Kirkus
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The Vietnam War, as seen from the perspective of Black Americans who fought it and fought against it. Dartmouth history professor Delmont writes that this book has its origins in a memory of his father’s, who told him of “this brother from Chicago or Detroit who…earned the Medal of Honor, but they got him when he came back home.” That man was Dwight “Skip” Johnson, who, unable to adjust to civilian life on returning home, was killed when he tried to rob a convenience store in his native Detroit. Delmont recounts Johnson’s life in the context of other Black soldiers, including fellow Medal of Honor winner Milton Lee Olive, who was one of the first to die in Vietnam, and who affectingly wrote his father, “We all do a man’s job and wear a man’s clothes and call ourselves men…but some of us are still little boys.” Olive was just 18, one of a disproportionate number of young Black men drafted into the military and killed in action (as Delmont notes, they accounted for 18.3% of combat deaths and made up 14.8% of the army, though only 11% of the U.S. population). The greater portion of his narrative, though, like David Maraniss’They Marched Into Sunlight (2004), is a parallel story recounting the work of Coretta Scott King in organizing a Black protest movement against the war, opposition in which she preceded her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. Delmont does great service by highlighting her work, which has long been overshadowed. He also tracks the long struggle of Johnson’s widow, Katrina, to prove that her husband had died as a result of combat-related posttraumatic stress, a struggle that took a decade to resolve. As he notes in closing, not much has changed, however: Black Americans now make up 13% of the populace, but 23% of active-duty soldiers. A fluent history of an era fast receding in memory. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.