A Chronicler of Conflict’s Long Road to a Vietnam Bestseller

‘Wallace Terry: A Reporter’s Journey from Selma to Saigon’ By Ray E. BoomhowerHigh Road Books, 272 pagesWallace Terry is best known for “Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.” The book that made Terry’s reputation in 1984 took many years to find a publisher and the right format as the journalist struggled to tell both his own story and that of soldiers in a war that at first seemed to hold the promise of full equality for African Americans and then to uncover the stubbornly embedded racism that Terry had witnessed in Selma, Alabama, and other parts of the South, where he had risked his life in the company of assassinated civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King.Terry, an ordained minister as well as a highly regarded journalist, working at Time magazine and a range of mainstream newspapers, devoutly believed in integration, even as whites in newsrooms did not know how to employ him to best advantage and were slow to recognize that his reports on African Americans said so much about the country they believed they had earned the right to serve.Ray Boomhower’s superbly researched biography follows a learning curve that became the trajectory of Terry’s life. A Brown University graduate used to working hard to prove himself to white employers, Terry first saw the Vietnam War as the vindication of the integration of blacks and whites that President Truman had established in the armed services. The black soldiers Terry interviewed during his first reporting trip to the Vietnam War believed they had succeeded in an army that recognized their talents and promoted them. As the war continued, however, and as race relations deteriorated in the late 1960s and the Black Power movement took hold, black soldiers increasingly began to question the sacrifices they were making and some encountered vicious attacks from white soldiers. Terry’s evolving sense of integration took a troubling turn as he kept trying to get right the book that eventually became “Bloods,” and as publishers told him no market existed for a book about the experiences of black soldiers.Then one of the relatively few black editors in trade publishing, Erroll McDonald, advised Terry to make “Bloods” not a memoir, not a conventional history, but a book of voices getting directly at the grain of black soldiers’ experiences. Mr. Boomhower notes that Terry began to see his book as a kind of ministry, encouraging what became, in a sense, his congregation.Terry had suffered from bad timing until films like “The Deer Hunter” (1978) proved that the public did not simply want to forget about the disastrous war. “Bloods” sold 50,000 copies in hardcover and another 300,000 in paperback. As Mr. Boomhower shows, Terry did not simply employ the customary question and answer format of oral histories. Instead he took the words of his interviewees, edited them, sometimes providing transitions and even his own wording to create narratives. Mr. Boomhower provides some fascinating examples of Terry’s working methods, based on his understanding of short stories. His technique reminds me of Faulkner’s way of getting inside of his characters, staying true to their experiences, even as he uses his verbal gifts to get at the essence of who they are and what they have to say.Terry’s approach to oral history received virtually unanimous praise, except for one review that Mr. Boomhower highlights. The reviewer questioned the veracity of certain accounts, pointing out the fallibility of memory and the tendency to be self-serving — all part of the peril of relying on oral history. Yet, in the main, Mr. Boomhower implies, Terry was true to the black experience and to the vicissitudes of war.Terry never felt that the war was worthless. Although he gradually came to terms with the futility of the fighting in Vietnam, he did not think black soldiers — any soldiers — had served in vain. He saw much of value coming out of the war in the character of the soldiers he interviewed. The very idea of service seemed to him to have been vindicated.Terry died abruptly of a rare disease before he was able to complete other book projects that would have built upon “Bloods.” It is a tribute to Mr. Boomhower’s powerful narrative skills that Terry’s loss should still be so keenly felt.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘American Biography.’ He deals with race issues in his work in progress, ‘A Detroit Odyssey.‘

A Chronicler of Conflict’s Long Road to a Vietnam Bestseller

A Chronicler of Conflict’s Long Road to a Vietnam Bestseller

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