Wil Haygood’s new book, his 10th, is The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home. Meeting in Washington DC to discuss it, he produces from between the pages a small Ziploc bag. Carefully, he takes out a flier, yellowed and brittle with age. The text at the top is Vietnamese. Underneath there is English.

It reads: “Colored GI’s! The South Vietnamese people, who are struggling for their independence and freedom, are friends with the American colored people being victim of barbarous racial discrimination at home. Your battlefield is right in the USA! Your enemy is the war lords in the White House and the Pentagon!”

Haygood says: “One of the soldiers I interviewed, Elbert Nelson, the doctor, he explains in the book that he found this leaflet directed to Black soldiers. And he was so touched that I tracked him down, he said, ‘I want you to have this.’ It was from the North Vietnamese, it was attached to trees and walls. It just gave me chills.”

The War Within a War tells such stories of Black Americans who from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s served in or otherwise experienced Vietnam: soldiers, marines, pilots, doctors and nurses, officers and drafted men, reporters and activists, cultural commentators and more.

Saying “this is my most important book,” Haygood cites a great writer who pointed the way.

“We need to remind Americans who have a very short memory what James Baldwin said. I met Baldwin when I started out my journalism career. I was at the Boston Globe, and he was a visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I was sent up there to do a feature about him. This was 1985. I hadn’t written a single book, but I was dreaming. And now I have a quote from him at the start of my book. I’ll read it, if I may.”

In a steady voice, Haygood reads words first published in the Black journal Freedomways in 1967.

“Long before the Americans decided to liberate the south-east Asians, they decided to liberate me. My ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this for he … was the first Viet Cong victim. We were bombed first.”

Haygood “came across that quote early in writing, and I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to use that at the beginning of the book, because it says everything.’ It synthesizes so much of what the feelings were among so many of those soldiers.”

Haygood describes racism faced by Black soldiers, stark disadvantages in circumstances and outcomes washing back to American soil, a nation jaggedly divided.

“Vietnam was the first desegregated war,” Haygood says, “the first engagement on any large scale in the history of this nation where Blacks and whites had to depend on each other. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, in spirit, told us to do that, to respect your fellow man or woman. But so often, that didn’t happen.”

Figures from the Library of Congress are stark: “Approximately 300,000 African Americans served in the Vietnam war. In 1965, African Americans filled 31% of ground combat battalions in Vietnam, while the percentage of African Americans as a minority in the general population was 12% … African Americans saw combat at a higher percentage and suffered casualties at a higher rate. Dr Martin Luther King Jr referred to the Vietnam war as a white man’s war, a Black man’s fight.”

In his reporting days, Haygood went to war zones including Somalia and Liberia. Closer to home, a piece for the Washington Post about a veteran White House staffer inspired The Butler, a hit 2013 film starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, directed by Lee Daniels. Previous book subjects include congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr, supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

His Vietnam book grew from humble roots. Haygood “grew up in Columbus, Ohio, lived on North 5th Street, and when I was in seventh grade, there was a guy who lived directly across the street by the name of Skip Dunn”.

“He was in high school, he was like the neighborhood sports hero, and he would wave to me every morning. ‘Hey, Wil.’ And then came a period when I didn’t see Skip. And I asked my sister, who was in school with him: ‘Where’s Skip?’ And my sister looked down at me and said: ‘Skip’s going to a place called Vietnam.’

“The following year, the summer of 1968, my mother moved to the east side of town, to an all-Black housing project. We were very poor. And that summer, there were rebellions and uprisings as a result of the assassination of King, and so I as a little kid found myself running from national guard troops and tanks that were sent to keep us all contained.”

King’s death was also a watershed event for Black Americans in Vietnam, where 1968 was also the year of the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese onslaught that showed the war wouldn’t be won.

Nearly 60 years after that, the war has been exhaustively studied. Nonetheless, Haygood identified “a big gap when it comes to Black soldier experiences, because Americans are still pretty confused by that war, and it’s a scary war to talk about because it lasted so long … and so I started thinking of the guy who lived across the street, Skip Dunn.

“I went back home. Skip had passed away but I started talking to people, and there were five other people who went, five other Black guys, and I happened to have known all of them. And so I said: ‘It damn sure is a book, now that I can pivot off of my childhood experiences, and start traveling around the nation, finding these soldiers to talk about the war.’”

Dunn appears on Haygood’s cover, under a helmet, gazing out at the reader. Inside, boldface names include Joseph B Anderson, a West Point graduate and the subject of The Anderson Platoon, a 1967 Oscar-winning documentary directed by Frenchman Pierre Schoendoerffer. There is also George Forrest, who fought heroically at Ia Drang, a ferocious battle in 1965; Fred Cherry, an ace pilot shot down the same year, tortured, finally released in 1973; and Wallace Terry, a Post and Time reporter who wrote Bloods, an oral history published in 1984.

Haygood also considers Motown’s response to the war, Berry Gordy putting out spoken-word albums of speeches in opposition, Marvin Gaye recording his great album What’s Going On in part-tribute to his brother, Frankie, one of thousands of psychological casualties.

There is Dorothy Harris, a nurse who in Cu Chi in 1967 grew close to an infantry captain, Riley Leroy Pitts, then formed a supportive bond with his widow. There is the remarkable Philippa Schuyler, a mixed-race former child prodigy pianist who went to Vietnam to save orphaned children, but died on 9 May 1967 when her helicopter went down near Da Nang.

Schuyler, Haygood says, “could get away with hiding who she was with white soldiers. But the Black soldier said: ‘No, we know exactly who you are, and we know exactly what you’ve been running from. And baby, we need to bring you up to speed about what’s going on in the world, in America and in Vietnam.’”

Shifts in political consciousness dot the book, among Black soldiers “dapping” to express solidarity, in chaotic actions such as the lethal uprising at Long Binh Jail, where Black soldiers disproportionately dominated.

Schuyler, Haygood continues, “came to really admire those Black soldiers who wanted to give her tutorials in Black history and in history in general, in the truth of history. You can’t run from facts. I know we’re in an age where people do run from facts, but we shouldn’t.”

His words are weighted. As The War Within a War is published, the Trump administration continues its war on Black history, particularly in the military, taking away honors bestowed on Black soldiers. One features prominently in Haygood’s book.

In 1966, at a US base in Cam Ranh Bay, Art Gregg was a lieutenant colonel in logistics. By the time he retired in 1982, he was the first Black three-star general. He was in his 90s when, in the fraught summer of 2020, he discussed with Haygood the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the protests for racial justice that followed.

From 2021, under Joe Biden and former general Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, the US military attempted to reckon with its racist past. In 2023, as part of a wider renaming initiative, Fort Lee in Virginia, named for a Confederate civil war general, was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams, honoring Gregg and Lt Col Charity Adams, the highest-ranking Black woman in US forces in the second world war.

“This shows the army has come a long way,” Gregg said then.

Gregg died in 2024, aged 96. In 2025, amid a slew of base renamings, the Trump administration took away Gregg and Adams’s honor.

To Haygood, “it’s unbelievable that a nation as big as ours, steeped in the history of slavery and in the savagery of Jim Crow, would come to a point when it would try to rewrite history.

“It was full proof to me, in light of what was happening to Black military history as the Trump administration was trying to wipe away all of these historical moments, that this would be my most timely book.

“This is the book the literary gods at this point in life wanted me to write, because I do firmly think that writers and film-makers will step up in this moment, amid this effort to whitewash history. As long as I have a pen in my hand, I will fight the good fight.”

• The War Within a War by Wil Haygood is out now