Two Marines Who Once Stood Up to Discrimination Reunite

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/magazine/black-marines-reunion.html

Version 0 of 1.

Harry Wilson jumped up from his booth at the Waffle House when he saw the white sedan with the red Marine Corps license plate pull into the parking lot. He knew it was the man he once considered his best friend, Alexander Holmes. The last time they saw each other was April 1974, when Wilson served as the best man at Holmes’s wedding.

“Ricky!” Holmes, shouted, using the nickname used by only Wilson’s closest friends and family. “Aw, man, it’s good to see you,” Holmes replied. It was the day before the Fourth of July. The two men pulled masks up over their noses and mouths and embraced.

They laughed as they noted how their bodies had changed since they wore Marine Corps fatigues in the early 1970s. Now in their late 60s, they patted their bellies, joked about receding hairlines and talked about heart disease and lost teeth until Wilson asked if they could go inside. He was exhausted and needed to sit down, having left his home in Maryland at 4:30 a.m. to make the drive. Holmes was the local; he came to this Waffle House in Greensboro, N.C., once a week.

The two men sat down in the booth, Wilson alongside his wife, Maxine, sitting across from Holmes and Holmes’s granddaughter Da’lashia. They ordered eggs over easy, hash browns, waffles, orange juice and coffee, as they recounted events that unexpectedly ended their careers in the Marine Corps nearly 50 years earlier.

In September 1972, Holmes and Wilson were deployed aboard the U.S.S. Sumter, a tank-landing ship carrying about 150 other Marines from the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment and other support units, off the coast of South Vietnam. Trained as supply specialists and truck drivers, they were close enough to see the enemy rockets fired from the shore at the Sumter — a reminder of what awaited them if they got the order to land on the beach and fight inland.

But it was not the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army that posed the greatest danger. Instead, the bigger threat came from their fellow Marines on the ship. In August 1972, racial tensions between the Black and white Marines sparked a series of fistfights on the Sumter’s steel decks and led to charges of mutiny against three of their friends: Pfc. Alexander Jenkins Jr., Pfc. Roy Barnwell and Lance Cpl. James Blackwell. Holmes and Wilson say they stayed out of the fighting on the ship, but they did not stay neutral in protesting treatment they endured from the white Marine sergeants and officers appointed over them. “All we tried to do was segregate ourselves, because we weren’t being treated fairly,” Wilson said, explaining that things began with small slights like Black Marines being given only manual labor jobs that whites were not, and then getting worse food than the white service members did in the chow line.

“Then there was one or two times when a white and Black got in an incident,” Wilson explained. “That’s when we started to separate ourselves. That’s when we didn’t want to be with them.” From then on, when all of the Marines on Sumter assembled in formation every morning for roll call, the Black Marines would form up on their own — just to the side of their white counterparts. Instead of eating their meals with the other Marines on the ship’s mess deck, Holmes and Wilson often bought snacks in the small ship’s store and ate them in the bed of the five-ton truck Wilson had parked in a large open storage area on the Sumter called the tank deck. “We were nonviolent until they came after us and said they didn’t like our music,” Wilson said. “Then there were riots.”

Holmes kept Wilson and some of the other Black Marines out of the worsening fray. “You’re in Uncle Sam’s military — you can’t beat the system,” Holmes told them. “We didn’t go the other way when an officer came up and we had to salute him, or when we had to salute the flag. We made an oath when we came into the service.”

Holmes knew the Marine captain and lieutenants on the Sumter thought they had ended all of the issues on the ship when they had Barnwell, Blackwell and Jenkins helicoptered away. He wanted to make a point that arresting three supposed “ringleaders” was not going to stop them from resisting the discrimination they were constantly experiencing, even though he was unaware of just how severely the justice system was pursuing his friends. “Keep the tension up,” he quietly advised Wilson and others. “Keep the tension up.”

On the ship’s mess decks, Holmes passed out butter knives to other Black Marines when he knew one of the white sergeants was watching him. It got the white Marines’ attention. When the Sumter returned to Okinawa months later, Holmes was pulled into an office, shown nearly two dozen witness statements attesting to the knife incident, and told that he was going to be court-martialed. Holmes readily admitted what he had done, and why. He said a Marine lawyer tried to use the threat of a court-martial as leverage to get Holmes to testify against his friends Barnwell, Blackwell and Jenkins, whom Black and underground G.I. newspapers were already calling “the Sumter Three.”

Even though Wilson was stationed on a different base on Okinawa, he got the same treatment. Wilson had orders to go back to the States and process out of the Marines on Nov. 7, 1972, but the day before he was to board a cargo flight back he learned he was on legal hold. “All you have to say is Barnwell, Blackwell and Jenkins are the leaders, and I’ll get you home the day after tomorrow,” his lawyer told him. Wilson refused. Nearly 50 years later, the Marine lawyer’s head games still sting. “I wound up coming home in May,” Wilson recalled bitterly.

Holmes said his own record was clean before that deployment to Vietnam, and once the Marine Corps dropped its mutiny charges against the Sumter Three, he was released with an honorable discharge. “We weren’t bad Marines,” Holmes said. “We were just victims of circumstance.”

Wilson received a general discharge and was prevented from joining the Marine reserve, though he had wanted to make a career out of the military. He had a tough time keeping a job once he returned to civilian life. About 15 years ago, Wilson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and began receiving health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Over the years, Holmes and Wilson lost touch. Both men moved several times and misplaced each others’ phone numbers. While once in Philadelphia, Holmes tried to look up Wilson at the local V.A. hospital — but he used his nickname, Ricky, not realizing Wilson’s first name was actually Harry.

At the Waffle House, the two men passed around copies of old photographs as they ate their breakfast. Wilson handed one print across the table that Holmes held in front of his granddaughter. He asked Da’lashia to spot her grandfather in the group of young Black men seen in a Philippines nightclub. She smiled and said, “I don’t know.”

The two old Marines stretched their breakfast reunion out long past when the last plates had been picked up and they had drunk all the coffee they could hold. After two hours, Holmes and Wilson made their way back to their cars, which occupied the only two disabled parking spots in the Waffle House’s parking lot. Wilson and his wife were heading to grab a quick nap, then continuing their drive to see some other family nearby. Monday they would drive back to Greensboro for a longer visit with Holmes.

It had been just over a week since Holmes and Wilson first reconnected by phone, and they talked every day since. “I was ecstatic,” Holmes said of the first time he talked to Wilson in June. “I went to work the next day, I couldn’t even sleep. I said, ‘I found my best friend.’”

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of At War delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.