Some Black Veterans Find Yellow Ribbon Bittersweet : Military: Often, those who fought in recent wars feel they had few real opportunities in service or afterward.

Stanley Robinson and Colin L. Powell grew up in the same Bronx neighborhood. They are both black. Both joined the Army. And the similarities end there.

His story, Robinson says, is more typical.

At 19, he decided to join the Army because he had one child to support and another one on the way.

“I remember thinking that, if I liked the service, I might stay. If not, at least I’d have money for college, plus have a few bucks put away in savings bonds for my kids.”

He signed up in 1987 for a two-year hitch and was assigned to an artillery unit after basic training.

“That’s what they like to put blacks in--artillery, tanks or infantry,” he said. Robinson said he achieved high scores on tests administered by the Army but was told that, “since I was only going to be in for two years, artillery, tanks or infantry were the only jobs open to me.”

To Robinson, promotions seemed harder to come by if you were black.

“I did my job well,” he said. “My evaluations were all perfect. I was even Soldier of the Month once. But all these other guys were coming in, Caucasian, getting promoted over me. I had to wait for time in grade.”

Colin L. Powell has another view of today’s armed forces. He sees them as models of equal opportunity and upward mobility. And, compared to much of American society, that boast is not idle.

In a masterstroke of understatement, Powell offered himself as an example. “I ain’t done bad,” the four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told one congressional panel last month.

For blacks and the the U.S. military, the relationship has long been a bittersweet one.

These are sweet days for the many black soldiers who are returning from the Persian Gulf War to enthusiastic and patriotic greetings.

But, beyond the bunting and yellow ribbons are the warning voices of black American veterans of other wars. Despite much progress in recent years, they say, the pattern of the black experience with the military remains essentially unchanged: first come the promises of opportunity and hopes of escape from racism and poverty, followed by a reality that falls short, both in the service and after discharge.

“It’s a problem we’re faced with today,” said Thomas H. Wynn Sr., director of the Milwaukee-based National Assn. of Black Veterans. “There are an inordinate number of blacks in the military who don’t have transferable skills--guys in the artillery, guys carrying that ‘piece’ up front.

“They’ll be returning to an economy that’s faltering, a reduced job market, unemployment rates that are extremely high in minority communities. We feel there is going to be a lot of negative residuals--high unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, possible incarcerations.”

The Department of Labor found in 1990 that black veterans 20 years old and older had an unemployment rate of 8%--more than double the 3.8% rate for white veterans in the same age brackets.

Also, blacks make up almost 40% of the nation’s homeless veterans, according to a study last year by the Veterans Administration. Public opinion polls showed that blacks were opposed to U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf in far greater proportions than other Americans. Part of the reason may have been the frequently voiced fear that history will repeat itself, with blacks once again finding little reward for their loyalty and sacrifice.

“Each time we are sucked into the idea of supporting our country, in spite of what we know in our heart of hearts about what happens to us when it’s all over,” said Wilbert A. Tatum, publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Amsterdam News and a Korean War veteran.

Powell defends the high percentage of minority-member soldiers--30% of the Persian Gulf force compared to 14% in the general population--noting that the military is one of the few places to offer opportunities openly to minorities.

Once in the military, the ladder up is more clearly set than in other American institutions, Powell and others point out. And, on being mustered out, there is the chance to get a better education.

When Robinson returned to civilian life last year, a former Army buddy got him on as a security guard with the Salvation Army Homeless Veterans Center in Queens, N.Y.--and he felt fortunate to get that.

“The job prospects for blacks out there are nothing if you don’t have a college degree,” he said. “With two years’ military experience, nothing. The only thing is taking the government service test and doing well. They give you extra points for being a veteran, but even then it might be two or three years before you actually get hired.”

Robinson plans to start college this fall. Under the GI Bill, he said, he will get $18,000 in aid for the $1,200 he saved in the service in monthly installments of $100. It is one of the few advantages he says he gained from military service.

“That’s pretty decent,” he said. “You put in $1,200 and get back $18,000.”

Few black veterans see their service as a mistake. Yet, for some, no matter when they served, their remembrances of their time in uniform and their experiences afterward are tinged with resentment and disappointment. Those sentiments were repeated in numerous interviews by The Times with veterans of the last half century. Here are some representative stories:

The Vietnam War

Bennie J. Swans Jr. got it going and coming.

On one of his last nights out before leaving to fight as an infantryman in Vietnam in 1968, he and several black Army buddies were refused service because of their race at the Red Hound Bar and Grill, a hangout for soldiers at Ft. Polk in Louisiana.

Not long after he returned from Vietnam to his hometown of Philadelphia--a highly decorated soldier but also severely disabled as a result of war injuries--a white policeman threatened to beat him on the head for parking his car in a handicapped zone, he recalled. All the cop saw, Swans said, was a black man who, he assumed, was trying to break the law.

“That was a very painful experience,” said Swans, 41, who was awarded three Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart in Vietnam. “One of the reasons I fought so very, very hard in Vietnam was to prove that African-Americans can contribute and have contributed to the development of American society.”

For the first time in combat, blacks and whites were thoroughly integrated throughout the U.S. military. Still, the military in Vietnam “mirrored the country and, to that extent, racism was present there, too,” Swans said.

Swans used his veterans’ benefits to continue his education, receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees. He later helped set up a crisis intervention program in Philadelphia that tries to keep rival street gangs from warring against one another. He is now running for a seat on Philadelphia’s City Council.

His military experience played a strong role in his decision to seek a career as a community activist. “Something good comes out of all things, and the military is no exception,” he said.

Martin Grimes, another black Vietnam veteran, recalls that he and other black soldiers were forced to eat field rations outdoors while their white comrades were allowed to eat cooked food in the mess hall at an air base outside Saigon to which they had all just returned after several days on patrol in the Mekong Delta.

“We all didn’t look or smell too good,” said Grimes, who drifted for years after his discharge from the Army and is now a culinary arts student at a community college in Everett, Wash. “I was just doing what I was ordered to do. It didn’t dawn on me then that it was because we were black.”

The Korean War

Charles B. Rangel was a first-class fighter in Korea, earning four battle stars, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for heroic action as part of an all-black artillery battalion that fought the length of that bloody Asian peninsula.

He says his unit was nearly wiped out in fierce combat near the Manchurian border because no black replacements were available and the Army hesitated to mix in white troops as reliefs. “We had been surrounded for a long time by what the Chinese called their volunteer army and were suffering 90% casualties.

“Somebody should have been indicted for that,” Rangel said.

When he returned to civilian life in 1952, Rangel found that he was still being treated as a second-class citizen in his native New York City. There were restaurants that would not serve him, theaters that would not sell him a ticket, neighborhoods in which he could not rent an apartment, solely because of his race.

Economic opportunities also were limited. In fact, when he left the Army, white military guidance counselors had suggested that he forget college and learn a trade if he wanted to better himself.

“They told me that I should be a mortician or an electrician,” recalls Rangel, a St. John’s University Law School graduate who is now in his 11th term as a Democratic congressman from Harlem. The generous educational benefits given to Korean War veterans enabled Rangel to finish high school and college. “It’s hard for me to think of anybody (black) my age who received a college education who was not a Korean War veteran,” the 60-year-old congressman said.

Vance Coleman joined the Army right out of high school in 1947, eventually won a commission as a 2nd lieutenant and stayed in the Army for 12 years, including a stint in Korea as the first black officer in the 623rd Field Artillery Battalion.

After his discharge, he enrolled in college in Milwaukee and applied for an apartment in a city-owned veterans’ housing development. But he was turned down.

“They were for white veterans, not black veterans,” he said. “I didn’t find that out, however, until after I had completed graduate school in Massachusetts and came back to Milwaukee years later as the city’s first black director of housing. I changed that policy, of course.”

Jobs were hard to find when he first returned to civilian life. “Nobody had a job for an ex-field artillery officer if he was black,” Coleman said. “I don’t remember how many places I tried. I looked for work for days for probably a couple of months.”

He ended up as a mail clerk with the Postal Service--a definite comedown for a former Army captain, it seemed to him.

Coleman, now 60 and a retired two-star general in the Army Reserve, said that he sees little change for returning Persian Gulf veterans from what he experienced 30 years ago.

“Although you will hear human resource managers talk about hiring veterans because with them you’re getting proven leadership, if you’re black they don’t practice it,” he said.

World War II

When Virgil Lee joined the Navy as an 18-year-old recruit in 1945, he was sent to boot camp and taught to wait table as a steward’s mate.

“The black men were trained to wait the officers’ tables, clean up their living quarters and tend to their wardrobes,” said Lee, a retired oil worker, who is now 65 and living in Houston. Still, for Lee, Navy life was better in some ways than the life he had left behind in the South. “There were no separate drinking fountains on the ships,” he said. And, on liberty in the Orient, he added, blacks were able to stay at the same hotels as their white shipmates.

But, when Lee left the Navy and returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Tex., north of Houston, “it was the same old thing,” Lee recalled. “Everything all segregated, colored and white restrooms, drinking fountains, everything.

“In times of crisis, Americans all band together, and we can go to war and win,” he said. “But, once it’s over, it’s back to the old grind. I’m sure things will be that way this war, too. Nothing will be better for the blacks that get back.”

Contributing to this report were staff members Doug Conner in Seattle, Caleb A. Gessesse in Washington, Lianne Hart in Houston, Susan Pinkus in Los Angeles, Ann Rovin in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago and Edith Stanley in Atlanta.