“I heard about some problems during and right after Vietnam but by the time I joined in 1977 (DEP) and 1978 (Active) it had subsided to almost nothing. Of course, Presidents Carter and Reagan weren’t $#*+-stirrers.”
Integration doesn’t just happen, it’s forced from above. The moment policies are selectively enforced, applying to only some groups, it falls apart. Hell, the moment 24/7 policing and constant supervision and indoctrination towards assimilation stop the oil and the water will separate.
Human beings will be human beings. They will self-segregate upon obvious lines of similarity, and they will look out for their own self-interests. It takes EXTREME effort to get them to work together, as that is not normal — human nature is tribal. Religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial differences can be the fault lines; and any one of those elements can lead to generational warfare.
In the past multi-ethnic empires tended to give up on trying to make everyone play together all nice and happy, and just tossed the various different tribesmen into their own battalions. Certainly makes it easier to maintain some sense of unit cohesion when you don’t have to spend a significant portion of your time and resources trying to prevent hate-crimes from cropping up and smoothing over the grievances that inevitably crop up. It frees more time and resources up to actually train and fight, rather than sitting everyone down for mandatory powerpoints on sensitivity training.
You have to remember, too, that even as an E-1 I spent more time with general and field grade officers than I did with other lower enlisted (save for a few co-workers and ROKA counterparts), so I suppose I was somewhat buffered from a lot of this. The bars in the ‘ville in Korea were strictly segregated, not from above but by choice and by music and venue. Also, the Korean women who comported with black soldiers and to a lesser degree Hispanics were looked down upon by the other Koreans and were usually not the cream of the crop as far as looks or English language skills went.
I think a lot of it during the truly bad period was because a big war was going on, which always empowers the ranks, and gives a devil may care attitude, plus, at the later stages of the war, there were a lot of draftees, so you had unpopular war, a bloody meat grinder war going on, and draftees, and the black power movement, all at the same time, that translates as a time of wild abandon, that you wouldn’t see in a 1980, military.