Turner Jackson was 21 when he left Columbus, headed for the jungles of Vietnam. As a young black man, the first lesson he had to learn was trust.
It didn't come easily. When he was 14, he and some friends were captured by Ku Klux Klansmen and nearly killed, he said, fueling an early distrust of whites.
But when Jackson stepped off the plane at South Vietnam's Bien Hoa Air Base in April 1969, he realized he was in an entirely new reality. In a place that "smelled like death," those he had onc
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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