Wallace Houston Terry, II was an African-Americanjournalist and oral historian, best known for his book about black soldiers in Vietnam, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, which served as a basis for the 1995 crime thrillerDead Presidents. Terry had a wide-ranging and eclectic career that reflected his many interests. Though primarily a journalist, he was also an ordained minister in the Church of the Disciples of Christ, and worked as a radio and television commentator, public lecturer, and advertising executive. He taught journalism at Howard University and The College of William & Mary, where he sat on the board of trustees.
Terry was hired by the Washington Post in 1960, when he was just 19; three years later, he was hired by Time magazine. In 1967, Terry left for Vietnam, where he became the magazine's deputy bureau chief in Saigon and the first black war correspondent on permanent duty. During his two-year tour, he covered the Tet Offensive, flew scores of combat missions with American and South Vietnamese pilots, and joined assault troops in the Ashau Valley and on Hamburger Hill. He and New Republic correspondent Zalin Grant retrieved the bodies of four newsmen killed by the Viet Cong on May 5, 1968, during the Mini-Tet Offensive in Saigon, following directions from ambush survivor Frank Palmos and New Zealand military personnel. Terry's 1967 Time cover story, "The Negro in Vietnam", enjoyed a huge success, and he vowed that he would one day write a book about the sacrifices of black soldiers in Vietnam. His wife, Janice, a former schoolteacher who was his close collaborator, later wrote:
For Wally, getting his book published became an obsession, a shadowy thing that was like another heartbeat in our household. It sat with us at the dinner table. It watched the evening news with us. It went with us to the movies, to church, to the grocery store. After thirteen years, we had sent the manuscript to a hundred publishers—and received a hundred rejections.
Finally, there was a breakthrough. The book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans was published in June 1984 by Random House and became a national bestseller. "And that shadowy thing in our lives finally disappeared", Janice Terry wrote. The New York Times wrote that "many of the individuals featured in pages speak about their experiences with exceptional candor and passion; and in doing so, give the reader a visceral sense of what it was like, as a black man, to serve in Vietnam and what it was like to come back to 'the real world.'" Terry wrote and narrated the only documentary recording from the Vietnam battlefields, Guess Who's Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, which was released by Motown in 1972 and re-released independently in 2006 as a CD. He wrote and narrated the PBS Frontline show, "The Bloods of Nam", the Mutual Broadcasting show Marching to Freedom, which won an NEA citation and the Edward R. Murrow Brotherhood Award from B'nai B'rith. In 1992, Terry became the first J. Saunders Redding Visiting Fellow at Brown University. In 2000, the Brown University Alumni Magazine named him one of 100 graduates who made the greatest contributions to the 20th century.
Death and legacy
In 2003, Terry developed a rare vascular disease called granulomatosis with polyangiitis, which strikes about one in a million people. The disease can be treated with drugs, but in his case it was diagnosed too late. He died under treatment at a Fairfax, Virginia, hospital on May 29, 2003. He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Janice Terry, and by their three children: Tai, Lisa, and David, and two grandchildren: Noah and Sophia. At the time of his death, Terry was working on Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. The book was published posthumously in June 2007 to wide praise. Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker called it a "treasure trove of history" in the May/June 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
