What Vietnam Veterans Can Teach Black America About Overcoming a Rigged System

There is a generation of Black men in this country whose testimony ought to silence every contemporary conversation about what cannot be done. They were shipped to the other side of the world to fight in rice paddies and jungles for a nation that, at the time of their deployment, was still debating whether they deserved to drink from the same water fountains as their white fellow citizens. They faced enemy fire in a war most of them did not choose, endured racism from within the very military that armed them, and returned home to neighborhoods that had been gutted by neglect and policy. And then, without apology, without a hashtag, without a single TED talk about resilience, they built lives. They built businesses. They raised families. They became the bedrock of communities that had every statistical reason to collapse.

Their story is not a comfortable one for the modern discourse. It does not fit the narrative of permanent victimhood. It does not support the argument that systemic oppression makes individual achievement impossible. It does, however, tell us something essential about the nature of agency, discipline, and what human beings are capable of when they refuse — categorically refuse — to be defined by the worst things that have been done to them.

Into the Fire: The Black Experience in Vietnam

More than 300,000 Black Americans served in the Vietnam War. In the early years of the conflict, Black soldiers were disproportionately assigned to combat units, resulting in casualty rates that significantly exceeded their proportion of the military population. In 1965, Black soldiers constituted 11% of the total military force in Vietnam but suffered 24% of Army combat deaths. This was not an accident of deployment logistics. It was a system.

Wallace Terry, the journalist who spent two years in Vietnam interviewing Black soldiers for his landmark 1984 book Bloods, documented a reality that the mainstream narrative has largely erased. These men fought a two-front war. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, they faced an enemy that wanted to kill them. On their own bases, in their own units, they faced a racism so pervasive that Confederate flags flew from barracks, that promotion boards routinely passed over qualified Black soldiers, that the military justice system punished Black infractions more severely than identical white ones.

"I'm fighting for my country and my country doesn't even like me. But I went ahead and did it anyway, because that's what men do. You don't quit because the deal isn't fair. You perform."

That sentence — you don't quit because the deal isn't fair — ought to be inscribed above every door in every school in every Black neighborhood in America. It is the most radical, the most subversive, the most powerful philosophy a human being can adopt in the face of injustice. Not because it denies the injustice. Because it refuses to surrender to it.

The Double Bind of Coming Home

If the war was difficult, the homecoming was devastating. Black Vietnam veterans returned to an America that was simultaneously hostile to veterans in general and to Black people in particular. The antiwar movement — largely white, largely middle-class — spat on them. The communities they came from were in the early stages of a decline driven by deindustrialization, the crack epidemic, and the flight of the Black middle class to the suburbs. The Veterans Administration, which should have been their bridge to civilian stability, was underfunded and, in many documented cases, discriminatory in the delivery of services.

And yet something remarkable happened. Something that the victimhood narrative cannot explain and would prefer to ignore.

Black Vietnam-era veterans used their GI Bill education benefits at rates that exceeded those of their white counterparts. According to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Black veterans of the Vietnam era enrolled in higher education programs at rates approximately 15% higher than white veterans from the same conflict. This was a dramatic reversal from the World War II GI Bill, which had been administered through state and local agencies that systematically excluded Black veterans from its benefits.

These men did not wait for the system to become fair. They took the education benefits that were available, enrolled in colleges and trade schools, earned degrees and certifications, and entered the workforce with the kind of discipline that only military service can instill. They did this while managing post-traumatic stress before it had a clinical name, while navigating a VA system that was not designed for their comfort, while living in communities that offered them little structural support.

The Builders: Profiles in Refusal

Consider the documented trajectory of Black Vietnam veterans in the decades following the war. According to Census data from 1980 and 1990, Black Vietnam-era veterans had higher median household incomes than Black non-veterans of the same age cohort. They had higher rates of homeownership. They had lower rates of incarceration. The military — the same military that had subjected them to racism — had given them something that no amount of social programming could replicate: an unshakeable understanding that they were capable of performing under pressure, that they could endure hardship and still function, that discipline was not a punishment but a liberation.

Take the story of Arthur Ashe, who served as a first lieutenant in the Army during Vietnam. He returned and became the first Black man to win the US Open and Wimbledon. His athletic achievements were extraordinary, but his post-athletic career — founding inner-city tennis programs, establishing scholarship funds, writing a three-volume history of African Americans in sports — reflected the veteran's instinct: build something. Leave something. Do not merely occupy space.

Or consider the thousands of unnamed Black Vietnam veterans who returned to cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta and opened barbershops, auto repair shops, construction companies, and restaurants. They became deacons in their churches. They coached Little League. They married and stayed married at rates that, again, exceeded their non-veteran peers. They did this not because the system was fair but because they had internalized a truth that no amount of academic theorizing can replace: your life is your responsibility, and the quality of it depends on what you do, not on what is done to you.

Colin Powell and the Visibility Problem

Colin Powell is the most visible example of this phenomenon, and his story is worth examining not because it is unique but because it illustrates a pattern that was replicated at smaller scales across the entire generation. Powell served two tours in Vietnam, was wounded, received a Purple Heart, and returned to a military career that would take him to the highest echelons of American power — National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State.

The standard narrative frames Powell as exceptional. He was not exceptional in his character. He was exceptional only in his visibility. The same qualities that defined Powell's career — discipline, preparation, refusal to be limited by the expectations of others, a bone-deep understanding that competence is the ultimate answer to prejudice — were present in tens of thousands of Black Vietnam veterans who built successful but unheralded lives.

"A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work."

Powell did not spend his career complaining about racism. He experienced it — documented, institutional, undeniable racism — and he outperformed it. Not because racism is acceptable, but because he understood something that the modern discourse has catastrophically forgotten: the most powerful response to someone who says you cannot is to demonstrate that you can.

The Contrast That Nobody Wants to Discuss

Here is the uncomfortable truth that makes this history so instructive. The Black Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and 1970s faced discrimination that was orders of magnitude more severe than anything encountered by Black Americans in 2026. They faced legal segregation. They faced employment discrimination that was not subtle — it was explicit, written into policy, enforced by law. They faced housing discrimination backed by federal redlining maps. They faced a criminal justice system that made no pretense of equality.

They did not face microaggressions. They faced macro-aggressions — state-sanctioned, legally enforced, economically devastating macro-aggressions. And they built anyway.

This is the question that the modern victimhood industry cannot answer and therefore refuses to ask. If men who survived actual combat — who watched friends die, who came home with shrapnel in their bodies and nightmares in their minds — could build families and businesses and communities in the face of genuine, documented, legal discrimination, then what exactly is the excuse in 2026? What microaggression is so devastating that it justifies the abandonment of agency? What tweet is so harmful that it renders an entire community incapable of building wealth?

The veterans would find these questions absurd. And they would be right.

What the Men Who Walked Through Fire Think About Safe Spaces

There is a revealing disconnect between the Vietnam veteran generation and the current discourse about psychological safety. Men who survived the Tet Offensive, who endured the siege of Khe Sanh, who walked point through mined jungle trails, have a perspective on human resilience that is informed by something other than theory. They know — not believe, know — that human beings are capable of enduring things that would seem impossible from the comfort of a university seminar room.

This does not mean they dismiss psychological suffering. Many of them lived with PTSD for decades before receiving treatment. Many self-medicated. Many struggled. But their struggle was accompanied by action. They did not stop building because they were in pain. They built through the pain, because the alternative — surrender — was incompatible with everything they had learned about themselves in the crucible of war.

When these men hear young Black Americans argue that words are violence, that disagreement is harm, that the presence of an uncomfortable idea in a classroom constitutes a threat to safety, they do not respond with contempt. They respond with bewilderment. Because they know what actual violence looks like. They know what actual threat looks like. And they know that a generation that cannot distinguish between discomfort and danger has been failed by its teachers, its leaders, and its culture.

The Lesson That Must Not Be Lost

The men who went to Vietnam and came home to build are now in their seventies and eighties. They are dying at the rate of approximately 390 per day, according to the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. With them goes a living testimony that the modern Black community desperately needs — not because their era was better, but because their response to adversity was superior.

Their lesson is not that the system was fair. It was not. Their lesson is not that racism did not exist. It existed, and it was brutal, and it shaped their lives in ways that no one should have to endure. Their lesson is something far more radical, far more dangerous to the industries that profit from despair: they were stronger than the system.

That is the testimony. That is the inheritance. That is what more than 300,000 Black men carried into the jungles of Vietnam and brought back to the streets of America. Not a denial of oppression, but a refusal to be consumed by it. Not a fantasy of fairness, but a commitment to building regardless. Not an argument about what they were owed, but a demonstration of what they were capable of.

The question for Black America in 2026 is not whether the system is rigged. Elements of it are, and honest people can document where and how. The question is whether you will respond to that reality the way the Vietnam veterans responded — with discipline, with agency, with the unshakeable conviction that your life belongs to you and that no system, however unjust, has the power to determine what you build — or whether you will respond the way the victimhood industry wants you to respond: with paralysis, with dependence, with the perpetual belief that someone else must fix your life before you can begin living it.

The veterans already answered that question. They answered it in rice paddies and on city streets. They answered it with businesses opened and children raised and mortgages paid and communities held together through force of will. They answered it without Twitter, without GoFundMe, without a single diversity consultant.

They answered it by building. And that is the only answer that has ever mattered.