By Andrea Stevens
AFRO Staff Writer
astevens@afro.com
The transition from military service to civilian life is often marked by silence, not just from those who serve, but from the families who wait, the communities that forget and the memories that linger long after the final deployment. For Charles McGee and Efrem Odum, military service was a turning point, a foundation and, in many ways, a personal transformation.
McGee entered the Army in 1967 to avoid being drafted into the infantry and went on to serve 30 years as a military police officer, including two tours in Vietnam and a deployment to Somalia. He rose to the rank of command sergeant major and said the military gave him purpose, structure and a lifelong calling to serve others.
“I became the brigade sergeant major and that meant I had the chance to help a lot of people,” McGee said. “Especially young soldiers, many of them Black and overlooked, who needed someone to fight for them inside the system.”
But service came at a personal cost. When he returned home from Vietnam in 1971, he was met not with gratitude, but with protests, slurs and disrespect.
“We fought for our country and we couldn’t even wear our uniforms when we got back,” he said. “That stayed with me.”
The African American Veterans Monument’s website states that “more than 300,000 Black Americans served in Vietnam. Though only about 12 percent of the U.S. population, Black servicemembers were 16.3% of the armed forces, and up to 25 percent of enlisted men in the Army.” Additionally, the wesbite shared, “as troop numbers increased, so did unrest at home, partly because of brutal crackdowns on Americans marching in support of the civil rights movement and protesting the draft and the war itself.”
Disillusioned by the hostility, McGee volunteered to return to Vietnam in 1972, where he said he felt more respected than in his own country. In the years that follow, he and his wife, whom he met between tours, married after his second return and remained together for more than five decades.
While McGee’s experience is shaped by combat and social unrest, Efrem Odum’s path through the military followed a different route, one grounded in family tradition and technical skill.
Odum joined the Navy at the age of 18 in 1979, inspired by his father and two older brothers, who are also military veterans. Assigned to the Naval Construction Battalion, he deployed across the Pacific to Japan, Guam, Sicily and the Philippines as part of the Navy’s Rapid Deployment Force.
“It isn’t combat, but it’s intense,” Odum said. “We build what needs building and we do it fast.”
Though he served just over eight years, Odum credits the Navy with setting the direction for his life. He used his training to become a licensed electrician and government contractor.
“The military makes me settle down,” he said. “It taught me responsibility. Without that, I’m not sure where I would’ve ended up.”
As Veterans Day nears, the stories of McGee and Odum serve as reminders that service does not end with a uniform and neither does its impact.