Bringing It All Back Home (25 page)

Herbert Sweat grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in central Brooklyn. The area was originally populated with Canarsie Indians and “bought” from them by the Dutch West India Company in the seventeenth century. The Dutch settled there and renamed it Bedford. Improvements in transportation and infrastructure made the area accessible to both downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan; therefore, the wealthier classes were lured to Bedford-Stuyvesant in the middle and late nineteenth century. At the same time, the region remained one of the only places in New York where free blacks could buy homes and land.

By the 1950s, Bedford-Stuyvesant was one of the largest black settlements in New York City. However, the housing stock deteriorated with time as landlords failed to invest in repair and upkeep, and by the 1960s the neighborhood was identified as a slum district. This is the Bed-Stuy where Sweat grew up.

He describes his background as essentially working-class. The family lived in a brownstone with a backyard, a birdbath, and a rose garden. His father was a veteran of the Korean War and lost a leg in the service. His father and his uncles belonged to the Masonic Lodge, and lodge meetings were held in the basement of the brownstone. Sweat remembers it as a mixed neighborhood—Italians, Germans, and African Americans living side by side. He acknowledges that the neighborhood was at the time considered a ghetto. But as a child he did not see it that way.

We understood and was raised by almost each and every neighbor and it—it was a beautiful thing to observe or to be part of [a place] that was pictured to be the worst, but yet there is the beauty. Why? Over my years I've understood that was the tree that grew in Brooklyn; that was the life … And one would never believe the unity of that block …

Everything was in place; it was a mother and a father, and they were providing for the children and themselves, and the relatives would come on all the holidays, and we would go downtown to Robert Hall on Flatbush Avenue and get our Easter suits and coats, and we would find Easter eggs in the backyard and throughout the cellar and all over the house. The holidays were celebrated like in any other home on the block.

Like so many others from his generation, Sweat fondly remembers life on the streets as a kid, playing stickball and stoopball and all of the street games with a diverse population of kids. There was order in his life, even if just a few blocks away things could be profoundly different. He is not blind to the realities of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1950s and 1960s. He knows that there were gangs and drugs and gambling and prostitution. But in his recollection, that kind of activity was happening on the main thoroughfares. The side streets were different: islands of respect, mutual care, and order.

Once he was forced to leave his block, life got harder and he changed. By the time he was in fourth grade, he was being bused from his neighborhood school to P.S. 221, a mostly white school on Empire Boulevard in East Flatbush.

Going to school on the bus was a beautiful ride, but getting off the bus was traumatizing, now that I look at it.

The only thing that I could truly remember is that when we lined up in the park, there was only three of us—three black children on these lines—and the girl who was next to me, on her line, was Alice. The other black child's name was Tyrone. We became immediately attracted to each other; we were always trying to understand, you know, like, why—why me, you know what I mean? Why do we have to come here?

He vividly remembers the Bedford-Stuyvesant riot of 1964, started by a police shooting of an African American youth in Manhattan, and the damage it did to his neighborhood.

To walk down what we call Broadway in Brooklyn, you would think you were on the Broadway in Manhattan, when I grew up. So to watch it one night be burned down and tore down because of the riots and then couldn't go … my family wouldn't allow none of [us] to go down to Broadway; that's where our movies and clothing stores and things were, and then to have seen it—these were traumatic experiences.

And that's another thing about coming up through my era. You were either with it or against it. You were either for the war or against the war. You were either black or you were white.

Those years changed him. By the time he reached junior high school, by his own admission he got
a little roughness with me. And I tell any of my people, you got to have a little roughness in order to survive. You had our fathers and teachers and leaders telling us to be peaceful, but when we got to get off that school bus or to get on that school bus, it's not peaceful at all. We don't understand how to [act] like we were taught in our churches.

He attended Franklin K. Lane High School, graduated in 1965, and then, like many of his relatives, went into the service in April 1966. Though he enlisted, he didn't think much about the Vietnam War or American social problems. Rather, military service was simply understood as a rite of passage for young males in his family. His father, his uncles, his cousins, and his brothers all had military service in their backgrounds. They had been in World War II and Korea and deployed to the Dominican Republic. He felt that if he was to earn his lineage, he would have to be part of that tradition.

All his family members who served had been paratroopers: members of the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, and the 555th—the Triple Nickels. Sweat recalls:
Now, my mind wasn't set on whether or not I was scared or worried; my mind was to get my wings.

The Parachutist Badge, also known as Jump Wings, is a badge of honor, a symbol of an elite status in the U.S. military. Earning it would be his way of asserting his equality. He was both African and American. He wanted to be part of a larger American history
because of Paul Revere, because of George Washington, because of the teachings, because of the understandings of what we were standing for.

Sweat wanted me to acknowledge the
hurt but yet the endurance that I must have possessed. You see, when you go into the service, I told you I was doing it as an honorable thing, a man's chore.

He anticipated that he would be treated fairly because there were so many other black soldiers. And perhaps the personal consequences of enlisting would have been less traumatic, less injurious, if he had experienced the equal treatment he expected. His life going forward would've gone better; he would have been proud, in the end, of his “gallantry.” But he doesn't feel that he was treated fairly.

And it was such a crucial part of my individual life, as well as, now that I think about it, it had to be that with many of my brothers.

He went into the service thinking he might become a noncommissioned officer or even an officer. He had high hopes and aspirations. As he put it, citing a gospel song,
I got my eye on the sparrow.
What he didn't foresee was the racism he would meet with in the military.

So going into basic training and Advanced Infantry Training, it was like me going full force but always bumping into a wall. The wall being the system that was in order at the time, and that system was as always—to hold the blacks back.

He met men from Wisconsin and Texas, as he recalls, who had literally never seen a black person before. Likewise, when he went to Jump School at Fort Benning in Georgia, he encountered the first segregated bathrooms he had ever seen, in the bus station. Having grown up as a leader in his neighborhood, physically stronger than almost everyone and better able to deal with difficult situations, Sweat believed he would and should be granted a leadership opportunity within the Army. He was not. He felt singled out because of his race.

After getting his Jump Wings, Sweat was sent to Vietnam to serve with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. It was October 1967. His account of moving into the jungle echoes the theme of twoness. He felt as though he traveled the distance between civilian and savage, between normal and not normal, regular person and killer.

Other soldiers quickly taught Sweat how to behave in the field. His sergeant, a black man named Abner, also from Brooklyn, instructed him to go through his rucksack and leave any unnecessary items, including underwear and books, that would be useless in the field. Sweat shed his civilian life, buried it in a foxhole.

So then, naturally, I became a Herdsman—173rd Airborne Brigade. Read your history books; we were at that particular time General Westmoreland's strike unit. We were just what they wanted—men who would die.

Life becomes the other side, the side that I don't give a damn whether I get back to New York or not. All I want to do is kill. I was what they called a boonie rat, and maybe someone in your interviews explained very deeply what a boonie rat is. And all you have to do is relax yourself enough to understand what a rat is and what and how a rat lives and then put it in what the word “boonie” means, and you have a human being running around in the jungles, eating, killing, very rarely sleeping, very rarely bathing, very rarely getting our mail properly, very rarely getting clean clothes, fresh water.

As he recalls it, the unit was pushed from place to place as the ultimate backstop, made out of bodies.

Vietnam retains a powerful hold on Sweat and many other African American soldiers, in part because the racial divisions of American life were sometimes forgotten. For once, “twoness” didn't necessarily define Sweat's existence. He could feel a sense of common humanity with fellow Americans at the very moment they were asked to engage in that most inhumane act of all, organized killing.

The trick of this is to understand that as we go through this jungle depending on each other, anything that happens, everything that happens, we're all one there. Like I said, there wasn't no color problem; there wasn't anything—especially after the firefight when you really see the true tears and the true understanding … This little group of men out in the middle of this jungle is really glad to be alive themselves but hurt because their best pal was dead. And to witness this and live like this and to live with the harmony of each other as well as the sacrifice of death, it was a beautiful way to live. That's why they say in war it's also love. And I found that love there for my comrades. That's when there's no color …

When he returned to the United States in the fall of 1968, Sweat began to experience—again—what he believed to be racism within the American military. He accumulated Article 15s, often listed as “minor” disciplinary charges. Even though he felt entitled to a discharge from the U.S. military, he was shipped to an armored unit. He telephoned his wife, and she wired him money to return directly to New York. He went AWOL. Four hundred thirty-two days later he wound up in the stockade at Fort Dix. He became, simply put, rebellious.

In 1970, the Pentagon listed 65,643 American soldiers as either AWOL or deserters.
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Herbert Sweat's decision to go AWOL began a trajectory that would lead him into serious trouble with the Army and alienate him from government institutions. Something like this had been foreseen by African American community leaders. In 1966, Whitney M. Young Jr., the civil rights activist and president of the National Urban League (NUL), used the pages of the
New York Amsterdam News
to describe the problems that African American veterans were likely to face and to describe the efforts of the Urban League to meet those challenges. The NUL established the Veterans Affairs Department, which was “designed to contact the G.I. shortly before he is to be discharged, to see if we can help him in his readjustment to civilian life.” The plan was to find out specifically what skills the soldier had and if any of them, through retraining, could be adapted for civilian use. Further, the NUL wanted to help soldiers return to school and find adequate housing. But Young understood the dramatic problems African American veterans were going to face. “Nobody gave a tinker's damn,” he wrote about this group of ex-GIs, “what they hoped to do, or even how they were feeling when they returned home, except his family and close friends.” The result was that thousands of them returned to the same old communities, Young asserted, “to the same old discriminatory conditions, to the same or worse nondescript little-paying jobs and to the same old depressing, dismal and hopeless second-class citizenship status that they have left.” Young concluded, “With all the trouble currently besetting the country, here at home, these Vietnam vets will be a force the nation can ill afford to have embittered.”
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In 1970 and 1971, Sweat was suffering from PTSD and he was angry, too. He got out of the Army on October 7, 1970. And then, he says,
I was back in jail for murder in '71.

He and another man were playing chess for money. Sweat won, and the man refused to pay. A fight followed, and the man pulled a knife. Using a pearl-handled .38-caliber pistol he had acquired while in Vietnam, Sweat fired. The bullet struck the man's collarbone, and something, a bone or a bullet fragment, penetrated his heart, and he died. Sweat was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He went through the justice system and was sentenced to probation when the charge against him was reduced from murder to manslaughter. It was ruled that the man he shot had reached for a weapon first. Thinking about it now, he says,
It's not hard to pull the trigger. It's hard to live with it. In fact, I don't live with it. I suffer with it.

Three marriages came and went. So did a number of jobs. He began to have flashbacks to a particular incident in Vietnam. In the fall of 1967, his unit was on a search-and-destroy mission when it took sniper fire from a village. Someone was hit. Assigned to carry the M79 grenade launcher, which fired an explosive 40-millimeter round, Sweat fired on one of the huts. After the firing stopped, Sweat's company moved through the village, and he entered the hut where his rounds had landed, 45-millimeter pistol at the ready. Sweat discovered the bodies of a number of individuals who looked like civilians, including an old man, two females, two or three younger children, and two men clad in “black pajamas,” identified as the uniform of the Vietcong. He is certain that he killed them.