rights legislation in the reforms of the 1960's. The sudden fall
of barriers to black Americans was primarily the result of the Civil
Rights Acts. But the fact and example of integration in the armed
forces was an important cause of change in the communities near
military bases. Defense officials, prodding in the matter of
integrated schooling for dependent children, found the mere existence
of successfully integrated on-base schooling a useful tool in
achieving similar schooling off-base. The experience of having served
in the integrated armed forces, shared by so many young Americans,
also exercised an immeasurable influence on the changes of the 1960's.
Gesell Committee member Benjamin Muse recalled hearing a Mississippi
hitchhiker say in 1961 at the height of the anti-integration, anti-Negro
fever in that area: "I don't hold with this stuff about 'niggers'. (p. 622)
I had a colored buddy in Korea, and I want to tell you he was all
right."[24-8]

[Footnote 24-8: Quoted in Ltr, Muse to Chief of
Military History, 2 Aug 76, in CMH.]

[Illustration: CAMARADERIE. _A soldier of Company C, 7th Infantry,
lights a cigarette for a marine from D Company, 26th Marines, during
"Operation Pegasus" near Khe Sanh._]

In retrospect, the attention paid by defense officials and the
services to off-base discrimination in the 1960's may have been
misdirected; many of these injustices would eventually have succumbed
to civil rights legislation. Certainly more attention could have been
paid to the unfinished business of providing equal treatment and
opportunity for black servicemen within the military community.
Discrimination in matters of promotion, assignment, and military
justice, overlooked by almost everyone in the early 1960's, was never
treated with the urgency it deserved. To have done so might have
averted at least some of the racial turmoil visited on the services in
the Vietnam era.

But these shortcomings merely point to the fact that the services were
the only segment of American society to have integrated, however
imperfectly, the races on so large a scale. In doing so they
demonstrated that a policy of equal treatment and opportunity is more
than a legal concept; it also ordains a social condition. Between (p. 623)
the enunciation of such a policy and the achievement of its goals can
fall the shadow of bigotry and the traditional way of doing things.
The record indicates that the