The Invisible Force: Latinos at War in Vietnam

*It’s not known with certainty how many Latinos died in the Vietnam War. At the time the U.S. military counted Latinos as whites; there was no official Latino count. Tomas Summers Sandoval, a professor of History and Chicano Studies at Pomona College, is working to change that. He calculated that 20 percent of the Vietnam casualties were Latino. VL


KQED-LogoBy Steven Cuevas, KQED

This Memorial Day coincides with the 50th anniversary of the U.S. military’s first major strike against the North Vietnamese. Nearly 60,000 American troops would die in the Vietnam War.

Many of the troops were Latino. But to this day no one knows exactly how many.

Yet the sacrifices of Latino Vietnam War veterans have never been fully measured.

Summers Sandoval began asking questions about his father’s war experience and that of other relatives who also served.

“During the war, the U.S. military didn’t keep separate data on Latinos,” explains Summers Sandoval. “Latinos were not considered their own racial ethnic category; they were just folded into the white population.”

At the height of the war, around 10 percent of U.S. residents were Latino. But a study from Cal State Los Angeles found that Latinos made up about 20 percent off all U.S. troops killed in Vietnam.

Click HERE to read the full story.


[Photo courtesy of The National Park Service]
CLICK HERE
Subscribe to the Latino daily

Subscribe today!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Must Read