Not “always” as in that’s all we talked about. It would happen several times a week. I’m sure that well under 1% of our conversations involved race or insults, and they’d rarely go more than a minute. 49% of our conversations involved work - typically complaining about it, and 50% were about women, alcohol and marijuana. It occurred all four years I was in the military.
The conversations in question would be stuff like white guys telling blacks how #$&@!?% awful black music (R&B) was,and to, “Stop playing that &#%”, and we’d tell them they were being too “#$&@!?% uppity.” The black guys would tell the white guys how #$&@!?% terrible white music (heavy metal rock) was and to, “Stop playing that &#%”, and remind us of the differences in “physical endowment” between the races. Plenty of expletives would be used as adjectives during these discussions. I still remember a Native American co-worker telling me he would “slap the #$&@!?% white off of my face,” and me cracking up because it was such a strange and funny insult… (You had to be there.) Things like that. The same kind of locker room talk that many guys typically engage in, only 50 times cruder.
We’d also engage in less racial, more mainstream insults - like telling each other how #$&@!?% ugly their girlfriends and wives were.
I will say that it was acceptable among many in the military to hold gays in contempt. This was around 1980, and the only person I remember being shunned in our squadron was a guy who was suspected of being gay because he came off as effeminate.
Otherwise, there was a line you couldn’t cross. Nothing was ever said that was meant to genuinely offend or hurt anyone’s feelings. We worked together, we ate together, we trained together, we played on the squadron football team together, a lot of us lived in the same apartment complex together -, but if people who weren’t familiar with our group only saw little video snippets or transcripts of the way we talked to each other, they’d no doubt be convinced we were all #$&@!?% racists.