The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home

This immersive history from bestselling biographer Haygood (The Butler) explores the unique experiences of African Americans drawn into the Vietnam War as the civil rights battle raged on the home front. Among those profiled are Capt. Leroy Pitts, the first Black officer awarded the Medal of Honor after he “heaved himself” onto a grenade to protect his men, and Air Force officer Fred Cherry, who endured seven harrowing years of torture as a POW, as well as civilians like Philippa Schuyler, a biracial piano prodigy who died while rescuing orphans fathered by American soldiers in Vietnam, Time journalist Wallace Terry, who doggedly reported on Black soldiers, and Maude DeVictor, a “government worker-bee” who investigated veterans’ illnesses caused by Agent Orange. These disparate threads combine to produce a wide-ranging examination of the “many truths” of African American life during “America’s first fully integrated war,” from discrimination against Black officers and racist tension between Black and white troops to those tensions’ dissipation under shared duress, as in the case of the moving friendship that developed between Cherry and fellow POW Porter Halyburton, a white Southerner. In particular, the book vividly portrays the growing anger among African American troops about fighting “a white man’s war,” culminating in a “racial riot” at the Long Binh Jail near Saigon in August 1968 following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The result is a highly original window into a turbulent historical moment. (Feb.)