Ray E. Boomhower is the author of the new book Wallace Terry: A Reporter's Journey from Selma to Saigon to Bloods. His other books include The Ultimate Protest. He is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press.
Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of journalist Wallace Terry (1938-2003)?
A: I have long been a fan of Terry’s classic book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, published by Random House in 1984. I was intrigued by his career, and his early days growing up in Indianapolis and graduating from Shortridge High School, also the school of such noted writers as Dan Wakefield and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I remember that in June 2018 I had done a Facebook post that someone needed to write his biography, given his life smashing barriers as a Black reporter covering such major events of the 1960s as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
My recent biographical writing has focused on war correspondents, with my last book focusing on the life of Associated Press Saigon bureau chief Malcolm Browne and his experiences in the early days of American involvement in Vietnam.
It seemed logical to start a project about Terry, as he had been in the middle of some of this country’s major turning points, including being on the ground in Saigon for the turning-point battle of the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive.
I discovered that the biographer and his subject shared some obvious connections, including being children of divorce. Both of us had grown up in Indiana and had dabbled in sports in school (Terry in football, me in tennis) before wholeheartedly embracing journalism as editors of our high school newspapers (Terry at the Daily Echo at Shortridge and me at the Alltold for Mishawaka High School).
Both of us attended Indiana University’s wonderful High School Journalism Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Terry won numerous awards during his time there, I did not.
We continued to follow journalism as a path in college, with Terry breaking barriers by becoming the first Black editor of an Ivy League school newspaper while at Brown University. I also knew much about the history of the community in which Terry grew up, Indianapolis. We both dreamed of having our names emblazoned on the cover of a book we had written.
I took additional encouragement from the fact that Terry and I shared admiration for another great Hoosier war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, about whom I had written many times, including a youth biography.
Terry took inspiration from Pyle’s war writing, remembering, “I thought there was no one like Ernie Pyle, except maybe Ernest Heminway and Stephen Crane. Those writers had the greatest influence on my own writing.”
Q: How did you research his life, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Although this book is not an “authorized” biography, I did want to have the Terry family’s support and cooperation. Early on I got in touch with his widow Janice and youngest son David.
To show my enthusiasm for the project, I first wrote an article about his career for the Indiana Historical Society’s popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History.
Both Janice and David, and later Terry’s daughter Lisa, provided invaluable assistance, providing details about Wally’s life and career. Janice, who unfortunately died in January 2026, as she had for her husband, proved to be a keen-eyed proofreader, pointing out where mistakes had been made.
As with my other biographies about war correspondents, I based my work on the large collection of material Terry left behind after his untimely death from an undiagnosed rare vascular disease in 2003.
The family had donated his papers to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, and I spent time there going through everything from Terry’s early articles about the Black Muslim movement for The Washington Post to his interviews with Black veterans of the Vietnam War for the book that became Bloods.
Interviews with some of Terry’s journalism contemporaries, including Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Leon Dash and Jesse Lewis of The Washington Post, proved invaluable in helping me understand the challenges they faced at a time when African Americans enjoyed little representation in America’s mainstream media.
The biggest surprise for me about Terry was his coverage of the civil rights movement and closeness to the leaders involved in the struggle, including such major figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.
I was impressed by the steps Terry took to protect himself as a Black reporter covering the protests in the Jim Crow South. To avoid being the victim of a policeman’s baton or a fireman’s high-pressure hose, he wore a dark, three-piece suit and carried an attaché case, hoping authorities might mistake him for an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Despite the precautions Terry took, he barely escaped danger. He and other journalists were locked up in Danville, Virginia’s city hall after being chased by police. Members of the Alabama Highway Patrol waved rapid-fire carbines in his face, warning him, “Boy, I don’t care who the hell you are—get the hell off these streets.”
The day after he interviewed Evers at his Jackson, Mississippi, home, the local civil rights leader was shot by a white gunman in his driveway; Evers died shortly after being taken to a local segregated hospital. It was a harrowing time.
Q: The author Leon Dash said of the book, and of Terry, “The obstacles were many. Terry overcame them all!” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Mr. Dash’s assessment is spot on, especially given the challenges Terry faced as one of the few, and sometimes only, Black journalists on such major media institutions as The Washington Post and Time magazine.
While working in Washington, D.C., Terry could not rent an apartment in the neighborhood where he wanted to live, eat in restaurants in nearby Maryland and Virginia, find stores with Black clerks waiting on customers, or attend a church convenient to where he could find accommodations.
As Dash points out, the frustrations Terry underwent were “a universal dilemma experienced by all African Americans in every competitive career field in white-run institutions.”
The challenges continued for Terry in getting his book about Black veterans of the Vietnam War published. Returning home from Vietnam, Terry experienced some of the same feelings of displacement and loss as the fighting men who had come home from serving overseas. Janice believed that her husband had become “as much a victim of PTSD [Post-traumatic Stress Disorder] as any soldier.”
Terry remembered feeling guilty about leaving his friends behind in Vietnam while he was safe in America. “No one here knows what it is I have seen, what I have experienced, what I owe those whom I left. . . . And no one asks. For one split second, I want to go back,” he confessed.
Editors at Time’s New York office let him know that his mother in Indianapolis had been calling them complaining he had not gotten in touch with her since his homecoming. He could not bring himself to do so. “I don’t want to talk to her or anyone else about the war I have seen and the feelings that I have,” Terry noted.
Beyond telling the stories of the often-forgotten Black Vietnam veterans and the racism they faced while overseas and upon their return home, Terry wanted to write about Vietnam because, to him, there existed “no greater subject to write about than war . . . it’s the worst thing that we do to each other. Almost all the human emotions are involved in war; it’s the most desperate time for man.”
He even hoped that his book would finally topple the conviction that “white soldiers are invincible and black soldiers are invisible.”
Although Terry had some early interest from publishers in his book about Vietnam, for various reasons, including the fall of Saigon and Americans’ wish to forget the war, he could not find a publisher willing to take the risk that readers would be interested in the stories of Black veterans.
Americans did not “want to hear any more about Vietnam,” Terry pointed out. “They most certainly do not want to hear anything connected to blacks who were in Vietnam.”
It became so bad that Terry’s children would “go to bed at night praying, ‘Dear God, please let my Daddy find a publisher because he’s driving us crazy,’” he remembered. “My wife suggested I publish the rejection notices as a book. She figured I had enough.”
Terry persisted. Finally, in 1982, Random House expressed interest. Erroll McDonald, an editor at the publisher, however, suggested that instead of a narrative the book should be done as an oral history.
Two years later, Bloods hit U.S. bookstores. The book achieved for Terry what he had set out to accomplish, becoming a bestseller and being turned into a program by the PBS television series Frontline and adapted for the National Public Radio program All Things Considered.
What touched Terry the most, however, was the reaction to his book from Vietnam veterans. “One black soldier I talked to called me a ‘Blood,” he reported. “He said I’d become one of them.”
Q: What do you see as Terry's legacy today?
A: The Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought there, both Black and white, continue to loom large in Terry’s story—something he acknowledge while he was alive. He compared the conflict to the U.S. Civil War, seeing it as a subject Americans would “go back to and back to and back to. We’ll never get away from it.”
It was a war he believed could not be romanticized, seeing it as “too ambiguous. But we’ll be writing about it forever. And the best books, the best films, are probably yet to come.”
Terry had big plans for future projects connected to Bloods before his death. For volume two of a planned Bloods trilogy, Terry wanted to write a book to be titled “Heroic Hearts: How Martin Luther King’s Dream Came True On the Battlefields of Vietnam.”
He pointed out that he had not been looking to write this book, but it had come looking for him while he had toured the country promoting Bloods. “Everywhere I went, from Maine to Mississippi, from Florida to California, I heard the same response: Tell us more about the brotherhood you saw in Vietnam,” he recalled. “Tell us about the blacks and whites who saved each other in battle, who died for each other and who learned to live with each other as brothers.”
He wondered how it might be possible to tell such a story in a book. Terry found the answer when white, Black, Native American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Puerto Rican veterans told him after his talks that their lives had been “unalterably changed by something that happened to them on the frontlines. And that something was always the same: They had discovered their common humanity and learned to become brothers.”
From these interactions, Terry became convinced that this extraordinary experience of racial change had been “the one good legacy worth claiming from the Vietnam years, the one great contribution Vietnam made to our growth as a multi-cultural society,” as well as a yardstick by which to measure the realization Martin Luther King’s dream expressed at the March on Washington. Unfortunately, Terry never got that chance.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am deep into the research and writing of a book exploring the controversy engendered by William Manchester’s book The Death of a President, an exhaustive examination of the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, which became a national phenomenon upon its release in 1967.
The book’s publication, however, had nearly been suppressed. Possessing a novelist’s knack for grabbing his reader’s attention and holding it for hundreds of pages of engrossing prose, Manchester had to contend with a lawsuit issued by the same person who had picked him to write about the tragedy—JFK’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. According to Manchester, she had told him, “I thought that it [the book] would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves.”
The battle over the book turned into a media firestorm that dominated the front pages of newspapers across the country and threatened to derail the political career of the president’s devoted brother, Robert F. Kennedy.
As with Terry and his determination to have Bloods published, I have been captivated by Manchester’s struggle to protect his work against all comers. Before an out-of-court settlement was reached in early 1967, Manchester endured being badgered by Robert Kennedy at a hotel room in New York, allegations by those acting for the Kennedys that he had gone insane, and a bout of pneumonia that put him on the critical list.
Despite his illness, Manchester had vowed to do all he could to save his book, which had become his obsession. He felt so aggrieved by the multitude of changes sought by the Kennedys that he wrote his agent: “I have reached the point where, if the integrity of my manuscript is violated, I have no wish to go on living. It sounds vainglorious, I know, but I am ready to die for this book.” It’s a sentiment shared by many authors.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ray E. Boomhower.
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