'Half American' explores how Black WWII servicemen were treated better abroad

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Veteran's Day is tomorrow, and today we feature interviews with and about veterans. Elliot Ackerman is a former Marine and intelligence officer who has become a reflective and elegant writer about war and its consequences. He was awarded a Silver Star for leading a platoon in one of the worst battles of the war in Iraq and the Battle of Fallujah, during urban house-to-house combat. The citation said his contagious combat leadership and ability to instill this type of dedication is the stuff of legends. In his memoir "Places And Names," he wrote about what was going on in his mind during the battle when his men took a lot of lives while losing members of their own platoon. In a New York Times review of the memoir, Anne Barnard described it as a classic meditation on war and how it compels and resists our efforts to order it with meaning.

Ackerman did five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was nearly killed at the end of his final tour. Ackerman has also written several novels and has been published in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. He's also a contributing writer for The New York Times and The Atlantic. His most recent article in The Atlantic, titled "A Knife Fight In A Phone Booth," is about urban combat and what Israeli troops are likely to face in Gaza.

Terry spoke to Elliot Ackerman in 2021. He told her as a young man, he was fascinated by the depictions of war he saw in films and TV.

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TERRY GROSS: Did war feel anything like what you imagined it would feel like?

ELLIOT ACKERMAN: I think the thing that's often not conveyed in film is that when you're in war, you don't really see war. You actually - it's more that you hear it. So the sense that you're engaging with most is your sense of hearing. So, you know, it's very rare to see the person who's shooting at you. You hear the person who's shooting at you. So that might be a very kind of tactical answer to that question, but that was probably one of the things that surprised me the most, was how little you actually see and how everything your experience - is often experienced through sound.

GROSS: And the sound was sometimes really loud, like ear-shattering loud.

ACKERMAN: Ear-shattering loud, or the thing I think that's scarier than something that sounds very, very loud is something that sounds very, very close.

GROSS: So your hearing became really attuned.

ACKERMAN: Yeah. It becomes very attuned. And your sense of time also warps. And the - to this day, the most intense engagements that I was involved in, I still have a hard time locating them on a timeline, meaning, you know, oh, this moment took 10 minutes, and this moment took seven minutes. They just sort of blur into this, you know, miasma where maybe three minutes felt like two hours, and then two hours felt like 15 minutes. So time does very weird things in combat.

GROSS: In your memoir, "Places And Names," you have a section - it's the last chapter of the book - in which you quote from the long citation when you were awarded a Silver Star for bravery. And so you juxtapose excerpts of that citation with what was actually going through your mind at the time of the Battle of Fallujah, which is what earned you the citation. You were leading a platoon in urban combat in the early days of the Iraq War. And there's an excerpt I'd like you to read. This kind of is a back-to-back version of the citation and what's going through your mind. And before you do the reading, let me just quote one more line from the citation for your Silver Star.

(Reading) Lieutenant Ackerman's heroic actions during this period, the Battle of Fallujah, reflect a level of bravery, composure under fire, and combat leadership that is beyond expectation.

So would you read the excerpt of the citation along with what you were thinking during the battle?

ACKERMAN: Sure. Sure. It begins with part of the citation. I think you'll be able to tell the portions where I'm filling in the gaps.

(Reading) During the course of the fighting in Fallujah, his platoon took casualties without the slightest degradation of motivation, professionalism or effectiveness. I can't take it anymore, one of the Marines tells me. We're four days into the battle. His squad leader said he needed to talk to me. He said, I keep thinking about my daughter. Every time I go into a house, I think about her. He is crying, and the other Marines are watching, and I know that fear is contagious. Do you want me to get you out of here, I ask. He keeps muttering that he can't take it. Twenty minutes later, I'm loading him into an amtrack that will drive him out of Fallujah alongside wounded Marines. He and Pratt, another Marine of the platoon, are married to a set of sisters. Pratt says he'll never speak to him again.

GROSS: How did you know whether to send this Marine away - because he was so afraid, and fear is contagious, or whether you really needed to keep him in the platoon during this battle?

ACKERMAN: You know, before I ever set foot in front of a rifle platoon, I had trained for the better part of six years, if you count, you know, all the time I did in college, all the summer trainings I did in college, all the training I did after college in Quantico. And the Marine Corps does an exceptional job training you and preparing you for moments like this - you know, to include classes on psychology, what they call killology (ph) in the Marine Corps, sort of the - you know, the science of the mind and how it deals with killing and understanding, you know, how - frankly, how fear works and that, as I mentioned there, it is contagious. So when that happened, I - you know, I knew from my training and from all the conversations we had about this that, you know, this - I got to get this - first of all, for the sake of this Marine, I need to probably get him off the line, and I need to do it in a way that segregates him from everybody else.

The part that was a little bit more complicated is, as I mentioned, this one Marine - he and another Marine in the platoon were engaged to - or married to a - they were married to a set of sisters. And so they were actually - you know, they were family. And probably the textbook answer at that moment was to bring the whole platoon together at a quiet time and explain, listen, you know, this Marine who we had to evacuate - he is a casualty, as though he'd been shot or anything else, and he needed to be evacuated. And you can't judge him. You can't - you know, you need to give him the space. You need to understand that he, you know, did nothing shameful. He is a psychological casualty of war.

Frankly, that was probably the textbook answer. But I also knew that there was something very personal about that Marine saying, I'm done, and I'm leaving. You know, at that point in the battle, you know, we were down - we'd started with 46 of us. We were down to 21 of us. And the leadership of our platoon had basically been decapitated. I was the platoon commander, and I was still in my position, but my second-in-command, my platoon sergeant, had been shot in the head. We had three squad leaders. Of those three squad leaders, two had been evacuated as casualties. And of our fire team leaders, four out of the six had also been evacuated.

And to see in the context of all of that, one Marine basically raise his hand and say, I'm leaving you guys 'cause I can't take it anymore - I could just look in their faces, and I could see what a personal betrayal that was. And maybe I was wrong, or maybe I was right, but in that moment, I sort of decided, you know what? Everyone's going to keep doing their job. And I'm not going to tell the Marines what they're supposed to think about this, because there's a certain portion, even in this scenario, of their souls that is theirs. And it's not my job to tell them how they're supposed to feel about this. It's - you know, they're allowed to feel how they want to about it. That was not something I had, you know, been prepared for in Quantico.

GROSS: How did you think of this Marine who said, I can't take it anymore? Did you think of him as a coward or as you described as a psychological casualty of war?

ACKERMAN: I thought about it, I think, in two terms. I could recognize that he was a psychological casualty of war, but I couldn't deny the fact, you know, as a - again, as a young lieutenant trying to hold the platoon together, he was actually one of the NCOs, a non-commissioned officer, so a leader in the platoon. And he was letting me down and saying, I know you need me right now, and you need me to lead the younger Marines, but I am not capable of doing that, so I'm walking away. So, you know, there's a duality there. You know, you can feel the betrayal, and it does feel like a betrayal, but you also know the reason for the betrayal. So it's - you know, it's tough. These aren't simple - there's no simple answers to this stuff.

GROSS: One of the things you've written - and I think it was about the Battle of Fallujah - was when you ordered, you know, fire against a group of insurgents, and there was a cloud of smoke, and they were just kind of lying on the ground, like, crumpled - that it sometimes felt more like murder. And I'm wondering why you use that word and where the line is for you between, you know, killing in war and murder. It seems like something you've thought about.

ACKERMAN: Sure. Well, I think in that section, it's a part of the book, and it's - you know, it's - it was when we called in, you know, say, a fire mission of mortar rounds on a group of troops. And, you know, we - I could see exactly where they were. I knew exactly how to call it in. And when the smoke cleared, you know, they looked like a bunch of wet rags in the street. And it was that - you know, probably the premeditation of it is what made it feel more murderous, and that we sat there for a long time, and I knew they couldn't see us and I knew exactly where they were. And I knew that my job, you know, was to kill them before they killed me.

To your question, what is the difference between that and actual murder, it's a very straightforward answer. It's the state. You know, war is state-sanctioned murder. So when someone asks you, well, did you kill someone over there, kind of as - and the people who've asked me that question have often asked - you know, ask me that, frankly, with - I mean, it might sound odd to say, but with good intention. Like, they're trying to make a connection with me. These are not people trying to offend. They're trying to connect. And the reason my response - well, if I did, you paid me to - it's because the state, meaning you - you were the ones who sent me. That's what makes this different.

But when you think about war, you know, contradiction is hard-wired into war 'cause why do we go to war? We go to war to protect the state or, put another way, to protect our civilization. And really, any civilization - one of the bedrock tenets that it's built upon that kind of keeps us from just being savages is the rule in a myriad of cultures of thou shalt not kill. So the contradiction built into war is that we engage in state-sanctioned killing in order to preserve the state or to preserve our civilization that, in many respects, is built around respect for core values like thou shalt not kill. And that latent contradiction that exists in war is also one of the variables, I think, that adds to war's latent insanity. War feels a little insane when you're in it.

MOSLEY: Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine and intelligence officer, speaking with Terry Gross in 2021. He's a contributing writer at The Atlantic and The New York Times. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2021 interview with Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine and intelligence officer who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He received a Silver Star, the Bronze Star of Valor and the Purple Heart. He is the author of two memoirs and several novels.

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GROSS: So, you know, you were awarded for bravery. Did bravery have, like, meaning for you? Do you know what I mean? Do you think, I'm brave, or do you just, like, do what you need to do?

ACKERMAN: Well, bravery's not an emotion, right? So, I mean, I don't know about you, Terry. Like, I've never - I never felt brave. I've never woke up and been like, I feel really brave today. It's not an emotion (laughter).

But if you're like me, maybe you felt fear before. I've certainly felt fear. I know exactly what that feels like. That being said, I've seen people - Marines, civilians, journalists - I've seen them do some really brave things in my life. You know, I've seen Marines - I've seen them running across the road. Their buddy gets shot on the road, and the next guy runs off and drags that guy out of the road. It's like, what makes, you know, a Marine run after his friend? It's not - what's the emotion? It's not bravery. There's something else that you feel in that moment, and if I were to put a word on it, I would say it's love. You know, you love each other. That's why you do these things.

But there is sort of a tough irony in war that is not always obvious when you start the journey, which is that, you know, you begin with a group of folks. As you're preparing to go to war, you train together. You get to know one another. You become each other's very best friends. You know, in the military, we use sort of more clinical terms like unit cohesion or esprit de corps to describe this. But what you're really doing is you are forming those bonds of love that you need to have to cohere as a unit so you can do one thing - accomplish the mission. And you are taught in the military that the mission always comes first 'cause you - some of you are going to get killed trying to accomplish that mission.

And this is sort of the bitter irony, is that if you're in any type of leadership position, giving orders, from a corporal up to a general, at a certain point, you might find yourself at a moment of consequence where you have to make a decision in order to accomplish the mission in which you are ordering your friends - these people - in my case, it was Marines - who you love, to certainly get wounded, sometimes get killed. And so really, the central dilemma in war is that you have to ultimately oftentimes destroy the very thing that you love. And that can lead to a lot of attendant heartbreak. And we all know what heartbreak looks like for veterans who come home from war. And I would posit that your heart can't break unless you are in love.

GROSS: You were almost killed toward the end of your last deployment. An IED exploded right in front of your tank? Car?

ACKERMAN: My - yeah, my - basically, the truck I was in.

GROSS: OK. Did - what went through your mind? I mean, you survived five deployments. You were at the end of the fifth. I think it's everybody's worst nightmare. Like, you go through the whole thing and then you, like, die right before it's over. You die at the last minute.

ACKERMAN: I was a new father at that point. And these wars have been going on for a long time. And I don't think - I only speak for myself, but I think many others might say this. You know, if you ask me why I was in these wars, I wouldn't, you know, have told you or sung an aria to you about how I was convinced my being there was going to, you know, solve all of the woes of the Afghan people. You know, I was there because I was, you know, a professional small-S soldier, and this is what I did. And I enjoyed it, and it was exciting. And I got a real sense of purpose out of it. You know, that's why I would tell you I was there.

But at a certain point, at least for me, it started to feel kind of gratuitous. And I was like, you know, like, I don't want to - I just, like - I don't want to get killed doing this. And I feel like maybe there are other things I want to do with my life. And that is what caused me eventually to, you know, get out. And - but the thing that's so difficult about, I think, getting out - and it's been difficult for many veterans I know who I speak to - is that in order to do that, you have to look at all your friends. And these are, you know, like, your best friends, the people you grew up with because - and all of you grew up in this war together - and say, I'm done. Yeah, the next one, you're going on that one on your own. You know, I'm sort of declaring this - you know, this separate peace. And that's tough. And in my case, you know, it puts strain on certain friendships. And, you know, it was difficult to walk away.

GROSS: I'd like to end this Veteran's Day interview by asking you to share a memory of one of your fellow Marines who did not make it back.

ACKERMAN: One of the Marines I served with who was pretty legendary in the Marines Special Operations and the Raider community is a guy named Master Sgt. Aaron Torian. Everyone called him T. And I was lucky enough to work with T in 2008 in Afghanistan. And we had planned a series of helicopter raids into a valley that the Taliban were occupying. And in order to do these raids, we had to basically build a helicopter landing zone in our remote firebase. And T was in charge of the entire Afghan labor force we'd hired to do this. And it was the night before these raids were supposed to go off. And these helicopters were going to land, and the landing zone wasn't done.

And T, he was 6'3", 220 pounds. He, you know, he used to play football. And he was one of these guys who, when 9/11 happened, basically quit what he was doing and enlisted. And I remember walking out of our firebase, and the sun was setting. And I was in a panic that this landing zone wasn't going to be finished. And I remember seeing T out there, you know, with a shovel with these hundred Afghans, you know, digging in the last parts of the landing zone. And when I went and checked on it, I could tell by his progress that this thing was actually - he was going to get it done in the nick of time.

And I just remember we're in the Hindu Kush, and the sun was setting. And he saw me checking on him. And he had this - he had a neckerchief tied over his face. He kind of looked like a cross between, you know, Billy the Kid and Achilles. And I just remember him looking up at me and, you know, holding the shovel in the air triumphantly that he had gotten it done. And six years after that, he was killed in Afghanistan in Helmand Province by an IED.

And the last time I saw him was about six months before he was killed. And he and his wife and his kids had come by my house in Washington just to have lunch because he was deploying. And, you know, I saw him on the front step. I - you know, I gave him a big hug. And I said, please don't get killed over there. I'll be so mad at you. And he just hugged me back, and that was the last time I ever saw him.

GROSS: Well, I'm sorry for your loss and for, you know, all the losses you suffered of fellow Marines and Afghan people, too, who you became close to. Thank you for being so reflective about the experience of war and the complications and paradoxes and consequences of war. I really appreciate you speaking to us today. And thank you for your writing.

ACKERMAN: Yeah, thank you, Terry. Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.

MOSLEY: Elliot Ackerman is a former Marine and intelligence officer. His latest memoir is titled "Places And Names." And his latest novel is titled "Halcyon." After a break, fighting for democracy and freedom abroad and for civil rights at home, the Black American experience in World War II. And a review of the film "The Killer." I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

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TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. When you see movies about World War II and photos of the Allied campaigns against the Axis powers, the military depictions are almost always white. But more than a million Black men and women served in World War II, fighting at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the battle of the bulge and served in support roles that were critical to the Allies' success. Historian Matthew F. Delmont is the author of a book about the Black American experience in World War II, which isn't limited to their contributions to the war effort. Delmont describes the discrimination Black Americans faced in the military and in civilian defense industries, and the brutality many Black American servicemen suffered when stationed near white communities that resented their presence. But Delmont writes that many Black Americans were energized and enlightened by their experiences in the war, and later became active in the Civil Rights Movement. Matthew Delmont spoke with Dave Davies last year. His book is titled "Half American: The Epic Story Of African Americans Fighting World War II At Home And Abroad." It comes out in paperback in January.

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DAVE DAVIES: Matthew Demont, welcome to FRESH AIR.

MATTHEW DELMONT: Thanks for having me.

DAVIES: So if we go to 1940, I mean, the United States is not in the war yet, but, you know, France, Germany are engaged in the conflict after the Germans invaded Poland. And Roosevelt really wants to get the United States to support the European allies here. And they - Congress organized the Selective Service System, a draft. And it's interesting that it included anti-discrimination provisions, but they didn't exactly work. I mean, what was the status of Black Americans who wanted to serve in the military in practice? How did it work out?

DELMONT: In practice, the Selective Service draft didn't work to the benefit of Black Americans because the military didn't have enough units in which to place Black draftees or Black volunteers. And so it was important to understand in the lead up to the U.S. entering World War II, Black newspaper editors, Civil Rights activists, have to actively fight just to make sure Black Americans have a chance to serve their country. It seems almost crazy to imagine that as America is preparing to join the Allies in fighting this massive global war that Black Americans actually had to push their way into military service. The entire military is segregated at this point. At the start of the war, the Marine Corps doesn't allow any Black Americans to serve, and both the Army and Navy are segregated. And so the first battle that Black Americans have to fight is really just getting their foot in the door to even have a chance to take on meaningful roles in the military. And it's these quotas that the military has that keeps a lot of Black Americans out.

DAVIES: Right. And because draft boards were actually run by local officials, no matter what the national law passed by Congress said, they could make their own decisions about who got to serve and who didn't, right?

DELMONT: Exactly. And what that meant when you turned things over to the local level, it meant you were relying on the local prejudices that existed in all parts of the country. So not only in the South, but in different parts of the Northeast, Midwest and West, when Black volunteers or draftees went into these draft boards, they were often turned away and told that there was no place for them in the military. That was true both before Pearl Harbor and even more troublingly, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that there were dozens of stories of Black Americans going to their local recruiting branches and being turned away, that they got in line with hundreds of other Americans because they wanted to join the military to help defend the country now that the United States had officially entered the war. But these Black Americans were turned away because at the time, the military didn't have enough units to accommodate them, and they were just left dumbstruck 'cause they're asking what's wrong with our service? What's wrong with our patriotism that we can't defend our country?

DAVIES: And they didn't have enough units to accommodate them, because then you had to have an all-Black unit to bring them into because the military was segregated. Did it remain the policy throughout the war that - you know, that there were white divisions and Black divisions?

DELMONT: It did. With very, very few exceptions, military segregation was maintained throughout the war, and it wasn't until 1948, when Truman signs an executive order that the military finally takes steps towards desegregation. And the thing that's kind of crazy making as a historian to look back at this is that there was no good military reason to have racial segregation. In fact, it was the exact opposite that it made a huge amount of logistical work for all branches of the military to have to do essentially everything in duplicate. They had to create separate units. They had to do separate barracks, separate eating facilities, separate recreation facilities. The only reason the military maintained this racial segregation during the war was to appease white racial prejudice. There was no strategic or tactical reason to do it.

DAVIES: You know, African Americans wanted to get into combat roles much sooner than they were able to. There was tremendous resistance in the military, but hundreds of thousands served in support roles in engineering units, in support and logistical units. You make the point that this was really critical stuff. Tell us about this.

DELMONT: So I think often when we think about World War II, we think only about the frontline fighting troops. But in reality, that was only about 10% of the entire military. Particularly for Black Americans, the lion's share of their service was in supply and logistical roles. And it actually turns out that's really important to trying to fight and win a global war. And so one of the arguments I try to make in the book was that World War II wasn't just a battle of strategy in will, it was a battle of supply. And I think the best way to understand that is thinking about something like D-Day. D-Day just stood for day of the invasion. There was D-Day: Plus One, D-Day: Plus Two. And in the weeks and months after, the Allies had to transport huge numbers of men and huge amounts of material across the channel and then through France to keep up with the armies as they were pushing into Germany.

By and large, it was Black troops that did that work to move those supplies. There were Black port troops across the channel who loaded the ships that moved the goods across the channel into Normandy and other ports in France. And then it was Black units like the one Medgar Evers was in that unloaded those ships and then loaded them onto trucks. The truck drivers who moved those goods were part of a truck convoy called the Red Ball Express, 75% of whom were Black truck drivers. These truck drivers were absolutely crucial to the war effort because they moved 400,000 tons of ammunition, food and other supplies all across France and the European theatre. Without that effort, it would have been impossible for Allied troops to move, shoot or eat.

DAVIES: Well, let's talk about African American combat units. I mean, probably the most famous is the Tuskegee Airmen. These were people who were trained military pilots. They overcame a lot to get access to the training. And eventually, the 99th Fighter Squadron was trained and ready in 1942, but it took a while for them to get missions. Why?

DELMONT: The Tuskegee Airmen - the - an experiment of training Black pilots at Tuskegee starts in 1941. That first cohort arrives there, but they have to train for nearly two years before they have a chance to deploy to the Mediterranean in the spring of 1943. So whereas white units - white pilots are training for six weeks, eight weeks before they deploy, it's nearly two years of consistent training in Alabama before the Tuskegee pilots have the same opportunity. Part of what takes them so long is first, they need to build up enough numbers to have a full fighter squadron, but then they still face resistance from white commanders within the Army Air Corps who are not convinced that Black pilots can do the job. And so they're reluctant to actually deploy this Black unit even though they've been trained and they've had, at that time, more training than most white pilots have. And so the - when you follow the story of the Tuskegee Airmen on a month-by-month basis, it's amazing what they had to overcome just to get the opportunity to serve in combat.

DAVIES: And when they got in the air, how did they do?

DELMONT: They did extremely well. They first had a chance to fight in the Mediterranean in 1943. And even though they perform well, they're initially tasked with accompanying bombers on runs to hit key Axis targets in the Mediterranean. Even though they perform well in those missions, then they have to deal with their primary white commander, who tries to undercut them in his after-action report. So in his report, he says that they weren't aggressive in combat, that they didn't have what it takes to be fighter pilots. And he tries to get them assigned to shore patrol rather than to combat. This ends up exploding in the media. Time and Newsweek pick up the story and really reprint the claims of the white commander. And then the Black press - they come to the defense of the Tuskegee Airmen and say that these pilots have trained and they need to have an opportunity to continue to prove themselves.

There's a series of back-and-forths over the summer of '43, and then eventually the Tuskegee Airmen have another opportunity to be in combat later that summer. And there, after finally having a chance to shoot down Nazi planes, it becomes clear to all members of the Air Corps that the Tuskegee Airmen do have what it takes, and they are able to push open that door to Black service in the Air Corps.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Matthew Delmont. He's a historian, and his new book is "Half American: The Epic Story Of African Americans Fighting World War II At Home And Abroad." We'll be back after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with historian Matthew Delmont. His new book describes the experience of Black Americans in World War II. It's titled "Half American: The Epic Story Of African Americans Fighting World War II At Home And Abroad."

Well, when the war was over, how were returning Black veterans treated when they came home?

DELMONT: One of the hardest parts about writing this book was reading these accounts of Black veterans and the kind of disrespect they were shown when they returned to the country. They frequently described getting off ships and being directed, being immediately segregated as soon as they left the ship. The white troops were pointed one way, and Negro troops were pointing the other way, and often they would use racial epithets to point Black troops in that direction. They described having no parades to greet them when they got back and being routed through only the Black section of town, being almost treated as though they were convicts when they return to the country.

And then there were numerous examples of violence against Black veterans that - at least a dozen Black veterans were killed or attacked, some while still wearing their military uniforms, in part because the white communities they often return to were threatened by Black veterans in the service. They recognized that these veterans were going to come back and be leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. In that context, the military uniform and the service of Black veterans was viewed as extremely dangerous, and it led to extremely hostile treatment for a lot of veterans when they returned home.

DAVIES: Yeah, there's one point where you list by name 15 separate cases of Black veterans who were murdered by white men, in many cases police officers. And there were some cases where - I think you said relatives advised returning Black servicemen, don't wear your uniform. Put on some overalls, right?

DELMONT: The treatment was terrible. And trying to recount those stories is - it's harrowing even today to think about that. These men had fought for their country. They were wearing the uniform of their country. They came home, and what you described - they had to change out of that uniform to work clothes, into overalls, so that white townspeople wouldn't attack them while they were wearing their uniform. It's almost mind-boggling to think about, but that's the threat that a lot of white Americans saw when they looked at a Black veteran in uniform. They saw this as something that was almost like a red flag waved in front of a bull that was going to engender such feelings of animosity and anger. I think it reveals how deeply divided America was at the end of the war.

DAVIES: Most people can't name many pieces of congressional legislation, but the GI Bill that was enacted by Congress after World War II is widely remembered as an enormously influential act that helped build America's middle class by providing funding for college and vocational training and low-interest home mortgages. The bill prohibited outright discrimination, right? But Black veterans ended up being treated differently.

DELMONT: They did. And if you were to look at the language of the GI Bill, it never explicitly says Black veterans are going to be discriminated against. But everyone at the time understands that when this legislation is crafted, Southern segregationist Democrats have a really key role in determining how it's going to be deployed. And so they make sure that states are controlled - that states control how these GI Bill benefits are going to be distributed. And it's clear to everyone that that means that discrimination is going to be baked into the GI Bill. And that's what happens in practice. So whereas white veterans are able to use this access to home loans, business loans and college tuition benefits to become part of the middle class and then be able to pass on those benefits to their family, by and large, Black veterans are excluded from that.

To cite just a couple of examples from it, in Mississippi, only two of more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans issued in 1947 went to Black borrowers. And things weren't much better up North. Of 67,000 mortgages that were insured by the VA in New York and northern new Jersey suburbs in 1947, fewer than a hundred went to Black people. Nationally, by 1950, white veterans had received nearly 98% of these VA-guaranteed loans. And so it had this extraordinarily detrimental impact on the ability of Black veterans to move into the middle class and to accumulate wealth.

DAVIES: You know, this might be a point to talk about the connection between the sociological changes that came with the war and building up the war effort and the Civil Rights Movement that would come in the years after the war. This experience had an impact; didn't it?

DELMONT: Absolutely. The Civil Rights Movement - the groundwork for it had been laid in the decades before World War II. But World War II was really an accelerant. It forced Black Americans to recognize that the kind of discrimination they encountered was something that they could and should organize to fight against. The infrastructure for that fight was really laid during the war. So the NAACP at the start of the war is a relatively small organization. But by the end of World War II, it has more than 450,000 members and a thousand branches all over the country.

Much of that work is credited to Ella Baker, who's a pioneering grassroots activist. Her methods of organizing were to get picked up by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, in the 1960s, and then even later by Black Lives Matter activists in the past years. But what she does is she tours all across the country talking to local Black communities, talking to everyday people about the importance of working together and organizing to fight for the issues that matter to them in their communities. And so that's where you see some of the most important initial steps to fight for voting rights and fight against school segregation, fight against job discrimination.

Speaking even more largely, the kind of things that the war is about, freedom and democracy, help to fuel demands of Black veterans and citizens after the war. And so that whole generation of Black veterans who fought in the war, they come back and start fighting for civil rights. As one veteran put it, they went from fighting in the European theater of operations to fighting in the Southern theater of operations.

DAVIES: And I'm sure they'd had experiences where, you know, if they might have grown up in a rural area of the South, where whites were all of one mindset about race relations, they'd had broader experiences that made them realize

it doesn't have to be this way.

DELMONT: Exactly. So one of the consistent stories that Black troops describe is when they went to Europe, their treatment and experience talking to white people in Great Britain and in France was entirely different than their experience with white Americans in places like Mississippi and Alabama. They felt like they were treated as equals for the first time.

So Medgar Evers, the famous civil rights activist, he's only 19 when he ends up in Normandy, just days after the D-Day invasion. As his unit is pushing through France, he has a chance to spend some time with a French family. And he says it's the first time he's ever been treated as a full human being by a white person. And it opens his eyes to what's possible. And so when he goes back to Mississippi, he believes that a different kind of world is possible, a different way of interacting across racial lines is possible. And that was true for thousands of Black troops who served in the European theater.

DAVIES: You know, you write that the story that you tell in this book matters not just because it's important to set the record straight, but because it will help us to understand and navigate the present and future. You want to explain what you mean?

DELMONT: The thing I tell my students all the time is that the stories we tell about the past matter. And I think if we only tell very simplistic stories about World War II, if we only talk about it as a good war and only talk about this idea that America was unified in some way, that doesn't do justice to the reality of what the country was actually like at that time period. If we can reckon honestly with this history of World War II, the fact that the military was segregated, the fact that Black Americans experienced intense racism both in the military and at home across the country and that they organized the fight for civil rights, I think we'd be better positioned to understand why we're still fighting some of these battles today. Some of these issues regarding voting rights and regarding police brutality, these are things that were front-page issues in the 1940s during the war. And we have to remember that as part of the history of World War II.

And the other piece that's important is that the experience of Black veterans is - makes clear that patriotism and dissent have always been intertwined. And I think sometimes it's easy today to think about those as being entirely separate beliefs - that either one is patriotic, or they're dissenting. That's never been true for a lot of Black Americans. And it certainly wasn't true for Black veterans. Black veterans fought for the country, and many of them identified as being deeply, deeply patriotic. But for them, that meant that you also had to demand that America be a country worth fighting and dying for. And so the sense that patriotism and dissent need to be seen together is a really important one that I don't think comes across clearly enough in our contemporary political discourse.

DAVIES: Well, Matthew Delmont, thank you so much for speaking with us.

DELMONT: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

MOSLEY: Historian Matthew Delmont speaking with Dave Davies last year. His book "Half American" will be published in paperback in January. Coming up, a review of the film "The Killer." This is FRESH AIR.

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TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. In "The Killer," Michael Fassbender stars as a globe-trotting hitman who's forced to go on the run after botching his latest job. It's the newest thriller from David Fincher, director of movies like "Fight Club" and "Gone Girl." The killer begins streaming on Netflix today. Here's Justin's review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: David Fincher has had murder on his mind for so long in thrillers like "Seven," "Zodiac" and "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" that you almost have to laugh at his new movie's no-nonsense title, "The Killer." It's adapted from a French graphic novel series by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and Luc Jacamon about a hitman, played here with cool precision by Michael Fassbender. We never learn the killer's name. He has countless aliases and fake passports, which he uses to travel the globe, killing rich, powerful people at the behest of other rich, powerful people. He isn't troubled by questions of motive, let alone morality. For him, killing is just a job, one that demands the utmost commitment, patience and discipline, as he tells us in the acidly funny voiceover narration that runs through the movie.

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MICHAEL FASSBENDER: (As The Killer) Skepticism is often mistaken for cynicism. Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is no more than a cold, infinite void. But I accept it, along with the freedom that comes from acknowledging that truth. I've come to realize that the moment when it's time to act is not when risk is greatest. The real problems arise in the days, hours and minutes leading up to the task and the minutes, hours and days after. It all comes down to preparation, attention to detail, redundancies, redundancies and redundancies.

CHANG: The movie begins in Paris, where The Killer has been hiding out for days in an empty WeWork space, waiting for his target, who lives in a swanky apartment across the street. We follow every detail of The Killer's routine - the carefully scheduled naps, the fast-food runs, the yoga stretches he does to stay limber. He listens to the Smiths, his favorite band, and he uses a watch to monitor his pulse. His heart rate needs to be below 60 beats per minute when the time finally comes to pull the trigger. But in a rare moment of bad luck for him, this particular job goes horribly awry and he misses his mark.

Amid the bloody fallout, he somehow manages a clean getaway. There's a beautifully edited sequence of Fassbender speeding through Paris at night on his motorcycle, discarding pieces of his rifle in different trash bins, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' haunting electronic score surges in the background. But the consequences of his mistake are immediate and devastating. Arriving back at his hideaway in the Dominican Republic, he finds that assailants have broken in and attacked his girlfriend, who barely managed to survive and is now hospitalized. The Killer's employers, trying to mollify their disgruntled client, have clearly turned the tables on him, and he decides to repay them in kind. Killing, something that's so impersonal for him, has suddenly become deeply personal.

The plot, as laid out in Andrew Kevin Walker's perfectly paced script, is fairly standard revenge-thriller business. The Killer's mission takes him to cities - including New Orleans, New York and Chicago - where he breaks into his employer's office, gathers information, and leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. But the beauty of Fincher's filmmaking, as always, is in the ultra-meticulous details. This is a process movie in which the mundane becomes mesmerizing. The violence is startling but relatively brief. We spend a lot more time watching The Killer make supply runs to hardware stores, Amazon delivery lockers, and his own personal storage units around the country.

As in Fincher's 1999 classic "Fight Club," there's a whiff of late capitalist satire here. After all, what is The Killer but just another participant in the gig economy, only with above-average pay and especially lethal occupational hazards? As he goes about his mission, The Killer keeps repeating the same mantras - stick to the plan, forbid empathy. The viewer, however, may feel sorry for some of the unlucky few who find themselves in The Killer's sights - OK, maybe not The Brute, a hulking adversary who gets taken down in one bone-crunching, furniture-smashing action set piece. But you can't help but feel for a rival assassin, played to perfection by Tilda Swinton, in one exquisitely written and directed scene.

Fassbender's performance is also a thing of chilled beauty. Like Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 hit man classic, "Le Samourai," he gives a cipher-like man of action an undeniable glimmer of soul. Even as he dispenses his glib aphorisms and spills his trade secrets in his running commentary, Fassbender's killer retains a crucial air of mystery. No matter how carefully he plots his every move, he still proves capable of surprising himself and us. I'm not suggesting his story cries out for a sequel, but by the time this very dark comedy reaches its strangely sunny ending, you're curious to see what job this killer - and Fincher himself - might take on next.

MOSLEY: Justin Chang is film critic for the LA times. He reviewed "The Killer," directed by David Fincher. On Monday's show, we go inside of the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine with journalist Mstyslav Chernov. He and his team were the only international journalists to spend the first 20 days covering the siege of the city of Mariupol. I hope you can join us.

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MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and to get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Tina Kalakay. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. I'm Tonya Mosley.

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