(The author, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 1969-70, spent more than two years in Vietnam as a correspondent for Time. During that time he conducted a private survey of the racial attitudes of black and white American troops in war. He distributed 833 questionnaires, each with 109 items, to black and white Americans and interviewed many of the respondents at length between May and September, 1969. Although it was not a scientifically designed probability sample, the 833 servicemen were selected in a variety of units and geographic locations, and do represent a significant trend in GI attitudes. Terry graduated from Brown University in 1959 where he edited the Brown Daily Herald. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago from 1959-60. He covered the black revolution for Time and the Washington Post from 1960-67.)

Black soldiers, schooled in the violent arts of guerrilla war as no generation of blacks, are returning home from Southeast Asia, fed up with dying in a war they believe is white man's folly and determined to earn their share of American opportunities even if it means becoming a Black Panther or turning to guns.

My survey of black and white troops discloses attitudes that are not only frightening but which could add significantly to the racial problem in the United States.

For example, many black enlisted men are fed up with fighting and dying for a racist America. A majority of black GI's in the survey feel that they have no business fighting in Southeast Asia. They say their fight is in the United States, against repression and racism. A frightening number - 45 per cent of black combat troops - say they would join riots and take up arms if necessary, to get the rights they have been deprived of at home. The spirit of black militancy has enveloped the GI on the battle ground in much the same manner as I have seen it involve the student on the college campus, and many black soldiers say they will join the ranks of radical groups like the Black Panthers or Students for a Democratic Society when they return home.

This is in direct contrast to my impression of the black American fighting man of 1967 and 1968 who was anxious to prove himself in the most integrated war in U.S. history-and did so by accounting for up to 22 per cent of U.S. combat fatalities while back home newspapers, magazines and television networks were heralding the spirit of brotherhood between blacks and whites in the foxhole.

"The notion has been disproved on the Vietnam battlefield," Maj. Beauregard Brown, a black, told me in Saigon in 1967, "that Negroes can't produce the same as white soldiers. Given the same training and support, the Negro has shown that he can do the job just as good as anyone else."

American commander William C. Westmoreland and President Lyndon B. Johnson agreed. Charges of cowardice (usually baseless) against segregated black troops from World War I to Korea were laid to rest. Concluded the Reader's Digest: the American Negro has earned his red badge of courage.

But blacks today feel differently about the war, life in America and themselves. "The young black soldiers are much more hostile than ever before," said Capt. Alexander Benjamin of Mobile, Ala., a black personnel management officer in the 9th Army Division when I visited him in Dong Tam. "I think we are probably building a recruiting base for militant groups in America. It frightens me."

The change in mood, leading to ugly incidents, even killings, has been induced by a combination of factors.

In large measure, the U.S. military in Southeast Asia reflects the entire American society. A major factor contributing to the new unrest is the growing unpopularity of the war among blacks as well as whites. In 1967 black soldiers roundly criticized Martin Luther King and Cassius Clay for objecting to the war; today, King, Clay and others like Eldridge Cleaver and Julian Bond, who have been heavy critics of the war, stand highest in their esteem.

Then, too, many of the black volunteers of 1967 in the Marine and Army Airborne Divisions have been replaced by conscripts. Some of the "volunteers" I talked to were escaping the draft or a jail sentence stemming from an arrest.

Before the war went stale, the black soldier stoically accepted Martin Luther King's proscriptions against violent protest. But such stoicism gave way to impatience, even riots, among black youths. Consequently, many of to day's black soldiers are yesterday's rioters. Also, King and Robert F. Kennedy, the young black's ghetto heroes, have fallen prey to the very violence he had been led to reject.

"Kennedy was getting ahead; King was getting ahead," observed Wardell Sellers, a black rifleman from New York City in the 1st Army Division. "They were trying to help the brothers. So you can see what that got 'em."

Furthermore, in the White House now sits a President who fails to speak to black needs. "He's not for the black man," said Seaman Ronald Washington of Los Angeles, stationed at Danang. "He's thinking only of foreign policy and his own race. If Nixon were a brother, he'd be the number one Uncle Tom."

And the black soldier has begun to flex his new-found black pride, making him less likely to take without notice the cross burnings, waving of Confederate flags and common use of racial slurs that have persisted among whites since American troops arrived in Vietnam in large numbers.