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.2 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 esta
blished 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.”3
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.
It has haunted me to the point where I felt it was an omen. That’s why I couldn’t keep a family—because I destroyed one.
After breaking up with his third wife in 1993, he became homeless, living at the Borden Avenue Veterans Shelter in Long Island City, Queens.
Homelessness among Vietnam veterans became a major public issue in the 1980s, though there had been homeless Vietnam veterans living on the streets of New York City since the 1960s. As the problem gained national visibility, the New York City Office of the Comptroller published Soldiers of Misfortune: Homeless Veterans in New York City in 1982. The report found that as of that year there were as many as ten thousand veterans living on New York City streets, accounting for an estimated one-third of the city’s homeless population. On average they were in their late thirties. The causes varied, of course, but the report pointed to both unemployment and underemployment and a lack of low-cost housing. Another explanation offered was that veterans were less likely to have completed their education than their peers. The report also cited stepped-up discharges from mental hospitals as a contributing factor. In 1982 unemployment in the city was running at 9.5 percent, while 11 percent of Vietnam-era veterans were out of work. The picture was much worse among minority veterans, who were suffering an unemployment rate of almost 25 percent. The housing market in the city changed dramatically between 1970 and 1981, too; the report estimated that 321,000 apartments had disappeared, mostly in low-rent buildings.4
Partly as a result of public pressure created by this report and the opening of Vietnam memorials in Washington, D.C., and later New York City, in 1987 New York City opened the shelter on Borden Avenue, the country’s first for homeless veterans. The community fought the shelter unsuccessfully. Located in an industrial building near the Queens-side entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, the shelter would house some of the estimated twenty-seven hundred homeless veterans already in the New York City shelter system. It was never a particularly welcoming place. It was originally designed for 275 occupants, but its population quickly ballooned to over 400. The city initially promised that veterans would receive both health care and job training on-site, but those services did not materialize for some time.
In February 1988, Bernard Edelman, then director of the Office of Veterans’ Affairs for Mayor Edward I. Koch, reported that among the 400 residents at the Borden Avenue shelter, 80 percent were black, 15 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent white. Fifty percent were Vietnam-era veterans, and 20 percent “ex-offenders.”5 In 1988, the Veterans Administration additionally opened a drop-in center on Ryerson Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which contained an examination room, a lounge, and a kitchen.6
The effort was only partly successful, as estimates of the number of homeless Vietnam-era veterans continued to climb. The press frequently cited statistics asserting that one-quarter to one-third of America’s homeless were veterans, and as late as 1991 some estimated that the proportion of Vietnam-era veterans among the homeless ran as high as 50 percent.7 Sweat was among them.
On August 7, 1993, Steven Zadarala, a forty-two-year-old homeless veteran sleeping on the cot next to Sweat’s at the shelter, was stabbed in the chest.8
I seen him and he was changing colors. I saw him going into shock now because he couldn’t even talk, you see. I had to get him to the floor so he wouldn’t run. I finally flipped him down to the floor. I truly didn’t really, really think that this guy was going to make it, [but] I started giving him mouth-to-mouth and trying to stop the bleeding and all of this at the same time. Once I got up to take a breather myself, and my man, who we called him Sarge, he jumped down there and he told me, “Sweat, he needs mouth-to-mouth again”; that’s all I remember. And then when I went back down to give him mouth-to-mouth the second time, we got his pulse back, but it was real faint. So then, naturally, we’re waiting and waiting on this ambulance. I didn’t know that much time elapsed, but it was something like fifty-something minutes before this ambulance came.
Why did it take all this time? Because it was a shelter? You understand, it’s nobody important, just a bunch of veterans; you understand me—they’re drug addicts and misfits and everything else. We wasn’t real people. We wasn’t nothin’. So they didn’t get there for about fifty-four minutes.
Zadarala died. Police arrested Milton Vasquez, another Borden Avenue shelter resident, for the murder. Sweat recalls: He ran and tried to flush a knife eight inches long down the commode. The police got the knife, got everything.
The incident brought Sweat to a mental breakdown.
I started flashing back. All I could think about was how I killed these people. That just kept piling in my mind as I was trying to get his blood off of me. They had me in the shower. Then the police came in and told me they were going to take me to the hospital. So they took me. And in a way that was the best thing that ever happened to me because they took me from there to people who I feel helped me. They put me in the VA on Twenty-Third Street, and they left me there for five months and twenty-three days. That was a lot of time to be locked up—not knowing what to do in there. Finally, that’s when they sent me to Lyons, New Jersey, and then from there they sent me to Martinsburg, West Virginia, which is a long-term hospital. And that’s why I thought I would never get back to New York.
While Sweat was living at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center, a residential care facility, a friend told
him about Black Veterans for Social Justice, an organization that offers treatment and social assistance for veterans from all wars. Founded in 1979, BVSJ aims to fill in the gaps left by the Veterans Administration.
One important service the organization provides is supportive housing for veterans. Sweat himself now lives in a BVSJ-owned building.
That’s why I belong to the Black Vets for Social Justice, because this is the only place that has said these words—that we have served too. We have these problems of war sickness, of socializing, of our behavioral patterns; we have problems and you shouldn’t just look at us as just guys in the ghetto. You should look at these soldiers of war as collateral damage.
Sweat had no desire to remain permanently at a Veterans Administration facility. Instead, he wanted to live as independently as he could. In BVSJ, he found a group that would help him move from dependence to independence by stressing the twin values of mutual aid and self-help.
I came to this organization because of what it stood for. And what it stands for is to unite blacks and other veterans, all veterans, in a united way to give us the benefits which we’ve never really received as being veterans. “Yes, we served too.” That’s our motto.
Within Black Veterans for Social Justice, that’s the key word: “justice.” We need justice. As you know, in our society of America, the black man and woman do not receive justice. So yes, there are organizations that must be formed to [fix] the injustices that have happened to us over the generations being here in America.
As a participant at BVSJ, Sweat has run the organization’s Veterans Action Group for many years. He describes it as a group which was formed by veterans for veterans. It exists today at 665 Willoughby and also 22 East 119th Street, where veterans come together and we relate to each other all kinds of situations that may approach us as veterans. To receive veterans’ benefits … to just enlighten each other and hearten each other in our tribulations. It’s a group that all veterans are welcome to come to, not just blacks. Not just [men], but all people can come to it. We open our doors to everyone.
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