TERRY : Bloods (fülszöveg)
Random House is proud to publish a powerful and compelling story hitherto untold in the annals of the Vietnam War: the first major account of the complex and unique experience of black soldiers, at their best and their worst, in the most controversial war in American history. Astonishing for its incisive eloquence and controlled explosiveness, Bloods is a brutally honest, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny self portrait by twenty black veterans, representative of men coming largely from poorly educated lower-class families, who shouldered a vastly disproportionate share of the burden of America's tragedy in Indochina.
In the heat of the civil rights and black nationalist movements, black soldiers were accounting for more than 23 percent of American fatalities in Vietnam, even though blacks comprised only 10 percent or so of America's population. Black soldiers were special targets of Communist propaganda, urging them not to fight other people of color. Black soldiers were contending with the most virulent racism on the battlefield, as their white comrades burned crosses and waved Confederate flags. Black soldiers wanted to quit the war and return home when Martin Luther King was murdered, and when they did return they were the first to be forgotten among a lost generation our country chose to ignore.
Among the cast of characters:
* Gene "The Montagnard" Woodley: in the jungle he was a one-man army, terrorizing the Vietcong, wearing only a loincloth and greasepaint, and carrying only his weapons and the ears and fingers of the enemy he had killed. Yet in his most haunting nightmare, he relived the mercy killing of a white soldier.
* Manny Holloman: called a "gook-lover" by his comrades, he tried to help the relatives of Vietnamese accidentally killed by American troops. When the Communists took over South Vietnam, Manny's Vietnamese wife and child disappeared. Manny began his search.
* Fred Cherry: the senior black officer in a prison camp in Hanoi. Had the Vietcong succeeded in breaking him and forcing him to broadcast statements calling on black soldiers to refuse to fight, he would have been a propaganda coup. Yet he withstood three years of the cruelest torture and two years of solitary confinement, and eventually owed his life to a white Southerner who hated blacks until he became Cherry's cell-mate.
Brilliantly edited by Wallace Terry, a journalist who covered the war for Time for two years, Bloods is a deeply affecting book about the vileness of man's most heinous enterprise and about the courage and cowardice of black soldiers who engaged in it even as they dealt with the dangerous tensions and ambiguities that have always characterized relations between blacks and whites in America. Bloods is an unprecedented, and will be a lasting, contribution to the literature of war.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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