group." Woodley tells of befriending a member of the Ku Klux Klan from Arkansas in Vietnam and, at a different point, of finding a white soldier flayed alive and staked out in the sun, to whom Woodley administered the coup de grace because "no rescue could be made in time." It was an act which to this day is alleged to be the foundation of Woodley's post-traumatic stress disorder. Edgerton cites as his source for this incident another secondary source. Apparently Edgerton never did any oral histories or research on the topic; he certainly never interviewed or researched Woodley.

If he had, he might have discovered that Arthur E. Woodley, identified by Wallace Terry (the author of Bloods, cited by Edgerton for this passage), was never with the 5th Special Forces Group. Woodley may well have gone on some deep patrols, as his military record does indicate he was a member of a divisional recon unit, but it appears that he knowingly misled Terry regarding his military record. The fact that Woodley claimed several awards he didn't earn, including multiple Purple Hearts, suggests that his accounts of events may be less than reliable. People go to history books expecting to find facts. Reliable sources form a foundation; again, that is why historians, at least most military historians, insist on primary sources. Edgerton violated this precept and has passed on a legend, presenting it as a fact.