The Page 99 Test: Ray E. Boomhower's "Wallace Terry"

Ray E. Boomhower is the acclaimed author of twenty books, including biographies about some of the country’s finest war correspondents such as Ernie Pyle, Richard Tregaskis, and Malcolm W. Browne.

Boomhower applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Wallace Terry: A Reporter's Journey from Selma to Saigon to Bloods, and reported the following:

From page 99:
President Harry S. Truman had attempted to do away with legal segregation in the military by signing Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, inspired in part by the disgust he felt at reports of white racist mobs attacking returning Black veterans. The order offered “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” By September 1953, as Terry discovered, fewer than 5 percent of Black troops were serving in all-Black units. “For the Black man in the American armed forces, a new chapter appeared to have begun,” he said. To learn more about the change, he traveled to South Vietnam in late April 1967; by this time US troop levels had ballooned to nearly a half million. According to Simmons Fentress, the chief of Time’s bureau in Saigon, the correspondent from the Washington bureau took “less than 24 hours to get over a 24-hour jet ride. Then he swarmed all over the place to plumb the Negro’s feelings about his race and his country, this war and this enemy.”

Because it marked his first venture into a war zone, Terry could not escape a bit of teasing from his colleagues. It fell to Danforth to see that Terry got adjusted to his new surroundings. The correspondents were quartered two doors down from one another at the Continental Palace Hotel. At about two in the morning on his first night in Saigon, Terry woke his friend “to say he had forgotten and drunk a glass of tap water and what should he do,” recalled Danforth. As an antidote to what Danforth considered unsafe drinking water, he recommended a concoction of gin and toothpaste. “Found out the next day he had taken me seriously, and I would have felt pretty bad about that except Wally said it helped relax him,” said Danforth.
Surprisingly, the Page 99 Test works well for giving readers insight into Wallace Terry’s introduction into a conflict that shaped his subsequent life and journalism career—the Vietnam War and Black fighting men’s role on behalf of the U.S. government that sent them thousands of miles from home.

In early 1967 Terry suggested that the magazine do a cover article about Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, called Terry to ask him to fly to Vietnam to help with the story. Terry accepted the assignment, believing that the attention President Lyndon Johnson had given to civil rights and his Great Society programs had been overtaken by a fixation about Vietnam. “I was losing a great story on the homefront to a greater story on the battlefront,” Terry observed.

The cover article, which ran in the magazine’s May 26, 1967, issue, pointed out that for the first time in the country’s history, Black soldiers were “fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance.” It seemed as if the U.S. military stood as a shining example when it came to race relations. “It was our first fully integrated war,” Terry observed. “It was democracy in a foxhole—the same mud, the same blood.”

Impressed by Terry’s work, Clurman asked him to return to Vietnam for a two-year stint in Time’s Saigon bureau, working as its deputy chief. Terry quickly accepted the assignment, as Vietnam represented “the biggest story in the world. And also in the back of my mind, I thought that I would write a book.” The correspondent’s two years overseas became “the most exhilarating and exciting years” of his life. “Maybe I got a rush from the danger and from the excitement,” Terry said years after his overseas assignment ended. “I went to where the action was because I felt that’s the only way I could fully tell the story.”

Terry learned that racial relations among American troops in Vietnam had deteriorated from the hopeful story Time had published just a year before. After traveling all over the country, from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta, interviewing American forces, Terry saw that the gung-ho professional soldiers who had volunteered for service early in the war had been superseded by draftees who were much more cynical. “Replacing the careerists were black draftees, many just steps removed from marching in the Civil Rights Movement or rioting in the rebellions that swept the urban ghettos from Harlem to Watts,” Terry observed. “All were filled with a new sense of black pride and purpose.”

These soldiers, who called themselves “Bloods” and lionized Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton, were more willing to question the American presence in the war. As his Time article, “Black Power in Viet Nam,” pointed out, there were more incitements from white soldiers, including Confederate flags displayed on trucks and barracks, cross burnings, and Ku Klux Klan costumes. In response, said Terry, African American troops “raised their fists in black power salutes, had their handshakes, flew red, black and green liberation colors in battle and protected each other against racism.”

After returning to the United States, Terry endured more than a decade worth of challenges until, finally, in 1984, he was able to capture in print the story of the Black soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen he had encountered in Vietnam with his oral history Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, published in 1984. What touched Terry the most was the reaction to his book from Vietnam veterans. “One black soldier I talked to called me a ‘Blood,” he reported. “He said I’d become one of them.”