A GI Rebellion: When Soldiers Said No to War
Steve
Early
August
20, 2019
Beyond
Chron
Fifty
years ago this fall, a campus upsurge turned opposition to the Vietnam War into
a genuine mass movement.
On
October 15, 1969, several million students, along with community-based
activists, participated in anti-war events under the banner of the “Vietnam
Moratorium.” A month later, 500,000 people came to a Washington, D.C.
demonstration of then-unprecedented size, organized by the “New Mobilization
Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”
As we
approach the 50th anniversary of both the Moratorium and Mobilization, it’s
worth recalling one critical anti-war constituency whose role was less visible
then and remains little acknowledged today.
While
student demonstrators and draft resisters drew more mass media attention at the
time, many military draftees, reservists and recently returned veterans also
protested the Vietnam war—with equal fervor and often greater impact.
Fortunately,
three Vietnam-era activists have just published Waging Peace in
Vietnam (New Village Press, 2019), which gives long overdue credit to
anti-war organizing by men and women in uniform, and their civilian allies and
funders.
Labor
organizer Ron Carver, Notre Dame professor David Cortright, and
writer/editor Barbara Doherty have crafted a beautifully-illustrated 240-page
tribute to the GI anti-war movement. Waging Peace includes
fifty first-person accounts by grassroots builders of that movement, plus photo
documentation of their work by William Short, a Vietnam combat veteran.
As
Cortright notes in the book’s introduction, social science researchers hired by
the military (and later academic experts) concluded that one-quarter of all
“low-ranking service members participated in Vietnam-era antiwar activity.”
This
percentage is “roughly equivalent to the proportion of activists among students
at the peak of the anti-war movement.” In the rural and conservative
communities which surround most military bases, then and now, “the proportion
of anti-war activists among soldiers was actually higher than in the local
youth population.”
The
Anti-Warriors Today
Now in
their late 60s and 70s, many anti-warriors profiled in Waging Peace are
long-distance runners in the field. Some remain active in Veterans for Peace
(VFP), which held its national convention last weekend in Spokane. One
highlight of that annual gathering was the unveiling of archival material and
photos which appear in Waging Peace.
This
hotel ballroom exhibit included many striking examples of underground press
work–mimeographed newspapers for GIs with names like Last Harass, Up
Against the Bulkhead, Attitude Check, or Fun, Travel and
Adventure (whose acronymic double message was “#### the Army!”
Among
those viewing younger portraits of themselves in Spokane—along with
documentation of their own anti-war activity –were ex-Marine Paul Cox, Army
veteran Skip Delano, and former Navy nurse Susan Schnall. In Waging
Peace, each one shares a memorable tale of personal transformation, due to
their war-time experiences at home or abroad.
A
native of Oklahoma, Cox served as a platoon leader in Vietnam’s Quang Nam
Province in 1969. There, he witnessed a massacre of civilians, “smaller
scale but no less barbaric” than the mass killings at My Lai which occurred a
year earlier.
After
completing his combat tour, Cox was assigned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
He and several Maine buddies decided it was “our duty to put out a newspaper
and print the truth about Nam.”
Over a
two-year period, they and later recruits produced thousands of copies of a
clandestine publication called RAGE. As Cox says today, “RAGE was
definitely not an example of great journalism.” But it did allow him to
redirect his own anger and disillusionment into an effort “to warn others who
were about to be deployed.”
In
Vietnam, Skip Delano was assigned to a chemical unit attached to the 101st Airborne
Division.
After his return to Fort McClellan in Alabama, he believed he had
earned the right “to comment on the war to other people”—an opinion not shared
by his base commander.
Delano
helped write and edit a GI newsletter called Left Face, whose
distributors faced six-months in the stockade if they were caught with bulk
copies. In October of 1969 he and 30 others bravely signed a petition
supporting the Mobilization scheduled for the following month in Washington,
DC.
This deep South expression of solidarity with civilian protesters up north
triggered Military Intelligence investigations and interrogations, loss of
security clearances, and threats of further discipline.
Protesting
in Uniform
A year
before Delano’s dissent, Susan Schnall’s dramatic acts of Bay Area resistance
drew heavy military discipline. She was court-martialed, sentenced to six
months of hard labor, and dismissed from the Navy for “conduct unbecoming an
officer.”
Schnall
grew up in a Gold Star family; her father, who she never knew, was a Marine
killed in Guam during World War II. As a Navy nurse in 1967, she toiled among
“night time screams of pain and fear” that came from patients badly wounded and
recently returned from Vietnam.
In
October, 1968, Schnall became involved in a planned “GI and Veterans March for
Peace” in San Francisco. To publicize that event, she and a pilot friend rented
a single engine plane, filled it with thousands of leaflets, and dropped them
over local military facilities like the Presidio, Treasure Island, the Alameda
Naval Station, and her own workplace, Oak Knoll hospital in Oakland.
Then,
in full dress uniform, she joined 500 other active duty service people, in a
march from Market St in San Francisco to its Civic Center, where they were
cheered by thousands of civilian protestors.
Fifty
years after Cox, Delano and Schnall rallied their uniformed comrades against
the Vietnam war, all three are still engaged in causes like defending veterans’
healthcare against privatization by the Trump Administration (See https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/07/under-guise-of-choice-trump-launches-assault-on-veterans-care/)
Later
this fall, they and other VFP members are helping to bring the Waging
Peace exhibit to Amherst and New Bedford, Mass, New York City and
Washington, DC. Next Spring, this book-based display will reach campus or
community audiences in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. (For schedule
details, see https://wagingpeaceinvietnam.com/exhibit)
Red
State Resistance
Activists
today, particularly those involved in working class organizing, should buy this
book or see the exhibit based on it. Local-level leaders of the GI movement
displayed courage, creativity, and audacity when rallying their own “fellow
workers” who had been conscripted by the hundreds of thousands.
Much
rank-and-file education and agitation about Vietnam occurred on or near heavily
guarded military bases located in what are now called “red states.” They became
unexpected incubators for homegrown (and imported) radicalism,
Some
forms of GI resistance, referenced in the book, involved sabotage of equipment,
small and larger scale mutinies, rioting in military stockades, and deadly
assaults on unpopular officers (the grenade-assisted retribution known as
“fragging.”)
The
national network of GI coffee houses described in Waging Peace became
places where active duty military personnel could relax, socialize, listen to
music, read what they wanted, and have fun with each other and their civilian
supporters. This helped break down the military vs civil society divide
that is far wider today–due, in part, to the post-Vietnam creation of a
“professional army” to replace the rebellious conscripts of fifty years ago.
Thanks
to their low morale—and heroic Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression—U.S.
ground forces were no longer “an effective fighting force by 1970,” according
to Cortright. “To save the Army,” he says,” it became necessary to withdraw
troops and end the war. Their dissent and defiance played a decisive role in
limiting the ability of the U.S. to continue the war…”
In an
era of “forever wars,” it may be hard to imagine such impactful organizing
among active duty military personnel or newly-minted veterans. Let’s hope that
the many examples of grassroots activism in Waging Peace prove
inspirational and instructive for younger progressives today.
This
valuable book might even stimulate some new thinking about how the left can
better relate to the 22 million Americans who have served in the military or
continue to do so–to their own detriment and that of people throughout the
world.
Steve
Early was a campus-based recruiter for both the October Moratorium and November
Mobilization in 1969. He later served as a full-time anti-war organizer for the
American Friends Service Committee in New England. He is collaborating on a
book about veterans’ affairs and can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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