Da 5 Bloods highlights the experience of veterans who fought for their country only to be treated as second-class citizens. W hen Dedan Kimathi Ji Jaga returned from combat in Vietnam , he painted his walls black, covered his windows and sat in darkness all day. His injuries and post-traumatic stress were severe, but as with many African American soldiers in , the US government gave him little support. Thomas Davis, 78, had hearing problems after his service during Vietnam, but he struggled to get the Department of Veterans Affairs VA to approve basic disability claims.
Military history of African Americans in the Vietnam War - Wikipedia
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. On August 31, , a rape was committed in Vietnam. Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system. War is obscene. I mean that in every sense of the word. The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one.
History is not a fixed set of facts. In reality, it is a collection of ideas, images, and information that enough people have chosen to preserve and disseminate. Necessarily, more is lost to time than is remembered. Photographs, and visual media generally, play an especially important role in this process of shaping collective memory of an event.
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. More than 3 million people including over 58, Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in , and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year. Vietnam, a nation in Southeast Asia on the eastern edge of the Indochinese peninsula, had been under French colonial rule since the 19th century. Seeking to regain control of the region, France backed Emperor Bao and set up the state of Vietnam in July , with the city of Saigon as its capital.