As a New Jersey teenager, Kyle Bibby watched in disbelief as the World Trade Center was struck down by two planes on September 11, 2001. Inspired by the bravery of first responders at Ground Zero and the initial phase of the U.S. military’s “War on Terror,” Bibby pursued acceptance into the United States Naval Academy, and following graduation, went on to become a commissioned Marine Corps infantry officer in Afghanistan.
But now, nearly 25 years after the 9/11 attacks on the United States — and no longer in active or reserve military service — Bibby, 40, is frustrated by the escalating rhetoric and aerial bombings by the U.S. in Iran.
“It’s a real bitter pill to swallow to just watch us walk into another aimless, strategically undefined war,” he said, as a co-founder and leader of the Black Veterans Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 to address discrimination against Black veterans. “We need to have more of a conversation about the resources lost by our communities. There is an element of injustice and moral injury here.”
As the United States nears completion of its sixth week of assaults on Iran, Black Americans — veterans in particular — are grappling with the specter of another looming ground war. President Donald Trump, on April 7, agreed to a two-week ceasefire while the Strait of Hormuz is opened up under tight Iranian oversight, but that does not mean the future threat of further violence has disappeared, and neither has the risk for service members.
Black people have consistently fought for America with distinction and dignity, without betrayal, even when the promise of doing so was never fulfilled and its veterans’ legacy of heroism repeatedly challenged.
To be sure, all active duty servicemen and women who face the ever-present reality of watching their friends and colleagues deploy — or even themselves — to high-risk environments, including and beyond Iran, continue to maintain resolute dedication to their assignments regardless of interior reflections.
The U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran that began on February 28, 2026, has already killed at least 15 U.S. service members and an estimated 3,500 or more civilians across the region, including over 1,600 documented civilian deaths in Iran alone from strikes on schools, hospitals, and urban neighborhoods, according to organizations such as Human Rights Watch.
In the second Trump administration, the Pentagon has scrubbed walls once lined with images of Black heroes — Tuskegee Airmen, Montford Point Marines, Vietnam veterans whose service was long ignored — replacing them with a sanitized, whitewashed version of military history. DEI programs and cultural awareness training have been unceremoniously gutted. Black History Month has been dropped from official calendars, while promotions for Black officers have stalled under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose interventions have blocked or delayed the advancement of senior Black leaders.
A 20-year Air Force veteran on active duty in the years between the Gulf War and post 9/11 period, “Kevin” [who agreed to speak to the AmNews on condition of anonymity] recalls having experienced bias and explicit racism on active duty, and as a veteran.
“There were definitely times I was marked down in my evaluations which kept me from advancing as an NCO (non-commissioned officer). When I would question the reasoning, none of my superiors could ever give me a clear, honest answer. On deployments overseas throughout Asia and other parts, I regularly had to face hostile environments [within the military ranks]. Now, as a civilian employee with the military, mostly white officers have a hard time accepting you as a civilian, and want to treat you as a lower-ranking person, even though you’re no longer a soldier,” he shared.
“It seems like we’re in a situation with Iran pointing to destruction on some level on all sides,” continued Kevin. “There’s so much bitterness, hatred. Americans suffer, Iranians suffer. We need to lean into solutions for ending the fighting and pulling back.”
For Black soldiers, the words and actions of a Pete Hegseth are searing reminders that true belonging in America’s military is conditional, impermanent, and can be denied at critical moments in the country’s journey, “which is why we’re envisioning a ‘1619-like’ project to acknowledge and educate people about the Black veteran experience,” said Bibby, seasoned in building impactful campaigns on behalf of organizations such as Color Of Change, and others.
Public opinion continues to mushroom against the war in Iran. A Pew Research survey in late March found 59% of Americans saying the U.S. made the wrong decision to use force in Iran and 61% disapproving of President Trump’s handling of the conflict, while Reuters/Ipsos and AP-NORC polls similarly show about six in 10 Americans believe that the strikes have “gone too far” and will make the U.S. less safe in the long run. Decades of research on American wars — from Vietnam to Iraq — show a persistent race gap in which Black Americans are significantly less supportive of overseas military force than white Americans, spurred by a higher sensitivity to casualty rates as well as an experiential belief that wars fought in the name of “liberation” rarely if ever reflect the realities for people of people of color in America.
Black commentators and non-profit organizations in this period are framing the Iran war in terms of “empire” and “racialized state violence,” part of a storied tradition of Black antiwar resistance extending from the World War II “Double V” campaign to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s denunciation of sending Black men to Vietnam, inspired by Coretta Scott King’s greater vocal advocacy for peace in Southeast Asia.
“I think World War II lives so large in American mythology because it was a time where we could clearly see that we were ‘good guys,’” noted Bibby. “I think the entire political identity of the United States grows outward from that point. But even in that instance, Black service members still faced horrible segregation in the military and outright racial terrorism when they came home. For that era, I think of the Joe Lewis quote: ‘Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.’ No matter [Blacks were] serving honorably in the largest war in world history, where the U.S. became a world power, we still came back to American fascism.”
Patriotism Unreciprocated
Data shows that Black Americans serve at disproportionately high rates — 17% of the armed forces despite being 14% of the population, as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has documented — and that service is often motivated by opportunity, mobility, and a desire to claim full citizenship in a nation that has not always reciprocated that loyalty. As one 2023 Syracuse University study highlighted, 89% of Black service members say joining the military was a good decision, and 93% report pride in their accomplishments, even as many leave the ranks facing steeper financial and employment challenges than their white peers. “Lost faith or trust in military or political leadership” was tied as a primary motivation for Black veterans retiring from the military, a revealing signal of the gap between individual honor and institutional betrayal.
As Princeton University professor Naima Green-Riley argued in a 2024 essay, “The Race Gap That Shapes American Views of War” for Foreign Affairs, Black Americans have long been “more skeptical than others about the use of U.S. military force abroad,” a skepticism rooted in history and lived experience. Polling on Iraq showed Black Americans were about 30% less likely than white Americans to support the war, driven in part by what Green-Riley and co-author Andrew Leber call “greater casualty sensitivity” — the knowledge that Black troops have often “borne an unfair burden in the fighting.” That unease persists as Black Americans are markedly less supportive of troop deployment to Ukraine, Taiwan, or the Middle East than the national average.
Two recently published books by journalist Wil Haygood and historian Matthew F. Delmont are compelling reminders that the Vietnam War was never just a foreign conflict for Black America — it exposed the existing fissures between national obligation and national betrayal. Haygood’s “The War Within a War” (Knopf) resurrects the stories of Black soldiers who fought two battles at once: one in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and another against the racism that stalked them from basic training to the VA hospital. Delmont’s “Until the Last Gun Is Silent” (Viking) widens the frame, showing how Black communities — mothers, clergy, activists, veterans — saw Vietnam not as an abstract geopolitical chess match but as a siphoning of Black life, Black labor, and Black possibility. The same questions that stalked the Black community then, as well as its soldiers and veterans, are coming to bear now: Who will be sent first? Who will be asked to sacrifice the most? And what, if anything, will our communities gain in return?
Bobby McRath understands better than most the costly folly of entering into war without clear objectives, having retired after four years of active duty in the Navy and 20-plus years in the Reserves. As an 18-year-old high school graduate, he voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Navy after a dream one night. In Vietnam, McRath was an E5 on a Patrol Craft Fast (PCF) — more popularly known as a “swift boat” — part of John Kerry’s squadron patrolling coasts and riverways, though not on the same boat. Returning to the States wasn’t easy. “The Black guys that didn’t go to Vietnam were saying to me that I had been killing babies, or that I should’ve died over there,” McRath, 79, recalled. “It was rough because they didn’t understand the war. I felt mistreated when I came home.”
As Naima Green-Riley wrote in Foreign Affairs, Black Americans remain “more skeptical than others about the use of U.S. military force abroad,” shaped by a long memory of disproportionate casualties, broken promises, and the knowledge that wars waged in the name of democracy rarely deliver democracy at home. Haygood and Delmont, in their respective books, also show that Vietnam taught Black America to read war not through presidential speeches but through lived experience — and that lesson, painfully earned, is guiding how Black Americans are interpreting the drumbeats by American Hawks around Iran now. Black veterans have lived with a bitter paradox for generations: they serve this country in disproportionate numbers but come home to systems that deny them benefits meant to ease their transition into civilian life.
Afghanistan. Credit: Photo courtesy of Kyle Bibble
After leaving the military, McRath clashed with the VA for years to receive the full disability benefits he was owed as the department declined to offer more than 50%. It was only when he reached out to then-presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, who intervened with the VA on his behalf, that McRath got the support he’d earned. Since then, “I’ve been treated nice,” he shared one evening from St. Louis.
The inequities stretch back to World War II and the GI Bill, where Black veterans received, on average, only 40% of the value of benefits granted to white veterans, as documented by researchers at Brandeis University and highlighted by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
The Black Veterans Project (BVP) was originally intended to be a narrative hub for preserving the historical narratives of veterans back to World War II, but soon enough began to focus on responding to the persistent benefit inequities endured by Black veterans, as well as their erasure from historical memory. BVP’s partnership with Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic produced the breakthrough Monk v. U.S. case, which forced the Veterans Administration (VA) to release decades of internal data showing that Black veterans were 21.9% more likely to have disability claims denied than white veterans. That disclosure has reshaped discourse on reparations, military equity, and federal benefits.
To date, the Black Veterans Project has done four seminal reports on systemic racism in the VA.
“I think the biggest divide between younger and older generations is a sense of solidarity towards people who are not Black as military members and veterans, ” explained Bibby. “Black Veterans Project has spoken out against the transgender ban in the military and supports LGBTQ rights across the board. We’ve had some older generations of black veterans tell us that we should only focus on Black issues.
“This ignores that Black veterans have intersectional lives. So when we speak about gay and transgender veterans, we are also protecting the Black veterans who are gay and transgender. Our opposition in civil rights often seeks legal precedent to exclude one group and then expands that to other groups later,” Bibby continued. “Any attacks against gay and transgender service members can eventually be expanded to include Black service members. That isn’t an exhaustive experience, though. Most of the [older] veterans we’ve met are living through the exact same things that we live through and completely share our values — they’re just one generation ahead of us.”
Jimmie Briggs is a Baltimore-based journalist and author of “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War” (Basic Books). He’s currently researching a book on masculinity in the 21st Century.
