In military parlance, "Mustang" refers to an officer who came up through the ranks. Tom Phillips is a Mustang officer who enlisted in the Air Force as a slick sleeve recruit, almost got kicked out on his third day at Boot Camp, and retired nearly four dec

Black soldiers first entered the regular army of the United States in the summer of 1866. While their segregated regiments served in the American West for the following three decades, the promise of Reconstruction gave way to the repressiveness of Jim Crow. But black men found a degree of equality in the service: the army treated them no worse than it did their white counterparts.

The Black Regulars uses army correspondence, court-martial transcripts, and pension applications to tell who these men were, often in their own words: how they were recruited and how their officers...