Bloods (30 page)

I said, “Look. You are wrong. Why don’t you just pay the man his money and move on?”

The chief turned around, and he says, “What did you say?”

“You’re wrong.”

And he said, “You’re a lying, fuckin’ nigger.”

And he punched me.

I immediately grabbed him and let him know my rank so that there was no misunderstanding. I was a lieutenant JG at the time. And he still was mouthing off. So I pulled out my ID card—I did know the rules—and he kept on. So I called the shore patrol, and I decided to put him on report. I couldn’t punch him back, which was on my mind.

The next day we got back on the carrier, and you would never believe the parade of people that came to see me, up to and including the executive officer of the ship. They were saying he was an outstanding chief. He never had gotten into trouble. He was drinking. And that it ought to be excused.

I said, “Look. This can’t be tolerated. This chief knew that I was an officer. I can’t believe that you are telling me that this ought to be called ‘extenuating circumstances.’ ”

The chief was brought around to apologize. And the executive officer urged me to drop the charges of disrespect, which I refused to do. To me there was a much higher principle that I was concerned about. But I left before anything ever was done about the chief. And I am certain that nothing ever was.

I admire people who didn’t always push every race issue, because they were doing everything proper, correct, by the book. They were the soldier’s soldier, the sailor’s sailor, the Marine’s Marine. I don’t put them down. It was tough. But I would raise holy hell every time. I would be ready to go to any authority. I was always very proud, probably still am now. There were just certain things that I was never willing to tolerate from anybody. I felt the same way about segregation.

I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and the separate but equal doctrine. Everything was separate, from the
theaters to the hotels to everything. I lived in a neighborhood that was all black except for some Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. We didn’t think about them as such. It was white people and the rest of us.

You could not find two people who were more gracious and more ordinary than my parents. My father worked for the Naval shipyard as a carpenter. Worked very hard all of his life. My mother did what mothers did at that time—worked at home. Was a mother of five children, housewife, manager of the house. And occasionally she did day work for extra money.

During those days I was not a crusader. Not consciously. I was not conscious of going out trying to break the segregation laws. There were just things that I was not going to tolerate. It was incomprehensible to me to stand by willingly and allow myself to be limited for artificial reasons. I just have a strong belief in myself. It was the way I was raised.

I can recall getting on buses and being asked to move to the back. I wouldn’t sit in the direct front, but I would clearly sit farther than where the unofficial line was. If whites got on, you had to move back if there were more seats in the back. The bus driver inevitably would say, “Hey, you. Get to the back.” I would sit there and wait for someone to throw me out. But they wouldn’t. They didn’t want to make enough of an issue out of it to throw a kid out.

Perhaps some of the things we did in the segregated environment was not too dissimilar from what Solidarity is doing to Poland today. You may not have gone out and stood before a bayonet, but you did as many of the little things that you could to erode the system and show you did not accept it.

I remember when I was a senior in high school. In 1955. I was always president of my class and president of the student government. I recall going to a citywide meeting of student government presidents. There was one particular white guy who said he was going to be going to the Naval Academy. That sounded exciting. So I went to the recruiting station and told the recruiter I wanted to understand something about the Naval Academy. And he simply wouldn’t give me any information. And he said
he didn’t want to waste his time going through the tests. I was irate. To his mind, blacks didn’t go to the Naval Academy. Interestingly, there was a few at the time. A very, very few. But I didn’t know it.

I took an undergraduate degree in mathematics and chemistry at West Virginia Wesleyan College, was an exchange student in the Soviet Union for six months, and then started teaching mathematics at my high school. In 1961 I got drafted. And I just made the decision to go into the Navy because I didn’t think I wanted to go into the Army and because of what that recruiter had done to me.

I qualified for the Aviation Officers’ Training Program and was the only black in my class at Pensacola, Florida. At that time there were very few black officers. In fact, on a ship as large as a carrier, you might be the only one.

We had what they called smokers at flight school. And they would set up boxing matches. One day the sergeant was standing around and said, “We have to have some boxers. Who volunteers as the battalion boxers? Who boxed before?” A few hands went up. “Who else would like to volunteer?” I never fought before. And back home, in the streets, I was not known as the one that was raising all the hell. But the sergeant quote volunteered me unquote. After all, I was black.

The first boxing match I was a hero. They give you some training, not much. But I was just too proud to be beaten by anyone. I boxed someone else who had never boxed, and I just kind of beat the hell out of him and won.

When it came to the second smoker, I fought a guy who knew what he was doing. He was not one of those quote volunteers unquote. He had done Golden Gloves stuff. He won the fight. I got him some good ones, but he really punched me. Of course, all my people thought I was robbed. And although the scoring was close, he did a job on me. That’s when I retired.

I did not experience the terrible, overt racism that older black officers did who went through before me. At least at the officer level, the Navy was priding itself on being ahead of what was happening in society. But the discrimination was still there, just not so open.

No one, for instance, would tell me that I couldn’t go to the swimming pool in the officers’ club area. If I went
with my group, no one ever paid that any attention. But if I went by myself, the people would start getting out. And I use to have fun making them do it.

I remember I was in the band, and the band was going to New Orleans to play in the Mardi Gras. The bandmaster called me in and said, “I had an experience one time before where there was a black in the band we took to the Mardi Gras, and people threw things at us. I would suggest that you not go.” When I complained to the sergeant, he said, “Look, you are an outstanding cadet. But you are down in the South, and those sort of things happen. We are doing this for you. We are trying to protect you from incidents. We are not giving you an order, but I think you ought not to push this anymore.” And before I could do anything about it, they had gone.

I was equally outspoken when I went to Advanced Technical Training School in Glen Cove, Georgia. Jerry Allen and I were the only black officers. Coming back from our dates one night, we were driving along and the police stopped us. We demanded to know why we were being stopped since we weren’t doing anything. The police threatened to break Jerry’s jaw. So when I got to the base, I went to the base attorney and asked him to file charges against the police for racial harassment. He said, “We don’t have jurisdiction over there.” Of course, the big problem was the base didn’t want to have any trouble.

And when I was stationed in Meridian, Mississippi, the executive officer once asked me if I wouldn’t mind not coming to the officers’ club because they were going to have a lot of guests from town. Just like Pensacola, the request was made under the guise that they didn’t want me to be uncomfortable. Though I hadn’t planned on going, I made a point to go there that particular time.

In 1963 I was on routine deployment into the Pacific. While we were in Japan, we received orders to go down to the South China Sea. I was on a carrier, the
Ranger
. None of us thought that much about it other than we were going south. We ended up in the waters off Southeast Asia. Because of the confidentiality of the mission, we were not to even mention what action we took even to other people on the ship. We were not to tell anyone back home, including relatives, that we were even in the area.
I might add that although it was the initial stages of the Vietnam War, particularly for the involvement of our forces, at the time, most of us weren’t able to deal with it as a war as such. Most of us didn’t recognize the impact of what was happening or how it was developing. Only afterwards did we make the connection of what was taking place.

I was in an airborne early-warning squadron. As the airborne controller, I was directly over a pilot, a copilot, the radar operator, and a technician. We would direct bombers to particular targets. The bombers we had were old, single-propeller aircraft and light attack jets. They were carrying light weaponry, 500-pound bombs or less, not the kinds of things that would cause tremendous damage. There was no napalm. Their mission was to destroy routes and roads, and stop the supplies coming in from the North to the South. Most of the missions were over into the Laotian area. At that time it was not identified as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Some of our people had had Korean experience, but most had never dropped anything or anything other than on practice targets. So there was a certain measure of excitement. And most of us didn’t envisage a great deal of danger. There was no air contact with the enemy. Occasionally, there would be some small-arms fire that you wouldn’t notice until after the plane was inspected. No one was being hurt. And no one was getting any battle fatigue, because these were not daily bombing missions. We would sometimes go three, four, five days without doing anything.

When the intelligence people briefed us, we were told that we were trying to stop quote Communist insurgency unquote. That was the battle cry, and there was no real questioning of that. And the assumption was that the action would be over soon. By cutting off the main supplies to the guerrillas, they would be hurt severely. And we believed that they didn’t have any enclaves of friendly support in the South. It was a very simple operation. And in all candor, most of us looked at it rather simplistically. You are trying to support a friendly country. It was a limited engagement. We were not thinking about a war. War in Vietnam was associated with the French period.

When I went back in January of 1965, we had a comparatively major situation. We were regularly assigning carriers to Southeast Asia. It was taking on the atmosphere of a combat zone. And we spent a great deal of time understanding the secret rules of engagement. There were specific conditions under which you could fire. We were told how far you could go in pursuit if anyone came after you. The MiGs would come out to test us and turn back in. But you could not go into hot pursuit of them into the North. We were in Cambodia and Laos, but you simply did not cross the DMZ. It was going to be a war fought under certain parameters. And it clearly was going to be limited. And that was somewhat of a comforting factor, because we thought that we had a clearly defined engagement, fighting for honorable causes, supporting a country that was being overrun by the neighbors from the North.

In the intelligence briefings we were hearing more about the geopolitical aspects of what was happening out there. There was no question as to who the good guys were. The North Vietnamese were aiding and abetting a guerrilla group against the legitimate, elected government of South Vietnam. I saw this as typical efforts of Soviet aggrandizement. A war of national liberation was being extended south to take over the people against their wishes. It seemed to make sense that the national interests of the U.S. was to stop these kinds of efforts. That’s what I’d been trained to think, and it made sense.

At first there were mild operations. Like checking fishing boats for guerrillas. And it was kind of fun, flying down low to take a visual look. If they looked suspicious, we’d call in a nearby boat to investigate. We would fly in support of some of the land forces, and occasionally the ships would go in for some shore bombardment as they were asked for it.

The things started to intensify. The war became real.

It started becoming real when they started putting heavier bombs on the planes. When they started loading napalm.

It started becoming real when we started getting fewer and fewer “bingo” fields. Those were fields in South Vietnam where you could land if something happened to you
and you couldn’t get back to the carrier.

It started becoming real when we started putting more emphasis on escape and evasion.

It started becoming real when the missions stepped up. When the targets of opportunity were getting closer and closer in the North, across the DMZ. And the more you started doing that, the more you faced the SAM emplacements.

It became real when the first pilot didn’t come back.

A guy we called Bush Bill as the first person I knew who didn’t come back. He was flying an A-6 off a carrier during night operations. We were in flight school together.

In that early stage, the tendency was to treat those kinds of deaths like you would the accidents that always happen on a carrier. Every time you take off from a carrier and every time you land, there is danger. And there is just a macho feeling among pilots that these accidents will happen on a carrier. And we tended to list the people as MIA as opposed to KIA until we were absolutely certain. We held out hope that they would be recovered, captured, anything but dead.

There was no feeling that we were in a war of attrition.

When I returned in 1969, I had the role as electronics warfare officer and combat information officer in the combat center for Carrier Division 3. In essence, I was representing the flag commander, giving the order to fire, the order to pursue or to change the rules of engagement. From just bombing roads on my first tour, we had advanced to a major war. There were bombing raids now into the North. We were bombing Hanoi. Yet there were certain kinds of power dams you couldn’t touch.