First, let me tell you about Salt and Pepper. They were two US marines who defected in Vietnam. One was white and one was black, hence the names, and they were always spotted together around Quang Ngai and Quang Nam provinces, speaking Vietnamese with their new communist comrades, but English to one another.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency investigated, but never identified, Salt and Pepper, as well as a third traitor called Pork Chop, a white guy who had long bushy sideburns and a flair for stealing military vehicles.

Salt, Pepper, Pork Chop. To me they sound like the kind of mythical characters that Tim O’Brien might have written about in The Things They Carried. A true war story has to be based on tall tales; otherwise it’d be complete bullshit, right?

But come on, you say, were they real?

‘As real as a heart attack,’ said UserName: RotorHead on an online forum for Vietnam veterans I found. After RotorHead gave his evidence (in the form of recollections), UserName: D Squad replied: ‘Heck, what manner of vermin could do something like that?’ ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ RotorHead responded. ‘I’ve read stories about guys in the Civil War switching sides two or three times, depending on who had the best food at the time.’

Except wait: it’s actually not hard to fathom why Pepper would have given the two fingers to Uncle Sam and crossed to the other side (without a fish supper being thrown into the bargain). By 1972, Black US citizens made up 11 per cent of the US population yet they had done 22 per cent of the dying in Vietnam. The civil unrest at home had also followed the soldiers east. The most integrated US Army in history (previously Blacks had their own battalions) segregated of its own accord. Confederate flags flew at base camps right after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. Meanwhile Black soldiers were reprimanded for displaying symbols of the Black Power movement in response.

There were also riots, cross-burnings, knifings and even killings on what the US Black journalist Wallace Terry described as a ‘double battleground’ for his brethren. In short, Vietnam (in terms of its US military ecosystem) mirrored US society, even its justice system. Black soldiers made up 11 per cent of the US troops; however, in the late ’60s at Long Binh Jail, a US military stockade outside of Saigon, more than 50 per cent of the men incarcerated were Black (and over half were being held on AWOL charges).

To protect themselves in Vietnam, Black soldiers in the US Army turned to each other, calling each other ‘blood’, but, as with any crowd, there had to be mavericks. Even if Pepper didn’t exist, we know McKinley Nolan did. Nolan was a Texas sharecropper who joined the US Army to see the world, only to defect in November 1967. The journalist Richard Linnett wrote of two divergent theories for Nolan’s motives: 1) he was sick of the racism in his platoon; 2) he got busted stealing military equipment that he planned to sell.

Either way, nobody would have understood why a Black US soldier would have been angry enough to walk away, or desperate enough to steal, better than Wallace Terry, who first came to Vietnam with Time in 1967. As the only Black US journalist on permanent assignment in the country, Terry spent years interviewing Black soldiers in the field, and continued to seek out returning veterans after the war. In 1984, he published Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History, which features twenty men speaking of their lives before, during and after their service in Vietnam. According to Eric Ducker, after battling for years to get this project published, Terry began to dream of seeing the story of Black soldiers in Vietnam on the silver screen. In the 1980s, Terry discussed a film adaptation of Bloods with none other than Quincy Jones. Then there was Dead Presidents (1995), a film that was ‘very loosely based’ on the life of one vet featured in Bloods, but neither the vet nor Terry cared for the highly dramatised and fictionalised plot. Terry was also critical of how the multi-Oscar-winning Platoon portrayed Black soldiers, saying in 1987, ‘[It] captures the horror, terror, and trauma of the war like no other Vietnam film, but sadly it still barely rises above the age-old Hollywood stereotypes of Blacks as celluloid savages and coons who do silly things’.

Now wouldn’t it be fascinating to hear what Terry, who died in 2003, would have made of Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee. Apparently, Lee made Terry’s Bloods required reading for the leading cast but looked elsewhere for a plot, choosing to rework a second-hand script, originally written by Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, a pair of career writers, who had dreamed of making a Vietnam war film since watching Apocalypse Now in 1979.

Their script, titled The Last Tour, was about four soldiers (three white, one Black, if that matters) looking for their MIA squad leader, and Oliver Stone was set to direct before deciding against returning to the jungle. After Lee and his writing partners’ repurposing, the film became all of these things: a quest for redemption, an A-Team style heist, a good-buddy flick, a war film, a documentary and a splatter-fest that genuinely offended many Vietnamese critics, such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, who (somewhat echoing Terry’s criticism of Platoon for failing to rise above age-old stereotypes) tweeted: ‘So that’s our place in the American imagination. Tour guides. Sidekicks. Whores and lovers. Bastard kids. The enemy getting wiped out facelessly. Does it matter if black guys are doing it?’

Later, writing in the New York Times, Nguyen drove the point home, ‘[Lee] does not know what to do with the Vietnamese except resort to guilty liberal feelings about them. As a result, the Vietnamese appear as the tour guide, the sidekick, the “whore”, the mixed-race child, the beggar and the faceless enemy, all of whom play to American desires and fears.’
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Today with the US once again experiencing extreme racial turmoil and riots, just like in the late ’60s, the release of Da 5 Bloods certainly chimed with the aggravated times, and from the publicity alone we already knew what Lee wanted to achieve in terms of the film’s political purpose: he wanted to show that Black histories matter. And in that sense I am glad Lee made the film, even if I hated watching everything other than the evocative opening (non-fiction) montage. Why? Because this week I have learned about the lives and histories of Black soldiers who served in Vietnam as well as the work of Wallace Terry, who fearlessly went into combat zones, interviewing Black soldiers, wanting others to hear their voices and better understand their rage as well as why many would willingly join a riot on returning home. As one Black marine in Vietnam told Terry: ‘[They had their] motherfucking Boston Tea Party, why can’t we have our riots? Is there any difference?’

In fact, the more I read about Terry, the more I wondered if the film that needs to be made is a biopic about Wallace Terry. Who was he before, during and after the war (once back in the US, he received death threats for exposing racism in the army during the war)? I feel like the characters in Da 5 Bloods would agree. In one early scene, the four returning vets stroll by McDonald’s on Nguyen Hue, soaking up the 2019 glitzy vibes of Ho Chi Minh City, and they start joking about shitty ‘Vietnam movies’ starring Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris. ‘Hell, I’d be the first cat in line if they made a flick about a real hero …’ says Otis.

He suggests Milton Olive, the first Black US soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, who died from diving on a grenade to save the lives of others. But someone else might suggest Arthur E. (Gene) Woodley, Jr., a Black marine from East Baltimore and a street fighter, who hung out with Puerto Ricans as well as ‘rednecks’ and saved the life of a close friend and fellow soldier who had been in the Ku Klux Klan. And, thanks to Terry, there are many other stories that could be shared, including his own.

Of course, if another US director is looking for a ‘true war story’, one that’s based on tall tales, well, let’s get back to talking about Salt and Pepper (I see Pork Chop as a sidekick). But a word of warning: if those guys did speak the local lingo fluently, and fought alongside the Viet Cong, a Hollywood director and his producers are going to have to boldly go where they have never gone before and hire some Vietnamese writers as well. Because Vietnamese histories matter, too.

• Tags: Connla Stokes, Free to read, Spike Lee, Vietnam, Vietnam War