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Invitation to Revolt. For black G.I.s coming home can be hell. San Francisco's Carl Witherspoon, 21, was a track star and scholastic achiever before he joined the Marines. In Viet Nam he collected a Bronze Star and two bullets in the gut. After nine months in hospitals, Witherspoon mustered out and began looking for a job and a home for himself and his pretty wife Paulette. Frequently rebuffed and insulted, Witherspoon finally landed work with the telephone company and an apartment in a good neighborhood. Though he and his wife are rarely at home in the evenings (they work), white neighbors are already complaining about "too much noise between 6 and 9." Witherspoon was approached by Black Nationalist Ron Karenga's boys shortly after his return (he holds a karate black belt), but turned down the invitation to join the revolution. Now he is not so sure. "Sometimes I feel it was all for nothing," he says of Viet Nam. "You know, we go over there and tell them their house is dirty before we got our own house clean."
The Government is gearing up programs that should make the Vietvet's return smoother than Witherspoon's. Project Transition, set up at Fort Knox by the Defense Department, is cooperating with industry to give vets training in everything from mathematics to data processing, and has already placed some Viet Nam veterans in jobs ranging from postal clerks to oil-company salesmen. President Johnson hopes to recruit Negro vets as ghetto schoolteachers, and a bill to that end is being drafted for presentation this year.
The Urban League's veterans' program (TIME, May 26) is already functioning in eight cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco and Washington—and in some of them has found work for more than a third of its applicants. Still, even the Urban League could do nothing for one Negro soldier who had lost an arm in the war and found that prospective employers considered him not a war hero but merely a one-armed man. He decided to stay in the service.