[3] While he was a child, his father and uncles rented four hundred acres called "The Place," where they farmed the land, grew livestock and built smokehouses.
Archer noted that it was never intended to be an academic institution because blacks were "not supposed to be intellectually capable of absorbing anything but vocational training," and he noted that the substandard building was not improved until the 1950s after the Supreme Court of the United States had rejected the practice of "separate but equal.
After graduating from high school, Archer attended Tuskegee University for a year before he volunteered for the United States Army Air Forces.
Serving in the newly formed 1st Special Forces Group (United States) he went to Vietnam beginning in 1957.
He was a part of a team that suffered some of the first American casualties of the Vietnam War near Nha Trang on October 21, 1957, with the death of Capt.