Mark Moyar

And so through integration, in some senses, it was an advance for now they're.

integrated in these combat units.

But I don't know the exact number, something like maybe 15 to 20 percent in those first few years of the casualties were blacks at a time when they were about 12 percent of the population.

So they are overrepresented.

Now, after

that becomes an issue, the U.S.

actually changes the policy so that there is not this disparity.

And so for the war as a whole, the blacks are right around 12% of the population overall, and they're also 12% of the casualties.

Yes, and having spent a great deal of time looking at that, I think just about anyone, any veteran will tell you that this problem was not that big of a deal once you were in the field because your life depended on cooperation.

And so the real frictions all took place in the rear areas.

We had people with too much time to do, maybe 10% of American forces are actually out, the rest of them are on these support units.

And so that's where,

Problems are really bad.

But you also see this happening all over the world where the U.S.

has military bases, Germany, Korea, etc.

You have this strong racial antagonism that is really corrosive starting around 1969.

Yeah, I do think the black power movement is sort of starting to change people's attitudes.

You had, I mean, for one thing, a lot of the blacks who fight early in the war had volunteered for service.

You know, a lot of them, I think, believed in sort of the vision of Martin Luther King that we want sort of a colorblind society.

And, you know, of course, a lot of people