A War on Two Fronts
Summary
The first interview with Ari Sesu Merretazon recounts his early life in Washington, D.C. with his family. Ari discusses how his parents' influence and the civil rights movement shaped his outlook on the United States and the military. In 1966, Merretazon was drafted during the Vietnam War, and he served in the Army from 1966 to 1968.In Vietnam, Merretazon carried out search and destroy missions. A squad or platoon would go out on patrols and lure the enemy into a fight. Then, the Americans would call in airstrikes. These tactics made many American combat troops feel like expendable bait and caused much resentment and disillusionment.1 Body counts became the criteria for measuring victory, creating the conditions for widespread atrocities and dehumanization of the Vietnamese. Amid the brutality of the war in Vietnam, Black soldiers formed bonds of solidarity with one another. Ari describes how Black soldiers survived through their "blood love." Many Black soldiers found commonalities between the Vietnamese struggle for independence and the ongoing struggle for civil rights in the United States, forging solidarity, respect, and sympathy for the Vietnamese people.
Revelations of War and Prison
Jason Higgins: Do you recall any reasons why your brothers discouraged you from joining the military?
Ari Sesu Merretazon: They were very discouraged about the relationship of this country to African Americans. I have come out of a political house. We always talked about that. . . It helped me to understand my environment at the time. I may have mentioned to you too that when I was about 10 years old . . . . I received a revelation. That I was going to war and prison. I think I was a 10 years old at the time. That was a very powerful revelation. I just knew that those two things were going to happen. . . Then, the draft notice came, and it said, 'You shall report,' and I reported down to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, then from there to South Carolina, Fort Jackson. From Fort Jackson, all my [advanced] infantry training to Vietnam -- from South Carolina to Vietnam.
Kill or Be Killed
Jason Higgins: Was there any kind of solidarity or sympathy for the Vietnamese people between black soldiers in Vietnam?
Ari Sesu Merretazon: Yeah, the Vietnamese people themselves made sure that occurred. The Vietnamese people engaged us. We engaged them because we are the same, in the context of power structures in this country and our country in the world. We were the same, and that's how we dealt with that. We gravitated towards them. They gravitated toward us just because they considered us the same, same. Just basic people, poor people that don't have no input in decision-making. . . We turned their country into a major war zone, village by village. We went in burned hutches, hootches, and things like that. That was the major mission: search, kill, and destroy. That's the attitude you had to have. . . We were always ready. Always ready.
Jason Higgins: You're describing this kill-or-be-killed mentality.
Ari Sesu Merretazon: This is war, man. Exactly, that's what it was. That's exactly what it was; now you know there's no other way to structure that; it was kill or be killed. ‘Cause when you charge into a village after we chase a VC into the village, usually, all hell breaks out, and a couple of times it did. On one occasion, my squad got caught right up in the middle of it. Let's see, one… two…three… three of us did survive. Then one just didn't have the courage at the time to fight.
A Clear Racial Divide
Jason: In the middle of trying to survive a war, did you form opinions about the rightness or the wrongness of the Vietnam War?
Ari: Yes I did. I'd formed it while I was in Vietnam. I was just a young 19-year-old, Gung Ho guy. I wanted to keep up with everybody, compete with everybody. But in Vietnam . . . we got to make sure that we go home. That's our goal: protect each other, so we can go home, "back to the world," we would say. We would come out of the field -- when we came back off a mission -- we were talking about what we're going to do when we got back in the world. We knew the dynamic in Vietnam between Black and white soldiers. The racial divide was very clear. . . 95 percent of the stockade in Vietnam was Black soldiers. We call it LBJ because Lyndon Baines Johnson was the president at the time. . . Long Bihn Jail, that was the stockade, 95 percent Black soldiers.1
Full Interview, Part 1
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- Ari Sesu Merretazon Jason Higgins