Setting aside all the moral complexity for a moment, I cannot escape the fact that I got a lot in exchange for my military service; three college degrees, a series of zero-down home loan guarantees, free Golden Corral dinners once a year... I served in the so-called “All-Volunteer Force,” when incentives have to count. But even under the draft, the benefits of military service were hard to ignore and included much of the same promises.
The scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois encouraged Black men to fight in WWI and WWII, and the NAACP he co-founded did the same. They saw military service as one of the surest paths toward full citizenship, in part because of the inherent duplicity in denying soldiers and veterans the rights they secured for others. There were also over 100 years of legal history linking Black military service and civil rights, from Dredd Scott v. Sandford in 1857 all the way to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. (I cover this in some detail in the final chapter of God is a Grunt)
I think about what I got from my service every April when my social media timelines get inundated with quotes from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” I think about how the military benefitted me because I would be a hypocrite to tell someone like me not to join, I would be depriving them of the benefits that got me to where I am. When a civilian like King fails to identify the important distinction between military service and “militarism”, I can’t help but think how easy it is to criticize something you have never experienced yourself. Anti-military bias often rides on the back of anti-war sentimentality.
King’s convictions set him against powerful former allies, including Du Bois’ NAACP. He also seemed to be ignoring the roots of the movement, which was born on the battlefields of the prior half-century. Not only was his second-in-command, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a WWII veteran, so were LT Jackie Robinson, CPT Dovey Johnson-Roundtree, Oliver Brown (rank unknown, see below), enlisted men Charles and Medgar Evers, and defense contractor Irene Morgan. Just as important were Korea-era veterans like PFC Sarah Keys and John M. Perkins.
Vincent G. Harding, who served stateside during the war in Korea, authored King’s controversial speech. With that that in mind, I can’t help but think of the diversity of the military community. There are as many opinions about war as there are soldiers; Harding’s experiences obviously resonated with King, but I wonder how combat veterans like Abernathy felt about being referred to as “psychologically deranged.” How were they supposed to respond to young men and women who wanted the same military benefits their service earned them? More importantly, how does one get Freedom Rides and integrated education without Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach and Oliver Leon Brown v. Board of Education?
I got a lot from my service, many soldiers still do. I still appreciate King’s speech, but it isn’t perfect and it doesn’t need to be. Until pacifists can distinguish between militarism and military families, we can’t be anti-war without also being anti-military. History is clear that we cannot fully appreciate the civil rights movement without acknowledging the sacrifice of soldiers and veterans who made it possible. It’s time to move beyond our simplistic notions and grapple with the full weight of what our democracy requires.