Historian Matthew Delmont’s new book offers a powerful account of how the Vietnam War reshaped Black America.
Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul weaves together the lives of Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and Dwight “Skip” Johnson, a Black soldier from a Detroit housing project whose bravery in combat earned him the Medal of Honor, and whose postwar life ended in tragedy amid untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
The book originated with a clue from Delmont’s father, who recalled Johnson’s story but not his name. Digging into the archives, Delmont found a narrative reduced to two moments: the ambush near Dak To that brought Johnson national acclaim, and the armed robbery a few years later that ended his life. “His story,” Delmont writes, “was frustratingly incomplete.”
Alongside Johnson’s arc, Delmont reframes Coretta Scott King not as a secondary figure but as a formidable antiwar leader in her own right. “I was never just a wife, nor a widow,” King said. “I was always more than a label.” (Read a review of the book in the New York Times.)
Delmont, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History, associate dean for international and interdisciplinary studies, and chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, is the author of five previous books, including the critically acclaimed Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, which won a 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His research has reached audiences from high school classrooms to World War II documentaries featuring African American service members.
In this Q&A, Delmont discusses the origins of his new book, the Vietnam War’s enduring impact on Black Americans, and why dissent itself can be an act of patriotism.
You describe your father’s memory of a Medal of Honor recipient as a “clue.” What did it feel like to realize that this fleeting recollection opened the door to a much larger, unfinished historical story?
The best part of writing a book like this is that you learn so much while doing the research. After my father’s memory led me to Medal of Honor recipient Dwight “Skip” Johnson, I set out to learn everything about his life that I could. I interviewed a dozen men who served with him in the 69th Armor tank regiment in Vietnam, gathered thousands of historical newspaper articles, and read hundreds of accounts of other veterans whose experiences overlapped with his in some way. I even found his old high school yearbook, Detroit’s Northwestern High, on eBay, which gave me insights into his life before he was drafted.
Most importantly, I was able to interview his widow, Katrina, several times. I describe her in the book as a “spirited septuagenarian.” She told how they fell in love by exchanging letters during his deployment and how she stood by him when he came home, through moments of celebration and spirals of despair. Her stories helped me personalize Skip’s story, so it wasn’t just a story of a war hero, but of a story of a kind and caring young man who had his whole life ahead of him until he didn’t anymore.
You frame Skip’s story as both unique and emblematic of a generation. What makes his life especially useful for understanding the broader Vietnam-era experience?
Demographically, the U.S. Army in Vietnam was filled with young men like Skip—poor and working-class guys drawn from Detroit, South Boston, Watts, and thousands of small towns across America’s heartland. He was one of 382,000 men drafted in 1966, more than in any other year of the Vietnam War. In the book, I describe an initiative led by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called Project 100,000 that sought, in his words, to “salvage” tens of thousands of young men from “poverty-encrusted” backgrounds for military service. As the Department of Defense increasingly turned to poor and working-class teenagers to fill its ranks, the average draftee looked more like a Black kid from the projects in Detroit than not.
Like many veterans, when Skip returned home he struggled with nightmares, health issues, and unemployment. Psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton and Chaim Shatan, who pioneered the study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), identified Skip as the first high-profile example of the war’s psychological toll. They regularly cited Skip as “the first public acknowledgment of the existence of a Post-Vietnam Syndrome” and questioned government figures suggesting that “psychiatric casualties” among Vietnam veterans were lower than those from World War II or Korea.
Lifton compared Skip’s story to that of the veteran and actor Audie Murphy, who earned the Medal of Honor and numerous other awards for valor in World War II but struggled with insomnia and depression in the years that followed. They lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to have the combat stress experiences of veterans recognized by the medical community. In 1980, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders officially recognized post-Vietnam syndrome as PTSD. The strides the VA, psychiatrists, and military leaders have made in recognizing and treating PTSD and moral injury in the decades since Vietnam are part of Skip’s enduring legacy.
Coretta Scott King, who never met Johnson, appears not as a supporting figure, but as a central architect of antiwar activism. What most surprised you about her leadership once you began digging into her role?
The Coretta Scott King you will meet in this book was a fierce and visionary leader—far more dynamic and dangerous than the demure helpmate the media so often portrayed. Two things surprised me most.
The first was the genealogy of her activism. From her days as a student activist at Antioch College in Ohio, Coretta raised her voice against war, racism, and poverty. She attended the Progressive Party national convention in 1948 and was deeply influenced by actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. In 1957, she helped launch the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear testing. And she was among 50 American women affiliated with Women Strike for Peace who attended the United Nations disarmament conference in Geneva, in April 1962.
The second thing I was surprised by was the scale of her antiwar leadership. She was involved with almost every major protest against the Vietnam War. In 1965, she spoke before 18,000 people at the “Emergency Rally on Vietnam” at New York’s Madison Square Garden. In April 1968, three weeks after her husband was assassinated, Coretta stood before 80,000 people in New York’s Central Park, vowing to carry on the work of peace “until the last gun is silent.”
In October 1969, she led nearly 35,000 people in a candlelight march to the White House as part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. And the next month, she led half a million people who rallied in Washington, D.C., for the second moratorium protest, the climax of three days of antiwar actions in the capital and across the country.
One research challenge was knowing where to look for Coretta. For example, when you search historical newspaper databases for “Coretta Scott King” you get about one third as many results as when you search for “Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr.,” since that was the convention of the era.
The book draws connections between war abroad and inequality at home. Why was it important to show these struggles as intertwined rather than separate histories?
One of the points Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., and others kept making was that the money being spent on the Vietnam War could be better spent helping people in America. In a 1967 speech, Martin shared a startling estimate that the war budget amounted to $332,000 for every enemy killed in war, while the War on Poverty allocated just $53 per person in need. “It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease the killing,” he said.
Coretta consistently challenged people to think about how economic inequality was harmful to the country. When she opened the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., on Mother’s Day in 1968, for example, she told the crowd: “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. …Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” For her, the violence of the Vietnam war wasn’t just about the combat deaths and the harm to civilians in Southeast Asia—it was about the country having less money to spend on food, housing, and health care.
Are there parallels or similarities between the Vietnam era and what you see happening in the United States today, particularly in how Americans debate war, dissent, and responsibility to veterans?
When the draft ended in 1973, Coretta Scott King recognized that the all-volunteer military was a part of the labor market, and an important one for Black and working-class Americans. When civilians’ jobs are scarce, military service and the pay and benefits it provides become especially appealing. In the 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Black Americans have continued to volunteer for duty and reenlist at higher rates than the general population.
The volunteers who step forward for military service today—of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—have much in common with Skip Johnson: young, working class men and women from Rust Belt cities and rural towns, for whom military service is more promising than the alternatives. Coretta fought for these same Americans decades ago.
Coretta consistently said she opposed war but supported warriors. For her, this meant holding politicians accountable when they rushed headlong into foreign military conflicts, and building a peacetime economy with full employment that did not rely on military stimulus to fuel the labor market.
Coretta was suspicious of the way the phrase “support our troops” could be used to silence dissent and make average citizens feel they had no right to question foreign policy decisions. Even worse, she understood that many people who claimed to support the troops in the abstract did precious little to support the actual men and women who volunteered for military service. By linking the military to the civilian labor market and advocating for soldiers and veterans alongside other workers, Coretta articulated a bold, expansive vision for what it means to support the men and women fighting the country’s wars.
What lesson do you hope readers take away from this book?
This book is about patriotism and dissent. Given the political divides today it can feel like those are incompatible concepts, but the stories in this book show how they are deeply intertwined. I hope readers are challenged to think more boldly about how we define patriotism. A patriotism where love for one’s country is strengthened—not diminished—by dissent. A patriotism rooted in an honest reckoning with our nation’s history, not in comforting myths about the past.