Racial tensions followed overseas

The war formed a cauldron in which America's racial tensions were stirred, often to the boiling point.

On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon, a riot at a party for soldiers preparing for deployment left a white corporal dead and dozens wounded at Camp Lejeune, N.C. That same year, officers at the Air Force Academy allowed the Confederate flag to be displayed and a cross burned on campus, and gang wars broke out regularly at Vietnam's Cam Rahn Bay, where white soldiers burned a 12-foot-high cross.

"Racial pressure that was developing since the early '60s really ignited with the 1968 assassination of Dr. King," said University of Cincinnati Professor James Westheider, author of "The African American Experience in Vietnam." "Black soldiers were frustrated by rising expectations that the system would live up to its professed fairness, and the Ku Klux Klan sometimes operated relatively openly among white soldiers."

While segregation in the military officially ended in 1948, and there was some integration during the Korean War, Vietnam marked the first widespread use of integrated units. But black soldiers in Vietnam were still being met with hostility by many white soldiers clinging to Jim Crow attitudes. Black troops, emboldened by the black power movement, stirred separatist tensions of their own.

"I knew a white captain from Montana who told us, 'Tell you the truth, I never saw a black man in my life until I got to the recruiting station,' " said Timothy Dahlen, 61, a white veteran who grew up in Merrick and served in the Mekong Delta in 1969. "Race was a big issue, very touchy on base."

The military also struggled against the perception that blacks were drafted and killed in disproportionately high numbers. Blacks were 8.7 percent of U.S. military personnel in 1969, but 9.7 percent of troops serving in Vietnam and 11.4 percent of Marines there, according to Census figures. Yet, blacks made up only 2.1 percent of officers.

But by creating a cohort of Americans who depended on each other in battle, and who jointly endured the nation's anti-war rejection once they returned home, the war may have nudged America toward racial reconciliation.

"If an airship went down, there was no question that the guy to the right of you and the guy to the left of you was with you," said Dahlen, of Speonk, whose unit included black pilots, and who depended on a black crew chief to keep his helicopter flying. "If you didn't think you needed him, you were thinking in the wrong way."