Wallace Terry - Career

Career

When only 19, Terry was hired by the Washington Post in 1960 and later worked for Time magazine, from 1963. In 1967, Terry left for Vietnam, where he became deputy bureau chief for Time in Saigon and the first black war correspondent on permanent duty. For two years, he covered the Tet Offensive, flew scores of combat missions with American and South Vietnamese pilots, and joined assault troops in the Ashau Valley and on Hamburger Hill. His fellow reporters cheered his daring rescue, along with The New Republic correspondent Zalin Grant, of the bodies of four newsmen killed by the Viet Cong on May 5, 1968, during the Mini-Tet Offensive in Saigon.

Terry’s 1967 Time cover story, “The Negro in Vietnam”, enjoyed a huge success, and he vowed that he would one day write a book about the sacrifices of black soldiers in Vietnam. His wife, Janice, a former schoolteacher who was his close collaborator, later wrote:

"For Wally, getting his book published became an obsession, a shadowy thing that was like another heartbeat in our household. It sat with us at the dinner table. It watched the evening news with us. It went with us to the movies, to church, to the grocery store. After thirteen years, we had sent the manuscript to a hundred publishers—and received a hundred rejections."

Finally, there was a breakthrough. The book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans was published in June 1984 by Random House and became a national bestseller, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. "And that shadowy thing in our lives finally disappeared", Janice Terry wrote.

Wallace Terry wrote and narrated the only documentary recording from the Vietnam battlefields, Guess Who's Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, which was released by Motown in 1972 and re-released independently in 2006 as a CD. He wrote and narrated the PBS Frontline show, "The Bloods of Nam", and the Mutual Broadcasting show, "Marching to Freedom", which won an NEA citation and the Edward R. Murrow Brotherhood Award from B'nai B'rith.

In 1992, Terry became the first J. Saunders Redding Visiting Fellow at Brown University. In 2000, the Brown University Alumni Magazine named him one of 100 graduates who made the greatest contributions to the 20th Century.