Bringing Sunshine to a Dark Place

BY Paul Rogers

Of the 293,000 U.S. airmen who served in-country during the Vietnam War, retired Master Sgt. Clyde Moore was one of only a handful who completed three separate tours of duty. A Black man born in the racially segregated South in 1938, Moore enlisted in the United States Air Force at 15 and also served in France, Japan, Guam, and Italy during his 24-year military career.

“I did what I had to do,” Moore, 86, said recently. “That’s the way I felt about it. And I’m proud of it.” Moore’s three tours in Vietnam came in 1964-65, 1966-67, and 1970-71. Records indicate that only four other USAF personnel put in three tours in the warzone, and Moore likely is the last living member of this very exclusive club.

The oldest male child raised by his grandmother in Columbus, Mississippi, Moore felt it was his duty to help provide for his family. With social and economic conditions as they were in Mississippi in the mid-1950s, joining the military seemed like the most viable option.

“In 1954, being a Black male in the South meant living under the constant reminders that the color of my skin limited my opportunities,” Moore said. “Jobs for Blacks barely paid enough for a family to live.”

The fact that Moore was only fifteen years old, younger than the minimum enlisted age of 17, was barely an obstacle. “Back in those days, the recruiters didn’t care about true age requirements,” he said. “When I said I wanted to enlist, no one asked about my age, they just signed me up. They were more concerned with making their [enlistment] quotas.”

Soon after enlisting, Moore found himself far from home, going through Basic Training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where his grandmother’s daily letters of encouragement tempered his homesickness and bolstered his deep commitment to helping his family. Given the daily letters, it seems appropriate that he became an Air Force postal worker who would serve at eleven duty stations during the next eleven years, including in Guam and in France.

A decade into his service, Moore received orders for Vietnam in April 1964. He would become one of what would ultimately be more than 300,000 Black Americans who served in-country during the war, more than 16 percent of the armed forces at a time when around 12 percent of the U.S. population was Black.

AP

“Nobody had heard of Vietnam when I went in 1964,” he said. “When I first got there, there were only 15,000 troops, as opposed to half a million troops a little later.” The official figures are 23,300 troops in 1964 and some 543,000 in 1969.

If being sent to Vietnam was a surprise for 25-year-old Airman Moore, there were more shocks in store when he arrived in-country. After a few weeks at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon, he and two fellow airmen were transferred to an Army Ranger Special Forces advisory unit in a MACV Team compound in Pleiku, some 250 miles away.

“The Army didn’t have any personnel over there to do any postal-type work,” Moore said. “That’s how I got stuck there, being in the Air Force. That’s how I got associated with the Rangers and the advisers.”

Despite having received no combat training, Moore was thrown into the strategically vital and hotly contested Central Highlands.

“I had to be quick with the job training,” he said. “I was told I had to pull guard duty. The lieutenant handed me a half-cocked weapon and said, ‘It’s ready to fire!’ I asked, ‘How do I reload?’ since I had never handled that type of weapon before. The lieutenant responded that someone would help me by the time I needed to reload. He turned and walked away.”

Pleiku was far from all bad. In an era when letters from home were the equivalent of emails, texts, and social media, Moore, as the man who brought the mail, was among the best known and most popular figures at the MACV compound. “I enjoyed watching the soldiers’ faces light up when I handed them the mail,” he said. “In the middle of a dark war, the mail brought sunshine.”

Still, being a postal worker at Pleiku bore little resemblance to the role of a neighborhood mail carrier back home. The surrounding area was hostile, with North Vietnamese Army units just across the border in Cambodia, and wary pilots would keep their engines running on the airstrip as they dropped off the mail to Moore. Plus, being a postman didn’t spare Moore from getting caught up in the 1965 Battle of Pleiku, one of the first big fights between the U.S. Army and the NVA, when his compound was attacked. He had been on guard duty just before the firing erupted and the man who relieved him was killed in the attack.

Moore’s eventual three tours in Vietnam had more to do with political and societal events stateside than with military matters in-country. That’s because in April 1965 he returned to a country that was very different from the one he left a year earlier. Racial violence gripped the nation, where the legal abolition of segregation was still not completely implemented.

“There was this skycap who asked me where I was coming from,” Moore said of his arrival in San Francisco. “I said, ‘Vietnam.’ He said that, you know, things are so bad here in the U.S. for Blacks, you should have stayed there. I didn’t know how to accept that, but I understood.”

At first, Moore couldn’t even find a hotel that would take him in San Francisco – he had to search for a “Black hotel.” Moore says that he and fellow Vietnam War veterans were treated so badly back home that he preferred to return to the war – and he wound up doing so, not once, but twice.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy when I tell you this,” Moore said. “I felt more comfortable over there [in Vietnam]. Because you knew what was going on. And we really stuck together over there. It was a different world.”

So, after just a few months at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Moore set off once more for Tan Son Nhut in July 1966, where he was again assigned to a postal unit. He came home in March 1967, only to face more disappointment and disillusionment.

“Antiwar demonstrations, increasing racial unrest, and now migrations to Canada [by draft evaders and military deserters],” he remembered. “Nothing had changed for the better. Things were getting worse. Jobs were scarce; money was, too; the service was the only place that offered a greater payout for me, personally and professionally.”

Clyde Moore

So, after spells at Air Force bases in Georgia and Mississippi, Clyde Moore arrived once again in Vietnam at Da Nang Air Base in March 1970 for his third tour of duty. After serving twelve months as Chief Clerk there, he came home for good early in 1971. At Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, he changed his MOS to finance. Master Sgt. Moore ran the office that handled pay and finance matters for the entire Air Force.

Of all his many postings, Denver proved to be Moore’s favorite, so he settled in the city after retiring from the service in the summer of 1978. He soon discovered that he was a quite talented car salesman, becoming Honda’s top U.S. salesperson in 1986, which he says was his proudest accomplishment.

Moore raised a family with his first wife, Celestine, in Denver. After retiring from the civilian workforce, he returned to Columbus, Mississippi, after she died. Back home, he reconnected with his childhood sweetheart and now wife, Christine.

While Moore doesn’t talk about his Vietnam War experiences much with non-veterans, he likes to share stories with fellow vets during appointments at the Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center in nearby Alabama. Despite his alarming stateside experiences in between his Vietnam War tours, and service-related disabilities including agoraphobia, memory loss, and social phobia, Moore is not bitter or cynical about his wartime service.

“Being in the military, you serve the purpose of helping the U.S., and I love the U.S.,” he said. “I have no regrets at all.”

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