CHAPTER 27

PLAYING INTO THEIR HANDS

ETHEL PAYNE HAD GONE TO VIETNAM TO SPEND TIME with black soldiers and report on how they were faring. Race, not war, was on her mind at each stop. At the end of nine weeks in Vietnam, after meeting hundreds of servicemen, Payne decided that most black soldiers preferred to push to the back of their minds civil rights and other issues, including the war itself. “Like every other soldier on the line, the immediate and overriding concern is how to stay alive,” Payne wrote in a long report called “How Negro Troops See War.” Soldier after soldier told her that American segregationist practices did not follow them across the ocean. “When you are in combat, you’re equal in everything,” a black soldier outside Da Nang told her. “You live together. You sleep together. You eat the same things. You fight the same way. You stink the same way.”

Reflecting on her brother Lemuel’s service in the Army during World War II and her own experience with the military in Japan, Payne deemed this the first war in which American troops were entirely integrated. “Gone are the days of separate units and the special categories of service reserved for Negro soldiers,” she said. “Gone, too, is the type of individual who resigned himself to the system.” In his place, according to Payne, are more aggressive, militant, and confident black soldiers.

This was not to say there was no discrimination. In her visits to the various camps, she ran across tales of racism and prejudice and did not hesitate to write about them. The most common incidents of bigotry were assaults and name-calling, particularly between urban black soldiers and Southern whites. When she visited Cam Ranh Bay Air Base, north of Saigon along the coast, she encountered a group of black soldiers brooding over a notice on a bulletin board. It offered a reward for information regarding a series of recent assaults. In describing the attacks, the assailants were described as “unknown negro soldiers.”

The black soldiers were indignant over the one-sided nature of the notice, claiming nothing had been done when they had been assaulted. They were irate about the potential of the notice to encourage false reports against them and were insulted by the use of Negro with a lowercase n. Sparing no detail, Payne published a lengthy account of the racist behavior and discontent among the soldiers. “We get threats in the barracks, on the job and at the EM [Enlisted Men’s] club,” one soldier told Payne. “They put lynch ropes on our bunks and write warnings in the latrines, but if we even look like we want to go after them, the company commander threatens us with Article 15.”*

Payne sought out the base’s white commanding officer, Brigadier General Mahlon Eugene Gates. An earnest, affable fellow, he introduced himself with his old family nickname of “Ink.” Gates was surprised when Payne told him the use of the word Negro in lowercase was considered derogatory. He listened attentively when Payne discussed the larger complaints about the notice and invited her to offer suggestions. Not being one to be demure on such an occasion, Payne told him to identify and isolate the troublemakers, train unit leaders and commanders on dealing in a more equitable manner with the troops, and use the chaplains to counsel the soldiers.

Despite this incident, Payne believed the experience of serving in a more integrated setting would spark change back in the United States. “After the searing experience of being in Vietnam in a war of unparalleled cruelty, Negro soldiers are coming home to claim their share of democracy,” she wrote. White soldiers, who endured the same baptism of fire, will return convinced that prejudice is wrong. “But with or without help, Negroes will demand a better deal from America.”

“In general,” Payne wrote her mother from Bangkok after leaving Vietnam, “integration has been very successful in the military service, much faster than at home, but human beings are still fallible and every once in a while it crops up.”

LEAVING VIETNAM, Payne was grateful she had survived. Though she did not come near actual combat and had felt danger only on a dusty road outing with marines, she was leaving a war zone. On the day before she left, Bernard Fall, a highly respected correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina, was killed after stepping on a land mine. “I felt the experience personally,” Payne wrote her mother, “since we had become quite friendly and just a week ago while we were at dinner, he was so happy because he was bringing his family to Hong Kong and buying a house there to stay two years while he worked on more books about the Far East.”

But, unlike Fall, who was widely known for his critical reporting on the conduct of the war, Payne did not question the American war policy or the effectiveness of its military operations. She had not gone to Vietnam to cover a war. If she had, she might well have become a critic like her colleagues Frances FitzGerald and Martha Gellhorn, who arrived in Vietnam around the same time. Instead, following her instructions from her publisher and by her own choosing, Payne had focused her coverage on race. By doing so, she wrote about the war’s one good story and played into the hands of Moyers, Martin, and others in the administration eager for favorable coverage in the black press to retain the support of African Americans for the war and the president.

“I didn’t really understand the politics of the war,” Payne admitted two decades later. “I think I was—maybe I was a little brainwashed myself because I didn’t concentrate on that, and I should have. I was so busy concentrating on how well the black troops were doing, that maybe I overlooked that.

“I’ve always regretted to this day that I didn’t do what I felt was an adequate job in reporting on the immorality of the war.”

SHE PAUSED IN SOUTH KOREA for the promised interview with General Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the only black general in the American armed forces. They met in a small brick building in the midst of a sea of Quonset huts that served as the military headquarters of the United Nations Command. In a wide-ranging interview, Payne brought up General Westmoreland’s comparison of the service of black and white troops. “Gen. Westmoreland said that during the Korean Conflict, Negro troops did well, but not as well as their Caucasian colleagues. With progress in race relations, he thinks they are now doing as well as all other soldiers,” Payne told Davis.

Westmoreland’s patronizing comment about the service of black troops offended Davis but he replied carefully, reflecting his years of working around white commanding officers. “I don’t think there’s any question about their outstanding performance in Vietnam, regardless of whether they are Negroes or not,” said Davis, his voice rising. In World War II and Korea, black soldiers fought under—selecting the right words—“an unnecessary burden.” The burden—his way of referring to segregation in the military—had been removed, he said. “We have a real fine operation in which every man can prove himself, and this is the way it should be.”

Making one last stop before returning to the United States, Payne revisited the country that had once been her home for three years. “Rip Van Winkle awakening from his 20-year sleep could not have been more amazed than I at the changes I found in Japan after 16 years.” As she rode in from the airport, nothing seemed familiar. “The freeways stretching like strips of spun-ribbon taffy could have been Washington, D.C., or any other American city.” When Payne asked her young cabbie about the Dai-ichi Hotel, General MacArthur’s headquarters, in front of which she had stood on her last day in Japan, he thought she was talking about a hotel. When they passed it, she saw it now served as an insurance building.

There was, however, one unchanged aspect of life in Japan that saddened Payne. The tan babies, children of black American soldiers and Japanese women—some of whom had reached adulthood—continued to face discrimination. “They are scorned as outcasts and inferiors,” she wrote.

She boarded a flight back to the United States. Sixteen years earlier she had crossed the Pacific by plane to come to work for the Defender. Once again she was making a similar journey to begin a second chapter in her life as a reporter for the storied paper. Yet, resuming the beat that she had given herself—that of civil rights—she knew that these many years later the movement remained a long way from its goals.