Breaking the Silence: 

The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans

The Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans, project evolved from a class project during my graduate studies in which I used my father's diary to conduct a critical analysis of a primary source. After discussions with a few colleagues about the possibility of an oral history grant project, I met Harlan Gradin, Scholar Emeritus at North Carolina Humanities, who became an avid supporter of this project from its inception. He understood that I was interested in hearing and collecting those stories of Vietnam Veterans that may have been similiar to my father's. I was soon introduced to Bob Mansfield who taught me everything I needed to know about oral history and by 1999, I started documenting the wartime stories and experiences of Vietnam Veterans in rural areas of eastern North Carolina, from Raleigh/Durham through Goldsboro, Greenville, Wilson and Clinton. Their stories were an integral part of Breaking the Silence, an oral history project initially funded by North Carolina Humanities (formerly the North Carolina Humanities Council). It included personal writings, oral history interviews, documentary photography, site-specific installations, academic papers, conference presentations and community forums where the veterans share their own stories. As natives of rural North Carolina, they shared a common experience of the region, its racial history, war, trauma and silence. My first dedicated publication about the “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans” project appeared in NC Crossroads: A Publication of the NC Humanities Council. This project also became the focus of my doctoral dissertation, Shattered Silence and Restored Souls: Bearing Witness and Testifying to Trauma and Truth in the Narrative of Black Vietnam Veterans. 

Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Vietnam reveals the experiences of men who fought in Vietnam and lived to return to the same small, rural communities they had left, though they came back as very different men. They tell of being drafted or enlisting for service, of leaving homes and segregated communities for integrated battalions, of fighting for civil liberties, freedoms and racial justice abroad while the Civil Rights Movement was proceeding at home. They tell of violent loss and disappointing homecomings followed by decades of silence, of personal re-adjustments and survival. While most of the participants in the project have been African American, soldiers of all races were among the first to serve in fully integrated troop battalions in a combat zone, so their stories have special significance. 

Since the beginning of the Breaking the Silence project, these particular veterans traveled across the state of North Carolina and parts of Virgina to share their stories and experiences with various communities, high schools, churches, libraries, colleges and universities such as East Carolina University, Mitchell Community College, North Carolina State University, Johnson C. Smith University, Fayetteville State University, Wake Forest University and Duke University. The educational aspect of our oral history project was to help others understand the importance of documenting life experiences. As they continued to tell their stories, other veterans from various wars began to participate in our programs, so we documented some of their experiences in a secondary oral history project, Soldier-to-Soldier: Men and Women Share Their Legacy of War, also initially funded by NC Humanities. The success of these projects were in collaboration with my family, especially Marquitta Raynor Mitchell and West Mecklenburg High School for hosting various programs and traveled with the veterans, Cassandra and Patrick Simpson for logistics, photography and videography, colleagues at various universities, especially Mike West for photography and videography, Cedar Point Church for being a community sponsor, and several students who helped along the way. 

These projects have been ongoing since 1999 because they tapped a community that was also in search of something, a lost brotherhood that had been left behind in Vietnam and other wars. Most of the veterans who continued to participate through the years had been involved since the beginning. The success of the projects were measured not only by the stories recorded but even more by improvements in the quality of life of the veterans and their families. They are forever united by the silence of war.