Academic literature on the topic 'African American soldiers in the Vietnam War'

Tim O’Brien was sent to Vietnam as a foot soldier in 1969, during the later part of the Vietnam War that can be called the “bad” or unwinnable war. Based on his experience, O'Brien's writing about the Vietnam War in his award-winning fiction novels is always "bad," meaning that the war was terrible for American grunts like himself, his fellow soldiers, and Vietnamese civilians, with practically no good or inspiring stories. Nevertheless, O’Brien touches upon almost all problems of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, but not many peer-reviewed authors or online literary analysis websites could identify or discuss them all. The purpose of this article is to discuss the war details in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and its historical perspective, so that young middle and high school readers can understand the meaning behind Tim O'Brien's writing about the Vietnam War. The goal is to summarize the entire big picture of the Vietnam War and to help students determine whether American soldiers’ actions, as described by Tim O’Brien, were morally right or wrong and were legal or forbidden according to the US law of war. The war-related issues that O’Brien mentioned in this novel are: boredom and meaningless death, abusive violence toward Vietnamese noncombatants, drug use, in-fighting, thefts within barracks, grief, rage, self-mutilation, mutilation of enemy corpses, and senseless animal and civilian killings.

This article examines the participation of African Americans in the World War I in the ranks of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the 1917 – 1918. The author studies the attitude of the African-American community towards participation in the World War I, describes the peculiarities of military service of African American soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces, and reveals the manifestations of racial discrimination. The article also reviews the attitude of French soldiers and officers towards African American soldiers of the U. S. Army, analyzes the impact of the acquired combat experience and sociocultural interaction with foreign soldiers upon the activity of African American population in fighting for their rights and freedoms in the United States. In Russian historiography, the participation of African Americans in the American Expeditionary Forces during the World War I, peculiarities of their service, and the impact of war on self-consciousness of this category of military servicemen have not previously become the subject of special research. Based on the article. The conclusion is made that the attitude of African American community towards participation in the World War I was quite ambiguous. Their soldiers faced different forms of discrimination during their military service: they could not serve in the Marine Corps and other elite units, and most of the time were engaged in the rear. A different experience received African American soldiers from the units transferred under the leadership of the French Army, whose officers treated them with respect; the blood shed for their country, combat experience and respectful of the allies enhanced desire of the African Americans to gain equal civil rights and freedoms in their homeland.

The American war in Vietnam killed 58,000 US military personnel and millions of people on the ground, creating a troubling war legacy that has been ‘resolved’ in the USA through state strategies to efface military mortalities. Drawing on Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s work addressing mortality denied or ignored in the field of international relations and that of Andrew Bacevich and Christian Appy on American militarism, I explore the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, as a site of war re-curations that refuse the effacement of mortality and disrupt the militarist myths that sustain it – namely, that America is renewed and revitalized through war, and that soldiers live on as American heroes when they sacrifice for the country. With the Vietnam Syndrome long since replaced by insistence on loving all soldiers, even if not all the country’s wars, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated to remembering those who were not publicly acknowledged for fighting and dying in America’s failed war. Assemblages of pictures, letters, and other items that a community of loss leaves at the Memorial re-curate the war by showing the lingering pain that war mortality inflicts on those who experience it decade upon decade. Taken together, the objects of war shown at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and collected each evening put mortality at the heart of war experience. The Memorial is therefore a key location of knowledge that challenges militarist appeals and state effacements in favor of what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls ‘just memory’ of war.