In the sizzling jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, John Clark, a retired U.S. Marine sergeant from Blackridge, often served as the point man during patrols. While his squad moved beside a river one day in 1966, Mr. Clark experienced firsthand one of the Viet Cong's booby traps.

Wallace Terry Soldiers outside of their "hootch" in Camp Tien Sha, 1969. Hekalu means "temple" in Swahili. Click photo for larger image. "Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era" Opens tomorrow -- Veteran's Day -- at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, 1212 Smallman St., Strip District. In a salute to the holiday and the military personnel it honors, admission to the exhibition tomorrow is free for all veterans and current members of the armed services. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Prices: $7.50 for adults; $6 for seniors over 61; $5 for students with identification; $3.50 for children ages 6-18; free to children under 6. Regular admission covers all other displays, including the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. Information: www.pghhistory.org or 412-454-6000.

"I bent down and went under a broken tree branch that hung over a path. I went down. I felt this pain in my foot," said the retired Pittsburgh firefighter.

Mr. Clark looked down and saw a barbed black punji stake protruding from the front of his right boot. For 20 agonizing minutes, he froze and waited while a technician disarmed the explosive attached to the steel stick lodged in his foot.

As a medic used a scalpel to cut out part of the feces-covered steel stick, Mr. Clark lay still on the ground, smoked a cigarette and tried to ignore the intense pain.

"You couldn't pull it out," he recalled, "because it had that barb at the end." Punji stakes, usually made of wood or bamboo, were designed to wound a soldier and tie up his squad while they waited for a helicopter.

The punji stake that pierced Mr. Clark's foot is among 200 artifacts, art works, photographs, oral histories, letters, diaries and music that re-create this decade of thunderous upheaval in a new exhibition called "Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era." The show opens to the public tomorrow at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.

In a way, the 1960s were like that punji stake for African-Americans, who served in record numbers during America's longest war. As black military members fought and died in Southeast Asia to control strategic plateaus such as Khe Sanh, they heard news about church bombings in Birmingham, Ala., and the murders of young black girls.

"The whole nation was going through hell," said Albert French, who lives in Point Breeze, was wounded in Vietnam and wrote a memoir about it called "Patches of Fire."

"Crossfire" by William M. Myles. This mixed media on canvas piece is one of nine pieces of art on loan from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago for "Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era," at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. Click photo for larger image.

In the South, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined hands with civil rights demonstrators and began driving a stake through "separate but equal" laws that denied decent jobs, housing, education and voting rights to blacks by marching in America's streets and sitting in at lunch counters.

The History Center's locally produced exhibition, running through October 2007, rekindles memories of those years of assassinations, bombings and body counts, hawks and doves, peaceful protests and destructive riots.

Curator Samuel Black collaborated with 21 veterans, nurses and their spouses to collect memorabilia and memories.

At the exhibition's entrance, visitors will hear the unmistakable sound of Huey helicopters as they walk past a wall bearing the names of African Americans from this region who died in the conflict.

Around the bend is a "hootch theater," where a flat-screen television plays a 12-minute orientation film. Viewers will see footage shot by soldiers, who, after putting down their M-16s, used Super 8 cameras to record events in Vietnam between 1969 and 1971.

Those images are contrasted with more recent scenes excerpted from "In Country: A Vietnam Story," a documentary produced by Chris Moore, local Vietnam vet and host of WQED-TV's "Black Horizons" and "On Q."

In Vietnam, soldiers called their living quarters hootches, which were underground bunkers designed to protect them from attacks. Like those dug overseas, the exhibition's hootch theater is lined with corrugated metal walls, sand bags, 55-gallon drums and ammunition crates.

While overseas, many black soldiers reinforced their sense of comradeship by doing the "dap," a series of handshakes, hugs, chest taps, head taps and sayings such as "right on."

Among those soldiers was Jeff Anthony, 57, of Washington, D.C., who became a Marine Corps sergeant and served at the battle of Khe Sanh. He also spent time aboard a boat with a hollow body that carried helicopters on its top deck.

In the boat's narrow passageways, Mr. Anthony recalled, "We'd all be standing there dapping each other and nobody could get by! To a lot of the old-school guys, it was unmilitary."

Mr. Anthony was influenced by a James Brown concert he attended in Danang, where the singer performed his hit "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud."

Afterward, Anthony paid a Vietnamese tailor to embroider the phrase "black and proud" on the front pocket of a military shirt, which also is on display.

"A lot of NCOs and officers would not have tolerated that, I don't think," Mr. Anthony said. "We had a black first sergeant who really had his act together. He was extraordinarily fair. He understood a lot of the attitudes we had."

Today, Mr. Anthony owns a production company and works as a tour manager and producer for USO shows. He has traveled to Germany, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia.

Mr. Anthony, who was wounded twice in 1969, attended a private opening of the "Soul Soldiers" exhibition earlier this week.

"Anything we can do in this country to make people aware of the price that people pay on both sides is worthwhile," he said. "Too many people in this country just don't understand the cost psychologically. They don't understand the cost in broken bodies."

On the night before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., Mr. Anthony put on his dressy blue Marine Corps uniform to attend a ball that preceded the next day's ceremony.

"As I was leaving the building, I ran into a woman I worked with" at the National Endowment for the Arts.

His coworker was surprised to see him in uniform, Mr. Anthony recalled, adding that in those days, "You didn't wear that on your sleeve."

"She thanked me for my service and I burst into tears. Ten years had gone by and no one had ever said that to me."

Like many veterans, Mr. Anthony had a difficult time adjusting to life in the U.S. after spending time in a hellish war zone.

"I have a lot of respect for the anti-war movement. They provided the political pressure to get the war ended. But I will never forgive them for letting that hostility be aimed at the troops instead of the people who made the decisions."