Watched a video of Al White: The Story of a Marine Grunt in the First Battle of Khe Sanh (April 1967)
He talked about a race fight on a ship leaving Okinawa to Nam, he claims 12 were killed and many injured. I personally don’t ever recall hearing about the incident, therefore reaching out to you.
His comments on race issues is around 12:39, the results of the riot around 14:31.
I was in Vietnam (USMC) from February '68 to March '69 and I never heard about this. I’m not saying it didn’t happen but I would think something like that would have been difficult to hide.
The riots aboard the Kitty Hawk are all over the google, but this, I can’t find anything about this. It was a big time for racial tension and there are always, always, racial incidents in the military but one that would result in 12 deaths is pretty big to not be found on google.
As you I did searches and didn’t locate anything, just hard to believe 12 deaths and no hits.
Also read through some of the comments and no one (at least I didn’t find any) disputed his statement.
I served from 68-72 and can’t recall ever hearing of this.
I don’t even know what he meant, but an uncle who was there (USMC, in country 66-67) got worked up about some character on TV and said “… they were great guys. Except them (you know) from Philly! They were worse than the dinks!”
Never heard of anything like the OP though. Years before my time in the Corps
So I know I’m a baby at 34 years old, but in my short time in the Corps, I did hear about this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lejeune_incident , but I haven’t ever heard about 12 Marines dying en route to Vietnam from Okie.
My dad was in back then. USMC. Retired after more than 20 years in the Marines. Never mentioned anything about race riots. Did not really talk a lot about any of his service unless you asked a direct question.
Except the one time I was sitting around watching Apocalypse Now and the movie soldiers were all sitting around getting doped up… He saw that crap and started shaking his head. Told me that in real life back then those guys would have had an ‘accident’ if doing that crap while on duty and not make it back. Asked him to explain and he did… He told me that any fool dumb enough to be getting blitzed like that while on duty was not only worthless to his team but was likely to be a handicap and cause someone that was not screwing up to get killed.
Have no doubt he was serious about those ‘accidents’.
My father was in the Marines from 1954 to 1975, did three tours in Vietnam. He didn’t talk about much either, but then his MOS was intelligence. I grew up on board Camp Lejeune, and I remember some racial issues, but nothing like that.