The Conflict In Service
What does it mean to serve as a minority in a war where the enemy looks like you?
During the course of the Vietnam War, over 42,000 Native Americans and Alaska Natives served in the United States Armed Forces. But for the many who served, there was an internal struggle. What does it look like as a people who have experienced “intergenerational trauma” as Sandy White Hawk, U.S. Navy, points out or who recognized, as Valerie Barber, U.S.M.C., did that it was “brown people going over there and killing other brown people.”
Listen to the voices of four Native American Veterans on what it took for them to fight in the Vietnam War and their feelings on the controversial war over 40 years later.
This clip is from The People’s Protector, a Twin Cities PBS original documentary.
This story is part of the collection The Call to Serve: Stories of Sacrifice, War and the Way Home, which was funded by the Fred C. and Katherine B. Andersen Foundation.
