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

Q&A with Author Wil Haygood

By Daria Sommers

In his latest book, The War Within A War, author Wil Haygood lays bare the psychological burden Black Americans faced serving in Vietnam. The country that sent them to fight for democracy abroad denied them equality and justice back home. By presenting their stories in counterpoint to the unfolding Civil Rights movement exploding across America, Haygood’s moving narrative makes tangible the complex socio-political reality Black servicemembers dealt with on a daily basis.

Among the profiles included in this deeply researched work are Henry Reed, a Marine who called out racism in the Marine Corps; Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese; Dr. Elbert Nelson, an Army surgeon who found himself in the middle of Black soldiers’ protests; and biracial pianist Philippa Schuyler, who, tired of discrimination in the States, went to Vietnam to work with orphans and lost her life.

An award-winning journalist and author of eleven books, Haygood has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and, in 2022, won the Ambassador Richard Holbrooke Dayton International Peace Prize. As an investigative reporter, he’s travelled the world. He was kidnapped and ransomed by rebels in Somalia and covered Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa. His book The Butler was made into a 2013 movie starring Forest Whitaker.

The War Within A War will be released February 10 (Alfred A. Knopf) and available for purchase online at major booksellers.

The below Q&A is followed by an excerpt from Haygood’s book. To find out more about the author and his work go to www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734766/the-war-within-a-war-by-wil-haygood/

DS: How did you come to write this book?

WH: In Columbus, Ohio, there was a guy who lived across the street from me named Skip Dunn who was a high schooler and a sports hero. As a kid I would wave to him every morning. “Hey Skip. How’ya doing?” Towards the end of 1967, there was a span when I didn’t see Skip and I asked my sister who went to high school with him, “Where’s Skip?” She said, “Skip’s gone to Vietnam.” I didn’t know what Vietnam was all about or what it meant. I just knew that I missed Skip.

In 1968, when I was in the ninth grade, we moved from that mixed neighborhood in the north end of Columbus to a segregated housing project. That summer the nation exploded because of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember coming home from school and all of a sudden, these tanks started to converge on our neighborhood. I found myself trying to outrun them and I was scared as hell. Why are National Guardsmen standing atop tanks and screaming at me? What did I do? I’m just a kid who moved to the east side of town with his mother.

Life goes on. I became a writer and when my sixth book The Butler [the story of Eugene Allen who served as the White House Butler for 34 years] came out, I was invited to the Red Stone Military Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama for a discussion. That swirled a lot of memories around in my mind because my grandmother, who I had lived with, was born and raised in Selma, Alabama.

That visit got me thinking about Skip and the other young Black boys from my neighborhood who were in Vietnam while I was a kid caught in this civil rights maelstrom. Those two events were seared in my memory. I had never seen a book that joined the struggle for civil rights, Vietnam, LBJ, politics and the USA. All of those things. That seemed to me to be a thrilling narrative if I could bring them all under one book.

DS: Describe the psychological burden Black soldiers carried as they were asked to fight for the Vietnamese people’s freedom when they didn’t have that freedom back home?

In 1964, there were Black soldiers on the ground in Vietnam who knew their mother and father in Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina and North Carolina, were not having an easy time to vote. The most basic right that every citizen in this country should enjoy. Even after the civil rights bills had been passed in 1964, 1965 and 1968, it was still tough going for Black folks in this country. It was a split screen. You had the civil rights upheavals going on and you had a lot of military leaders coming out of VMI and The Citadel who did not readily get inequality. Truman had desegregated the Armed Forces in 1948 but that didn’t mean a whole lot to many people.

It must have been horrific for a Black soldier in Vietnam to come out of his tent in the morning and see a Confederate flag planted in front of it. That must have been heartbreaking. And yet you had this story that grew to be true: Black couldn’t survive without white in the war, and white couldn’t survive without Black. So, there was this forced brotherhood that outpaced what was happening in the States because of the intensity of war. You’re in war, you’re in battle and everyone wants to stay alive. 

You write in your book about how the ‘dap’ handshake among Black soldiers was seen as subversive. Yet, when a white soldier planted a Confederate flag outside a Black soldier’s tent, it was tolerated because those white soldiers were southern and that somehow made it ok. How did that affect Black soldiers?

[The dap handshake refers to The Dignity And Pride handshake created by Black soldiers in Vietnam]

Situations like Confederate flags appearing made the Black soldier more intense about freedom and about being treated fairly. Now maybe if they were in their hometown of Cincinnati or Dayton or Newark or in eastern Texas, then maybe they could take a slight in a drugstore or in a bar if something racially was out of line. Maybe they could tolerate it. But being in war where they were asked to watch a white soldier’s back and also tolerate Confederate flags and racial slurs uttered just out of earshot, well that couldn’t be tolerated. Not in a war zone. Not when I just saw somebody’s leg blown off. Not when I’d have to count on a white soldier to save my butt and he had to count on me to save his butt. That’s just not going to be tolerated. Let’s talk about this right now. Let’s iron out all of these racial conflicts before we march off tonight on this six-hour trek. Let’s straighten this mess out right now.

The Vietnam War ignited racial conversation. And, of course, the soldiers would get letters from their siblings back in the States telling them what was going on and it wasn’t nice, about race and the fires that were happening. To the Black soldier, it was the war within a war.

Did the shared experience of Vietnam between white and Black soldiers break down prejudices when they returned home?

There was a white soldier who I interviewed about race in Vietnam. He told me, “When I left to go to war, it was almost common for the N word to be uttered in my house. Because of the friendships that I made with Black soldiers and witnessing their bravery, when I got back home, I said to my kids,” and this is almost making me tear up right now, “the N word will never be uttered under the roof of this house.”

Now that’s deep because through bullets and death and fire in Vietnam, a white soldier concluded that his family back home had to work through this racial prejudice that has been flowing across our nation for years and years. It took the bloodshed and the bravery and the camaraderie and the battles of war to make that happen. Those examples were more pronounced, of course, than any examples on the streets of our nation. You didn’t have a lot of racial intermingling in the States in the 50s and 60s. One of the avenues for someone white to hang around someone Black or someone Black to hang around someone white was in the military. That’s just the way it was.

It must have been strange for Black soldiers to find themselves working through racial issues in the midst of a war on the other side of the world.

Army surgeon Dr. Elbert Nelson, who I write about in the book, told me the story of when he was walking through the jungles and saw these logs floating down river. The North Vietnamese had attached flyers addressed to Black soldiers to the logs.

The fact that the North Vietnamese understood what was going on in America and had more insight than many of the military personnel was riveting. The Black soldiers wanted to win the war of course. They all wanted to be known as soldiers who went to this foreign land and won because America had never lost a war. At the same time, the Black soldier wanted to say to themselves, “I stood my ground for Rosa Parks. I stood my ground for Martin Luther King, Jr. I stood my ground for John Lewis. I stood my ground for Ella Baker in Mississippi.” They wanted to have that medal singed into their soul and be able to say, “Yes, I fought for my country but I never lost sight of another battle I was forced to fight simultaneously in Vietnam.”

To what extent did the American media pick up on the racial strife among US troops?

It’s very interesting to me that the mainstream media during the Vietnam War – LA Times, NY Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, AP etc – avoided reporting on the racial strife across our Armed Services. I believe they considered the reporting of such a story unpatriotic. The editors couldn’t help reporting on the Civil Rights revolution in America because it was right out their front door as those newspaper offices were smack in the middle of so many downtowns.

The communiques about racial discord that reached America’s shores came from Black soldiers themselves in their letters back home. With many of those letters explaining to loved ones exactly why they were being disciplined or how they ended up doing time in the Long Binh Jail.

The photograph on the cover of your book is so striking. How did you and your editor decide on it?

After the book was finished, I wondered whatever happened to my friend Skip Dunn. So, I called home and learned that Skip had passed away about nine years ago but I got the phone number for his widow. At this point, the book designer already had an idea for the cover. When I met with Skip’s widow I asked her for a picture of Skip for sentimental reasons. The picture she sent me of Skip knocked me out. She’d said, “Wil, I know the book is finished but at the back of the book if you even just mention Skip’s name, it would be nice for his six sons.”

I called my editor and said I know all the photographs have been handed in but I had one last picture I’d like to send. After the editor got it, he called me and said, “Wow, Wil. Me and the art designer are so touched by this photograph of Skip Dunn that we are thinking of putting it on the cover.” That is Skip Dunn, my childhood friend, on the cover of the book.

The look in Skip’s eyes says so much. The helmet is so big and he is so young. It is as though he is quoting Marvin Gaye’s song, “What’s going on?” It is as though Skip is thinking, “Ok America, this is what you wanted for me. I’m here. Please treat my family back home equitably. Please don’t let anything happen to my young brothers and sister.” So, it is a divine occurrence that Skip Dunn appears on the cover of this book.

When I met his widow for lunch at a small diner in Columbus and I showed her the cover, she just screamed, “Oh, my goodness. Oh Wil.” It was just a magical moment in my life. Across ten books I’ve written, to be able to sit there and show her the cover, that was truly, truly special.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

There are many lost stories of the Vietnam War especially when it comes to Black soldiers and this angle of the Vietnam War hasn’t really been told in such depth before.

When truthful stories are told about war, they have a lot of lessons to teach us. When it comes to the Vietnam War, it moved this country into a racial consciousness that was equivalent to a Civil Rights movement. That story deserved to be told and that is what I sought to do with this book. It was a struggle in Vietnam and at home for Black Americans.

The Civil Rights movement in this nation as we’ve seen in recent years is ongoing. There have been setbacks as we know but it is the noblest fight that any nation can wage. That being the fight for racial and gender equality and fairness. Today there are forces trying to wipe away Black history. There are people banning books and this must not stand. We have enough people in this country, from all walks of life, who realize that you can’t ban history. As Thurgood Marshall said, “The truth needs no defense because it is the truth.”

Of all the books that you’ve written, how was this one special?

Almost every soldier, every Marine I interviewed at the beginning of the interview said, “I’ve been waiting to tell my story.” And at the end of the interview, they’d have tears in their eyes.

That told me I was on the right road. That the literary gods had tapped Wil Haygood, who lived across from Skip Dunn, who moved to another side of town, who was caught in the vortex of rioting after the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, that made me know why the literary gods had tapped me on the shoulder, if I can sound a little spiritual here, to tell this story. And I knew I was going to tell it. I knew it needed to be told. And I just thought I had the nerve to tell it.

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Excerpt from:

The War Within A War:
The Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home

By Wil Haygood

One day, in his hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois, Robert Stewart was casually glancing up and down the street. He hoped to spy a buddy who’d want to go see the Cardinals play! As a seventeen-year- old high-school student, Stewart had the same passion a lot of other teenagers in East St. Louis did at the time: he loved Bob Gibson, the fiery Black pitcher, loved how he’d whip his fastball past the startled player in the batter’s box. He saw someone coming closer. “It was this kid who I knew from the neighborhood. He always used to look raggedy, but now he was in a shiny uniform. He had his hat on. He was really squared away. Walking tall!” The closer the soldier got to Stewart, the more in awe he became of the image. This was a military man, and he cut such an impressive figure. Young Robert couldn’t shake the memory of the transformation his neighborhood acquaintance had made. “This guy impressed me!”

A lot of people in that East St. Louis neighborhood were talking about the war. It was 1967; talk about Vietnam flowed across kitchen tables, on backyard porches, in barbershops, and even in county jails, where some inmates were being given the option of going to prison or heading to Vietnam. After graduating from high school that year, Robert Stewart decided he was going to enlist in the military. Not because he was gung-ho, but because he figured he needed to be proactive and choose the branch of the military that might afford him the best chance to survive in Vietnam. The neighborhood soldier Stewart had seen was in the Army, but Stewart’s research convinced him that the Marines could train him better than any other branch of the military. He found something reassuring in their tough-as-hell image. He saw all those slogans on billboards: the few. the proud. the marines. And another one: ask a marine. And yet another one: we don’t promise you a rose garden. He watched the recruitment TV commercials with wide eyes. “Those commercials really worked,” he says.

In 1967, East St. Louis—because of zoning codes and gerrymandering and other features of real-estate discrimination—remained an all-Black community. But the mayor was a white man.

All through high school, the future was a concern for Stewart and his classmates. When he looked around East St. Louis—situated on the Missouri border—he did not see plentiful opportunities for young Black men. The city had endured an explosive race riot in 1917 and even after all these years, it was hard to say there was still not a residue lingering: housing segregation, an income gap between Black and white, mistrust between law enforcement and the Black community. Simply put, urban renewal had hastened the destruction of parts of the city. Robert’s father, Charlie, worked at Granite City Steel, over in Granite City, Illinois. His mother, Alice, worked for the Veterans Administration at the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. Alice Stewart was not opposed to the military, but that did not stop her from trying to talk her son out of joining the Marines after he had made up his mind to do so.

Because her son was only seventeen years old, Alice Stewart had to sign his consent form to go into the Marines. Not long after he took his date, Lillian, to the high-school prom, Robert Stewart was bound for San Diego and Marine boot camp.

Everyone kept reminding Stewart that the Marine boot camp he’d be attending was “near Hollywood,” which seemed to be their way of saying, “How bad could it be?” But Stewart found the place hellish, with its nonstop exercise regimen—the push-ups, the screaming from drill instructors, the sleep deprivation, the physical training, the classroom work, all of it coming as if on a constant loop. There were drill instructors who’d call you “pussy,” “maggot,” “lunatic,” “coward,” “asshole.” They’d tell you they were going to kill you— and make you believe it. “Boot camp was a nightmare,” Stewart said years later. “They wanted to get you ready for a combat zone.” There were sixty-four Marines in his class. Of that total, including Stewart, there were only four Blacks.

The deployment to Vietnam for Marines meant a thirteen-month assignment, one month longer than the twelve-month Army rotation. The difference was a holdover from World War II, when Marines went overseas on ships. Their journey accounted for one month of duty, but it wasn’t subtracted from the yearlong assignment they were going into.

In January 1968, Robert Stewart landed in Vietnam. A few weeks later came the Tet Offensive, that bombardment that began at mid- night on January 31 when North Vietnamese Army troops and the Viet Cong attacked thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals. Stewart himself felt ready—and confident that the Marines had trained him well. “I’d rather be feared than to be fearful” was his attitude at the time. He was a rifleman. The Marines overall were a smaller force than the Army units. In Vietnam, they’d go on stealth missions up into the jungle. He began to understand why the Marines liked to recruit the young. “The Marines liked you young because you can hump the hills all day long and not get heat stroke. Forty-year-old guys wouldn’t want to do that.”

Sometimes it seemed as if the jungle was playing tricks: Stewart and his men would be fired upon by the enemy. They’d give chase, but, just that quick—poof—the Vietnamese soldiers disappeared. “They were gone, hiding in tunnels.”

Robert Stewart turned eighteen in Vietnam, and by the time of his birthday he had been promoted to sergeant. Word reached him and his fellow Marines about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 4, 1968, assassination. As painful as the news was, he couldn’t really reconfigure his mind to focus on anything happening back in the States. “At the time, I was concerned about staying alive, day to day. There was no TV to watch anything. Your thinking was: ‘How can I make it past the next day?’ ” The racial turmoil in the aftermath of King’s killing didn’t seem to affect his Marine unit. Marines were careful about not antagonizing one another, at least in the war zone. “First of all,” Stewart says about racial harassment, “I got three to four grenades, a bayonet. You didn’t need to be picking on someone carrying a machine gun and hand grenades. I mean, accidents could happen. You just didn’t have that mindset. You knew what training other Marines got. You weren’t challenging people.”

Sometimes, however, the dynamics of race were so complex that they would linger in Stewart’s mind and come to haunt him decades later. “We had to go up into a valley one day,” he recalls. “I had been walking point. The captain looks toward two of us, myself and another Marine, who was white. The captain had to choose who to go into that valley first. If he’d’ve chosen me, I wonder if some in the unit would have wondered if it was because I was Black. He chose the white guy. He went in, and he went down. It was suicide, walking point in Vietnam.”

Now and then, they’d write letters home. “You’d be writing about your experiences with villagers, the food, the children. Or you’d tell your mom you couldn’t wait to get home and get some of her sweet- potato pie. But I remember a sergeant telling us, ‘When you get letters from home, don’t get wrapped up in what’s in them, because you put that letter up and see how many bullets it’s gonna stop. So get back to the business at hand.’” From that day on he had another attitude about receiving letters. “If I got a letter, fine; if not, fine. I survived another day in Vietnam.”

Excerpted from The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home by Wil Haygood. Copyright © 2026 Wil Haygood. Reprinted with permission from Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House.