75 years later, LI Marine recallssegregated training

There is hardly anyone alive who remembers the day the first black Marines went into combat. Vincent Long, 93, of Hempstead remembers. After completing boot camp at a segregated section of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, called Montford Point, Long and a small group of other black Marines were sent to work as laborers for the June 15,1944, invasion of Saipan, near Guam. But as they scrambled at the shoreline to supply ammunition to white Marines farther forward, they were engulfed by Japanese artillery.