Wallace Terry’s ‘Bloods’ a Tribute to Persistence : Author Wins Fight to Document Heroism of Black GIs

NEW YORK —  Wallace Terry takes a last sip of milk before heading to the podium. He glances at the first line of his notes, which reads “Hollywood,” and tells of how movies have unfailingly ignored black heroism in American history.

He makes jokes about the ironies, then hammers them in with not-so-funny stories of the black men and women who have died--and been ignored.

There were 5,000 blacks fighting in the American Revolution, 250,000 who fought in Union blues during the Civil War--a cascade of sacrifice leading inexorably to the focus of Terry’s riveting, painfully honest book about Vietnam, “Bloods.”

“They had less to fight for,” Terry says of the black soldiers in Vietnam, “and they would go home to less.”

He is proud, unabashedly proud, of the soldiers who learned to forget color in the face of death. He is enraged by the number of blacks killed by “friendly fire” and the GIs who raised Confederate flags after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Black Veterans Speak

The speech ends and the slides begin, accompanied by tape-recorded voices of black veterans. Shots of serene sunsets are followed by those of destroyed villages, decayed corpses, the horrible pockmarks a bomb leaves on the face of the jungle, the face of a Vietnamese child.

“There’s some degree of horror behind everything I see there, even when I see a little child,” Terry says a couple hours later, sitting in a restaurant not far from the Columbia University classroom where he lectured.

Across from him is Robert Holcomb, one of the 20 soldiers of various backgrounds whose stories “Bloods” relates. In the book, Holcomb tells of how he reluctantly went to Vietnam, the hell he lived through and, 11 years after he came home, meeting the son he sired there but never knew existed.

Tonight, Holcomb is talking about raising money for Vietnam veterans centers and a memorial that is to be erected in Manhattan. He is happy to see Terry again and, when the two men part, they hug each other warmly.

Terry has become something of a veterans’ hero since the publication of “Bloods” last August.

Book Draws High Praise

The book has drawn nearly universal high praise and called attention to the injustices endured by black soldiers, who accounted for 23% of the war’s deaths, although blacks only comprise 10% of the nation’s population.

Its publication is a personal triumph for Terry, who spent two years in Vietnam as a correspondent for Time magazine and 12 years after that trying to get published a book on what he found there.

Terry, 46, an ordained minister, had covered the civil rights movement for the Washington Post (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was godfather to one of his three children).

He first went to Vietnam to write a story about the racial integration of the troops, news that so pleased the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration that officials had Terry brief the President personally.

After the war, he wrote a book in straight narrative form and began shopping it around. He has 120 rejection letters from a decade spent employed as a broadcast commentator so he would have plenty of time to work on his obsession.

‘Not Commercially Viable’

“It was not a commercially viable story,” he was told. “America does not want to hear any more about Vietnam. They most certainly do not want to hear anything connected to blacks who were in Vietnam.”

When the acceptance letter finally came, it was not for the book Terry had written. He could write his book about blacks in Vietnam if it was an “oral history,” a book told in the words of the veterans themselves.

Finding the veterans was not hard. Telling their stories, which read like well-crafted short stories, was.

After the interviews, Terry spent hours on end in a small room with quote fragments taped on the walls surrounding him, working on each man’s story.

“Bloods” has since landed on the editor’s choice lists of Time magazine and The New York Times, gained kudos from the likes of Walter Cronkite and Studs Terkel, and even earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Now there’s talk of a movie deal.

“I remember what Alex Haley said when he found out ‘Roots’ was so popular and was selling so well. He said he wished he could have written faster,” Terry said.

Tells Regret Over Delays

“I wish that this nation had grown up faster and could have read what I was trying to say to it 10 years ago, then maybe I wouldn’t have put my family through as much deprivation and pain as I did because I wasn’t always there.”

Not only did he sacrifice career and family, Terry went deeply in debt working on the book. “It just became the center of my life,” he said.

He has visited dozens of college campuses in recent months, sometimes talking late into the evening, as long as there are students interested enough to listen and ask questions.

Terry often tells stories that are still difficult for him to discuss. He says he brings up the name of one veteran just to keep the man’s memory alive.

“I almost broke down three or four times tonight,” he confided. “I always get emotionally involved.”

Perhaps the most difficult story is about how he went to recover the bodies of John Cantwell and three other Australian journalists who were killed in Vietnam in May, 1968.

Grew Up Amid Bigotry

He leads into it by explaining how he had grown up frightened of the racial bigotry in the South, so frightened that the first time he ventured to Georgia he carried containers in his car “because I wasn’t going to stop between Atlanta and Birmingham to go to the toilet.”

“I’m telling you, I hated the klan, I guess I kind of hated everybody had anything to do with the South,” he said.

“Yet, in Vietnam, when I had to go get those four guys’ bodies who had been killed and they were journalists, including my roommate, I needed somebody to go with me. And the only guy who went with me out there was a Southerner, ‘Zip’ Grant.”

Now, hammering in his point, Terry says in disbelief, “And I was out there tryin’ to find the body of a white Australian.”

The point, he says, is that war brings out the worst in men and, every so often, the best--selflessness, love for one’s fellow man regardless of color.

Vietnam’s ‘Lasting Message’

“That’s the lasting message, the only positive message, about Vietnam,” he said. “The rest of it is nonsense. Foolishness.”

It is a message to which Terry has devoted his life since the war. In addition to “Bloods,” he has made an award-winning documentary recording, “Guess Who’s Coming Home.”

Now he plans to get into print his original book about blacks in Vietnam--the straight narrative--and then complete the trilogy with another oral history, this one including white soldiers and women, possibly even some of the enemy.

He optimistically predicts all this will take another three years, but it will probably take longer, with a paperback edition of “Bloods” expected later this year, a possible film version of the book and his work on yet another book, “Missing Pages,” about black journalists.