Wallace begins the interview describing that he wanted to produce a book that would say something about the futility of war and how it tears at the psyche as much as the flesh of those who fight it. For the majority of the interview, Wallace talks about what it meant to be a black man serving in the American military in Vietnam. In particular, he describes the issues that black men faced upon their return to a “normal” society from the white community’s general hatered of the war and those who served in it and the black community’s rancor with black soldiers because they fought for the white man to the military community’s ostracizing of Vietnam era soldiers because they were the “first” American soldiers to loose a war. In the end, Wallace also talks about collecting the stories of black soldiers as a means to explore the American experience of war in the hope that this experience would serve as lesson for future generations about the triumph of the human spirit.
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