Bloods (31 page)

By now, I had gotten married, taught at the Naval Academy, and finished a degree in international relations and national security policy. So I began looking at Vietnam from an academic view. I began questioning the rationale for what we were doing and the effectiveness of our efforts. It was no longer a war in which a few people were being killed. Large, large numbers of people were being killed. And everybody knew about it. It was in the papers, on television. And there were demonstrations against the war back home. I was seeing the war from a perspective that I had not seen it before.

And now I was getting all the intelligence information. Our resources were so fantastic that we could listen to the North Vietnamese pilots talking to each other as they prepared to take off on their runways. You would really know what was happening everywhere.

And in the command room, where four of us maintained a twenty-four-hour watch, you would have a tremendous quantity of time to think. And I would think and think and think.

It was still clear to me that there was Communist aggression from the North. But it was less clear that it was an aspect of Chinese or Soviet orchestration than it was a matter of the North and South going at it in a struggle for unification. And I wondered if the war was worth the American effort. Worth the number of people I saw getting killed. Worth the attrition that was taking place in the country. Worth the protection of a government that was appearing to be increasingly corrupt. Was it a typical example of Communist aggression? Was it a war of national liberation in which the North was not aligned with any other country? Were the Vietnamese simply trying to get everybody out? Was the war part civil, part aggression?

And I would get the feeling that we were going at what we were doing in a halfhearted way, not with any degree of confidence that we were fighting a winnable war using all the power that we had. The Communists were winning it guerrilla-style, but not because we couldn’t stop them if we wanted to.

In all three tours I never once set foot in South Vietnam. I had made arrangements that last time to fly over to see my brother, Kenneth, to join him in Danang. He was working with a special intelligence group. A soldier’s soldier. But before we could get together, he got hurt. Hurt so badly he still has trouble walking to this day.

I thought about him. Thought about all the people being maimed and killed. And you kept saying, Why?

When my letter of resignation reached Admiral Zumwalt, he asked me to hold off and work with him in the whole area of improving conditions for people in the Navy.

Zumwalt was really quite strategically oriented and an extraordinarily professional Naval officer. To the surprise
of many people, he started asking questions about everything when he took over. He had commanded the naval forces in Vietnam and had lived with his family in the Philippines. So he had a great feeling for nonwhite people in general. I agreed to be his special assistant for minority affairs, but I didn’t have any high expectations that he was willing to go as far as I was wanting to go.

Shortly after I arrived, we decided to have a group of black officers and their spouses come to Washington to talk about various problems that they had been experiencing in the Navy. We did the same thing with enlisted personnel. This was an opportunity for me to have them legitimize the recommendations I would be making.

One of the admirals listening in began to talk about how much he loved his stewards as if they were his own children. At the time, the steward’s rates were closed to all but blacks and Filipinos.

“This boy that I have working for me is just like a son and a close friend.”

One particular wife said, “Admiral, how old is this
boy
that you’re talking about?”

And he says, “Oh, he’s almost forty.”

Zumwalt heard that.

And he heard the senior officers snicker when the enlisted men talked about the black hair products they wanted placed in the Navy exchange. Or the need to wear their hair a certain length.

Zumwalt was outraged.

Afterwards, he said to me, “I was looking at those flag officers, and they did not understand any of what was taking place here. I think I made a serious mistake. I have put so much emphasis on trying to ensure that everyone would be treated equitably that I was losing track of the fact that there are some differences, such as cultural, which have to receive some special attention.”

At that point he started getting an emotional involvement in what he had to do. And that made it easier to get changes made. But I wanted him to understand everything from a logical approach, to see the intellectual basis.

Eliminating discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity seemed so right to him that he could not understand why others didn’t deal with it from a logical basis. Even
if the whole world was full of bigots, he just could not understand how a senior military commander still wouldn’t be committed to equal opportunity and treatment because it made good sense from the point of view of mission effectiveness. Otherwise, you were not allowing your resources to develop. It was very simple.

In less than three years, we instituted some 200 programs. We had a new Navy. The first ships were named after black heroes. The first black was promoted to admiral. Ten percent of our NROTC units were set aside for predominantly black colleges. We guaranteed that blacks would be on promotion boards, assignment boards, and would make their way to the command colleges. The steward’s rate was opened up to anyone, not just blacks and Filipinos. We opened all rates to women and welcomed them into the Naval Academy. And we relaxed the rules on haircuts and allowed beards.

A lot of people didn’t like what was happening, and Zumwalt and I got called every name imaginable.

The flag officers were especially resentful that I was so outspoken, just a lieutenant commander, and Zumwalt always supported me.

One admiral did everything he could think of to block me or get me to quit. He would question the legal aspects of each new effort, unaware, of course, that I already had done so. He would offer me orders to this fabulous assignment, or he would try to find something he considered more important for me to do. Always, I said no. Finally he called me in to tell me that the Navy had been making some progress and now I was setting it all back by creating enemies.

You know, I was always able to find out any information I needed about the effective implementation of our equal opportunity programs, about race relations or any race crisis. It was not because I had Zumwalt’s signature in my hip pocket. Not because I didn’t have the power to get a Naval investigation going. But because the admirals and senior people almost always talked in front of their stewards and drivers as if they didn’t exist. And the drivers and stewards would pass information on to me in a matter of hours.

In spite of everything that Admiral Zumwalt was
willing to do for me in terms of promotions and assignments, I decided to resign from active duty in 1973. I really did believe we needed a period of consolidating the gains. I was so much associated with change and a kind of bellicose manner. We had had to use a meat cleaver instead of a rapier at first to get everyone’s attention. And there were too many very, very senior officers who would love to have gotten me in a situation in which I was no longer with the CNO. And they never had any reservations about saying it.

And so I went to work for Cummins Engine Company in the area of corporate action and responsibility.

When I heard that Saigon had fallen, I felt angry. I’m sort of competitive. I don’t like to lose at anything. We had put all this effort and lives into this, and we lost. Then when I saw the people climbing over our Embassy trying to get out, I felt a certain degree of disgrace and sadness.

Then I began to feel deceived, deceived by our foreign policy-makers. There was no question in my mind that if we were not prepared to go to the limit to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Communists, then we should not have done anything. We should have been willing to commit more resources. We could have bombed the dikes in North Vietnam, used stronger tactical weapons—not nuclear weapons. Gone to the heart of North Vietnam and bombed them. Maybe up until the Tet Offensive, we could have done a large quantity of things. And we didn’t have all the daily media to inform us on how much was going on. After Tet, that kind of escalation I think would have caused rioting everywhere back home.

Even when we pulled our forces out, I wondered, Why give up now? Even if we had had to maintain a permanent presence like we have in South Korea, that would have been a far preferable solution than the Communist takeover.

I realize Vietnam was an evolutionary process, from our clandestine role, to a covert one, to the wide-open participation. But I think we muddled through because our policy-makers had the sense that there wasn’t the national resolve to fight the kind of war that would win. When it came time to take strong actions, it was too late.

I think the people who were there, like me, were doing
their duty as they understood it. We were fighting for the honor, the integrity, and the national interests of this country. What upsets me now and will always is that there were policy-makers with a perception based on a set of conditions that was not reality.

I finally did get to South Vietnam. One of the first things I did when I became Zumwalt’s assistant was to tour all the Naval facilities throughout the world. When I went to Saigon, Danang, and other places in the war, I met with black soldiers, sailors, and Marines, and talked with them. I discovered a militancy of a nature that I’ve never seen before in anyone.

These men belonged to a generation that was far, far more outspoken than any generation of black men before them. So they get over there, get introduced to the drugs, the killings, the uncertainty, and they still had to put up with racism within the service. They were there to kill and be killed. About ready to die. To do first-class dying. Yet in terms of their assignments and promotions and awards, they were getting second-class treatment. It created a special brand of bitterness.

And many of them came back home with less than honorable discharges, caused by their anger and outspokenness. So they lost their veterans’ benefits, which weren’t so great anyway.

I don’t think you can call Vietnam a success story for the young blacks who served there. A few stayed in service and did very well. But those who experienced the racism in a war we lost wear a scar.

Vietnam left a scar on them that won’t go away. The black soldier paid a special price.

Today I am a group vice-president of Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, responsible for five corporate departments handling marketing and business development, including the computer services, information systems, and strategic planning. I’m also a captain in the Naval Reserve.

And you know, until now, I hadn’t thought about Vietnam for five years.

The FBI was on a rampage looking for me. Around the Fourth of July 1969. So I called the FBI, and I told them I was out on the Long Island Expressway. And they came and picked me up and put me in manacles again. Then they took me to Whitehall Street, where everybody in New York City gets inducted.

One of the agents said, “Holcomb, this time we’re gonna make sure you take the oath so in case this time you leave, you’ll be a problem for the Army and not us. We don’t wanna be bothered with you anymore.”

They took me inside to say the oath, and I refused. So they took me outside.

The other agent said, “Listen, Bob, if you don’t say the oath, we’re gonna lock you up forever. You just won’t be seen around anymore.”

So I said, “All right.” And we went back inside.

I raised my hands and said the oath.

I was sworn into the Army in manacles.

Then the agents took the manacles off, and they left.

It was really a strange scene. Because there were a lot of very young Spanish guys who were very proud to be getting inducted into the Marine Corps while this was going on with me. They were excited about becoming Marines and getting to wear that uniform. They couldn’t understand me. They thought I was a degenerate or something. But they didn’t say anything. They just stayed as far away from me as they could.

I had evaded the draft for more than a year, but my antiwar views were shaped long before, while I was a student at Tennessee State University.

After two semesters at Indiana University, I transferred to Tennessee State in Nashville to get farther away from home. I was rebelling from the middle-class values and way of life my parents, both schoolteachers, were grooming me in. I think my first protest came in a march for civil rights that Martin Luther King had organized back home in Gary when I was a junior in high school. I had printed a huge sign to carry in the march. From the time I could hold a pencil, I was always drawing something. The sign said, “
Nunc Es Tempes
.” “Now is the time.”