Terry Whitmore

Terry Marvell Whitmore (March 6, 1947 – July 11, 2007) was an American soldier, deserter and actor.

A Black Marine, he who was one of the 503,926 soldiers and sailors who deserted from the United States military during the Vietnam War. He wrote about it in Memphis-Nam-Sweden: The Autobiography of a Black American Exile, one of the few memoirs of that war by a Black author, as well as appearing in two documentaries about GI resistance to the war. His autobiography, which was first published in 1971 and republished in 1997, has been called "an important addition to the canons of Viet Nam War literature and…also to that of African American autobiography."

Early life

Terry Whitmore was born on March 6, 1947 He felt he would have been drafted anyway, so he voluntarily enlisted which allowed him to stay home for one more Christmas.

Military service After enlisting, Whitmore was sent overseas to fight in Vietnam. He was promised non-combat duty on a ship, but told an interviewer he had been cheated out of this by the Marines. As he recovered, he began dating a Japanese woman named Taki who had a photo of Martin Luther King in her apartment and a political cartoon of U.S. President Johnson with the caption "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" The more time he spent with her, and the more questions she asked him, the more difficult it became for him to explain or justify what he was doing. In his memoir, Whitmore credited Taki with opening his eyes. Some of what Whitmore described could have been the results of bombs and other earlier activity. One historian has called Whitmore a liar while acknowledging that the Marine hearing officer during the military investigation stated “The evidence reveals that some horrible acts were committed". Another historian who studied the same events is much more in line with Whitmore's descriptions. Nick Turse, who wrote the award winning Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam based on secret Pentagon archives and interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, quoted two separate Marines as saying their orders were to leave nothing alive, "kill everyone in the ville and burn it down." In 1977, after President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order granting amnesty to draft evaders of the Vietnam War era, Whitmore returned to the US to meet his daughter for the first time, who was being raised by his mother. In Sweden, he worked for awhile as a script writer for the Swedish Film Institute, and then got more permanent work as a bus driver and a buyer for a large company. Whitmore returned permanently to Memphis in 2001, and died in 2007. He was the subject of the 1970 Swedish documentary Terry Whitmore, for Example,

Awards and honors In 1967, he was awarded the Purple Heart by President Lyndon B. Johnson.