Tonight I watched Spike Lee’s latest movie Da 5 Bloods. I’m glad I saw it. There wasn’t much I learned from the movie but it was a black perspective on the movie that has been all but absent in earlier Vietnam flics. For that reason alone it was worth it. There is a lot of blood and like other Lee movies it pauses for education breaks. Given the state of America right now I didn’t begrudge Spike any of them. And it was good for me to be reminded that America had changed in the fifty years since my Grandfather’s war and mine. My Grandfather served as a white officer in one of the only black infantry units to be allowed to fight – in military thinking the “honor” to fight. Most other servicemen were used as stevedores to move equipment off of trains for the white soldiers.
In the wake of World War II something funny happened. Returning GI’s had their college tuition paid for. And then their generation decided that college was so valuable as a strategic asset for America that their sons should be given four year deferments for studying at college. The upshot of this calculation was that when we got sucked into Vietnam college kids got a pass. Unlike earlier wars black draftees got more honor than was good for them. Only one in ten in the American population, they were three in ten in Vietnam and even more greatly represented among the front line troops.
They ended up feeling more like cannon fodder than honorees in America’s first and only unloved war.
I was struck in particular by one of Spike Lee’s didactic pauses to show us Martin Luther King Jr. speak exactly one year before his assassination in Memphis. He was quoting the Harlem Poet Langston Hughes who said: “O, yes/ I say it plain/ America never was America to me/ And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
If ever one wanted to explain today’s BLM protests everywhere in America this quote does it. Black children coming to be aware that however much less awful America is now for them. They still need to make America be everything its supposed to be.
