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.

Out In The Be-Bop 2000s Night- A Class Website Of One's Own, For The Class Of 1964 Wherever You Are

Out In The Be-Bop 2000s Night- A Class Website Of One's Own, For The Class Of 1964 Wherever You Are

By Bart Webber

 

North Adamsville (Ma) Class Of 1964, comment:

Although these blog sites that I have been involved in through the good offices of my friend Sam Lowell who taught me the best he could since neither of us are “techies” and blogs that I contribute tend to reflect old time, be-bop night, hard times, beat times, beat down times, beat down, beatified schoolboy concerns and memories I am not adverse to coming into the new millennium to try, try hard by the way, to deal with the implication of the new technologies like the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  and whatever comes up next as the “new” mode of so-called social networking in order to get that “message” out. That said, I was surfing one such social networking site (okay, okay I won’t be coy Facebook) looking at the class message boards of the classes at North Adamsville just before and after my class, the Class of 1964, and found that Rodger Goldman had made an announcement that the Class of 1965 has its own website hosted by its own webmaster. Correct me if I am wrong but didn't the Class of 1964 have several members who went to MIT or other scientific or technically- oriented schools who could take on such a task?

Actually, these days doesn't someone have an eight-year-old grandchild who could serve in that Webmaster capacity? In either case, isn't there someone who can take on this chore so that we get to see all the photos of children and grandchildren, the family dogs and cats, the aging children of the Class of 1964, and whatever else cyberspace will accept. I am on a crusade, fellow classmates.

Now I have not always been a techie fan. In fact in the past I have been something of a technological Luddite (if you do not know who a Luddite is go to Wikipedia but if you don’t have time that started when English home weavers trashed, or tried to, the new industrial spinners in the early 1800s at the front end of the Industrial Revolution. Maybe they were right or wrong but they were swamped by history and efficiency). During most of my life I have consciously kept a few too many steps behind the latest technology, at times from a political prospective and at others from a desire not to get too much clutter in my space. Now, however, although cyberspace has not brought us the “golden age of the global community,” far from it, that I have long hankered for, it does permit those of us from the Class of 1964 to take a stroll down memory lane.

I know there is someone out there who, with evil intent in his or her heart, someone like Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king hell king of the be-bop early 1960s schoolboy night, says " Well, why doesn't old Bart Webber take on this task?" Fair enough. However, as this is a confessional age, I must come clean here. While I appreciate and can certainly use the Internet when the deal goes down and I get into technological trouble or have to upgrade, etc. I must call in my "significant other" to rescues me. When I say,” Cindy, the #*& computer just went kaput” she comes to the rescue. Moreover, if the truth were known I also still use a CD player when I go for my walks. In the age of the iPod how yesterday, right? I, however, would be more than happy to write a little something for our website. But we need a Webmaster extraordinaire to get us up and running. And I know it will not be old Frankie and his progeny because, king of the night he might have been but he was (and is) a techno-no. His thing was pitter-patter, and girls. Where is there room for techno-competence in that world? So, as this is also an age that is addicted to sports metaphors- who will step up to the plate?

*****Present At The Creation-The Penguins’ Earth Angel (1955)

*****Present At The Creation-The Penguins’ Earth Angel (1955)

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Deep in the dark red scare Cold War night, still brewing then even after Uncle Joe fell down in his Red Square drunken stupor spilling potato-etched Vodka all over the Central Committee, the Politburo, or his raggedy-ass cronies who were to pick up the pieces after he breathed his last, one night and never came back, so yeah still brewing after Uncle Joe kissed off in his vast red earth, still brewing as a child remembered in dark back of school dreams about Soviet nightmares, worried about the whether those heathens (later to find out that Miss Todd who first made him and his classmates aware of the scorched red earth menace had been wrong that they were atheists not heathen, a very different thing, but she wanted to make us think they were in need of some high Catholic missionary work and so heathen)under Uncle Joe wondering how the Russkie kids got through it, and still brewing too when Miss Winot in her pristine glory told each and every one of her fourth grade charges, us, that come that Russkie madness, come the Apocalypse, come the big bad ass mega-bombs that each and every one of her charges shall come that thundering god-awful air raid siren call duck, quickly and quietly, under his or her desk and then place his or his hands, also quickly and quietly, one over the other on the top of his or her head, a small breeze was coming to the land (of course being pristine and proper she did not dig down deep to titillate us with such terms as “big bad ass” but let’s face it that is what she meant, and maybe in the teachers' room or some night out in the moonless moors she sued such terms you never know).

Maybe nobody saw it coming although the more I think about the matter somebody, some bodies knew something, not those supposedly in the know about such times, those who are supposed to catch the breezes before they move beyond their power to curtail them, guys in the government who keep an eagle eye on such things, or professors endlessly prattling on about some idea about what the muck of society has turned into due to their not catching that breeze that was coming across their faces like some North wind. 

No those guys, no way they are usually good at the wrap-up. The what it all meant par after the furies were over. Here is what I am talking about when I talk about guys who know what to know, and how to play it to their advantages. Take guys like my older brother Franklin and his friends, Benny, sometimes called "the Knife" and Jimmy, who was called just Jimmy, who were playing some be-bop  stuff up in his room. Ma refused to let Franklin play his songs on the family record player down center stage in the living room or flip the dial on the kitchen radio away from her tunes of the roaring 1940s, her and my father’s coming of age time, so up his room like some mad monk doing who knows what because I was busy worrying about riding bicycles or something. Not girls or dances stuff like that no way. Here’s the real tip-off though he and his boys would go out Friday nights to Jack Slack’s bowling alleys not to bowl, although that was the cover story to questioning mothers, but to hang around Freddie O’Toole’s car complete with turned on amped up radio (station unknown then by me but later identified as WMEX out of Boston and stull in existence the last I heard, including a few hour segment on Saturday replaying the old Arnie "Woo-Woo" Ginsberg shows that drove us wild and drive us to learn about the social customs around drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants when thinking about girls time did come) and dance, dance with girls, get it, to stuff like Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 (a great song tribute to a great automobile which nobody in our neighborhood could come close to affording so hard-working but poorly paid fathers' were reduced to cheapjack Fords and Plymouths, not cool), and guys who even today I don’t know the names of even with YouTube giving everybody with every kind of musical inclination a blast to the past ticket.

Here's something outside the neighborhood just to show it was hard-ass Franklin Webber who was hip to all things rock. So how about the times we, the family, would go up to Boston for some Catholic thing filled with incense and high Latin everybody mumbling prayers for forgiveness, when they did nothing to be forgiven for, into the South End at Holy Cross Cathedral and smack across from the church was the later famous Red Hat Club where guys were blasting away at pianos, on guitars and on big ass sexy saxes and it was not the big band sound my folks listened to or cool, cool be-bop jazz either that drove the "beat" night but music from jump street, etched in the back of my brain because remember I’m still fussing over bikes and stuff like that and not worrying about guys hitting the high white note. Or how about every time we went down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston as the sun went down, the “Negro” part before you hit Huntington Avenue at Symphony Hall (an area that Malcolm X knew well a decade before when he was nothing but a cat hustling the midnight creep with some white girls into kicks and larcenies) and we stopped at the ten billion lights on Mass Ave and all you would hear is this bouncing beat coming from taverns, from the old time townhouse apartments and black guys dressed “to the nines,” all flash dancing on the streets with dressed “to the nines” good-looking black girls. Memory bank.           

So some guys knew, gals too don’t forget after all they had to dig the beat, dig the guys who dug the beat, the beat of  out of some Africa breeze mixed with forbidden sweated Southern lusts if the thing was going to work out. And it wasn’t all dead-ass “white negro” hipsters either eulogized by Norman Mailer (or maybe mocked you never knew with him but he sensed something was in the breeze even if he was tied more closely to an earlier sensibility) or break-out “beats” tired of the cool cold jazz that was turning in on itself, getting too technical and losing the search for the high white note or lumpens of all descriptions who whiled away the nights searching their radio dials for something that they while away the nights searching their radio dials for something that they could swing to while reefer high or codeine low.

If you, via hail YouTube, look at the Jacks and Jills dancing up a storm in the 1950s say on American Bandstand they mostly look like very proper well-dressed middle class kids who are trying to break out of the cookie-cutter existence they found themselves in but they still looked  pretty well-fed and well-heeled so yeah, some guys and gals and it wasn’t always who you might suspect like Franklin, white hipsters, black saints, and sexy sax players that got hip, got that back-beat and those piano riffs etched into their brains.

Maybe though the guys in the White House were too busy worrying about what Uncle Joe’s progeny were doing out in the missile silos of Minsk, maybe the professional television talkers on Meet The Press wanted to discuss the latest turn in national and international politics for a candid world to hear and missed what was happening out in the cookie-cutter neighborhoods, and maybe the academic sociologists and professional criminologists were too wrapped up in figuring out why Marlon Brando was sulking in his corner boy kingdom (and wreaking havoc on a fearful small town world when he and the boys broke out), why  Johnny Spain had that “shiv” ready to do murder and mayhem to the next midnight passer-by, and why well-groomed and fed James Dean was brooding in the “golden age” land of plenty but the breeze was coming.

(And you could add in the same brother Franklin who as I was worrying about bikes, not the two pedal kid powered but some bad ass Vincent Black Lightning kind, getting “from hunger” to get a Brando bike, a varoom bike, so this girl, Wendy, from school, would take his bait, a girl that my mother fretted was from the wrong side of town, her way of saying Wendy was a tramp and maybe she was although she was nice to me when Franklin brought her around still she was as smart as hell once I found out about her school and home life a few years later after she, they, Wendy and Franklin, had left town on some big ass Norton but that is after the creation so I will let it go for now.)               

And then it came, came to us in our turn, came like some Kansas whirlwind, came like the ocean churning up the big waves crashing to a defenseless shoreline, came if the truth be known like the “second coming” long predicted and not just by mad man poet Yeats and his Easter, 1916 mind proclaiming a terrible beauty is born, and the brethren, us,  were waiting, waiting like we had been waiting all our short spell lives. Came in a funny form, or rather ironically funny forms, as it turned out.

Came one time, came big as 1954 turned to 1955 and a guy, get this, dressed not in sackcloth or hair-shirt but in a sport’s jacket, a Robert Hall sport’s jacket from the "off the rack" look of it when he and the boys were “from hunger,” playing for coffee and crullers before on the low life circuit, a little on the heavy side with a little boy’s regular curl in his hair and blasted the whole blessed world to smithereens. Blasted every living breathing teenager, boy or girl, out of his or her lethargy, got the blood flowing. The guy Bill Haley, goddam an old lounge lizard band guy who decided to move the beat forward from cool ass be-bop jazz and sweet romance popular music and make everybody, every kid jump, yeah Big Bill Haley and his Comets, the song Rock Around The Clock.         

Came as things turned to a little more hep cat too, came all duck walk and sex moves, feet moving faster than Bill could ever do, came out of Saint Loo, came out with a crazy beat. Came out in suit and tie all swagger. Came out with a big baby girl guitar that twisted up the chords something fierce and declared to the candid world, us, that Maybelline was his woman. But get this, because what did we know of “color” back then when we lived in an all-white Irish Catholic neighborhoods and since we heard what we heard of rock and roll mostly on the radio we were shocked when we found out the first time that he was a “Negro” to use the polite parlance of the times not always used in the house, the neighborhood, the town, a black man making us go to “jump street.” And we bought into it, bought into the beat, and joined him in saying to Mister Beethoven that you and your brethren best move over because there is a new sheriff in town.   

Came sometimes in slo-mo, hey remember this rock and roll idea was as an ice-breaker with a beat you didn’t  have to dance close to with your partner and get all tied up in knots forgetting when to twirl, when to whirl, when to do a split but kind of free form for the guys (or gals, but mainly guys) with two left feet like me could survive, maybe not survive the big one if the Russkies decided to go over the top with the bomb, but that school dance and for your free-form efforts maybe that she your eyeballs were getting sore over would consent to the last chance  last dance that you waited around for in case she was so impressed she might want to go with you some place later. But before that “some place later” you had to negotiate and the only way to do was to bust up a slow one, a dreamy one to get her in the mood and hence people have been singing songs from time immemorial to get people in the mood, this time Earth Angel would do the trick. Do the trick as long as you navigated those toes of hers, left her with two feet and standing. Dance slow, very slow brother.   

Here is the funny thing, funny since we were present at the creation, present in spite of every command uttered by Miss Winot against it, declaring the music worse than that Russkie threat if you believed her (a few kids, girls mainly, did whether to suck up to her since she would take their entreaties and suck ups seriously although boys were strictly “no go” and I know having spent many a missed sunny afternoon doing some silly “punishment” for her since she was impervious to my sly charms).We were just too young to deeply imbibe the full measure of what we were hearing. See this music, music we started calling rock and roll once somebody gave it a name (super DJ impresario Alan Freed as we found out later after we had already become “children of rock and roll”) was meant, was blessedly meant to be danced to which meant in that boy-girl age we who didn’t even like the opposite sex as things stood then were just hanging by our thumbs.

Yeah, was meant to be danced to at “petting parties” in dank family room basements by barely teenage boys and girls. Was meant to be danced to at teenage dance clubs where everybody was getting caught up on learning the newest dance moves and the latest “cool” outfits to go along with that new freedom. Was meant to serve as a backdrop at Doc’s Drugstore’s soda fountain where Doc had installed a jukebox complete with all the latest tunes as boys and girls shared a Coke sipping slowly with two straws hanging out in one frosted glass. Was meant to be listened to by corner boys at Jack Slack’s bowling alley where Jack eventually had set up a small dance floor so kids could dance while waiting for lanes to open (otherwise everybody would be still dancing out in front of O’Toole’s “boss” car complete with amped-up radio not to Jack’s profit). Was meant to be listened to as the sun went down in the west at the local drive-in restaurant while the hamburgers and fries were cooking and everybody was waiting for darkness to fall so the real night could begin, the night of dancing in dark corners and exploring the mysteries of the universe, or at least the mysteries of Miss Sarah Brown.  Was even meant to be listened to on fugitive transistor radios in the that secluded off-limits to adults and little kids (us) where teens, boys and girls, mixed and matched in the drive-in movie night (and would stutter some nonsense to questioning parents who wanted to know the plot of the movies- what movies, Ma).              

Yeah, we were just a little too young even if we can legitimately claim to have been present at the creation. But we will catch up, catch up with a vengeance.