The following is an excerpt from An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era by Beth Bailey, available everywhere books are sold. Bailey's account of the way the army responded to the growing crisis is original and informative. Eric Foner, London Review of Books A TACTIC OF SILENCE On a humid afternoon in mid-October 1968, Maj. Lavell Merritt, described by one newspaper as “a uniformed Negro,” strode into the official press briefing in Saigon and passed out copies of a statement asserting that “the American military services are the...