National Perspective: Fighting Two Wars

His grandparents and mother were born in Selma, Ala., the site of the violence of the 1965 civil rights march that led to the Voting Rights Act. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where within 30 yards of his house six Black active-duty soldiers went off to Vietnam, including one of his childhood heroes — a young man who one day quietly slipped off to war. He went to college in Oxford, Ohio, where eight years earlier the legendary civil rights figure John Lewis had trained the Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights volunteers, three of whom were murdered.

For Wil Haygood, the Black struggle in America and the Vietnam War long have had a strong pull. Indeed, the two had been swirling around him since he was a child.