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By Root 611 0

boring jobs. There was little entertainment or diversion, so oftentimes there would be problems in the rear. These could be booze, drugs, or racial. More often than not these problems resulted from boredom and idleness rather than viciousness or premeditation. By this I mean few people enlist in the Marines during wartime to smoke dope or raise hell in a little American island surrounded by barbed wire and rice paddies. But idle minds are the devil’s workshop. Now add to this the fact that the rifle companies dumped their pot heads and troublemakers back in the rear. To protect lives in combat, it was easier to send malcontents back to be supervised by the companies’ first sergeants and gunnery sergeants, who were generally less than sympathetic to any complaints that these castoffs would have. This is what usually caused fraggings.

Fragging was the nickname for assaults on superiors, usually with a fragmentation hand grenade. But such incidents were few and far between, and the real problem for the Marine Corps in 1969 was an undercurrent of black militancy. There existed a terrible frustration among many blacks that their deaths in Vietnam would serve no purpose, and that their place was really with the civil rights movement—or The Revolution—back home.

When LtCol Ray G. Kummerow assumed command of 3d Battalion, 7th Marines in August 1969, he encountered a smattering of this discontent. Kummerow, who was unusually attuned to the social revolution being exported to the battlefield, noticed the young black Marines arrived already extremely sensitive to any real or imagined discrimination. The battalion operations officer had created a Watch & Action group to investigate all charges of prejudice. Most were unfounded, but a few were not; for example, some officers and staff NCOs would not allow Black Power bracelets, made from woven bootlaces, but ignored the peace medallions worn by white grunts. To a certain percentage of blacks in 3/7 Marines, these incidents became their excuses for malingering.

For others, though, their alienation with the war effort was very real. For example, in November 1969, 3/7 was at LZ Ross preparing for an operation in the Que Sons. Prior to this, the battalion had been reduced to 600 men due to battle casualties and malaria, and Lieutenant Colonel Kummerow—himself a casualty of the Summer Offensive—had just hitchhiked back to Ross after recuperating on a hospital ship. Trouble was in the air. The battalion had just received 300 replacements from the 3d Marine Division, and half these men were black; they were bitter about being sent back to the bush while the rest of their former division sailed for Okinawa as part of the withdrawals. These were the Marines who organized a show of protest in one of the line companies. This particular company was known as a “brother killer”—during Operation Oklahoma Hills, a black grunt had to be dragged aboard a helicopter, and after landing in the bush he accidentally ran into the chopper blades and was killed. As this company formed up to go into the Que Sons again, sixteen blacks didn’t answer muster; a few even crept off to far corners of LZ Ross and disappeared in empty bunkers. Kummerow told the company commander to stand down and round up his missing men. The next day, they held a meeting in the fire base chapel. Kummerow noticed some of these blacks were the finest infantrymen in the company, and he had no doubt they were sincere. They felt that blacks were not only overrepresented in the bush,* but were given the most dangerous assignments by the company leaders—there was only one black officer in the entire battalion and he had no tolerance for such complaints—and that whites received most of the promotions and safer rear jobs. At this time, all Kummerow could do was to “… assure them that if they truly had a grievance it would be heard out by their chain of command, and if they didn’t get satisfaction, they had recourse at any level to request mast. I told them they were in trouble, but if they didn’t carry out their orders, they would be getting