Bringing It All Back Home (10 page)

He believes, he says, that there is peace to be found in sharing and communicating his experiences with others.

Some Vietnam veterans can't talk about it. They don't want to talk about it, whereas I made the choice. It needs to be spoken about so people will know what a veteran goes through, what a soldier goes through, so when folks make a decision to send someone in harm's way, you understand exactly what you're asking that person to do.

Wallace's parents reached New York from the South, having joined the big northern migration that took place as southern agriculture mechanized in the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was from Alabama, his father from North Carolina.

When folks migrated from the South, you hoped first you could get a job and get a place to live, and then you found a church. You hooked up with people you already knew. Relatives of mine found Cornerstone. That's where we ended up.

Wallace's parents, Benjamin and Virginia, met on Greene Avenue in Brooklyn and married in 1947. Anthony was their first child, born on a day with twenty-five inches of snow on the ground that made getting to the hospital difficult. Two more children would follow, Cynthia and Vincent. His parents eventually found an apartment in the Marcy Houses, a then-new public housing project in Brooklyn, bordering Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Family legend has it that the Wallace family was one of the first to move in. The Marcy Houses were part of a large-scale effort by the city to build affordable postwar apartments. Completed in 1949, the buildings gave priority to World War II veterans, as long as their income did not exceed Housing Authority guidelines. Wallace's father was a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, which may have helped the family get into the complex.

Wallace recalls an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a unique flavor. He remembers Italian, Polish, Jewish, and German families.

At Christmastime everybody's home or apartment was your apartment. You ran from one kid's house to another to see what they got for Christmas. It was a joyous time. I have to stress, it was diverse.

As a young boy in New York City, Wallace had the freedom to visit other kids' houses, taste food from other cultures, and share other cultural traditions, which led to a certain innocence when it came to racism. On one occasion, his family traveled by train to visit relatives in South Carolina. As his mother unpacked the food brought along for the train ride, Wallace kept asking why they couldn't eat in the dining car, with its linen-covered tables. She chose not to answer. It wasn't until much later that Wallace realized why they wouldn't have been welcome there. Even though segregation in railway dining cars had been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950, Mrs. Wallace did not want her children to experience the racial tensions that might have arisen had they tried to eat in one. Segregation, a fact of life for southern African Americans in the 1950s, was not something he had so directly encountered before.

In some ways, he recalls an upbringing that echoes small-town life. In and around the Marcy Houses, child rearing was a neighborhood business. Living next door to the Wallace family was a single mom raising three daughters. Even though she was not a family member, she had a very real authority:
If Mrs. Madeline spoke to you and told you to do something, it was like your mother speaking or your father. You listened to [other adults in the neighborhood] as if they were your parents.

Despite the communal nature of life in the Marcy Houses, Wallace remembers being something of a loner. His time was spent in school and going to music rehearsals and church. He loved riding the New York City subway system, watching the airplanes land at LaGuardia Airport, and visiting the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Wallace's mother worked part-time at the Industrial Home for the Blind on Gates Avenue, now P.S. 297. Wallace's father worked in a foundry in Red Hook. Wallace grew up with a sense of his family's place in the city's social hierarchy. He remembers playing in the band in junior high at I.S. 33, the only student playing a school-issued trumpet. His family was not what he would call poor, but there were real-world financial constraints that affected everyday living.

It was a combination of church life and church music that would ground Wallace through the tumultuous times ahead. Christmas and Easter music gave him an appreciation of classical music that served him well in school and became a source of pride. Music opened doors: his trumpet playing later enabled him to play taps and reveille during infantry training. He also played for church services at the Noncommissioned Officer School chapel. As he puts it,
The instrument gave you the opportunity to do something different
.

A church usher by the time he was eight, at age eighteen he was teaching Christian education and leading youth groups. The roles of student and teacher would prepare him for the rigors of military training and for military leadership. He developed a desire to inspire, instruct, and motivate others.

I wanted other people to understand and believe it [the Gospel] just as much as I believe it. So much so, that after I came back from the service, I was ordained a deacon, and I was one of the youngest deacons to be ordained in our church history.

After high school, Wallace attended Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn for two years and at the same time worked at the Sherman Creek facility of Con Edison, the New York City power company. In 1969, he resigned from Con Ed so he could return to school full-time and finish his degree. He handed his letter in on a Friday and went home to find his draft notice in the mail. He returned to work on Monday and asked for his resignation letter back. His boss was happy to oblige, thinking this hardworking young man had changed his mind.

I tore it up in front of him, reached in my jacket pocket, and showed him my draft notice. He said, “No wonder.”

Because Wallace had been drafted, the company was legally obligated to offer him a job on his return from service. In this way he had preserved his place at Con Ed, where he still works today, albeit now in a management position.

One of the ministers in his church offered to try to help him get out of the draft. Many others were urging him to find a way out of going to war, including his parents. In the end he felt resigned to going, and on a cold January morning, at the age of twenty-one, Anthony Wallace reported to Fort Hamilton, not far from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

I went and I did what I had to do, and I don't regret that. If I had to do it again in another life, I would do the same thing. I said, “Maybe this was a chance for me to venture out. Maybe I won't end up in Vietnam. I'll end up in the Army band.”

He recalls that he wanted to take the first steps into the Army on his own, saying:
The day I left it was cold, but sunny and bright. I walked to the subway. I didn't want anyone to go with me.

It didn't work out that way. Going to induction, he ran into an old neighborhood friend, Willard Kelly, and they walked in together. Once inside, they found hundreds of men, some of them having ridden for hours on the subway to make the 7:00 a.m. start time. The experience made quite an impression on Wallace.

It was like New York, a diverse group. There were Latinos, blacks, whites. Some folks were apprehensive, of course. What I always think about was the people telling you what to do. There were clerks, specialists, ordering you around like they were generals. I laugh about it now, but that was their job. We stayed there all day, paperwork and more paperwork. Buses, charter buses, came to the base and loaded us up. Took us to LaGuardia Airport and flew us to Fort Jackson … We were still filling out paperwork, I would say, until one in the morning. You were tired, hungry; I don't think we really slept until the next day. Haircuts, uniforms, fatigues. Some folks were still shocked by the haircuts. In the meantime, while we're doing all this, we had a meal or two, but then they put you out there to police the base. It was an awakening, the first day or two in the military.

At Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Wallace was quickly recognized as someone with leadership potential and was made acting squad leader. He took responsibility for making sure everyone in his squad carried out his job; if one guy messed up, everybody suffered. In the best shape of his life, Wallace found the physical training easy. He remembers that he quickly determined that basic training was like a game, that he could learn from it, and that if he did his job as he was told, it could save his life.

In March 1969, his basic training complete, Wallace was shipped by bus to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for Advanced Individual Training (AIT). Here he was taught navigational skills and how to use weapons. Once again, he was made acting squad leader and was asked to play reveille on a bugle every morning at the personal request of a lieutenant. One bonus of being squad leader was not having to do KP duty. However, as Wallace would prove his whole life, he has never been above doing the work he has asked others to do. Once, he took the KP duty of a soldier whose family had come for the weekend, and found it suited his sense of order. Leaders do not always have to lead from the front.

Although Wallace does not like to speak about his experiences through the lens of race, one incident stands out for him from his AIT training. Having found the worship services at Fort McClellan unsatisfying due to their ecumenical nature, Wallace wanted to attend services at a Baptist church.

I had a little portable radio and I picked up local stations and they were broadcasting a service from Anniston, Alabama. I recall it said, “Come to Anniston Street Baptist Church,” and they were singing and they were broadcasting a service. And it sounded good.

So one Sunday morning he put on his uniform khakis and headed down to the church in Anniston.

There was nobody outside, so I walked up the steps, and I remember it being a Gothic-type structure with one or two entrances. I walk up the steps, and to my surprise it was not a black Baptist church. It was a white congregation. So, of course, they were more than likely part of the Southern Baptists. Once I walked in, I almost had the sensation of saying, “Well, you don't need to be here. You need to turn around and walk back out.” But that did not happen.

An usher came up and escorted me all the way down, it seemed as if to the first or second pew. As I'm walking down the aisle, uniform on, it felt like my ears were burning because I didn't want to look too much to the left or too much to the right. I felt like everybody was looking at me. I sat down and they gave me a program and I listened to the sermon. Then, after the sermon and the benediction, people came over to me and said, “Thank you for coming to our church.” And then they asked me if I would come downstairs and join them for dinner. Now, that was kind of them, but I said to myself, “If I go downstairs, there is a possibility that the base and my family may never hear from me again.”

Despite the racial fear dominating the country, especially in the South, and despite his personal trepidation, Wallace believes he had found acceptance. While it may seem like a small incident, understood within the context of 1969, with its urban rioting, assassinations, and Black Power protests, this became a defining moment for Wallace, one that would shape his views on race for the rest of his life. Fellowship, not race, mattered that day. When he politely declined the dinner invitation, they asked him to fill out a visitor's card with his name and address. Later, he would return from Vietnam to find a letter from the church, thanking him for attending and inviting him to come back if he was ever in Anniston, Alabama. To this day Wallace continues his search to locate the church—which no longer seems to exist—or at least a few of the congregants who were there that long-ago day in 1969. He says:

I haven't gone there yet, but I need to do that one day before I leave this earth. Perhaps there's nobody there that would remember that Sunday, but at least I could say thank you for allowing me to come and worship.

Wallace took his military aptitude tests and found that he qualified for Officer Candidate School (OCS). As a draftee, he was already obligated to serve two years in the Army, and agreeing to become an officer would add a year to his time and would almost guarantee a tour in Vietnam. This did not sound appealing. On the basis of his test scores, another option was to go to flight school. But with warrant officer training again came the requirement to enlist for a third year. He declined both opportunities. He was holding out hope for a place in the Army band or an assignment that might keep him out of Vietnam. Once he began “cultural sensitivity” training, however, his eventual deployment to Vietnam became clear. As he listened to instructions on how to treat Vietnamese women and children and learned basic Vietnamese words, it began to sink in.

They wanted you to have an idea of where you were going. So as this kind of training continued to take place, I said, “My goodness, guess what? I think you may be going to Vietnam.”

Soon thereafter a third offer came Wallace's way, this time to become a noncommissioned officer (NCO). This opportunity did not come with an added year of duty, and he would emerge with the rank of sergeant. He jumped at the chance. The war was taking a severe toll on noncommissioned personnel, and the demand was growing. This provided opportunities that Wallace feels he may not have had otherwise.

They were looking for people who could take on leadership. It didn't matter if you were black, white, yellow, green. They needed bodies. You are OD [olive-drab] green. You bleed OD blood. In other words, everybody's the same. They tried to get folks to understand that it's not about being African American. It's not about being white. It's not about being from a farm. It's not about where you were from. They tried to get you to understand that you are now government property.