She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era, and reported the following:
Page 99 of An Army Afire describes the events of a May night in 1970, when forty or fifty Black soldiers massed outside the headquarters building of the 1st Infantry Division in West Germany, demanding to see the commander. General Garth refused the summons—an action in keeping with the overall advice to officers on handling racial dissent—and sent a couple of majors in his stead. While the two majors were meeting with the soldiers and their leader, Sergeant Hobson, someone tossed a hand grenade through the window of the unit mess hall, where twenty enlisted men and officers–Black and white—had gathered following a softball game. Other grenades exploded outside the building.Follow Beth Bailey on Twitter.The fragging brought General Garth to headquarters, where he was confronted by a furious Sergeant Hobson. Hobson told General Garth that he if had just come down to meet with the soldiers, none of this would have happened. He raised his voice. He called his commanding officer ‘incompetent.’ He threatened to report ‘the problems of racism’ to the ‘proper authorities.’Page 99 captures a lot of what matters in An Army Afire. It has at least the beginning of a good story. It captures a moment of Black protest, as well as the failure of an army leader to manage a potential crisis. It suggests the volatility of that moment in history. It offers a glimpse of the escalating violence that US Army leaders believed had come to threaten the institution’s ability to fulfil its mission of national defense. It raises the significance of leadership, a key element of the army’s “institutional logic” and one of the major tools the army, as an institution, employed in its efforts to solve “the problem of race.” And it makes clear that while the book is about the Vietnam era, it definitely doesn’t take place only in Vietnam.
. . . Before long, Hobson had been charged with attempted murder and conspiracy, identified as the ringleader of a group of Black militants who had planned and carried out the fragging and the attempted arson. It turned out that the sergeant had been a gang leader on Chicago’s West Side; known by the street name ‘Caveman,’ he had fought his way up the ranks in the notoriously violent Vice Lords while he was still in his teens. James Hobson had cycled through thirty-one foster homes in less than seven years, slept on the streets from the age of sixteen, been convicted by the same judge in the Cook County Boys Court forty-three times for crimes of theft, battery, burglary, and mob action. If racial unrest was—as many white army leaders hoped and believed—due to a few militant troublemakers rather than to the underlying conditions in which Black soldiers served, Hobson was a perfect example of the problem they faced.
This fragging, however, was not a story of Black militancy. It was instead a cautionary tale about the failure of leadership, and some came to see it as such at the time....
But the payoff comes on the following two pages, where Sergeant Hobson turns out to be a hero, General Garth becomes “a rabid proponent of fairness” and “makes it his business to speak personally with every Black soldier in the division,” and the US Army embraces a creative solution that challenges its fundamental principles of rank hierarchy and control.
The Page 99 Test: America's Army.
--Marshal Zeringue
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