‘A white man’s war, a Black man’s fight’: the eye-opening story of Black soldiers in Vietnam

At a time when Black military history is being rewritten under Trump officials, new book The War Within a War provides a vital reminder

Martin Pengelly

Wil Haygood’s new book, his 10th, is The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home. Meeting in Washington DC to discuss it, he produces from between the pages a small Ziploc bag. Carefully, he takes out a flier, yellowed and brittle with age. The text at the top is Vietnamese. Underneath there is English.

It reads: “Colored GI’s! The South Vietnamese people, who are struggling for their independence and freedom, are friends with the American colored people being victim of barbarous racial discrimination at home. Your battlefield is right in the USA! Your enemy is the war lords in the White House and the Pentagon!”

Haygood says: “One of the soldiers I interviewed, Elbert Nelson, the doctor, he explains in the book that he found this leaflet directed to Black soldiers. And he was so touched that I tracked him down, he said, ‘I want you to have this.’ It was from the North Vietnamese, it was attached to trees and walls. It just gave me chills.”

The War Within a War tells such stories of Black Americans who from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s served in or otherwise experienced Vietnam: soldiers, marines, pilots, doctors and nurses, officers and drafted men, reporters and activists, cultural commentators and more.

Saying “this is my most important book,” Haygood cites a great writer who pointed the way.

“We need to remind Americans who have a very short memory what James Baldwin said. I met Baldwin when I started out my journalism career. I was at the Boston Globe, and he was a visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I was sent up there to do a feature about him. This was 1985. I hadn’t written a single book, but I was dreaming. And now I have a quote from him at the start of my book. I’ll read it, if I may.”

In a steady voice, Haygood reads words first published in the Black journal Freedomways in 1967.

“Long before the Americans decided to liberate the south-east Asians, they decided to liberate me. My ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this for he … was the first Viet Cong victim. We were bombed first.”

Haygood “came across that quote early in writing, and I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to use that at the beginning of the book, because it says everything.’ It synthesizes so much of what the feelings were among so many of those soldiers.”…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/feb/10/war-within-a-war-black-soldiers-vietnam-wil-haygood

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