A View From The Left- WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

BLOWBACK: Does the US Military Incubate Brutal, Abusive Cops Along With Their Deranged, Disconnected Shooters?

Media spokespeople and politicians in both parties are working overtime to paint imaginary connections between the broad movement supported by millions of Americans to strip police of their traditional immunity and impunity for violent acts committed against civilians on the one hand, and the deranged, disconnected shooters of police in Texas and Louisiana. The real links they studiously ignore are that the Dallas and Baton Rouge shooters were both veterans of the unjust and murderous US military occupations of Afghanistan and/or Iraq, as are many of the police who commit violent acts against their fellow Americans after they return home. While the percentage of cops with military backgrounds is unclear due to the existence of special laws protecting police personnel, disciplinary and other records from prosecutorial and public scrutiny, the percentage of military veterans among police around the country is probably higher than any other line of work excepting civilian employees of the Pentagon, intelligence services and their contractors…  Indications are that the Baton Rouge and Dallas shooters both had problems which are likely results of their military experience. By the same token, it’s not implausible to imagine that many violent and abusive former military members were in need of psychological help even before they became law enforcement officers.    More

 

War Violence Comes Home

The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways.  In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front.  As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment -- including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) -- have poured off America’s distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide.  And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public…  Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country’s wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over “the homeland” on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies.  So the future stage is set.  Once you’ve used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, it’s only logical -- given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.    More

 

Friend of DPP Betsy Drinan in the Dot Reporter:

MY CASE AGAINST CHARTER SCHOOL EXPANSION

Continuing to grow the charter school movement without ensuring equity on all fronts contributes significantly to the further development of a two-tiered “public” education system. We already have gross inequities in terms of what is offered educationally across the various communities in this state. Do we really want to continue this stratification by expanding charter schools and depleting the budgets of our local school districts – whose schools welcome and educate any and all children?  More

Are We in for Another Increase in Military Spending?

Certainly most Americans are not clamoring for heightened investments in war and war preparations… Actually, it appears that, when Americans are given the facts about US military spending, a substantial majority of them favor reducing it. Between December 2015 and February 2016, the nonpartisan Voice of the People, affiliated with the University of Maryland, provided a sample of 7,126 registered voters with information on the current US military budget, as well as leading arguments for and against it.  The arguments were vetted for accuracy by staff members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on defense. Then, when respondents were asked their opinion about what should be done, 61 percent said they thought US military spending should be reduced. The biggest cuts they championed were in spending for nuclear weapons and missile defense systems.  When it comes to this year’s presumptive Presidential candidates, however, quite a different picture emerges.   More

 

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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

U.S.-Backed 'Moderate' Rebels Behead a Child Near Aleppo

Details conflict about which groups, exactly, comprise the “moderate” Syrian rebels funded by the U.S.-led coalition, but critics have long warned that fluid dynamics and shifting allegiances on the ground make it difficult to predict which groups will be aligned with U.S. interests.   Yet the Zenki movement was on the white list as recently as December 2014. A McClatchy report on the U.S.’s decision to stop payment and suspend delivery of weapons to rebel factions noted that the crackdown would not affect the Zenki movement and Harakat Hazm in Aleppo. As many as 1000 Zenki fighters were on the CIA payroll, according to the article.   More

 

U.S. Considers "Pause" In Supplies For Group Beheading Child

The five "individuals" who killed the child are members of the Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, a group supported by the CIA as well as with Saudi money and weapons. The group issued a statement on the case. It called it "an act of an individual" and blamed the "international community" for its problems. While only one person does the cutting the video shows that the five "individuals" are clearly acting as a group, cheering Takbeer and Allahu Akbar during and after the beheading…  We may expect, says the State Department, a "serious pause" in the delivery of new lethal U.S. weapons to the group… Moderate "Rebels" doing moderate head chopping of a sick 11 year Palestinian child, we will pause and then start the killing by supplying cluster bombs and other killing machines.   More

 

Release of 28 pages begins to lift curtain on US-Saudi relationship

The US-Saudi alliance has been toxic for many years.  Not only does this put the US on the side of a repressive absolute monarchy that oppresses its own people –especially women and the Shia minority --  but the kingdom has also been a principal source for the funding of religious extremism and support for reactionary regimes throughout the Arab world. The Saudis are now leading a horrific attack on neighboring Yemen, the poorest country in the region, saughtering thousands of civilians and earning universal opprobrium for the use of cluster bombs in heavily populated urban centers (which we protested two weeks ago).

 

Take a moment to send an email thanking Representatives Lynch, Capuano, Clark and McGovern for the role they played in winning release of long secret classified documents and urge our whole delegation to support a re-examination of the U.S. - Saudi relationship.

 

 

 

MSM and Establishment: Meh. . .

In 9/11 Document, View of a Saudi Effort to Thwart U.S. Action on Al Qaeda

It is by no means a Rosetta Stone that deciphers the lingering mysteries behind the attacks. But it is also a far more substantial document than many American and Saudi officials — from the White House press secretary to some members of Congress to the Saudi foreign minister — tried to indicate in a flurry of news conferences and emailed news releases on Friday afternoon.  And it was made public at a particularly troubled moment in America’s decades-long relationship with Saudi Arabia. The Senate unanimously passed a bill in May that would make it easier for families of Sept. 11 victims to sue the Saudi government for any role in the attacks. The bill is now being considered in the House…   Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, quoted that assessment word for word on Friday, adding that the various leads that investigators pursued about top Saudi officials having a role in the plot “didn’t really turn up anything.”  Adel al Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, echoed that sentiment hours later at a news conference at the Saudi Embassy, saying that all the allegations in the document “have been dealt with in the subsequent investigations and they have found that they were without merit.”  “The surprise in the 28 pages is that there is no surprise,” he said.      More

 

The Long-Hidden Saudi-9/11 Trail

First and foremost, here is what you need to know when you hear any member of our government say the newly released 29-page chapter from the congressional 9/11 report contains no smoking gun — THEY ARE LYING.  Our government’s relationship to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is no different than an addict’s relationship to heroin. Much like a heroin addict who will lie, cheat and steal to feed his vice, certain members of our government will lie, cheat and steal to continue their dysfunctional and deadly relationship with the KSA — a relationship that is rotting this nation and its leaders from the inside out… For an Administration looking to dump some insanely incriminating evidence and have nobody take notice — doing it on Friday when Congress was leaving for their two-month summer recess was probably the best day anyone could have imagined… More than anything, please know this: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided operational and financial support to the 9/11 hijackers. That is a fact. And, the U.S. government has been covering up that fact for 15 years — even to this very day. And that is a crime.   More

 

JILL STEIN: After US Airstrikes Kill 73 in Syria, It's Time to End Military Assaults that Breed Terrorism

This latest accidental atrocity in Syria ought to be America’s last. How long will it take before our government learns that bombs do not settle problems? How many more innocent civilians must die before our Commander-In-Chief finally realizes these “mistakes” are only making the problem worse? How many more hospitals will be destroyed and medical personnel and patients killed? How many more women and children must be maimed or killed by Hellfire missiles before the US grounds the drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria?  What will a potential President Clinton or Trump do as the War on Terror continues to “come home” to San Bernardino, Beirut, Paris, Istanbul, and Nice? ISIS – a direct outgrowth of the Clinton-supported US invasion and occupation of Iraq – is a force that feeds on the outrage of people on the receiving end of our disastrous, belligerent approach to foreign policy and national security. Clinton’s destruction of Libya added to the chaos by unleashing vast stockpiles of Libyan weapons that then became available to ISIS.   More

 

The Only Way to Challenge ISIS

By refusing to accept the fact that ISIS is only a component of a much larger and disturbing course of violence that is rooted in foreign intervention, is to allow violence everywhere to perpetuate.  Defeating ISIS requires that we also confront and defeat the thinking that led to its inception: to defeat the logic of the George W. Bushes, Tony Blairs and John Howards of this world.  No matter how violent ISIS members or supporters are, it is ultimately a group of angry, alienated, radicalized young men seeking to alter their desperate situation by carrying out despicable acts of vengeance, even if it means ending their lives in the process. Bombing ISIS camps may destroy some of their military facilities but it will not eradicate the very idea that allowed them to recruit thousands of young men all over the world.  They are the product of violent thinking that was spawned, not only in the Middle East but, initially, in various western capitals.   More

 

US-Led Airstrikes Kill as Many Civilians as Nice Attack--but Get No Front-Page Headlines

A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, the New York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, with the actual stories buried on pages A-16 and A-15, respectively…  By contrast, the Nice attack garnered multiple front-page stories in the New York Times and LA Times, as well as significantly more than 20-word blurbs in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.   More

 

A Third of Nice Truck Attack’s Dead Were Muslim, Group Says

Kawthar Ben Salem, a spokeswoman for the Union of Muslims of the Alpes-Maritimes, said that Muslim funerals were being held for at least 30 of those who died during the Bastille Day attack, including men, women and children.  The Paris prosecutor’s office, which handles terrorism investigations, said on Tuesday that all 84 people killed in the attack had been formally identified, meaning that the number of Muslim fatalities may be even higher. The number of people who were wounded was also raised, to 308 people.   More

 

ISRAEL’S WOLF-CRYING ABOUT IRAN’S BOMB

A year has passed since diplomats from Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; plus Germany) defied conventional wisdom and struck a deal aimed at both preventing Iran from getting the bomb and preventing it from getting bombed.  At the time, the deal’s detractors were apoplectic; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “historic mistake” that would pave the way for Iran to obtain a bomb. But the world has not come to an end. Iran is not the hegemon of the Middle East, Israel can still be found on the map, and Washington and Tehran still define each other as enemies. These days, voices such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, criticize the deal for having changed too little.   More

 

The Arguments Change, but the Effort to Kill the Iran Nuclear Agreement Continues

Despite this record of compliance, efforts to destroy the agreement continue. Those efforts demonstrate that most opposition to the agreement has not been motivated by the ostensible reasons, and most of the actual reasons are not ones that would be satisfied or negated no matter how well and how long Iran conforms with its obligations… That opposition has centered in two overlapping places. One is Republican determination not to let Barack Obama have a major foreign policy success. The other is the objective of the right-wing Israeli government—with everything such an objective customarily implies regarding domestic U.S. politics—to keep Iran permanently ostracized and not to have anyone (especially the United States) do any business with it, and thereby to keep Iran forever as a bête noire that is portrayed as the “real” source of trouble in the Middle East, to continue to use it as a distraction from any other troubles the Israeli government prefers not to talk about, to make sure there will be no competition to Israel as supposedly the only reliable U.S. partner in the Middle East, and to keep a major regional competitor to Israel weak and isolated.    More

 

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ISRAEL, PALESTINE . . . and the U.S.

 

Activists defeat anti-BDS legislation in Massachusetts

An anti-boycott amendment was withdrawn in the Massachusetts senate on 14 July following a campaign by Palestine solidarity groups.  The amendment, which was tacked onto an unrelated economic bill, would have blacklisted individuals and businesses that engage with the Palestinian-led boycott of Israel.  Amendment 133 was withdrawn within just a few hours of being proposed by Massachusetts State Senator Cynthia Creem.  These bills are part of a growing wave of legislation promoted by state and federal lawmakers – and encouraged by Israel lobby groups and the Israeli government – to suppress activism related to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign.  Leading civil liberties groups and legal organizations have condemned such legislation as violating constitutionally protected rights of free speech and freedom of association.   More

 

And, unusually,  it was noted in the Mainstream Media:

 

LAWMAKERS PAUSE ON ANTI-BOYCOTT BILL FOR ISRAEL

Those free trips that lawmakers have been taking to Israel — paid for by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, a pro-Israeli lobbying group - are still haunting Beacon Hill.  In both the state House and the Senate, two lawmaker offered — then quietly withdrew — amendments to the nearly $1 billion economic development bill last week that would crack down on companies which participate in boycotts of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians… JCRC, a registered lobbying group which has pushed the anti-boycott issue on Beacon Hill, has over the years squired state lawmakers for 10-day trips to Israel, paying any where between $4,000 to $6,000 for each member. Last December, 10 state senators participated in the tour, and the year before, a House contingent was treated to a similar junket.  Even Attorney General Maura Healey, whose office could be drawn in to adjudicate the legal issues of the debate, took a free trip this Spring — funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American-Israel Friendship League.  That has raised the ire of peace activists who have called on the State Ethics Commission to crack down on what they see as a serious conflict of interest.  More

 

TELL CONGRESS: Oppose 'Combating BDS Act of 2016'

As of yesterday, 29 Senators and 90 Representatives had supported this outlandish legislation. Click here to see if your Members of Congress have cosponsored this bill.  This bill would “authorize” state and local governments to unconstitutionally penalize entities such as nonprofit organizations and corporations for supporting the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).  The Supreme Court has long held that boycotts and related activities to bring about political, social, and economic change are political speech, occupying “the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.” As the Harvard Law Review recently concluded, “Supreme Court precedents make clear that attempts to disqualify contractors for support of BDS are foreclosed by the First Amendment.”  Even though this bill might be unconstitutional, we still need to organize to oppose it. This legislation is designed to further encourage a country-wide effort by the Israel lobby to try to suppress BDS activism at the state and local level.  Check out the RightToBoycott website we recently launched with member groups Palestine Legal and Jewish Voice for Peace. Find out if anti-BDS legislation has been introduced in your state and get the legal and organizing resources you need to mobilize to challenge it.  Contact your Member of Congress today!

There are 89 co-sponsors in the House – so far including NONE from Mass;  28 co-sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Markey, but not Sen. Warren.

 

The coming battle over Israel in US presidential race

US-Israel policy has increasingly become a contentious and partisan issue. This is a product of two things; the confluence of a right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu with a Democratic Obama administration, and value-based voters' growing rejection of the apartheid reality on the ground, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea…  while the progressive base of Hillary Clinton's democratic party are pushing for more evenhanded policy on Israel, Clinton herself has given every indication she will move in the other direction.  This shift is likely to set up a battle in Democratic politics over the relationship with Israel. The future of the party - those under the age of 45 - have a strikingly different view of the situation than its older leadership. In this sense, Clinton is a leader of the party's past, pushing policies that will create tension with the party's future.  Clinton has already committed to inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House in her first month in office.  Netanyahu, likely to still be the Prime Minister at the time barring a dramatic shift in Israeli politics, may well arrive in Washington alongside the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convening that takes place every spring.   More

 

 

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OTHER EVENTS

 

 

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CONTACTING DPP and Joining Our Work:

 

To make it easier to get involved with DPP, we've decided to publish contact info for our coordinators in every issue of this update. We will also regularly publish upcoming meetings of work committees, create a brochure or flyer about DPP, and greet new people at monthly meetings with an explanation of how we work. Here's how to reach them.

 

Facilitation Team:

Sydney Miller       sydsail@gmail.com

Alison Gottlieb:    asgottlieb1@gmail.com

Rosemary Keane  rosemarykean@yahoo.com

 

 

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JULY 22, 2016

The Big Boom: Nukes And NATO

by CONN HALLINAN

• 

“Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

-William J. Perry, U.S. Sec. Of Defense (1994-97)

Perry has been an inside player in the business of nuclear weapons for over 60 years and his book, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” is a sober read. It is also a powerful counterpoint to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) current European strategy that envisions nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war:  “Their [nuclear weapons] role is to prevent major war, not to wage wars,” argues the Alliance’s magazine, NATO Review.

But, as Perry points out, it is only by chance that the world has avoided a nuclear war—sometimes by nothing more than dumb luck—and, rather than enhancing our security, nukes “now endanger it.”

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is generally represented as a dangerous standoff resolved by sober diplomacy. In fact, it was a single man—Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov—who countermanded orders to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer that could have set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the USSR and the U.S.

There were numerous other incidents that brought the world to the brink. On a quiet morning in November 1979, a NORAD computer reported a full-scale Russian sneak attack with land and sea-based missiles, which led to scrambling U.S. bombers and alerting U.S. missile silos to prepare to launch. There was no attack, just an errant test tape.

Lest anyone think the Nov. 9 incident was an anomaly, a little more than six months later NORAD computers announced that Soviet submarines had launched 220 missiles at the U.S.—this time the cause was a defective chip that cost 49 cents—again resulting in scrambling interceptors and putting the silos on alert.

But don’t these examples prove that accidental nuclear war is unlikely? That conclusion is a dangerous illusion, argues Perry, because the price of being mistaken is so high and because the world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1980.

It is 71 years since atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and humanity’s memory of those events has dimmed. But even were the entire world to read John Hersey’sHiroshima, it would have little idea of what we face today.

The bombs that obliterated those cities were tiny by today’s standards, and comparing “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”—the incongruous names of the weapons that leveled both cities—to modern weapons stretches any analogy beyond the breaking point. If the Hiroshima bomb represented approximately 27 freight cars filled with TNT, a one-megaton warhead would require a train 300 miles long.

Each Russian RS-20V Voevoda intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) packs 10 megatons.

What has made today’s world more dangerous, however, is not just advances in the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but a series of actions by the last three U.S. administrations.

First was the decision by President Bill Clinton to abrogate a 1990 agreement with the Soviet Union not to push NATO further east after the reunification of Germany or to recruit former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact.

NATO has also reneged on a 1997 pledge not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Warsaw Pact countries. This month NATO decided to deploy four battalions on, or near, the Russian border, arguing that since the units will be rotated they are not “permanent” and are not large enough to be “significant.” It is a linguistic slight of hand that does not amuse Moscow.

Second was the 1999 U.S.-NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil war and the forcible dismemberment of Serbia. It is somewhat ironic that Russia is currently accused of using force to “redraw borders in Europe” by annexing the Crimea, which is exactly what NATO did to create Kosovo. The U.S. subsequently built Camp Bond Steel, Washington’s largest base in the Balkans.

Third was President George W, Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the decision by the Obama administration to deploy anti-missile systems in Romania and Poland, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Last is the decision by the White House to spend upwards of $1 trillion upgrading its nuclear weapons arsenal, which includes building bombs with smaller yields, a move that many critics argue blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

The Yugoslav War and NATO’s move east convinced Moscow that the Alliance was surrounding Russia with potential adversaries, and the deployment of anti-missile systems (ABM)—supposedly aimed at Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons—was seen as a threat to the Russian’s nuclear missile force.

One immediate effect of ABMs was to chill the possibility of further cuts in the number of nuclear weapons. When Obama proposed another round of warhead reductions, the Russians turned it down cold, citing the anti-missile systems as the reason. “How can we take seriously this idea about cuts in strategic nuclear potential while the United States is developing its capabilities to intercept Russian missiles?” asked Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

When the U.S. helped engineer the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, it ignited the current crisis that has led to several dangerous incidents between Russian and NATO forces—at last count, according to the European Leadership Network, more than 60. Several large war games were also held on Moscow’s borders. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev went so far as to accuse NATO of  “preparations for switching from a cold war to a hot war.”

In response, the Russians have also held war games involving up to 80,000 troops.

It is unlikely that NATO intends to attack Russia, but the power differential between the U.S. and Russia is so great—a “colossal asymmetry,” Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times—that the Russians have abandoned their “no first use” of nuclear weapons pledge.

It the lack of clear lines that make the current situation so fraught with danger. While the Russians have said they would consider using small,tactical nukes if “the very existence of the state” was threatened by an attack, NATO is being deliberately opaque about its possible tripwires. According to NATO Review, nuclear “exercises should involve not only nuclear weapons states…but other non-nuclear allies,” and “to put the burden of the doubt on potential adversaries, exercises should not point at any specific nuclear thresholds.”

In short, keep the Russians guessing. The immediate problem with such a strategy is: what if Moscow guesses wrong?

That won’t be hard to do. The U.S. is developing a long-range cruise missile—as are the Russians—that can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. But how will an adversary know which is which? And given the old rule in nuclear warfare—use ‘em, or lose ‘em—uncertainty is the last thing one wants to engender in a nuclear-armed foe.

Indeed, the idea of no “specific nuclear thresholds” is one of the most extraordinarily dangerous and destabilizing concepts to come along since the invention of nuclear weapons.

There is no evidence that Russia contemplates an attack on the Baltic states or countries like Poland, and, given the enormous power of the U.S., such an undertaking would court national suicide.

Moscow’s “aggression” against Georgia and Ukraine was provoked. Georgia attacked Russia, not vice versa, and the Ukraine coup torpedoed a peace deal negotiated by the European Union, the U.S., and Russia. Imagine Washington’s view of a Moscow-supported coup in Mexico, followed by an influx of Russian weapons and trainers.

In a memorandum to the recent NATO meetings in Warsaw, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity argued “There is not one scintilla of evidence of any Russian plan to annex Crimea before the coup in Kiev and coup leaders began talking about joining NATO. If senior NATO leaders continue to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between cause and effect, increasing tension is inevitable with potentially disastrous results.”

The organization of former intelligence analysts also sharply condemned the NATO war games. “We shake our heads in disbelief when we see Western leaders seemingly oblivious to what it means to the Russians to witness exercises on a scale not seen since Hitler’s army launched ‘Unternehumen Barbarossa’ 75 years ago, leaving 25 million Soviet citizens dead.”

While the NATO meetings in Warsaw agreed to continue economic sanctions aimed at Russia for another six months and to station four battalions of troops in Poland and the Baltic states— separate U.S. forces will be deployed in Bulgaria and Poland  —there was an undercurrent of dissent. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for deescalating the tensions with Russia and for considering Russian President Vladimir Putin a partner not an enemy.

Greece was not alone. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeler called NATO maneuvers on the Russian border “warmongering” and “saber rattling.” French President Francois Hollande said Putin should be considered a “partner,” not a “threat,” and France tried to reduce the number of troops being deployed in the Baltic and Poland. Italy has been increasingly critical of the sanctions.

Rather than recognizing the growing discomfort of a number of NATO allies and that beefing up forces on Russia’s borders might be destabilizing, U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently inked defense agreements with Georgia and Ukraine.

After disappearing from the radar for several decades, nukes are back, and the decision to modernize the U.S. arsenal will almost certainly kick off a nuclear arms race with Russia and China.  Russia is already replacing its current ICBM force with the more powerful and long range “Sarmat” ICBM, and China is loading its ICBM with multiple warheads.

Add to this volatile mixture military maneuvers and a deliberately opaque policy in regards to the use of nuclear weapons, and it is no wonder that Perry thinks that the chances of some catastrophe is a growing possibility.

Join the debate on Facebook

--

Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action - state's largest grassroots peace organization

11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

617-354-2169 w

617-466-9274 m

www.masspeaceaction.org

Facebook: facebook.com/masspeaceaction

Twitter: masspeaceaction

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Could Hillary Be Any Worse? Sure, Add Tim Kaine to the Ticket

Could Hillary Be Any Worse? Sure, Add Tim Kaine to the Ticket By David Swansonhttp://davidswanson.org/node/5225 Tim Kaine has been consistently ranked as one of the least progressive Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Adding him to the Hillary Clinton ticket would be a kick in the face to Bernie Sanders supporters holding out hopeless hope for some sign of democracy within the Democratic Party. Kaine was an anti-environmentalist pro-coal governor of Virginia, a supporter of the "right to work" (for less) law restricting union organizing in Virginia, and he is a supporter of corporate trade agreements including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and including fast-tracking the TPP. An extremely loyal Democrat, he nonetheless criticized Democrats in 2011 for proposing higher taxes on millionaires. Kaine is the anti-Bernie Sanders on policy and on process. He takes his direction from those in power, not from the public. In a poll of over 250 Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention (by the Bernie Delegate Network), only 2.7% of them said they thought Kaine would be an acceptable vice presidential nominee. The bulk of what the U.S. government does, financially and in terms of work hours, is wage wars and move troops and weapons around the world. That whole topic, and even the existence of 96% of humanity, is largely absent from election campaigns. Yet war may be the one spot where people hunt for something more progressive than Hillary Clinton in Kaine's record. Kaine supported a nuclear agreement with Iran, a diplomatic breakthrough arguably made possible by the departure of supreme militarist Clinton from the State Department. But Kaine backed President Barack Obama on that, as on everything else. To imagine that Kaine has challenged presidential war powers is to misread another part of his record. Together with Senator John McCain, Kaine introduced the War Powers Consultation Act of 2014, which some falsely imagined to be a bill to strengthen Congressional war powers. It was not. The Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress. The War Powers Resolution requires a president who launches a war on his/her own to notify Congress within 48 hours and to end it within 60 days unless Congress authorizes it. The McCain/Kaine bill would repeal the War Powers Resolution, turn Congress into a toothless consulting firm, and arrange for a vote without consequences on "approval" of each war within 30 days of its start. Only if Congress voted down "approval" would it vote on "disapproval." And if it passed "disapproval," nothing would follow from that. This amounts to nothing less than unconstitutionally bestowing the power to make war on the president. The idea behind this "reform" is to take a Congress fully committed to allowing and funding every war, and compel it to also formally express its approval, thus strengthening the president's position. Kaine has thus pushed for a Congressional vote, a Yes vote, on authorizing a war on ISIS. He's expressed his view that President Obama lacks authorization. But Kaine has not put a hold on funding bills, has not forced a vote under the War Powers Resolution, has not introduced legislation to deny funding, has not introduced censure or suggested impeachment. He does not object to Obama's wars, he just wants Congress to clearly and publicly back them, so that the president is not the only one sticking his neck out. Kaine has proposed authorizing air strikes but not ground troops, or at least he did before there were so many ground troops involved. And he's expressed awareness that some measures can be counterproductive. But his top commitment, followed most consistently, has been loyalty to the Obama White House. A shift to loyal obedience to a Clinton White House would not require much of Tim Kaine. He might have a few more wars to urge Congress to support, but it seems unlikely Kaine would deem that much of an inconvenience. -- David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Help support DavidSwanson.org, WarIsACrime.org, and TalkNationRadio.org by clicking here: http://davidswanson.org/donate. Sign up for these emails at https://actionnetwork.org/forms/articles-from-david-swanson.

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Monthly Review

Volume 68, Issue 02 (June 2016)

Vietnam and the Soldiers’ Revolt

The Politics of a Forgotten History

by Derek Seidman

Derek Seidman is an assistant professor of history at D’Youville College in Buffalo. He is writing a book about the history of GI protest during the Vietnam War.

This article is part of an MR series on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

It has been nearly fifty years since the height of the Vietnam War—or, as it is known in Vietnam, the American War—and yet its memory continues to loom large over U.S. politics, culture, and foreign policy. The battle to define the war’s lessons and legacies has been a proxy for larger clashes over domestic politics, national identity, and U.S. global power. One of its most debated areas has been the mass antiwar movement that achieved its greatest heights in the United States but also operated globally. Within this, and for the antiwar left especially, a major point of interest has been the history of soldier protest during the war. This interest grew with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when both dissident soldiers and antiwar civilians looked back to the legacy of Vietnam-era GI resistance as a usable history to help oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Cortright’s classic 1975 account of troop resistance, Soldiers in Revolt, was republished in 2005, and that same year, the documentary film Sir! No Sir! helped to popularize the hidden history of active-duty soldier protest.

Activists looked back to this history for good reason. It was an exciting front within the broader antiwar movement, one that bucked conventional wisdom. Soldiers, such potent symbols of U.S. patriotism, turned their guns around—metaphorically, but also, at times, literally—during a time of war. Thousands of troops protested, petitioned, dissented, disobeyed, and deserted. Antiwar soldiers were strategically important, bestowing a special kind of legitimacy and authority on the peace movement. There was also a more concrete dream: that antiwar GIs, stationed literally at the war’s point of production, had a unique capacity to end it.

Fascinating in itself, the story of Vietnam-era GI protest also serves as a weapon in the ongoing battle over the memory of the Vietnam War. If war is politics by other means, the same could be said about memory and narrative of historical events. The battle to shape our accepted understanding of the past—the stories we recall, the icons and symbols we think of—is deeply linked to political interests.

All sides have attempted to define the collective memory of the Vietnam War in ways that advance their current visions for global and domestic politics and superimpose them on the past. Think, for example, of the persistence of the “spit upon” or “baby killer” myths, or the claim that the antiwar movement “stabbed” soldiers “in the back” (even many of my students, born decades later, say these are the first things they think about when they hear “Vietnam War”).1 The continued influence of these myths has helped prop up consent for militarism at home and abroad. The story of GI protest during the war is an important counter to the conventional story, for it hits at the heart of some of the most emotive symbols in these political battles: the soldiers. It offers grounding for an alternative politics from the antiwar left. It is history worth knowing.

Context

Three larger factors combined to create the context for the rise of Vietnam-era GI protest. The first was the nature of the Vietnam War itself. It was widely unpopular within U.S. society, and this sentiment stretched into the military’s ranks and intensified as the war went on. In Vietnam, the war was deeply disorienting: troops faced harsh natural elements and guerrilla-style tactics, and they often could not distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Few knew why they were fighting; once they arrived in-country, the Cold War rationale for the war felt like a vapid abstraction. The “body count” strategy seemed perverse, and military victories brought no political headway. As the war went on, few wanted to be, as the saying went, the last soldier to die for a mistake. This attitude reverberated beyond combat roles and throughout the whole military.

Second was the conflict between the institutional culture of the Cold War military and lower-ranking soldiers. The military’s conservative, traditionalist norms clashed with the sensibilities of many GIs of the era. Despite formal desegregation, racism was prevalent, with a white-dominated officer corps and pervasive prejudice against blacks. The system of military justice restricted troops’ civil liberties and placed arbitrary power in the hands of higher-ups. In Vietnam, many soldiers felt they were used as pawns by commanders who sent them into dangerous battles to advance their own careers. And with all this, the military was fed by the draft, which coerced two-thirds of all combat troops, mostly poor and working-class youth, into battle.2

Third was the mass appeal of protest politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were years of global insurgency, when millions embraced the spirit of rebellion. The polarization around the war deepened and sank into the consciousness of many troops heading to Vietnam. As two journalists put it, the late-Vietnam era soldier had “seen antiwar sentiment grow into a unifying force for his generation” and come to identify with it instead of the “dispirited remnant of America’s Southeast Asia fighting machine.”3 Three movements were particularly important in shaping GI protest: the antiwar movement, Black Power, and the counterculture. These galvanized many soldiers, offering radical critiques and a language of protest that they brought into the ranks.

Beginnings

The first acts of active-duty GI protest broke out in 1965 and 1966. They were isolated and individualistic, reflecting the infant stage of the broader antiwar movement, as well as the early years of U.S. escalation in Vietnam. But they pioneered a set of aims and tactics that would shape the larger wave of protest to come. Equally important, they emboldened other soldiers and compelled the civilian antiwar left to provide solidarity and material support that would enable the rise of a full-fledged GI movement.

In November 1965, Lieutenant Henry Howe, who was stationed at Fort Bliss, was arrested after attending an antiwar demonstration in El Paso, Texas. Howe was in civilian dress and carried a sign calling President Lyndon Johnson a fascist. The antiwar movement soon organized the “Freedom Now for Lieutenant Howe Committee,” and the ACLU came to his aid. Convicted and jailed for “conduct unbecoming an officer” and “contemptuous words against the President,” Howe became the antiwar movement’s first GI cause célèbre. Others soon followed, including Captain Howard Levy, a dermatologist who refused to train Green Berets headed for Vietnam, and the Fort Hood 3, a trio of young privates who refused shipment to Vietnam. The Fort Hood 3 made the biggest splash yet, sparking New York City’s antiwar left into a defense campaign that signaled the beginning of a civilian-GI alliance. One of the three was in the orbit of the Communist Party, previewing a trend of left involvement in soldier organizing.

By the end of 1966, cases like these had developed an initial set of protest tactics and an agenda for GI dissent that pivoted around civil liberties, racism, and, above all, the war. Others soon built upon these. In 1966 and 1967, Private Andy Stapp organized a group at Fort Sill, Kansas, that became the American Servicemen’s Union (ASU). The ASU framed GIs as the military’s working class and aimed to unionize them along radical, anti-imperialist lines. The group’s eight-point program included demands for “An End to the Saluting and Sir-ing of Officers” and “Rank-and-File Control over Court-Martial Boards.” The ASU was the first organized expression of a lower-ranking GI class politics, and they even garnered a cover story in Esquire.4 Around the same time, the Black Power movement emerged within the ranks. In July 1967, William Harvey and George Daniels, two black marines from Brooklyn, organized a rap session with fellow troops, where they declared that black men had no place fighting a “white man’s war” in Vietnam. The soldiers were court-martialed for “promoting disloyalty” and dealt long prison terms. The prosecutor claimed that Harvey and Daniels created “an extraordinarily dangerous situation” by urging black marines to “stick together” in refusing to go to Vietnam.5 The ASU and Harvey and Daniels drew support from the antiwar movement and politicized other troops. Taken together, these cases of dissent from 1965 to 1967 prepared the way for the larger GI movement.

Up to this time, antiwar activists mostly considered GIs moral symbols whose presence in the movement could help disarm opponents. Yet they also genuinely sympathized with soldiers, viewing them as working-class victims of an unjust war. Throughout its early years, the antiwar movement sought out veterans to speak at rallies and promoted slogans like “Support the G.I.s: Bring Them Home Now!” But the bulk of the civilian movement did not initially see soldiers as a group to be organized. “The idea of looking to GIs as part of the antiwar constituency was considered bizarre at that time by most of the movement,” wrote antiwar leader Fred Halstead.6

By 1968, however, things had changed. The rising examples of GI protest showed antiwar activists that soldiers could be much more than moral props or objects of sympathy; they could be agents for peace in their own right—a major, dynamic constituency of the antiwar movement. They did need to be organized; indeed, they were already organizing themselves. Moreover, both sides needed each other. The civilian movement created a larger atmosphere for troop resistance and could provide moral and material support. GIs offered the civilian movement a new kind of legitimacy, as well as a strategic front that struck at the heart of the war machine. And by the end of 1967, both sides were building a tighter relationship through common work in urban hubs located near military bases. In San Francisco, for example, a blossoming relationship between antiwar GIs and civilians produced new breakthroughs in creative tactics and solidarity efforts. Perhaps most famously, the October 1968 Presidio Mutiny that involved 27 troops showed the potential for collective GI resistance. Such local developments in the Bay Area would soon go national and even global.

The GI Movement

All of this set the stage for the rise of the GI movement in 1968. The GI movement was a collective effort by soldiers, veterans, and civilian activists to build dissent within the military during the war’s last half-decade. It was united by the common goals of organizing troops, ending the war, fighting racism, and defending troop civil liberties. Most organizing with the GI movement was local, shaped by the conditions soldiers confronted. The different parts of the movement, however, were knitted together through common narratives, symbols, and tactics. The GI movement grabbed media headlines and generated alarm from the military brass. It would be the first time in U.S. history that a mass antiwar movement tried to organize within the military in a sustained way, imagining soldiers as a core constituency for a radical mission of ending the war and re-envisioning foreign policy.

Two organizing breakthroughs in 1968 were crucial to the rise of the GI movement. The first was the rise of GI antiwar coffeehouses. Civilian activists established these venues near military bases to attract and politicize GIs and give them an alternative, countercultural space to gather. These coffeehouses served as centers for local antiwar organizing and helped build solidarity between GIs and civilian activists. The first coffeehouse, called the UFO, opened its doors in early 1968 in Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson, the army’s largest basic training installation. The UFO was the brainchild of Fred Gardner, an antiwar activist from the Bay Area. Gardner believed that the army “was filling up with people who would rather be making love to the music of Jimi Hendrix than war to the lies of Lyndon Johnson.”7 The UFO aimed to attract these soldiers, and it did so by the hundreds. The example of the UFO inspired others, and coffeehouses quickly spread across the United States and beyond. They soon became targets of repression, sometimes violent attacks, but not before they made an impact in spreading the GI movement.

The second breakthrough was the birth of the GI underground press. These were antiwar newspapers aimed at soldiers that circulated widely throughout the Vietnam-era military. The first GI paper, Vietnam GI, appeared in late 1967, edited by a Vietnam veteran named Jeff Sharlet, and dozens of other papers soon followed. Their titles mocked the military— The Last Harass, A Four Year Bummer, Kill for Peace—and their pages contained uncensored news about the war, heroic reports of GI protest, satiric cartoons that bashed military authority, information on legal help, and letters written by soldiers. More importantly, the production and circulation of the papers provided a common project for dissident soldiers and their allies across the world. Organizers for the GI movement distributed the papers deep into the ranks, and thousands of troops were exposed to their antiwar message. Through the GI press, troops stationed from Europe to Japan and from the United States to Vietnam could plug into the global effort to build soldier opposition to the war.8

With the first coffeehouses and GI papers came a host of new soldier organizations. Scores of dissident troops joined newly formed groups like GIs for Peace at Fort Bliss, GIs United Against the War in Vietnam at Fort Jackson and Fort Bragg, and the Concerned Officers Movement. These organizations engaged in a range of activities, from petitioning and protesting on bases to mobilizing turnout for regional demonstrations. They inevitably faced harassment and punishment, but they used this to build defense campaigns that attracted media attention and popularized soldier protest.

A burgeoning network of civilian support was also central to defending GIs against repression and expanding the GI movement. Campaigns like 1968’s “Summer of Support” and groups like the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace and the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF) spread the word about GI resistance and provided valuable solidarity, from organizers on the ground to material aid. The USSF raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that it distributed to local projects. Organizations like the Pacific Counseling Center and the GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee provided top-notch movement lawyers to defend dozens of antiwar soldiers. All this contradicts the myth of an antiwar movement that hated the troops. In fact, by working together in solidarity, GIs and civilian allies made soldier organizing a key front for the antiwar movement by the end of 1968.

The GI movement continued to grow through 1969 and into the early 1970s. Soldier protest became a ubiquitous part of the peace movement, with thousands of troops involved in mass marches, signing petitions, and small-scale direct actions. For example, 1,365 GIs signed a November 1969 full-page New York Times ad against the war. Hundreds, including those stationed in Vietnam, showed their support for the 1969 Moratorium demonstrations. One soldier wrote from Vietnam to report that “59 Marines and 1 corpsman signed our petition for Xmas moratorium and we have more planned for this month.”9 Another GI wrote from Long Binh to say he was “enlisting the support of the soldiers” and included with his a letter a signed petition that was “simply a statement of support for the Vietnam Moratorium.”10

While thousands of soldiers signed petitions like these during the war, others took more immediate measures. A soldier stationed at “Pig Headquarters, Long Binh” described a Memorial Day event at which “several of the ‘lower EM’ [enlisted men] decided to have a war protest parade in the company area.” Because the “folks at home have the privilege of parading in their hard hats and T-shirts,” he explained, “we felt it was appropriate to express sentiments against the war in the same manner.”11

Troops also defended their civil liberties against military authority. The Uniform Code of Military Justice gave commanders arbitrary power to punish dissenters. Soldiers countered military justice with “GI rights,” a broad defense of the constitutional rights of servicemembers to express their opposition to the war, even as they served. Hundreds of soldiers struggled for their free-speech rights, aided by a legal defense network led by some of the nation’s most prominent attorneys. Soldiers in Vietnam invoked the language of rights as they complained of the invasiveness of military authority and its erosion of their morale.

Vietnam was a working-class war, and most of the soldiers who resisted were the rank-and-file troops who bore its greatest burdens. In opposition to the “lifers” up top, soldiers formed groups, even unions, animated by the concerns and consciousness of the lower ranks. The class structure of the military was also deeply racialized. Top commanders were mostly white, while black GIs fought and died in disproportionate numbers and suffered an excessive amount of Article 15s, courts-martial, and other punishments. This racism existed against a backdrop of rising black political radicalism, with figures like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers serving as inspiration for young troops. Black GIs formed anti-imperialist organizations like the Unsatisfied Black Soldiers in West Germany and the Movement for a Democratic Military in California. They refused riot duty, wore African medallions, raised their fists in Black Power salutes, and sometimes spearheaded efforts at interracial GI organizing.

The depth and breadth of soldier dissent is seen most fully in the GI underground press. By the turn of 1970, scores of antiwar papers were circulating among thousands of soldiers throughout the military. Hundreds of troops took it upon themselves to order bundles of these papers and distribute them across the globe. In 1971 several GIs wrote to the Ally from Vietnam: “We, the undersigned…would like as many copies[,] over a hundred [if] possible,” and said the papers would “be distributed between two companies here in Chu Lai.”12 The Ally and other GI papers received hundreds of letters like this, and they offer a glimpse of how troops brought the antiwar press deep into their ranks. Producing, circulating, reading, and writing to GI papers were central unifiers for troop resistance from the United States to Europe and Japan to Vietnam. The pages of these papers contained news and analysis about the war and GI resistance around the world, and through them soldiers saw themselves as part of a wider movement.

In addition to distributing papers as a form of movement-building, GIs wrote them thousands of letters that reveal much about the hidden world of Vietnam-era soldier resistance. These letters captured the antiwar, countercultural politics of many troops, and described the tension on the ground between GIs and higher-ups. A Marine stationed in Chu Lai wrote that he had “a lot of people behind him” when he complained that “the pigs keep fucking with us and pulling their petty shit” because our “hair to [sic] long, mustache not trimed [sic] like Hitler…, living area not clean, for wearing peace medallions or beads…for having a peace symbol in your hooch.”13 Letters also hinted at collective solidarities among GIs. Some described group actions or were signed by multiple troops. Nearly a dozen soldiers signed a 1970 letter from Vietnam that declared: “We have all been fucked in some way by this Army. All of us would like to distribute copies of your paper. Some of us are draftees, the others enlistees, but we all agree that this war is immoral.”14

Meanwhile, coffeehouses and movement centers continued to spread. By 1971, close to two dozen had appeared across the United States, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. These continued to be hubs for organizing and the cultivation of GI-civilian solidarity that resisted the war and the military. Thousands of soldiers visited these establishments. Vibrant communities of resistance from Killeen, Texas, to Mountain Home, Idaho, sustained antiwar protest that brought the peace movement to military bases and towns. Even more, GI protest had gone truly global, with organizing efforts everywhere from West Germany to Japan to England to the Philippines, and even at obscure bases in Iceland, Turkey, and Spain. Soldiers and their allies imagined these local activities as parts of a worldwide GI rebellion.

The U.S. radical left played an important role in the GI movement. Enlisted “GI organizers” connected to civilian radicals fomented troop dissent with an impact that belied their small numbers.15 Politically driven and backed by networks of savvy activists, these troops were a vanguard within the ranks that played a catalyzing role analogous to left-wing CIO militants of the 1930s. Some had links to left groups who provided material aid and ideological motivation. Andy Stapp, for example, was associated with Youth Against War and Fascism; Private Joe Miles, who organized dozens of troops at Fort Jackson to defend GI rights, was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. Radical allies mobilized the “Legal Left” to defend persecuted troops, continuing a tradition of mass defense campaigns that went back to Sacco and Vanzetti. The legacies of the left’s role in the GI movement were mixed: sectarianism, opportunism, turf battles, alienating rhetoric, and patronizing behavior towards troops were all persistent problems. But radical leftists also played an indispensable role in providing political will and tireless organizing efforts.

The breadth and dynamism of the GI movement was displayed on May 15, 1971, when antiwar troops turned the traditional Armed Forces Day into what they called Armed Farces Day. Creative protests involving hundreds of troops occurred at nineteen separate military installations, in some cases forcing commanders to cancel their planned festivities.16 Dissent extended into the Air Force and especially the Navy. In 1971 the “SOS Movement” (Save Our Sailors) spread across the California coast, with hundreds of soldiers and civilians organizing in attempts to prevent the U.S.S. Constellation and Coral Sea from sailing to Vietnam. Throughout all this, the self-activity that fueled the GI movement continued: sailors agitated and conspired below deck; troops staged ad hoc protests in their company areas in Vietnam; African American soldiers held anti-racist rallies in West Germany.

In Vietnam

The GI movement was an organized expression of a much larger reservoir of troop discontent. By the early 1970s, the military in Vietnam was ridden with decentralized rebellion. Many combat troops felt that the unpopular war “wasn’t worth it,” and they saw themselves being used as “pawns” and “bait” in a “lifer’s game” of career advancement. To stay safe and sane, troops developed what Fred Gardner called a “vague survival politics” that responded to the immediate dangers they faced in Vietnam. These tactics became weapons that grunts used to exert bottom-up power to protect their bodies and minds as they waited out the war.17

The starkest form of survival politics was outright refusal of combat orders, but such mutiny was rare. More common were maneuvers to avoid combat without openly risking punishment. Soldiers used the “search-and-evade” tactic, in which they pretended to obey fighting orders while secretly avoiding armed contact. One veteran explained that his unit would “go a hundred yards, find us some heavy foliage, smoke, rap and sack out.”18 Combat avoidance was “virtually a principle of war” by late 1971. Troops also sabotaged military equipment: gears were jammed on ships and fires mysteriously broke out on deck, which prevented embarking to Vietnam.

The most violent form of revolt was “fragging,” or the attempted murder of higher-ups. Nearly 600 instances were reported between 1969 and 1971, though more likely went unreported. Some fragging attempts happened in the field but many occurred in the rear, often because of anger over punishment for drugs or racial tensions. One GI called fragging “the standard response of the Army’s little people” to “any action directed by their superiors that they consider unnecessary harassment.” Actual fraggings could take the form of a grenade explosion or feigned friendly fire, but more important was the widespread knowledge that they could happen. The practice of fragging, said one officer, was “troops’ way of controlling officers,” and it was “deadly effective.”19 While brutal, fraggings grew out of the surreal atmosphere of the war and its normalized violence. They reflected the disintegration of the late Vietnam-era army and the fact that some GIs saw their main conflict with the military rather than the Vietnamese.

Soldiers in Vietnam also waged a cultural rebellion that drew on the symbols and language of the 1960s counterculture. They grew their hair out and wore protest decorations. They etched peace signs and psychedelic art on their Zippo lighters, along with slogans like “Pray for peace and put a Lifer out of a job,” and “We are the unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unfortunate for the ungrateful.” They used drugs to relax and escape the stress of war, and GI “heads” celebrated getting high as a rejection of the war and the army’s authoritarianism. This GI counterculture was also a rank-and-file class culture. The rebellious identities that soldiers asserted were distinctly those of the lower ranks, of the grunts who performed the thankless labor of the war while, as they saw it, uptight lifers sat in air-conditioned buildings barking out orders.

One measure of the depths of GI rebellion is the deep sense of alarm that it generated among military and political elites. Congress devoted hours of hearings in the early 1970s to the investigation of radical subversion in the armed forces. Military intelligence closely monitored the activities of the GI movement, and even General Westmoreland worried about the GI coffeehouses. Army leaders openly lamented the scope of the crisis. Most famously, the celebrated military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl published an article in the June 1971 edition of the Armed Forces Journal titled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” It began with the stunning words: “The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.” Over the next twenty pages, Heinl elaborated in grim detail the breakdown of the military: the disintegration of discipline, the spread of dissent, and the unraveling of morale.20

The media echoed this sense of crisis. “Not since the Civil War,” stated the Washington Post in 1971, “has the Army been so torn by rebellion.” In 1970, Newsweek wrote of “the New GI” who opposed the war, embraced the counterculture, and identified with protest politics. These soldiers were “young antiwar warriors” who “flout[ed] the conventional ‘my-country-right-or-wrong’ military values of yesteryear” and “prefer[ed] pot and peace posters to the beer and pin-ups of their more traditional comrades.” The crisis in the military that these “New GIs” created would soon lead elites to completely overhaul the armed forces.21

Decline

As much as it thrived, the GI movement also faced serious obstacles, and several factors contributed to the decline of soldier resistance in the early 1970s. While many troops sympathized with the antiwar movement, most declined to actively participate. Speaking out was risky, with harassment and punishment, even a dishonorable discharge, awaiting dissidents. Moreover, involvement was unstable even for those that joined the GI movement. The military regularly transferred soldiers, and the grind of service could isolate and wear down individuals. Thousands of soldiers participated or sympathized with antiwar protest, but the finite nature of enlistment—the incentive to suck it up, wait it out, and get out—and the levers of military justice militated against many GIs acting on their beliefs.

Outright repression also hampered the GI movement. Local police and military intelligence closely monitored coffeehouses, and they were targeted with fines, arrests, and even paramilitary violence. Bullets were shot through the Shelter Half in Tacoma; the Covered Wagon in Idaho was firebombed. Soldiers who received and distributed GI papers had their mail read. Protesters were given Article 15 punishments, courts-martial, or thrown into the stockade. GIs knew that association with dissent invited unpleasant consequences.

Left sectarianism also hurt the GI movement. Some coffeehouses were taken over by tiny groups and turned into recruitment operations. Competing sects theorized GIs as the potential vanguard of their hoped-for revolutionary movements. Their dogmatic style limited the reach of local GI movements and created, as one report stated, “an atmosphere that many people can’t relate to.”22 The radical politics of organizers could be an asset, but the tactical errors of some and their often condescending attitude towards soldiers contributed to the failure of a dynamic, sustainable coffeehouse project that could draw on GI self-activity.

Most crucial was the winding down of the war itself in 1972 and 1973. Steady combat troop reduction and the end of the draft stemmed the channeling of social unrest into the ranks. GI organizing efforts continued into the late 1970s, but they were never able to achieve previous levels of success. When the ordeal of the Vietnam War ended, so did the conditions that bred the possibility of a large wave of GI dissent.

Legacies

Nearly a half-century later, what are the legacies of Vietnam-era GI resistance? First, dissident troops helped create a crisis within the military that ultimately contributed to the end of the draft and the war. With the rise of the All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s and 1980s, elites overhauled the military for a post-Vietnam, neoliberal era. It is also worth noting that protest by black GIs during the Vietnam War catalyzed substantial reforms within the armed forces to integrate the higher ranks and deal the final death blow to the Jim Crow army.

Second, Vietnam left a model of resistance for later generations. Since 2003, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been inspired by the example of the GI movement. They have linked up with Vietnam-era movement veterans and borrowed many of their tactics, from public testimony and agitprop actions to coffeehouses and antiwar papers. The precedent of Vietnam-era GI resistance and the preservation of its memory helped pave the way for the current era of troop dissent.

Third, the history of the GI movement debunks the widespread trope of a civilian peace movement that hated U.S. troops. This has long been the most potent myth aimed at discrediting the antiwar left and inciting support for militarist ventures. It is important to remember that the antiwar movement’s orientation towards Vietnam-era GIs was mostly one of sympathy and solidarity. Antiwar activists saw troops as exploited by a deceptive political class and a draft rigged by class and race. They sought to help them and organize them to defend their rights and end the war. Many troops saw the antiwar movement, not the war’s backers, as their biggest ally. As one soldier put it in a letter: “We troops here in Vietnam are against the war and the demonstrations in the states do not hurt our morale. We are very glad to see someone cares and is working to bring us home.”23

This brings us to a final point. Hegemonic “common sense” rests in part on political constructions of historical memory and popular icons. The soldier is a powerful cultural figure that has been defined by a linkage between knee-jerk support for “the troops” and uncritical support for war-making, military spending, and an emotional investment in a culture of militarism. The historical erasure of soldier protest has aided both conservative reaction and liberal militarism in marginalizing left dissent and simplistically pitting middle-class protesters against working-class troops.24 The history of Vietnam-era GI resistance is a vital counter-memory that reminds us that many troops were not against protesters, but that they were the protesters; that the civilian antiwar movement didn’t spit at soldiers but rather oriented towards them with sympathy and solidarity; that thousands of working-class troops stood for peace over war and militarism; and that it was the war and the military, not antiwar protesters, that demoralized many GIs fighting in Vietnam. This is important history to remember if the left is to challenge the dominant myths that continue to underpin a culture of military aggression.

Notes

1. On the spit-upon veteran myth and other tropes used to discredit the antiwar movement and the left, see Jeremy Lembcke’sThe Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam(New York: NYU Press, 2000) and H. Bruce Franklin’sVietnam and Other American Fantasies(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
2. See Christian Appy’sWorking-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), chapter 1.
3. Haynes Johnson and George C. Wilson,Army in Anguish (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 73.
4. Andy Stapp,Up Against the Brass (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and “Exclusive!: The Plot to Unionize the U.S. Army,”Esquire, August 1968.
5. “Two Marines Test Right of Dissent,”New York Times, March 7, 1969.
6. Fred Halstead,Out Now!: A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War(New York: Monad, 1978), 173.
7. Fred Gardner, “Hollywood Confidential: Part I,” in Viet Nam Generation Journal Online 3, no. 3.
8. For more on the GI underground press, see Derek Seidman, “Paper Soldiers: The Ally and the GI Underground Press” inProtest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
9. S.R. to theAlly, February 7, 1970, Box 2 Folder 6, Clark Smith Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society [WHS].
10. Long Binh Post, October 28, 1969, Vietnam, Vietnam Moratorium Committee Records, Box 1 Folder 7, WHS.
11. Sp4 “Getting Short and Getting Out” to theAlly, n.d., Box 2 Folder 1, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
12. R.M, S. C. K., and F.J.H. to theAlly, January 3, 1971, Box 2 Folder 6, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
13. The Gremlin to theAlly, n.d., Box 2 Folder 5, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
14. 86th Maint. BT to theAlly, June 20, 1970, Box 2 Folder 3, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
15. “GI Organizer” was a term used by Lawrence Radine inThe Taming of the Troops: Modernizations in Social Control in the U.S. Army (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974), chapter 1.
16. David Cortright,Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance during the Vietnam War(Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 82–83.
17. Fred Gardner, “War and GI Morale,”New York Times, November 21, 1970, 31.
18. “The Troubled U.S. Army in Vietnam,”Newsweek, January 11, 1971.
19. “Fragging and Other Symptoms of Withdrawal,”Saturday Review, January 8,1972.
20. Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,”Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971.
21. “Army Seldom So Torn By Rebellion,”Washington Post, February 10, 1971; “The New GI: For Pot and Peace,”Newsweek, February 2, 1970, 24.
22. “Report From the Fort Bragg Collective (Haymarket Square Coffeehouse),” Box 1, Folder “Project Description (Internal),” David Cortright Collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
23. “Dear People”, October 23, 1969, Student Mobilization Committee Collection, Box 2 Folder 6, WHS.
24. On the construction of the middle class protesters versus working class pro-war troops trope, see Penny Lewis,Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement As Myth and Memory (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013). I borrow the term “countermemory” from Lewis.