Herman Graham, III. The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience Gainesville

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Willie J. Harrell, Jr.

Herman Graham, Ill. The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2003. 179 pp. $55.00.

During the 1960s, political movements that fought to express new racial awareness among African Americans in the United States rose amidst of the ideologies of Black militants such as Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X, and others. These ideologies sought to eliminate some, if not all, of the racial constraints that plagued African Americans since the first Africans set foot on New World soil as indentured servants in 1619. Activists began to crush some of the racial inequalities. For example, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregation in America's public schools; the 1957-58 school year at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was perhaps the most radical and potentially far-reaching aspect of the Civil Rights Movement. Four years later, James H. Meredith, led by U.S. marshals, integrated the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Meredith believed that his enrollment at Ole Miss was "more for America than it was for me." With these triumphs, and many more to follow, African Americans had successfully prevailed over some of the Jim Crowisms that had plagued the South since Reconstruction. Their protest language was manifested in the forms of marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts.

These movements had a major impact not only on blacks in America but also on Black GIs who served during the Vietnam War. Opposition to the war was expressed by African American leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Carmichael, and in numerous other dissenting voices, such as Black Women Enraged of Harlem, and the Nation of Islam's Muhummad Speaks. What impact did the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s have on Black GIs? What effects did the draft during the Johnson administration have on African American males? What influence did Muhammad Ali's resistance to Selective Service and the draft have on the African American community? How were intraracial tensions and rituals of unity personified among GIs? What role did race play in forging a sense of community during basic training for Black GIs? These are some of the fundamental questions that Herman Graham, III, sets out to explore in his book The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience. Graham argues that, during the Vietnam War, Black GIs were able to draw from the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s and forge a sense of male prowess, racial identity, and homosociality that they used for survival. Graham's organization of the book into seven chapters and a conclusion offers readers new avenues of inquiry and research on the subject of military history. The chapters are: "The Fight of Their Fathers," "The Draft and the Allure of Military Service," "Basic Training," "Combat and Interracial Male Friendship," "Combat and Interracial Male Friendship," "Muhammad All and Draft Resistance," "Black Power GIs," and "Black, and Navy Too." Readers will find that the progression of the chapters helps the text as an historical book because the heart of Graham's discussion consists of a detailed reconstruction of African American involvement throughout Vietnam.

As an historical text, Graham's study does extremely well, providing an illuminating discussion on the problematic involvement of African American military history. In the first chapter, which also serves as the introduction to the text, Graham takes readers on a journey through African American involvement in all American wars. Not much changed for Black servicemen during America's first 150 years of war. African Americans went from being used "as a tool of psychological warfare" in the Revolutionary War to seeing the first signs of desegregation during World War II to being charged with "cowardice" during the Korean War. Amid all this racial polarization about black involvement in America's wars, the author concludes that African American GIs in Vietnam who were "shaped by the civil rights and Black Power movements" were given a sense of identity.

Structurally, Graham centers the first half of his discussion on black GIs' attainment of male prowess during a still racially segregated military. On paper, America's armed forces had been formally "desegregated" in 1954. But the acquisition of manhood was not an easy task for African American GIs in Vietnam. As the GIs speak for themselves through storytelling, which helped to promote a sense of community, Graham articulates several significant dimensions to Black Power and male prowess in the other six chapters that comprise the text. One of Graham's strongest arguments is based on the relationship of black solidarity and the color line. Graham is deeply attuned to the ways African American GIs acquired manhood and concludes that, though racial conflict had always existed, it would become more defined through the evolution of the war, as African American GIs forged stronger ties to black solidarity. Graham writes: