That Time A Freedom Rider Shot Down a Rebel Flag in Vietnam
The successive waves of de-Dixiefication that have washed over the South in the last five years have produced a number of arresting images. Bree Newsome triumphant atop the South Carolina state house flagpole, one rebel flag removed. New Orleans Robert E. Lee or Austin Jefferson Davis or Memphis Nathan Bedford Forrest floating off their pedestals into the sky, never to return. Now Richmond Robert E. Lee is being forced to serve his final public days as the mute star of his own vigorous public contextualization. Slide shows, graffiti, and dance are making for a remarkable send-off for the cornerstone of both Richmond’s Monument Avenue, from the get-go a mix of Confederate memorialization and real-estate hustle, and the Lost Cause, kinda same.
There’s another scene I want to add to this collection, from an earlier era of the war on Confederate propaganda. No photograph of it exists, so you will have to imagine the moment Freedom Rider Hank Thomas shot down a Confederate flag flying over an Army base in Vietnam.
After the Rides, Thomas continued organizing, working in Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama, among other places. Like other young men in the movement, he was eventually tracked down by his local draft board (St. Augustine, Florida, in Thomas’ case). It was 1963. He was told to come in and explain himself. Why had he not been keeping the board current on his mailing address as he moved around the south?
Two years later, Thomas was in Vietnam as an Army medic, his bet as the best way to survive his tour, physically and spiritually. It was a good bet, as it turned out, though there were a couple of close encounters with combat. And there was this one encounter, at an Army outpost, with a rebel flag.
I had to take some action, once. Some people wanted to fly the rebel flag. I was threatened with court martial because when they ran the rebel flag up the flagpole, I shot it down. I’m not that good a shot, but if you put a M16 on fully automatic and just point —
I carried an M16, yes. I was a most unusual medic. I had a superstition. I was the most heavily armed medic you have ever seen. And this is the reason. I figured if I carried all this stuff, I will never get to use it. That was my rationale. And it almost happened, okay?
After I opened fire everybody runs out and here I am standing there. And there’s this rebel flag on the ground. By this time, the lines were drawn between blacks and white. It was a tickly situation. So we had a meeting. You don’t get together with soldiers to have a meeting to go to the commander during wartime. You just don’t do that. But we went to the captain and said, “We’re not going to be over here fighting for our freedom and you’ve got these racist symbols here.”
I could’ve been arrested right then and there and charged with mutiny. But if it was gonna get me back to the States, that would’ve been a good thing. So the word went out in our outfit, you cannot display the rebel flag.
Thomas recounted his Vietnam experiences to me when I interviewed him at his home outside Atlanta in 2007. That he would shoot down a rebel flag made perfect sense for someone whose life had been filled with protest. “It came natural to me,” said Thomas. His first “act of rebellion” came at 9 or 10, when he insisted a white door-to-door salesmen address his aunt be her last name and an honorific. Soon after he integrated the public library — by himself. At Howard University in 1960 he joined the Nonviolent Action Group and took part in numerous sit-ins. The next year he was on the bus that was attacked and firebombed in Anniston, Alabama. After brief R&R, Thomas was back on the bus, leading the Riders into Jackson.
Below is a fuller account from the interview of Thomas’ experience in Vietnam. You can also read an earlier post, in which Thomas compares and contrasts the experiences of returning to Vietnam and returning to Anniston.
You’re supposed to notify the draft board when you change your address, which I didn’t. Eventually a notice was sent to my home and my mother finally got in touch with me. I was supposed to report to the draft. No, I was supposed to come back to St. Augustine [Florida, his hometown] to explain to the draft board why I did not notify them. That’s when I began to hear what had happened to other folks — “they’re gonna get you.” I’d be subject to immediate induction, and a lot of those guys got put into combat infantry outfits.
Some, of course, decided to just defy the draft board all together and submit to arrest, or they left for Canada. By then, I was married and had a baby on the way. So I decided, well, to make the best of the situation, if I go on and report for the draft, then I would have a choice I was told of what branch of service or what job you can get. And the only thing I could think of since I wasn’t crazy about combat was to become a medic. I didn’t know [laughs] – I thought all medics were in a hospital some place. A nice hospital. Little did I know you gotta have the medics where the infantry is. So lo and behold, I’m still with the infantry.
I was inducted in ’63, and in ’65 I’m getting ready to go to Vietnam. And I’m thinking, “Ain’t this something? Just a couple of years ago you’re trying to kill me and now I’m going to Vietnam.”
I knew absolutely nothing about Vietnam, like most of the soldiers who went over there. I started to read, and I knew that the French had been there. And something told me that it looks like we’re going in there to replace the French. How do I reconcile that? I knew about communism and all of this. How do I reconcile this with my beliefs? Well, I did by saying, “I’m a medic. And one thing I’m gonna do, my job is to try to save lives.” And I had decided I was gonna save the lives of U.S. soldiers, and if I get an opportunity I’ll try to save the lives of Vietnamese soldiers.
But when I got to Vietnam, thankfully, the outfit that I was with was not involved in a great deal. No combat at all. So my job, since I was senior, was to supply medics to the other companies. With all of the patrolling and all of the movement, I was still out in the field. We would always go to the small, very, very rural Vietnamese villages. I got an opportunity to practice some of the medicine that I felt could salve my feelings about the war. We treated a lot of villagers. I carried extra medical supplies with me. It got to the point where I would carry an extra big boxy bag on my backpack that weighed as much as 50 or 60 pounds, full of medicines that could treat minor and tropical diseases. Often wherever they would see me and the great big box, the kids would come running up. Some of the other medics did the same. That was what I enjoyed doing.
I did get an opportunity to work on a couple of wounded Vietnamese soldiers. At one point, much to the chagrin of some American officers. I remember one lieutenant telling me, “Don’t waste any medicine on that gook.” I had to remind him of the Geneva Convention, that this man’s a soldier, and that we would want our soldiers to be treated that way. I’m only a corporal. And I’m talking to an officer this way. That did not go down well with him, especially being a white Southerner. But medics always got the respect from the soldiers, because you’re the man that is gonna help them when they get wounded. So those were the things I did in Vietnam that made me, I guess you can say, reconcile what I was doing, in terms of what I knew.
There was a lot of racism in the Army, both in the states and in Vietnam. It got really bad over there. The Army just about fell apart in Vietnam. It wasn’t so much when I was there, because I left in ’66. But ’67, ’68, it started to really fall apart because what was happening was you had kids who were coming from the inner cities. They had been participating in the revolutions in the inner cities. And they weren’t gonna take the stuff. When I was over there, there was a little bit of it. And there were some incidents. Fragging got started. I didn’t see any of it personally, but I heard about it.
I had to take some action, once. Some people wanted to fly the rebel flag. I was threatened with court martial because when they ran up the rebel flag up the flagpole, I shot it down. I’m not that good a shot, but if you put a M16 on fully automatic and just point —
I carried an M16, yes. I was a most unusual medic. I had a superstition. I was the most heavily armed medic you have ever seen. And this is the reason. I figured if I carried all this stuff, I will never get to use it. That was my rationale. And it almost happened, okay?
I think I would carry about 200 rounds of ammunition. I’d have three or four grenades. I’d have a pistol. Medics are normally just armed with a pistol. One day this guy says, “What are you doing? You’re a medic!” I said, “Never mind. I got my reasons.” [Laughs.] And, of course, until that day I never had the need to shoot it. Well, I had been caught in a couple of ambushes. But I never had a chance to fire back.
After I opened fire everybody runs out and here I am standing there. And there’s this rebel flag on the ground. By this time, the lines were drawn between blacks and white. It was a tickly situation. So we had a meeting. You don’t get together with soldiers to have a meeting to go to the commander during wartime. You just don’t do that. But we went to the captain and said, “We’re not going to be over here fighting for our freedom and you’ve got these racist symbols here.”
I could’ve been arrested right then and there and charged with mutiny. But if it was gonna get me back to the States, that would’ve been a good thing. So the word went out in our outfit, you cannot display the rebel flag. Other outfits did. There weren’t just fistfights. There were a couple of shootings, and a situation where grenades were tossed into a tent where white white officers were, NCOs. It really got bad two years, three years after that. And then the publicity of the problems got started. I’ll never forget one captain being interviewed on CBS. He could not order his company out on patrol. When the cameraman asked him why, he said, “Because when the shooting starts, I don’t know who’s gonna be shooting at whom.” That’s just how difficult things were there.
That’s when the Army realized it had a problem. And they began to work on it. I’ve written about it. I said the use of the word “nigger” was pretty common by some white officers. You can’t do that when the man you’re calling a nigger has a machine gun. Some of ’em found out the hard way.
Another thing some soldiers used to do is, when they went into town, they would teach the Vietnamese racial slurs. And lots of Vietnamese, not really understanding, got roughed up by blacks for then saying these racial words to them. So the Vietnamese or the Vietcong or the Viet Minh were not the only problems that the Army had. To its credit, the Army did start to correct a lot of the stuff that was going on in the Armed Forces. It set the tone. By the time the Vietnam War was over, the Army had set the tone for a lot of the changes that have occurred in society.
