" You figure, Williams explained to the author, you don't like what's happening at home in Chicago, and now in the U.S. Marines "...you finally get a chance to get away." Those were Williams' reasons for joining the military and participating in the Vietnam War as an African-American youth. Indeed Williams saw the military as not just an escape, but as "a form of incarceration" - but the war might offer him "a fuller measure of freedom than the kind of imprisonment that seemed inevitable if he were to stay on the street" (Appy 78).

Another key reason the author discovered in terms of black youth volunteering for duty in Vietnam was for "self-advancement" (as was mentioned earlier in this paper). The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey in 1964 found that nearly twice as many blacks as whites offered "self-advancement" as their main reason for signing up for war...
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