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The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience. By Herman Graham, III. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. ISUN 0-8130-2646-6. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 179. $55.00.
The Vietnam War was the first conflict in modern U.S. history fought by a fully integrated military, but few historians have examined military race relations during the period. The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience by Herman Graham, III, of Denison University is a groundbreaking work about a watershed development in American military history.
African American men, in Graham's view, approached the Vietnam War in terms of their own manhood-something denied to them in a racist society. Hc argues that black men volunteered for service at higher rates than whites because of the military's masculine image. "The U.S. military was selling manhood during the Vietnam War," he writes, "and African...