John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced legislation in the House that would require either military or alternative national service for all U.S. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., a black veteran of Korea, and Rep. Nevertheless, the race and military service debate was recently revived when Rep. The percentage of blacks of military age at that time was 13.5 percent of the population. In terms of Vietnam, the widespread impression that blacks died in disproportionate numbers during the Vietnam War is actually a myth.Īccording to statistics compiled by Veterans of Foreign Wars, during the Vietnam War, blacks accounted for 10.6 percent of all Americans who served (275,000), and 12.5 percent, or 7,241, of all fatalities. “Having been in a military offers that ‘stamp of approval’ for many civilian employers.”Īnother factor, Segal said, is that the military often offers extra higher education benefits for individuals who choose hard-to-fill skills, which includes many combat arms billets. Moreover, “blacks believe that in order to get a job, they have to be better than their white ,” Segal said. “The combat arms don’t offer that easy transfer” of skills. “And a lot of the reasons are rather hard to quantify, although we know they’re true.”įor example, one reason blacks tend to focus on combat support jobs “is a desire for skills that are transferable to the civilian labor force,” Segal said. “There are a lot of different things going on,” David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland, said in a Tuesday telephone interview. The reason blacks choose less combat-oriented jobs is complex, according to academics specializing in military demographics issues. Meanwhile, the statistics showed that blacks hold 36 percent of all functional support and administration jobs in the military, while 27 percent of all personnel in medical and dental fields are black.
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