Revisiting the GI and Vietnam Veterans

Gudaitis, Alexandra 2019 History Thesis

Title: “An Act of Honor”: Revisiting the GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War Movements: Advisor: Jessica Chapman Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Authenticated User Access: N/A Contains Copyrighted Material: No

“An Act of Honor”: Revisiting the GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War Movements

by

Alexandra A. Gudaitis

Jessica Chapman, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

April 15, 2019

Dedicated to the brave participants in the GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War Movements, especially those who shared their stories with me.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... i

Introduction: “We Have to Tell People the Truth”...... 1

Chapter One: “Acts of Conscience”: The GI Movement of the Vietnam War...... 17

Chapter Two: “The Highest Form of Patriotism”: Vietnam Veterans Against the War...... 55

Conclusion: “I Have No Regrets”...... 99

Images...... 107

Bibliography...... 113

Acknowledgments

I have so many people to thank without whom this project could never have come to fruition. First and foremost, I have to thank my advisor, Professor Jessica Chapman, for making an extremely daunting project not only doable, but extremely enjoyable. Her endless guidance and support over the last year, from my first knock on her door to introduce myself and ask her to advise a vague thesis project on the Vietnam War, to her time spent helping me work through my ideas, to the infinite line edits and citation checks in the final stages of the process, was incredible. I could not have done this without her.

I would also like to thank the people without whom I never would have decided to devote a year of my life to studying the Vietnam War. My thanks go to Irving Kagan, my high school

History teacher who first introduced me to the era and who supported by first research project on it. I also thank Don MacKinnon for giving me the unique opportunity to join him in his work in support of Florentine Films’ documentary The Vietnam War and who trusted that my love for

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried could translate into a fascination with the Vietnam War as a whole. My work with Don led to my spending the summer of 2017 working at Florentine

Films during the months leading up to the release of The Vietnam War. That experience, more than any other, pointed me to the work of this thesis. My heartfelt thanks go to everyone at

Florentine, especially Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein, Ken Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward, David

Schmidt, Salimah El-Amin, Mike Welt, Megan Ruffe, Stephen Sowers, and Jonah Velasco, first for creating such a deep, moving, and important film and, second, for welcoming me so warmly into the New York Florentine family. Had I not spent that summer working with them I would never have even considered writing this thesis.

i I also have to give thanks to the professors who were instrumental to my growth as a writer and historian throughout my college career. Many thanks to Professors Karen Merrill,

Roger Kittleson, Charles Dew, James Wood, and Eiko Siniawer for their support and guidance over the last four years. My biggest thanks go to Magnús Bernhardsson, the single most important figure in my academic and personal growth during my college experience, for making me fall in love with History and for engaging my mind in ways I could not have imagined. This thesis owes a huge debt to the confidence in myself and in my ideas he instilled and to the academic skills I gained in his courses.

I would also like to thank everyone who assisted me in my research process. Thank you to Lori DuBois who found government documents that I thought were unattainable and to Patrick

Gray who was a lifesaver when it came to recording my interviews with veterans. Thank you also to everyone at Hive who was so supportive of my taking time off to do research for this project, especially Katie Harrison, Jenifer Willig, and Maggie Robinson.

Huge thanks also go to the incredible Vietnam veterans who took the time to speak with me for the benefit of my project: Jan Barry, Bill Ehrhart, Ed Damato, Jerry Lembcke, John

Ketwig, Frank Toner, Steve Geiger, and the veteran who wanted to remain anonymous. I will never be able to fully express to them the depth of my admiration for the actions they took in pursuit of what they believed and knew to be right, how exciting it was to hear their stories firsthand, and how grateful I am that they shared them with me. Speaking with them made my thesis process more personally impactful than I ever imagined it could be.

Finally, I want to thank my friends and family for their endless support throughout this process. Thank you to Alana and Amelia for being there for me through everything during the last nine years. I cannot imagine what my life would be like without the two of you in it, but I

ii know that it would be immeasurably worse. Thank you to Mary Kate for being my lifeline at

Williams during this whole process. I am so happy that I got to go through this experience with you by my side. Thank you also to Lesya, Ruben, and David for making my college experience so much brighter. And of course, my biggest thanks go to my parents. Mama and Papa, I would not be who I am today without your endless love and guidance. Thank you for supporting me at every stage of my life and of this process and for always believing in me, even when I did not believe in myself. I would never have thought I could do this if you had not been there to support me through it all. Thank you.

iii Introduction: “We Have to Tell the People the Truth”1

I sort of latched onto the idea we were there to help people – I wanted to believe we were doing the right thing. When I got to Vietnam it really didn’t take me but about one day in-country to realize it wasn’t true.2 -David Cline, GI Movement participant

For myself and I think for most, our motivation stemmed from a sense of betrayal… We saw the lies and had to speak out.3 -Steve Geiger, Vietnam Veterans Against the War member

These quotes by David Cline and Steve Geiger speak to some of the most important

motivations behind Vietnam War era protest among both the active and former military

population, the most notable of which were the GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War

(VVAW) movements. These movements composed of military personnel, both active-duty and veteran, overlapped in their core objective of bringing an end to the war, yet their activities and organizational structures differed considerably. While active duty participants in the GI movement found restrictions to their right to free speech or freedom of expression, the members of VVAW were able to protest the war openly as citizens. The result was that the actions of the

GI movement were often on a smaller scale, less centralized, and more improvisational than those of VVAW.4

These two movements, by virtue of their membership makeup, are unique and deserving

of study independent from comparisons with civilian antiwar groups whose members had

1 Joe Urgo, quoted in Richard Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 207. 2 David Cline, interview by William Short, Willa Seidenberg, and Addison Gallery of American Art, A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1992), 40. 3 Steve Geiger, "Interview with Steve Geiger," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 7 and February 28, 2019). 4 Skip Delano, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42; Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013), 122; Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 75. “GI” stands for “Government Issue” and it is a general term used to refer to members of the armed forces.

1 fundamentally different relationships to the war. Examining the GI and VVAW movements in

tandem reveals a falsehood in treating them as entirely separate entities, as is commonplace in

popular and scholarly discussions. Not only did the two groups have overlapping membership,

their participants were driven to antiwar activism by similar experiences of disillusionment with

the American war in Vietnam.5

My interest in these movements developed out of an experience I had working as an intern for Ken Burns’ film company Florentine Films in the months leading up to the release of its 18-hour documentary film The Vietnam War. Before that I, like many of my peers, had a limited understanding of the Vietnam War as a result of it being largely untouched in both my high school and college survey courses. However, in watching and working on The Vietnam

War film at Florentine, I became fascinated by the war as a whole and particularly by the experience of veterans. Through this work I had the opportunity to meet some of the veterans interviewed in the film, including a member of VVAW who participated in its most visible action, the medal turn-in ceremony at Dewey Canyon III in April 1971. After finishing my internship, I found my mind continuously returning to the veterans whose stories were told in the documentary and particularly to those who had engaged in antiwar protest. I began researching

VVAW and from there discovered that not only was there substantial veteran antiwar protest, but

5 Because of the restrictions presented by a study of this length, I was compelled to narrow my focus. The result is that I do not focus on the larger antiwar movement or on issues of race within the two movements I discuss. In terms of the broader movement, there was a credibility gap between the civilian and military movements that helped drive the sense of an obligation to protest among military personnel, but which also served to distance the military antiwar groups from the civilian ones. Unlike civilian antiwar protestors who learned of governmental deception through the media, GIs and veterans experienced firsthand the discrepancies between the government’s official line about the war and the realities on the ground. In terms of race, within the two movements, race was important both at the larger, more structural level and at the individual level. The ongoing Civil Rights Movement and the profound racism within the country as a whole, and within the military specifically, made race an important consideration. I have chosen not to grapple with this issue because it is too substantial a topic to do justice to in this thesis. Questions of race within the two movements are important and deserving of their own separate studies and I hope that future scholars will look more closely at how these issues helped shape the GI and VVAW movements.

2 that there was also significant GI protest throughout the war. The parallels between the two

movements jumped out at me immediately and I began to wonder what drove these two separate

groups of military personnel to continue to pursue an end to the war, in spite of the often perilous

conditions they experienced as a result of their protest efforts. Even more, I wondered how the

participants themselves understood and interpreted their own involvement in the antiwar effort.

Existing literature on the GI and VVAW movements consists of several narrative histories detailing their development and the central activities through which they pursued their antiwar agendas. The GI movement is often either entirely overlooked in survey histories of the

Vietnam era or simply mentioned and then brushed off as being made up of GIs trying to save themselves. As Vietnam veteran and writer Jerry Lembcke explains, “Revisionist portrayals of

GI resistance [present it] as marginal…[or] a fiction.”6 However, there are some more

specialized books that focus on the various movements that engaged in antiwar protest during the

Vietnam War that highlight the GI movement and treat it as an important part of the history of

antiwar protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Some literature takes an even closer look at the

movement with several monographs focusing on the GI movement as a whole and other works

taking up specific aspects of it, like the underground press it developed.

David Cortright, a Vietnam War veteran who participated in the GI movement himself, is one of its chief chroniclers. His 1975 book Soldiers in Revolt, written as a conscious effort to prevent the erasure or loss of this piece of antiwar history, is one of the foundational works on the GI movement and has been drawn on in almost every piece of writing on the movement since. As Cortright says in the preface, “The book is an attempt to document the GI movement from the perspective of those involved – to speak for and with the hundreds of thousands of low-

6 Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 36.

3 ranking servicemen whose resistance has transformed American military and political life.”7 To

do this, Cortright writes a history of the movement based on conversations with other

participants, arguing that the war should not be studied solely by looking at the major players

and decisions, but through the “young, inexperienced, enlisted men, living in an encapsulated

and alien world, who struggled together to make their hearts and voices heard.”8

VVAW member Jerry Lembcke’s 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the

Legacy of Vietnam and Richard Moser’s 1996 work The New Winter Soldiers also contribute to a larger narrative of the GI movement and help to explain the different types of actions in which the group engaged and how those actions then helped shape changes in military policies toward antiwar protest. The focus of Lembcke’s book is on disproving the myth that Vietnam veterans were spat on upon their return to the United States, a myth that had only grown since the end of the war. While his focus is not on the GI movement itself, in discussing this larger issue of the treatment of military personnel by civilians, Lembcke takes a close look at the movement and its activities that involved interaction between GIs and the general public, especially the civilian antiwar groups. In doing this, Lembcke argues that the GI movement received meaningful support from antiwar civilian groups that helped to provide greater unity to the movement, such as through the development of the GI Press Service or by supporting the public actions taken by participants in the movement. While Cortright mentions many of the points of overlap with the civilian movement that Lembcke highlights, Lembcke pushes further to argue that these points of overlap between the military and civilian movements help demonstrate that the GI movement

7 David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), vii. 8 Raskin, Marcus, “Introduction,” in Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, xv. Though Soldiers in Revolt is his most substantial contribution to the literature on the GI movement, Cortright has also contributed essays and chapters to collected volumes on the general antiwar movement such as his chapter “GI Resistance During the Vietnam War” in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-War Movement: Essays from the Charles Debenedetti Memorial Conference.

4 was far from marginal. Not only did it receive support from major civilian antiwar groups, but it also helped provide credibility to the antiwar movement as a whole through the involvement of soldiers.9 He uses this evidence of the collaboration between antiwar GIs and antiwar civilians to help demonstrate that antiwar protestors were not opposed to all GIs and veterans.

Moser’s book, which analyzes both the GI and veterans movements, looks closely at the historical idea of the citizen-soldier, and the symbols attached to it, drawing back to the days of the Revolutionary War’s minutemen. He argues that the military antiwar movements transformed the participants “from warriors into peacemakers” and that in doing so they also transformed the symbols and ideas that were central to America.10 Moser argues that the

Vietnam War destroyed the tradition of the soldier, but that in entering a fight against the war through their activism, the participants in the GI movement were then able to gain “entrance into a powerful tradition of cultural change dating back to 1776” in which soldiers were historically involved.11 His focus is on how the military antiwar protest gave the participants access to the country’s past citizen-soldier culture that was denied to them by virtue of their involvement in a war that was contrary to the nation’s ideals. In looking at the war through this lens, Moser emphasizes the importance of the larger social and cultural upheavals the nation was experiencing in developing this new citizen-solder that would then help reshape the military culture. In terms of the transformation of American symbols that he addresses, Moser focuses on the use of the Statue of Liberty and other symbols of American ideals, as well as the repurposing of military imagery, in antiwar images and symbols. With all of these points, Moser argues that when the Vietnam War broke the soldier ideal that had existed since the nation’s birth, the ideals and community values of popular culture helped to create a new citizen-soldier that served as a

9 Lembcke, The Spitting Image, 34-48. 10 Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 141. 11 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 142.

5 continuation of the historical citizen-soldier.12 Moser’s book, taken together with Cortright’s and

Lembcke’s, provides a useful narrative of the GI movement on which to build.

In contrast to the GI movement, historians have come to accept VVAW as an important part of the story of antiwar activity in the 1960s and early 1970s and, as such, they have written about it more extensively. This is largely because of its greater visibility during the war and because the face of the movement, John Kerry, has continued to be a major political figure, thus maintaining interest in the group that first brought him to national attention. While many books and articles address the movement in different levels of detail, there are several that put VVAW at the center of their analysis. All of the major books on VVAW were published during a four- year period, from 1997 to 2001, with each author noting a desire to fill the hole in the historiography of the Vietnam War related to VVAW in their explanations for writing their books. However, no one has taken up the question of VVAW in a meaningful way since the end of this brief period nearly twenty years ago and, as a result, the literature has not grown significantly since that time.

Gerald Nicosia’s 2001 book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement is arguably the foundational historical text of VVAW. Utilizing more than 600 interviews he conducted himself, Nicosia pieces together a history of VVAW up through the time of his writing unlike any other in both breadth and depth, providing a detailed story of the movement’s development and actions. His intent was to bring attention to what he saw as an important and overlooked piece of history. Through his book, Nicosia argues that the Vietnam War, and

12 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 141-2, 144, 146, 148-9, 154.

6 specifically the experiences of the veterans who came to oppose it through VVAW, should always be at the backs of our minds when thinking about the world in the present.13

At the same time that Nicosia was researching his book, other authors were also working to fill the lacuna in VVAW history. Andrew E. Hunt’s 1999 book The Turning: A History of

Vietnam Veterans Against the War was, like Nicosia’s book, an effort to fill the gaps that he felt were left by most histories of the sixties in relation to VVAW by demonstrating the political and personal impact of the movement. Through his work, Hunt argues for the importance of VVAW in the larger antiwar context by demonstrating that it had a major impact on the antiwar movement as a whole by putting veterans at the front of the struggle to end the war. He argues that VVAW not only created the rallying symbols of the antiwar movement as a whole through events like the medal turn-in ceremony at Dewey Canyon III, but that it also filled a void in the leadership of the larger antiwar movement that had appeared during the late 1960s.14 Hunt also highlights the human element of the movement in terms of the space it created for connections between veterans who agreed that the war was morally wrong.

Richard Stacewicz noted the same gap in VVAW literature that Nicosia and Hunt did when he began work in 1992 on his 1997 book Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam

Veterans Against the War. Unlike much of the literature on VVAW, Stacewicz’s book relays the history of the movement almost entirely through the words of his nearly 30 interviewees.

Stacewicz felt that the only way to truly understand the movement would be through speaking to the participants directly and, after doing so, he decided that the distinct and powerful voices they brought to their own stories should be preserved. As a result, Stacewicz’s book provides insight

13 Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008). 14 Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 1-2.

7 into the thinking behind many aspects of the movement, from its organization, to its actions, to its restructuring beginning in late 1971 in a depth that could only be attained through direct personal narratives. Overall, Stacewicz’s argument is that participation in VVAW was an act of both conscience and courage and that the movement should serve as an educational tool for future generation to prevent a similar war from happening again.15 This is his most convincing point. That is largely due to the structure of the book where only the brief contextual introductions to the chapters and the short preface, introduction, and epilogue feature

Stacewicz’s own writing. The result is that while Stacewicz makes bold claims in these sections, they are usually presented without any analysis and are often unsupported by the interviews within the larger text, making them appear unfounded. These claims include saying that the desire to speak out against the war was the result of emotional, physical, and ideological trauma and that the contradictions between the governmental war narrative and the lived experience, as well as the break with the American values that the service members had been raised on, were other major motivators for action.16 Stacewicz further claims that veterans viewed their participation in VVAW as being connected to patriotism – a claim that struck me when reading the book. With this particular claim, Stacewicz does not provide any analysis or substantiation for the argument in either his own writing or through his interviews.17 While Stacewicz does address motivation for antiwar activism in his interviews, this is neither the focus of the interviews nor of his analysis at the end of his book and often his questions related to motivation go unanswered by the interviewees. For him, the motivations are just one small part of the larger narrative of VVAW and while he makes statements regarding motivations, he does not provide any analysis of the impact of those motivations in shaping the experiences or actions of VVAW.

15 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 436. 16 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 3, 425. 17 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 428.

8 Although the arguments Stacewicz makes at the beginning and end of his book are largely untethered and unsupported, that does not mean that the majority of his book, namely the interviews and the historical context that accompanies them, is not of value. The book as a whole tells the story of the development of a political consciousness for the veterans Stacewicz spoke to and of how that consciousness then shaped the activities of VVAW. For me, the most useful piece of the book lay in the members’ articulations of their own accomplishments and experiences as part of the organization.

The questions I ask in my thesis were most directly inspired by the work of Moser and

Stacewicz. Moser discusses the transformation of the idea of the citizen-soldier and of the physical symbols that represented the country, like the Statue of Liberty, by antiwar GIs and veterans. He argues that the Vietnam War destroyed the ideal of the soldier that had existed in previous wars and that only by virtue of their activism were GIs and veterans of the era able to connect to the nation’s historical citizen-solder. This inspired me to think more critically about what it meant to be a soldier at that time. Stacewicz’s unsupported claims were particularly important to the development of my research questions. His interviews that touch on motivation as well as his broad statements about motivation being connected to patriotism for some veterans drew me to ask how both veterans and GIs understood their own political activism in relation to their military experiences. From the work of these two scholars, I was inspired to look not only at the motivations behind activism, but to push further to look at how the unique set of experiences and social positions held by GIs and veterans contributed to a certain conception of duty, which, I argue through my thesis, drove participation in antiwar protest. Additionally, I investigate how participation in the antiwar movements related directly to the historical ideals of the soldier – ideals that, unlike Moser, I posit were not destroyed by the war in Vietnam, but

9 redirected – as well as how this participation helped to transform the very symbol of the soldier and of the veteran itself. Finally, I try to understand how participation in antiwar protest personally affected the GIs and veterans in an effort to understand the benefits in addition to the costs of their activism.

Existing literature leaves open questions about what exactly drove the participants of both movements not only to oppose the war privately, but to become involved in public antiwar activity and of how they interpreted their own experiences in relation to their military service. In each movement, the participants exhibited a willingness to take great personal risks and make significant sacrifices, which ranged from risking jail time to experiencing isolation from their families and communities, for the sake of the antiwar cause because of their fervent belief that the war opposed the nation’s ideals.18 I wanted to understand why they took those risks and what impact their decision had at both a personal and a broader level.

In order to answer these questions, I looked to a number of different sources including oral history interviews, historical and current first-person accounts, and news publications from the period under study. For the first person accounts, I first utilized interviews included in books on the two movements, like Stacewicz’s, which included transcribed interviews with participants, and in recording archives at the New York Public Library. For the GI movement, my main source for interviews was a collection of interviews published in 1992 titled A Matter of

Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. I also looked at the first person writing of participants in the two movements in both articles in newspapers like the New York Times and in memoirs. In addition to these written sources, I also examined the first person recollections found in documentaries including Sir! No Sir! directed by David Zeiger and Going Upriver: The

18 Sir! No Sir! directed by David Zeiger, (London: BBC, 2005), 26:35; Delano interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42; Jerry Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 15, 2019).

10 Long War of John Kerry directed by George Butler. After looking at the existing interviews, I then began conducting my own oral history interviews. The benefit of this was that I had full control of the questions being asked. For this, I directly contacted some interviewees whose names I had encountered during my research using information on their websites. However, I got in touch with most of my subjects by reaching out to VVAW and asking whether there might be anyone who would speak to me about their experiences in the movement during its early years. A number of veterans responded to my email request and I was able to either schedule phone interviews with them or to correspond over email. In the end, I was able to conduct eight thorough interviews. For these interviews, I shaped my questions based on my experiences of watching and reading interviews on a variety of subjects throughout my academic career as well as on the guidelines laid out in Donald A. Ritchie’s book Doing Oral History. More specifically, my questions were inspired by those used in other scholars’ interviews with Vietnam veterans, including Stacewicz’s. Having seen how direct questions about motivation could often lead to off-topic responses or evasion from the interviewees, I worked to phrase my questions in such a way that the idea of motivation flowed naturally in a discussion of general experiences in the war and then in the antiwar effort. I phrased my questions to work toward the idea of motivation, asking questions about their involvement in the military as well as in the antiwar movement, thus getting a better picture of the actual experiences that helped turn the participants against the war through a narrative that began before they entered the war and ended with their participation in the antiwar movement.

In addition to these first person accounts, I also utilized contemporary press publications to gain an understanding of the activities of the two movements and of how they were perceived by the public. This included looking at mainstream publications, like the New York Times, and at

11 the publications produced by the movements themselves, especially the underground press of the

GI movement. Through the Library of Congress archives I was able to read an array of

underground press publications in order to better understand how participants in the GI

movement were presenting their views on the war to their fellow GIs and of how the

decentralized movement was able to stay connected and spread ideas about antiwar activities.

In this thesis, I argue that the same sense of duty and service to one’s country that is

typically understood to drive participation in the military, and which actually drove many of my

subjects to enter the armed forces, was also what motivated the participants of the GI and

VVAW movements to engage in antiwar protest. I show that the participants felt an obligation

to serve and protect their country and that, after spending time in the armed forces, they

understood that protesting the war, rather than fighting in it, best fulfilled this obligation. In

particular, I highlight that their sense of duty was driven by the conviction that they had a unique

understanding of the reality of the war based on their own experiences, which gave them an

authority to speak out against the government’s policies and pro-war message. I demonstrate

that the sense of betrayal that GIs and veterans experienced as a result of the disconnect between

their own lived realities of the war and the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ stated reasons for

being in Vietnam, the progress of the war, and the atrocities being committed there served as a

trigger that drove many of the movements’ participants to turn against the war. Finally, I build

off of Moser’s book to argue that by virtue of their understanding of their own participation, the

GIs and veterans redefined the very meaning of service to one’s country, broadening it to include not only military service, but also active political engagement as civilians.

12 As Gerald Nicosia writes, “We were a generation born and bred on patriotism, on the

Pledge of Allegiance every day in school and absolute respect for the American flag.”19

Participants in the Vietnam War describe the patriotism on which they were raised as involving

an unquestioning devotion to the country and its policies. Many American service members

experienced the Vietnam War as a profound challenge to this uncritical, kneejerk patriotism. In

response, they began to revise their understanding of what patriotism could look like. In line

with this, some participants in the movements equated their dissent against the war to the

patriotic actions taken by Revolutionary War heroes.20 The term “patriotism” throughout this

thesis refers not to an abstract ideal, but to the specific conception of patriotism held by

participants in the GI and VVAW movements. Likewise, references to the nation’s “core values

and freedoms” refer to those constitutionally protected first amendment rights that these soldier-

activists strove to protect.

The first chapter of my thesis focuses on the GI movement (which I define as being made

up of the non-violent antiwar actions taken by GIs), looking at the motivations that drove

participants to engage in antiwar protest and at the ways in which they were able to do so within

the military context. In it, I argue that participants in the GI movement were driven to antiwar

activism by the same sense of duty to their country, and to protecting its ideals, that had first

brought many of them to the armed forces. They engaged in a principled opposition to a war that

they believed was undermining the American ideology they had sworn to defend when entering

the military. I argue that rather than their protest being un-American, as many war supporters perceived antiwar protest to be at the time, it was actually extremely American as it reflected a love of their country given the sacrifices they were making in its defense through their

19 Nicosia, Home to War, 3. 20 Bragg Briefs, quoted in James Lewes, Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers During the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 63.

13 activism.21 For this analysis, I first look at the key events that were important in the process of

disillusionment with the war for many GIs. Then I follow the trajectory of the movement

through the three different approaches to activism that defined it: individual actions, sharing and

spreading the collective sensibility, and public actions. Within these main approaches I look into

the wide variety of activities that made up the GI movement including absenteeism,

conscientious objection, coffeehouses, the underground press, public trials, and public protests.22

In line with this, I look at how the experiences of being in the military contributed to the

development of an antiwar perspective and speak to the motivations behind engaging in the

limited acts of protest that were available to antiwar GIs within the military context.

The second chapter of my thesis asks the same questions about motivation as the first,

this time in relation to VVAW. I argue that, like for the participants in the GI movement, the

members of VVAW felt an obligation to engage in antiwar activism given the unique knowledge

of the reality of the war that they had thanks to their time in the military. I further argue that by

virtue of their antiwar protest, the veterans redefined the meaning of service to one’s country to

include civil service, as well as military service, and they reclaimed their own symbolic image so

that it could not be used to promote a war they opposed. In order to do this, I break the central

years of the movement down into two phases, the first lasting from 1967 to 1968 and the second

from 1969 to 1971. I analyze the methods of activism within each phase and the reasons behind

them. I look at the importance of education and of democracy to the movement as well as at the

21 Bragg Briefs, quoted in Lewes, Protest and Survive, 63. 22 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 121; Bruce MacLean, "Bruce Maclean: Antiwar and Radical History Project," interview by Jesse Kindig and Maria Quintana (2009), video 1, 1:35; David L. Parsons, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Lincoln Bergman and Alan Katzman, “Last Word from Underground,” in The Underground Press in America, ed. Robert J. Glessing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); Lembcke, The Spitting Image, 35; John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 276; Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 132.

14 ways that the movement’s structure, and its image, shifted over the years. I look at both the smaller scale activities that the movement engaged in, including teach-ins and supporting antiwar political candidates, as well as taking a close look at the three major events that defined VVAW:

Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal), the Winter Soldier Investigations, and Dewey

Canyon III. I use oral histories to help understand how the veterans who participated in these activities felt about their own involvement in them as well as to analyze how they came to not only turn against the war, but to decide that they had a duty to help bring it to an end.

Through this thesis I work to show that many participants in both movements saw their antiwar activism as being, as VVAW member Bobby Muller put it, “An act of honor.”23

23 Bobby Muller, quoted in Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, directed by George Butler, THINKFilm, 2004, 1:10:40.

15

16 Chapter One: “Acts of Conscience”: The GI Movement of the Vietnam War1

The GI Movement is the name given to the collective actions of antiwar GIs who

engaged in various forms of protest throughout the Vietnam War. Though referred to as a

“movement” both at the time and in the historiography of the war, the GI movement started as a

series of disparate acts of dissent that gradually turned into a collective sensibility, enshrined in

the activities of coffeehouses and underground newspapers, that increasingly guided the actions

of the GIs who participated in antiwar efforts. Given the natural restrictions on GI organization

imposed by the military structure, as well as active efforts by the military brass to prevent

organizing by transferring leaders, harassing participants, and confiscating publications, the GI

movement never developed a centralized organization structure.2 At no point was there a single

leader or even a hierarchical leadership system. Instead, the movement was fairly egalitarian

with individual GIs taking on leadership roles by engaging in and organizing antiwar activities.

Though the GI movement became more structured as the war progressed, especially with the

added involvement of civilian antiwar groups beginning in the late 1960s, it never achieved a

high level of central organization. This is not to say that the different actions undertaken by GIs

to oppose the war existed in isolation nor that historians have retrospectively imposed the

concept of a movement where one did not exist. As GI antiwar activity progressed, the GIs who

were involved in the more coordinated actions that gained prominence in later periods

understood themselves to be acting as part of a larger whole, guided by a unifying set of

1 David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 52. 2 Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013), 122.

17 principles. Given that this collective GI antiwar sensibility is typically referred to as the “GI

movement,” I will refer to it as such throughout this work.

Along with its diffuse leadership, the GI movement also did not follow a typical linear

timeline, but rather a general trajectory of development. The GI movement has no clear start

date and any attempt to tie down the movement to specific dates and time frames draws away

from an understanding of its natural evolution and growth throughout the war. However, the

movement can be broken down roughly into three key approaches to activism to help understand

its growth and development. While each approach involved new types of antiwar activity, they

were not mutually exclusive and the actions that fall into the earlier categories continued on

throughout the war despite the added advances into new approaches to activism. The movement

saw a progression from individual to group actions with the more collaborative coffeehouses and

underground press, and the collective antiwar sensibility they developed, fostering that

progression.

The first approach to activism of the GI movement, beginning almost as soon as the first

ground troops set foot in Vietnam in 1965, was largely made up of individualized actions by GIs

who were ideologically opposed to the war in Vietnam and who took action to resist it on their

own without realizing that their views might be shared by others within the military. These types

of protest varied and included anything from absenteeism to minor interference to fasting to

demonstrate opposition to the war.3 From these individual actions came the growing

appreciation among antiwar GIs that their views on the war were part of a collective sensibility.

Along with this came efforts to create spaces to discuss common concerns about the war both in

3 Mike Wong, interview by William Short, Willa Seidenberg, and Addison Gallery of American Art, A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1992), 16; John Ketwig, "Interview with John Ketwig," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 11, 2019); John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 276.

18 terms of physical spaces and in terms of publications where GIs were able to debate and share

their thoughts with antiwar civilians. Although, in a way, the coffeehouses and underground

press were stepping-stones for the group actions that would follow, they were also some of the

core products of the movement that continued to be central even as they stimulated the more

public and large-scale protests that began in earnest in 1968 and 1969. This progress involved

greater engagement with the civilian world through collaborative efforts that saw the movement

getting greater media attention, including by holding teach-ins, spreading ballots and petitions, and taking part in public protests, as well as an even greater involvement with other antiwar organizations in order to raise awareness of the ever-growing antiwar movement within the armed forces. While it is difficult to break down the GI movement along clear chronological lines, this trajectory provides a good framework for understanding its development.

Common threads run through the motivations of individual GIs who opposed the war, many of whom initially volunteered for service. While some entered the armed forces already opposed to the war, many participants in the GI movement went through a process of disillusionment during their time in the military (some while in Vietnam and some on bases at home when hearing about their fellow GIs’ experiences in Vietnam). When looking at testimonies from various participants in the GI movement, some patterns emerge. The GIs who were not opposed to the war when they entered it had largely found ways of justifying the United

States’ presence in Vietnam when they first joined the military. Steve Fournier, a Marine who came from a military family, explained his own thinking saying, “I volunteered to go to Vietnam.

I wanted to be there, I thought it was the right thing, that we should go and protect democracy.”4

The justification of America’s presence in Vietnam as being necessary to protect democracy was

4 Steve Fournier, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 6.

19 a common one given that it echoed the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ defenses of the war.5

For some GIs, what exactly the United States was defending was less clear-cut, but there was still a belief that there was some larger reason that was bringing the GIs into Vietnam. David

Cline explained this sentiment by saying, “I sort of latched onto the idea we were there to help people – I wanted to believe we were doing the right thing.”6 Of those GIs who were not

opposed to the war when they entered it, many were not fully convinced that there was a clear

justification for the war, but at the same time they still were not fully convinced that the war was

wrong.7 That realization would come later.

Before the Vietnam War, Americans, and GIs in particular, did not question the

information they received from the government in the way people do today. The official line on

the war was that the United States was getting involved to protect democracy and the basic

values and freedoms that America holds dear as well as to protect the South Vietnamese people

from an invasion by the North Vietnamese communists. It also continuously emphasized that

that the U.S. was close to victory and that the war would be short-lived.8 The GIs who entered

the war, especially those who did so at the beginning, believed that they were going to complete

the mission the government had set before them.9 The events of the war soon cast doubt upon

that view.

The daily experience of Vietnam quickly eroded the convictions of many GIs who would

eventually turn against the war. These GIs witnessed horrific acts of violence perpetrated by

5 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, "How the Vietnam War Broke the American Presidency," The Atlantic, October 2017; Richard Cohen, "Vietnam, a War between Truth and Lies," NY Daily News, September 18, 2017; Daniel Ellsberg, "Lying About Vietnam," New York Times, June 29, 2001; Karl Marlantes, "Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust," New York Times, January 7, 2017. 6 David Cline, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 40. 7 Wong, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 16. 8 Donald Duncan, "The Whole Thing Was a Lie!" Ramparts, 1966, 15-6. Burns and Novick, "How the Vietnam War Broke the American Presidency;" Cohen, "Vietnam, a War between Truth and Lies;" Ellsberg, "Lying About Vietnam;" Karl Marlantes, "Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust." 9 Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 69, 78.

20 their fellow Americans against Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, whose

humanity they were now forced to confront head on.10 They also saw that these violent incidents

were not the acts of crazed individuals, but rather the products of larger military policies. The

military training that the GIs experienced before shipping out was focused on dehumanizing the

Vietnamese enemy and essentially brainwashing the recruits to turn them into killing machines.11

Once they got to Vietnam, the GIs were confronted with the military’s constant focus on achieving high body counts that came from the top of the military structure down to the individual servicemen. They not only saw the questionable methods involved in perpetrating a war whose attention appeared to be singularly focused on killing as many enemies as possible, they also witnessed the artificial inflation used to increase body count numbers. This included counting separated parts of an individual body as each coming from separate bodies, counting civilian dead as enemy dead, and summarily executing any prisoners or potential prisoners in order to have higher numbers.12 Even more jarring to some GIs was witnessing the effects of

napalm, a jelly gas that burns at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, which was dropped on the Vietnamese

in bombs, sticking indiscriminately to the bodies of civilians, including children, as well as to the invisible enemy.13

When confronted with these systematic atrocities many GIs were forced to question

whether the vague and unrealistic goals established by their government were actually worth the

pain and suffering they observed and, in many cases, inflicted.14 They struggled to come to

10 Longely, Grunts, 80-2. 11 Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 28-9; Longely, Grunts, 150; Frank Toner, "Interview with Frank Toner," By Alexandra Gudaitis (February 13 and 28, 2019). 12 Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 44-7. 13 Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 83-4; "Napalm and the Dow Chemical Company," American Experience, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/two-days-in-october-dow-chemical-and-use- napalm/. 14 Longely, Grunts, 136, 139.

21 terms with the disconnect that they witnessed between the government’s message and the reality in Vietnam. One Marine Lieutenant described this disconnect saying:

The Vietnamese did not like us and I remember I was shocked. I still naively thought of myself as a hero, as a liberator. And to see the Vietnamese look upon us with fear or hatred visible in their eyes was a shock…the people I thought would regard us as heroes were the very people that we were fighting, and all of the sudden my black-and-white image of the world became real gray and confused.15

Many GIs experienced similar feelings of confusion when forced to confront the fact that the reality they were experiencing did not mirror what they had been told.

In addition to daily horrors contributing to the process of disillusionment for many antiwar GIs, there were two major incidents that forced many service members to challenge their feelings about and understanding of the war. The first of these incidents was the Tet Offensive, a massive offensive by the North Vietnamese that began on January 30, 1968 and caught the

American and South Vietnamese military completely by surprise. Though technically a victory for the U.S., the offensive was really a loss given that it brought Americans, both civilians and military personnel, face to face with the fact that the government’s message that victory was on the horizon was far from true. As a crisis of confidence swept the nation, Walter Cronkite, a trusted CBS news anchor, expressed the general attitude saying, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”16 For years the message coming from Washington had been that the North Vietnamese were on the brink of defeat. Tet not only demonstrated the strength of the North Vietnamese forces and the fact that they were far from loss even after years of fighting, it also showed the American people that the government had been actively deceiving them for years by concealing this reality.17 This caused substantial disillusionment across the country and forced many GIs to reconsider what they were actually fighting for and whether supporting their

15 Longely, Grunts, 102. 16 Longely, Grunts, 119. 17 Longely, Grunts, 119.

22 government’s lies was actually the best way of defending their country. The resulting increase in

GI antiwar sentiment mirrored the nationwide increase in civilian protest.18

The second major incident that contributed to the disillusionment of many GIs was more in line with the everyday horrors they were witnessing, or hearing about, in Vietnam, but it still managed to bring those horrors to new heights. This incident was the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, a small village in South Vietnam, by an American Army Company on March

16, 1968.19 In what is largely considered to be the worst atrocity of the war, 500 innocent civilians were brutally murdered over the course of four hours. The only explanation provided for the violence was that the soldiers had been told they would experience substantial resistance from the village. However, upon landing there, it quickly became clear that the only people in the village were women, children, and old men who provided no resistance. In fact, in the end there was only one American casualty at My Lai, which occurred in the form of a self-inflicted gun wound.20 Thanks to the bravery and persistence of Ron Ridenhour, a GI who accidentally learned about the incident after one of the soldiers involved bragged to him about it over a beer a month later, an investigation was eventually conducted with the story breaking publicly in an issue of Life magazine in November 1969, more than a year and a half after the incident occurred.21

With the publicity of My Lai, Americans could no longer deny the atrocities that were being perpetrated by their own soldiers in Vietnam. Despite censorship, the story reached many

GIs who were suddenly faced with the brutality that their country was executing in the name of

18 Although many GIs experienced Tet in the same way that civilians did, learning about it through second- hand sources; as active-duty members of the armed forces, they were in more immediate danger of actively perpetuating the war thanks to their military role, thus making the disillusionment among GIs hit closer to home. 19 Longely, Grunts, 151. 20 Longely, Grunts, 151-2; Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 2. 21 Longely, Grunts, 152-3.

23 its lofty ideals.22 Many realized a reality that Ridenhour himself expressed years later when he described the slaughter at My Lai saying, “This was an operation, not an aberration.”23 Though

My Lai was an extreme, it was not far outside the norm of American behavior in Vietnam. Like

Tet and the general experiences in Vietnam that they heard about or engaged in, My Lai caused many GIs to reevaluate their beliefs about the war and their own involvement in it. They questioned how such brutality fit in with the mission of achieving democracy and protecting civilians when it seemed that the Americans were causing more damage to the South Vietnamese people than their North Vietnamese enemies were. These realities on the ground in Vietnam were perhaps the most significant factor in the disillusionment process for many antiwar GIs.

With My Lai, as with Tet, some GIs experienced concern over serving in the U.S. military in light of these publicly revealed controversies. Philip Caputo, a Marine in South Vietnam in

1965, described the shift that many antiwar GIs experienced well, saying, “We [Americans] saw ourselves as the champions of ‘a cause that was destined to triumph.’ So, when we marched into the rice paddies…we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions…that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.”24 One GI whose perception of the war shifted drastically as a result of My Lai was

Mike Wong. He had previously been unsure about whether the war was right or wrong, but he found clarity when he heard about the events of My Lai and learned that it was not the Viet Cong who were killing women and children, but rather the Americans. In an interview he said, “I can’t describe what that did to us. There could no longer be any doubt as to who’s right and who’s

22 Wong, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 16 23 Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 5. 24 Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), xii.

24 wrong.”25 That realization that all doubt was gone motivated him to desert because he

understood that he could not support the war anymore.26

The speed at which GIs reevaluated their positions on the war varied. For some, it was

almost immediate. David Cline described his experience of coming to Vietnam thinking that

America was doing the right thing by saying, “When I got to Vietnam it really didn’t take me but

about one day in-country to realize it wasn’t true.”27 For others, the conversion took a little

longer, as it did for Skip Delano, a soldier who enlisted in the Army voluntarily and served in

Vietnam for a year, who described his experience turning against the war saying, “I joined the

Army in February 1967. I got to Vietnam in May, and by August I was very clearly against the

war.”28 For him, as for many other GIs, the initial reasoning for being against the war was not as

clear as it would become. He said, “I think most of us just immediately opposed [the reality of

the war] and maybe our understanding of [that opposition] wasn’t as sharp as it might have been,

but just on a gut level.”29 This raw, gut feeling characterized many of the triggers for disillusionment with the war for GIs, however, for others, the specific incidents discussed above marked the shift. For yet others, the central causes of their disillusionment fell outside of the reactions to these public atrocities and instead related more to the disconnect they witnessed in the conceptual justifications the United States made for its involvement in the war and to what they perceived as the unconstitutionality of America’s presence in Vietnam.30

Overall, a common thread that united most antiwar GIs was the conviction that what the

United States was doing in Vietnam was inherently un-American, running counter to the

25 Wong, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 16, 75. 26 Wong, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 16. 27 Cline, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 40. 28 Skip Delano, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42, 71. 29 Delano, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42. 30 David Allen Reed in Peace Is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest, ed. Jan Barry (Montclair, NJ: East River Anthology, 1981), 58; Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 52.

25 principles it purported to hold dear. This war that the country was supposedly fighting in the name of democracy and freedom was, they believed, actually oppressing the democracy and freedom of the Vietnamese people. GIs who had joined the war in the name of those ideals came to the conclusion that their government was violating them and began to protest the war. Seeing themselves as complicit in an immoral war, they expressed a sense of duty to resist its continuation. There was a sense of righteousness in how they explained their actions. They had joined the armed forces in defense of America’s values and they were now embarking on a resistance movement against the war for the very same reason.

In an issue of the GI underground paper Bragg Briefs, the editor summarized the sentiments of many antiwar GIs:

If what we are doing is un-American, then that lauded ideal, the American Spirit, has undergone a number of degenerative changes since its inception…Being a patriot was not easy in 1776 and it is no easier today, for it demands sacrifice and a willingness to bear abuse and reprehension. We who have spoken out declare our willingness to be patriots in the true, historical sense of the word.31

The GIs who engaged in the movement did so in the name of their country, believing that it could once again return to those values that had guided its existence for nearly 200 years.

The acts of protest that would retroactively be included in discussions of the GI movement began in 1965. These were actions taken by individual servicemen who were motivated by their personal opposition to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.

The earliest actions related to absenteeism and combat refusal, both of which continued on throughout the duration of the war. Two of the first visible participants in the movement, Donald

Duncan and Howard Levy, expressed their opposition to the United States’ involvement in

Vietnam by simply refusing to continue being part of it. Donald Duncan quit the Green Berets in

31 Bragg Briefs, quoted in James Lewes, Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers During the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 63.

26 1965 and in 1967 Howard Levy became the first person to disobey a direct order. Both men

were among the first to publicly take on great risks because of their opposition to their country’s

behavior in Vietnam.

In 1965, Master Sergeant Donald Duncan quit the Green Berets after 10 years in the

military, becoming the first Vietnam soldier to publicly oppose the war.32 He was motivated by

the many contradictions raised by the fighting in Vietnam. His most jarring experience, the one

that first forced him to question what exactly the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, occurred during an

operation when, at the last minute, he received orders saying that American troops were not to

accompany the South Vietnamese soldiers into Laos as had been originally planned. The reason

for the change was that it was an election year and if any American soldiers were arrested, it

would have a negative effect on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign. As a result, 40

Vietnamese soldiers were sent out alone on a mission that was doomed to fail. Only six returned

alive and un-captured.33 For Duncan, in that moment “it became apparent that we were not

interested in the welfare of the Vietnamese, but, rather, in how we could best promote our own

interests.”34

Upon quitting the Green Berets, Duncan worked to publicize his realizations by

publishing several articles expressing his views, including “The Whole Thing was a Lie!,” one of

the first exposés of American Vietnam policy, which he published in the left-leaning magazine

Ramparts in 1966.35 In addition to telling personal anecdotes about how he came to the

realization that his own beliefs about the war were lies, Duncan emphasized the fact that, unlike

what the government was telling Americans, most people in South Vietnam supported the North

32 Duncan, “The Whole Thing was a Lie!” 13. 33 Duncan, “The Whole Thing was a Lie!” 16-7. 34 Duncan, “The Whole Thing was a Lie!” 17. 35 Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 43.

27 Vietnamese Communists, meaning that even the most basic premise of the U.S.’s presence in

Vietnam was false.36 At the time, there was no movement for Duncan to join, so he simply engaged in a personal protest to express his views and demonstrate his opposition to the war. In

Sir! No Sir!, a documentary on the GI movement, Duncan describes his process of realizing that his country was not doing what it should, saying, “I was really proud of what I thought I was doing. The problem I had was realizing that what I was doing was not good. I was doing it right, but I wasn’t doing right.”37 After coming to that realization, Duncan felt he could not continue to be part of the hypocritical action he saw occurring and, given that he was complicit in that action as a Green Beret, he quit the armed forces.

Though Donald Duncan was the first U.S. soldier to publicly oppose the war, he was by no means the last. In fact, absenteeism, which covers all types of desertions, grew massively throughout the duration of the Vietnam War. As the actions of going AWOL and deserting became more politicized within the context of expressing a principled opposition to the war beginning in 1967, the rate of absenteeism simultaneously increased with the annual number of deserters within the Army and Marine Corps increasing from over 70,000 to over 80,000 between 1969 and 1971 while the number of servicemen overall between the two groups decreased by 500,000.38 These numbers do not even include servicemen who went AWOL. By

1971, out of every one hundred soldiers, seven deserted and seventeen went AWOL. These were the highest rates of absenteeism in Army history.39 There is no evidence of the motivations these

GIs had for engaging in absenteeism, but it is likely that opposition to the war was at least part of

36 Duncan, “The Whole Thing was a Lie!” 21, 23. 37 Sir! No Sir! directed by David Zeiger (London: BBC, 2005), 2:30. 38 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 275. AWOL means Absent Without Leave. It implies a temporary disappearance from the armed forces that may eventually result in the return of the service members who disappeared. 39 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 111.

28 the motivation for some of them. Mike Wong, a GI who deserted to Canada, described his own

process of making the decision to desert, saying, “The question had been framed in black and

white: do you want to be a murderer or do you want to be a coward? And I finally decided that

the worst thing that can happen to a coward is he hurts himself, but a murderer not only hurts

himself, he hurts other people too. And so I went to Canada.”40 For Wong, it was his inability to

be a murderer in the name of a war he did not support that made him decide to desert. Though

there are no generalized statistics, there are many similar stories of GIs feeling they had no

choice but to engage in absenteeism so as not to be complicit in the atrocities they witnessed.41

Engaging in these forms of protest involved taking on major risks ranging from the potential for imprisonment and court-martial to the possible personal costs, as men who refused service were often perceived as self-serving cowards. While self-preservation may have been a motivator for some people, it certainly was not the sole, universal motivation. This is highlighted by the fact that over a fifth of deserters had already completed their tours in Vietnam by the time they deserted, meaning that they were no longer in immediate danger within the armed forces. Yet these men, who could have completed their remaining months of service relatively peacefully and safely on bases in the United States, instead chose to engage in an individualized form of protest, possibly in order to express their principled opposition to what they had witnessed in Vietnam. Army volunteer Ed Sowders demonstrated the type of ideological motivation that could be tied to desertion by describing the shift in his perception of the war that he experienced in Vietnam. He said:

When I volunteered for Vietnam…I tended to believe my political leaders – the president. They said we were over there helping the Vietnamese…What I saw as a medic was

40 Wong, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 16. 41 Charlie Clements, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 26; Keith Mather, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 54.

29 massive civilian casualties that were the results of our firepower. Women, children, the elderly would come flowing into the hospital after certain missions as the results of our weapons and bombs.42

As Sowders said in an interview after the war, “I can honestly say that I deserted the Army on the very same basic principles that I volunteered for the war.” 43 It was his same ideological commitment to helping others that motivated him to volunteer in the first place, which then also motivated him to desert as a way to express his belief that what America was doing was wrong.

Throughout the Vietnam War, the Pentagon recorded a total of 503,926 “incidents of desertion.”44 The deterioration of morale that led to this level of desertion suggests widespread disillusionment with the war effort among GIs. While not all of these incidents were directly tied to what would become the GI movement, there is no denying that these activities had an effect on the functioning of the armed forces given that they were losing military personnel and expending resources on punishing them. Though absenteeism was an individual action, it reflected the larger antiwar sentiment among GIs and for those who felt that the United States was not fulfilling its role on the world stage well, it provided an outlet through which they could express that discontent.

Combat refusal, like absenteeism, was an individual act that began early in the war and continued to be a prominent means for GIs to express their antiwar sentiments throughout it, with general noncompliance becoming one of the major tools of resistance as the war progressed.45

There are records of early combat refusal beginning in 1966, but the first major incident occurred in 1967 when Captain Howard Levy, an Army doctor, stopped training Special Forces soldiers in

42 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 78. 43 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 78. 44 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 38:10. 45 Harry W. Haines, "Soldiers against the Vietnam War: Aboveground and the Ally," in Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2, ed. Ken Wachsberger (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 12; Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 44-5.

30 dermatology as he was required to. He realized that the soldiers were only being taught how to cure minor skin ailments as a way of ingratiating themselves to the Vietnamese as part of the larger perpetuation of a war that he already disagreed with based on principle. Levy felt that this training was unethical and that he could not support an activity to which he was opposed, so he threw the soldiers out and refused to train them.46 This act made headlines and is considered by some to mark the start of the GI movement. Levy did not shy away from the publicity his action drew, instead walking to his sentencing, where he would be court-martialed and condemned to prison for three years, with his head held high. In 2005, Levy recalled realizing that he was not alone in his antiwar sentiment when, as he was walking to receive his court-martial, he saw hundreds of GIs hanging out of their barrack windows and flashing him peace signs and clenched fists in support.47

While Levy was not the only person to engage in combat refusal during the early years of the war, he received the most publicity. Other GIs who also engaged in some form of combat refusal during this period did so largely without any awareness that their feelings were shared.

Another Vietnam veteran, Bill Short, described his own experience refusing to go on combat missions as being motivated by “a strong moral sense of something not being right” without any awareness of there being a larger GI antiwar movement with members who shared that sense.

Like Levy, Short felt that he had to do something to demonstrate that he did not support his nation’s behavior and he turned to combat refusal because it was one of the few avenues of protest available to him as a member of the military.48

Though relatively common, these two forms of antiwar activities carried significant risks and not every antiwar GI was willing to break military law in such an overt fashion in order to

46 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 171; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 2:45, 4:35. 47 Joseph P. Fried, "Following Up," New York Times, July 21, 2002; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 5:20, 6:15. 48 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 33:20.

31 express their sentiments. Perhaps for this reason, some service members turned to more minor

levels of interference on their bases as a way of impeding the war effort. For many, this involved

persistent hindrance of the daily functioning of the army. Specifically, many did this by working

more slowly, an action that was not illegal, but that still reduced the efficiency of the military

and thus its ability to continue perpetuating the war at the same level.49 Army soldier John

Ketwig described this type of minor interference, saying, “There was a sizeable sabotage that

happened. No great big things…It was just little things here and there. One guy would scratch

this, damage that, paint obscene things on the side of something; you just, kind of, inhibit the

whole activity in a small way. But it was a pain. It was always something that the military had

to deal with.”50 This type of minor interference was an action that began on a more

individualized scale, but that started to grow as awareness of an emerging GI movement developed. Sometimes these small actions could build up into larger forms of resistance that then helped raise awareness of the GI movement for other service members on the base.51 Once

underground press publications began to be produced and circulated, they often emphasized the

importance of these small-scale forms of daily resistance, even providing suggestions on how to

engage in them.

Another means of expressing resistance while working within the military system was

applying for conscientious objector status. Generally, conscientious objector status was

something that a person applied for before entering the armed forces, however, many antiwar

GIs, specifically those who initially volunteered for service while supporting the war, only later

49 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 42, 55. 50 Ketwig, "Interview with John Ketwig." In his interview, Ketwig described a minor of sabotage that he engaged in himself when on kitchen duty preparing a meal for the officers. As a small act of resistance, Ketwig decided to put sugar in all the salt containers and salt in all the sugar containers. As with many other similarly small actions, this was intended to be an inconvenience for the military brass and to help convey the displeasure of the GIs with the war they were forced to engage in. 51 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 73.

32 discovered that they were opposed to it. Some of these GIs attempted to gain conscientious

objector status once already in the armed forces as a way of legally expressing their opposition to

the United States’ presence in Vietnam. For some, the appeal of this method of expressing

opposition was that it would create a record of their principled opposition that could not be

refuted, unlike with other means of opposition, such as absenteeism, where the motivations

behind the action could potentially be discredited as being based on self-preservation rather than moral factors.52

One GI who sought conscientious objector status once already in the military was Bruce

MacLean, a draftee who was not opposed to war in general, but who, after completing his basic

training, found himself strongly opposed to the Vietnam War specifically. He did not believe in

ploys to get out of service, such as injuring oneself, but he felt that he could not support

America’s activities in the war and had to do something to demonstrate his opposition.53

Because of this, he decided to apply for conscientious objector status. MacLean’s application was denied and he was forced to remain in the armed forces. Instead of engaging in absenteeism, MacLean decided to continue working against the war on his base to try to spread the antiwar message to other GIs.54 By seeking conscientious objector status, antiwar GIs, like

MacLean, demonstrated an ongoing faith in the justice of the American system.

By 1967, many individual service members were starting to question their convictions

about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and were searching for ways to stop being complicit

in the continuation of the war effort. Some antiwar GIs took on personal risks by openly

demonstrating their opposition to the war when it might have been easier to just quietly fulfill

52 Bruce MacLean, "Bruce MacLean: Antiwar and Radical History Project," interview by Jesse Kindig and Maria Quintana (2009). 53 MacLean, "Bruce MacLean: Antiwar and Radical History Project," video 3, 1:40. 54 MacLean, "Bruce MacLean: Antiwar and Radical History Project," video 1, 0:30-1:35, video 4.

33 their obligations until their time in the military came to an end. Overall, GIs were, on an individual basis, working to make their principled opposition to the war known with some even beginning to realize that others might share their views.55 What these individual GIs still lacked was a means of communication that would allow their potential impact to grow.

As GI antiwar activity became more widespread and evident, the need for communication methods became more pressing. The development of the coffeehouse and underground press were natural responses to this need. Given the limited freedoms afforded to members of the military, antiwar GIs did not have many legal means through which to spread their message.

While individuals tried their best to operate within the military system, such as by working with civilians to create coffeehouses off the bases where they could congregate to discuss their feelings about the war and where they could legally publish antiwar literature, they often still got in trouble with the military authorities and could face serious punishment. Though there were risks involved in this antiwar activity, especially when it involved the breaking of military laws, such as by spreading antiwar literature on bases following the creation of the underground press, many GIs saw these dangers as being worthwhile because they cared more about the cause than about their own safety.

The creation of the coffeehouse was one of the key developments of the GI movement. It was a space that was close to the military base, though still off it, meaning that GIs could meet there to mingle and openly discuss their feelings about the war not only with each other, but also with members of the larger antiwar movement beyond the military. Fred Gardener, a civilian antiwar activist, opened the first coffeehouse, called the UFO, in 1967 near Fort Jackson in

Columbia, South Carolina.56 The idea quickly took off with nineteen coffeehouses opening

55 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 121. 56 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 98.

34 across the country by 1970 and twenty-six opening by 1971. Most of these were founded and run by civilians who appreciated the impact GIs could have in helping to end the war given their firsthand knowledge of its realities.57 The civilians were not trying to proselytize to the GIs, but

rather to support and nurture their antiwar sentiments and to empower them to channel their

energy into action.58

The coffeehouse provided a space for GIs to freely discuss their feelings about the war

and their experiences in Vietnam, if they had already returned from there, as well as providing a

space to simply hang out and escape military life.59 They had antiwar literature available and,

through the involvement of civilian activists, GIs were able to connect their own ideologies to

those gaining momentum in the rest of the country.60 While the GI movement came about

independently, once it had started, and once members of civilian antiwar movements gained

respect for the antiwar GIs, a relationship developed that involved GIs taking part in civilian

protests and interacting with civilian antiwar literature and ideology. This, in turn, helped with

the development and organization of the GI movement given that outsiders whose activities were

not dictated or restricted by military law were now supporting the movement. Because of all the

opportunities they afforded GIs, wherever they sprang up, coffeehouses quickly became centers

of political and social interaction.61 Additionally, thanks to the space for discourse and

organization that coffeehouses provided, following the creation of one, there was typically an

increase in antiwar activities on the nearby base.62

57 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 99. 58 David L. Parsons, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 19. 59 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 122. 60 Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 34; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 20:50. 61 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 274. 62 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 99.

35 Perhaps because of the immense power they had in opening the eyes of GIs to the

existence of substantial antiwar sentiment within the armed forces and in helping to develop a

cohesive movement, coffeehouses were heavily targeted both by the military brass and by local

officials. They faced frequent harassment from everyone from local officials to the military to

the KKK, making the creation and maintenance of a coffeehouse an often-dangerous endeavor for the GIs and civilians involved.63 The government tried to repress coffeehouses through

closures, raids, and arrests. Some were declared off-limits by the military, including one near

Fort Knox, and others were burned to the ground.64 At the Fort Dix coffeehouse, there was a

bomb explosion on February 14, 1970 that injured three people. It was the fourth attack on the

coffeehouse in five months. The Green Machine coffeehouse near Camp Pendleton in California

similarly faced attacks, including one in which it was attacked by .45-caliber machine gun fire on

April 29, 1970.65 Despite these dangers, coffeehouses continued to play an important role in the

movement as the war went on and they continued to spring up near American military bases

around the world.66 With the coffeehouses, GIs attempted to express their views through legal

means, however, by endangering the GIs even when they were following the law, the military

demonstrated that antiwar service members might have to move to more extreme means to have

their messages heard.

As unified antiwar sentiment grew among service members, some GIs began thinking

about how they could spread the message even further utilizing the organizational space and

access to resources the coffeehouse provided them. This thinking led to the development of the

63 Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 54; Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 99; "Snapshots of a Short but Interesting Life II," February 11, 2016, https://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/. 64 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 122; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 23:20. 65 Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 54. 66 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 99.

36 first GI underground press publication, The Bond, by Andy Stapp.67 This newspaper, like many

others, was intended to be a publication by and for GIs that spread the news GIs were not

receiving, either because mass media was not covering it or because of the military’s use of news

blackouts where GIs would not hear about news, including protests and other antiwar or

antimilitary activities, happening on other bases, making it easier for the military to silence

protestors.68 GI news workers largely agreed that underground papers were a response to the

effects of the military censoring its media in this and other ways.69 The motivation behind

creating a paper was explained succinctly by Lincoln Bergman, a contributing editor to the

underground paper Movement. He said, “Why an underground newspaper?...Because the truths

they tell cannot be told in the mass media, because they serve needs that are not being served,

because a generation in rebellion and facing repression needs a voice.”70 The underground press

was intended to inform GIs about the activities of the GI movement on other bases and to help

spread the movement’s antiwar message to those who may still be undecided in their stance on

the war or may even still support it. Even more importantly, perhaps, it was intended to share

the truth about what was occurring in the Vietnam War from the people who actually fought in it

and thus had a unique firsthand knowledge of its realities.

In terms of the pragmatics of the papers, GI underground press publications were

typically produced at coffeehouses or at other off-base locations. They were self-funded by the

GIs who created them and sometimes by civilian antiwar groups, though often the editors would

have to ask their readers to donate money to help them produce the papers. Given that the papers

67 Lewes, Protest and Survive, 51. 68 WE GOT THE brASS, quoted in Lewes, Protest and Survive, 72; It was common for titles of underground press publications to make plays on military terminology, like “WE GOT THE brASS.” 69 Lewes, Protest and Survive, 51. 70 Lincoln Bergman and Alan Katzman, “Last Word from Underground,” in The Underground Press in America, ed. Robert J. Glessing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 161-2.

37 were being created off base when the GIs were off-duty, the news workers made the papers as civilians, meaning that they maintained their First Amendment rights and they did not break military law during the creation process. However, given that GIs, unlike civilians, lacked their

First Amendment rights, once an underground paper made its way to a military base, it, and the

GIs who interacted with it, were in violation of the law.71 Despite the risks that came with

breaking military law, GIs on bases around the country continued to produce, read, and spread

underground publications.

The content of GI papers could vary, but they all shared the mission of informing and

encouraging fellow GIs to understand it was their duty to turn against the war themselves. Some

GI papers hoped to expressly dictate what their readers should think, but generally papers were

intended to educate GIs on the views that were out there without directing their response. Often,

they aimed to have a mutual relationship with their readership. Most papers had pages devoted

to letters to the editors, which could include both antiwar letters and letters that were strongly

opposed to the GI movement. Many papers also solicited writing from their GI readers as well

as from veterans and civilians. The staff of the Fort Sheridan paper, The Logistic, expressed this

view well saying, “We vow to make our paper a forum for your ideas and viewpoints…We

aren’t interested in telling you what to think, but we do wish to inform you about what others are

thinking so that you can make your own decisions and form your own opinions.”72 Though the

underground papers clearly had a strong antiwar angle, typically their goal was to let their

readers make their own decisions about the correct view of the war after gaining all the available

information rather than just trying to force them to take an antiwar stance.

71 Delano interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 26:35. Underground press publications constituted “unauthorized literature” and were thus not permitted on military bases. 72 The Logistic at Ft. Sheridan, quoted in Lewes, Protest and Survive, 71.

38 In addition to this focus on spreading information, many underground press publications

also highlighted the oppression of rights that GIs experienced within the military; especially in

the creation and distribution of the GI press. Many GIs, including those who published

underground papers, felt that military laws oppressing freedom of speech and of the press

violated their constitutional rights and American values. In continuing to publish and read the

papers, GIs demonstrated that they cared more about maintaining the nation’s values than those

of the military. Of the 710 underground press articles that James Lewes examined for his book

Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers during the Vietnam War, 224 of them

invoked the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.73 Clearly, the lack of these rights for GIs was a

major concern within the underground press, especially given that it impeded the potential

impact that the papers could have by creating a risk both for the GIs who produced them and for

those who read them. In an issue of the underground paper Graffiti, the editor summarized the

feelings of many GIs on the violation of their rights saying, “The Bill of Rights guarantees

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Religion. Its [sic] time GI’s [sic]

moved up from second class citizenship and acquired their rights.”74 Through their papers,

antiwar GIs hoped to increase outrage over this violation of their own rights and their inability to

express their feelings on the war in any way on military bases.

The final, and possibly most important, purpose of the GI paper was to encourage

resistance among its readers and suggest avenues for it. In many cases, stories of resistance on

other bases seemed designed to inspire others to carry out similar acts. For example, in a

stateside issue of the underground paper Vietnam GI, there was a section titled “Through the

Grapevine” that had short articles on instances of protest on different bases, including the story

73 Lewes, Protest and Survive, 58. 74 Graffiti, quoted in Lewes, Protest and Survive, 52.

39 of a reserve unit at Fort Lewis that made so much trouble on the base that their Vietnam orders

were cancelled. The article went on to detail the different actions the unit took including

drawing peace signs around the base, sabotaging equipment, and messing up the training cycle.75

The papers would also often provide information on lawyers if a GI’s antiwar actions got them in

trouble with the military brass.76 In addition to these broader means of inspiring GIs to action,

underground papers would sometimes provide very specific instructions for how to avoid being

complicit in the war. An article titled “Going to Nam?” in an issue of Vietnam GI provided nine

explicit steps for how to avoid being sent to Vietnam once already in the armed forces. These

steps included applying for a Hardship Discharge, which, though the request would likely be

denied, would still be a long process that would buy a GI time, applying for Officer Candidate

School or Flight School, both of which, again, were very long, paperwork-heavy processes that

would provide extra time, or writing to the GI’s congressman and saying that their rights were

being infringed upon.77 The paper was not encouraging GIs to break the law, but rather showing

them how to take advantage of weaknesses within the system for their own gains.

There is no denying that GI press publications were widely read and that they likely had

some influence on the GIs who encountered them. Recent estimates show that there were around

300 different GI underground papers throughout the war and some of those papers, like Vietnam

GI and The Bond had circulations in the tens of thousands while others, like The Ally, had more

typical circulations ranging from 3,500 to 10,000.78 In fact, many GIs experienced their first contact with the US antiwar movement through underground papers.79 Given that GIs moved

75 “Through the Grapevine,” Vietnam GI, September 1968 Stateside issue, 4. 76 “Through the Grapevine,” Vietnam GI, 4. 77 “Going to Nam?” Vietnam GI, September 1968 Stateside issue, 4. 78 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 96; Jonathan Neale, The American War: Vietnam 1960-1975 (Chicago: Bookmarks, 2001), 123; Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 274; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 27:30. 79 Lewes, Protest and Survive, 53.

40 from base to base so frequently, both because of typical military movements and because the brass would use relocation as a way of trying to combat the growth of the GI movement on their bases, the GI press provided a means for unifying the principles and sensibility of the movement between bases in the absence of an ability to organize in the same way that movements outside the military were able to.80 As James Lewes put it, GI newspapers became “the fundamental expression of political opposition within the armed forces.”81 Though it is unclear just how big the effects of the papers were, there is no denying that they were widely available and that they provided a useful way of uniting the movement and its ideology. In an environment where GIs had little freedom or opportunity to express their views, the underground papers were, as the editor of The Ally put it, “a way of striking back at the guys who are standing on your stomach.”82

For some of the GIs who were involved in the creation of underground papers, it became the core component of their activism. These GIs faced substantial dangers in creating these papers. These included the physical dangers that they faced when working within the coffeehouses as well as the dangers of military punishment, specifically through court-martials and sentences of hard labor, for violations of military law in producing and distributing

“unauthorized literature.” 83 The GIs who created and distributed underground papers knowingly faced the consequences of breaking military law in line with what they felt was their duty in helping to save the country from the biggest threat it currently faced: itself.

80 Jessie Kindig, "GI Movement: Underground Papers: GI Papers at Fort Lewis," last modified 2008, http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/gi_papers.shtml; Andy Stapp, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 32; Tom Roberts, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 48; David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 51. 81 Lewes, Protest and Survive, 55. 82 The Ally, quoted in Lewes, Protest and Survive, 69. 83 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 26:35; Delano interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42.

41 Given the difficulty of maintaining contact between GIs on different bases, the GI

movement’s aim of unifying in order to increase its impact faced serious challenges. While the

underground papers generally shared similar messages and stories, there was no single paper that

a GI could turn to in order to find an overview of the movement and the activities being engaged

in within it. This problem was somewhat alleviated with the development of the Student

Mobilization Committee’s GI Press Service (GIPS) in June 1969, which saw itself as the

“Associated Press of the GI movement” serving as a link between local GI papers that created a

general national overview of the movement that was then published in their publication, GI Press

Service.84 The publication ran 25,000 to 30,000 copies that were sent out in bundles to over

three hundred subscribed GIs who would then distribute the papers to other GIs on their and

nearby bases.85 Between the development of GIPS and the general growth of underground

papers, many GIs were becoming aware of the large-scale antiwar sentiment within the armed forces and they were also discovering that there was an avenue through which they could express their antiwar views.

The development of coffeehouses and the underground press was a critical step in bridging the gap between the individual acts of protest that marked the early GI movement and the more public group actions that would help put the movement on the map among civilians.

Although stepping-stones, these components were two of the key aspects of the movement as a whole and they continued to be central to its progress throughout the Vietnam War. They helped to develop the collective sensibility that defined the GI movement. They also showed antiwar

GIs that they were not operating in a vacuum, but rather that they were part of a larger whole and that their actions contributed to a shared mission. Thanks to the coffeehouses and underground

84 Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 38, 41; Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 61. 85 Lembcke, The Spitting Image, 41-2.

42 press stimulating the collective consciousness and creating avenues to connect GIs, the

movement was now able to begin engaging in group and public actions and it was better able to

connect with the people who were backing a similar ideology in the civilian world who would be

able to assist them in their efforts.

In order to increase awareness in the general public that there was substantial antiwar

sentiment within the armed forces, the GI movement first had to challenge the dominant public

narrative of GI dissent being based on fear and self-protection by demonstrating that it was, in many cases, based on principled opposition to the war. The movement made the case that GIs were opposed to the United States’ actions in Vietnam not because they endangered the lives of people in the military, but rather because the nation was violating the very values and freedoms on which it was built through its actions in the war. The participants in the GI movement sought to increase awareness within the public through different forms of collaborative action, such as by marching in public protests in uniform, holding teach-ins in local communities, and suing the government for violations of constitutional rights. Participants in the movement also began engaging in actions with the intent of getting press attention so as to spread awareness. This desire for public outreach was likely based on a realization that the military brass could more easily silence GI dissent if the larger public was unaware of it. Another potential factor was that

GIs came to realize that their own opposition to the war could help provide validation for the views of civilian antiwar groups given that their resistance was clearly based on firsthand experience and was thus more difficult to brush off for those who denounced general antiwar sentiment and protest.

One of the main ways that antiwar GIs began engaging with the civilian population was by taking part in public protests against the war. The first such incident occurred during a march

43 on April 27, 1968 when GIs led a civilian peace rally for the first time, with 40 active-duty GIs walking at the front of a San Francisco antiwar demonstration.86 Later that year, Navy nurse

Lieutenant Susan Schnall worked to bring even more GIs into contact with the civilian peace

movement.87 In an interview after the fact, Schnall described her experience saying, “After

about a year and a half [in the armed forces] I felt I could no longer live with myself and face

myself if I didn’t do something against the war.”88 She decided that the best thing she could do

would be to try to get as many GIs as possible to attend demonstrations planned by the Veterans

for Peace, an antiwar organization, in her local San Francisco. Inspired by the United States’

system of flying B-52 bombers over Vietnam urging the Vietnamese to defect, Schnall decided

to drop leaflets about the march from a plane onto bases in the San Francisco area, including the

aircraft carrier Ranger, the Oakland Naval Hospital, and the Treasure Island navy base.89 On the day of the protest, commanders tried to keep their soldiers from leaving the base by frequently holding role call and formation, but, despite this, around 500 GIs took part in the march.90

The most attention-grabbing component of the protest was not the involvement of these

500 GIs, though, but rather Schnall herself who decided to march in her uniform despite there

being a Navy regulation saying that uniforms cannot be worn when speaking political or partisan

views publicly.91 In wearing her uniform Schnall both resisted and highlighted the hypocrisy of

the military laws that GIs were bound to follow. When describing her decision to wear her

86 Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 57. 87 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 276. Schnall is one of only a few known female participants in the military antiwar movement. Another example of female participation in antiwar protest occurring during Thanksgiving 1969 when there was a protest at the 71st Evacuation Hospital at Pleiku where 100 servicemen and women had a silent fast in protest of the war, asking that their dinners be given to the poor instead. It is interesting to note that the GI movement was so heavily male given that there were many female nurses in the armed forces. 88 Disobeying Orders: GI Resistance to the Vietnam War, directed by Pam Sporn (Grito Productions, 1990), 16:14-16:25. 89 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 9:50, 10:00; Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 276. 90 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 276. 91 Susan Schnall, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 12.

44 uniform, Schnall said, “I thought, if General Westmoreland can wear his uniform before

Congress asking for money for Vietnam, I can wear mine as a member of the Armed Forces

speaking out against the war. I had as much right to freedom of speech as he does.”92 When the

military court-martialed Schnall, it proved that the brass did not agree with her.93 Though

Schnall was punished, she still succeeded in attracting media attention to the existence of a

growing GI movement.94 As the war progressed, GIs continued to take part in public protests as

a way of demonstrating their opposition to the war as active-duty service members. In fact, civilian antiwar protestors would often ask GIs to speak at events where they could then spread their message even further.95

Though public protests provided a useful means for informing Americans about the

presence of a substantial antiwar movement within the armed forces, they did not provide a space

for GIs to speak in depth about their specific oppositions to the war. To address that problem,

some antiwar GIs held teach-ins to educate people outside the military, especially those who

might soon be entering the armed forces, about the realities of the war in Vietnam. One such

teach-in occurred on August 10, 1968 at Berkeley’s Provo Park. This teach-in involved collaboration between the GI movement and a civilian antiwar group, the Student Mobilization

Committee, which sponsored the event. At that teach-in, Donald Duncan, the first GI to resign from the armed forces in Vietnam, spoke first and talked about how the system, not the GI, is the enemy. The event ended with an open microphone for GIs and veterans to speak about their own

92 Schnall, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 12. 93 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 10:45. 94 Special to The New York Times, "Navy Nurse Gets 6-Month Sentence for War Protests," New York Times, February 4, 1969; "Navy Nurse Convicted for Antiwar Activities," Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1969; "Navy Nurse Sentenced to Hard Labor." The Washington Post, February 4, 1969. Schnall was sentenced to six months of hard labor, but, as was usually the case with women sentenced to less than a year, she did not have to serve her sentence. The press attention that she received for her action and for her court-martial and sentencing was focused in the major coastal papers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times. 95 Fournier, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 6.

45 issues with the war.96 This type of event provided a space for participants in the GI movement to interact directly with civilians and actually explain the basis for their beliefs.

GIs also often relied on democratic means to express their opposition to the war. Some groups of antiwar GIs used ballots and petitions as a way to express their antiwar views to their superiors and to demonstrate that the majority of their fellow GIs shared these views. In 1969,

1,366 active-duty GIs signed a New York Times ad in support of the November 15 moratorium, a national day of protest against the Vietnam War that included a march in Washington D.C. with several hundred thousand participants, to demonstrate the significant opposition to the war within the armed forces.97 Other ballots and petitions were intended to keep the GIs who participated from going to Vietnam and being further complicit in the war effort. As the war continued, both the Army and the Navy saw GIs begin signing petitions to express their opposition to the war.98 A few Navy cases gained public attention when the GIs tried to keep their ships from sailing to Vietnam by expressing their sentiments democratically. On the USS

Coral Sea, over 1,000 GIs signed a petition saying they were against sailing to Vietnam. Despite this, the ship was still sent.99

The crew of the “Connie” (the USS Constellation), the biggest ship in San Diego Harbor, took even greater action than the Coral Sea, gaining the attention of everyone from everyday civilians to United States Senators, when they decided that everyone on the ship would cast a ballot indicating whether or not they wanted to go back to Vietnam. Ron Momahan, one of the

GIs on the ship, explained how the crew came up with the idea of the ballots saying, “We truly

96 "GI’s Hold Teach-In," The Ally, http://www.sirnosir.com/archives_and_resources/library/articles/ally_07.html. 97 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 33:55; Dave Blalock, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 30. 98 Terry H. Anderson, "Vietnam Is Here: The Antiwar Movement," in The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War, ed. David L. Anderson and John Ernst (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 261; Neale, The American War, 140-1. 99 Neale, The American War, 140-1.

46 believed that what would stop [the war] was when the soldiers stopped fighting it… we sat

around and brainstormed about what kind of non-violent action we can take that can actually

touch sailors.” 100 Eventually they came up with the idea of the ballots.

What started as a more insular expression of antiwar action on one ship quickly spread

when the GIs aboard the ship decided to bring the ballots to stores and shopping centers around

San Diego in the hopes of getting as many responses as possible.101 Huge media and public

education campaigns accompanied the ballot campaign, which was also being driven by the San

Diego Nonviolent Action Organization, one of many civilian antiwar organizations that began

working more extensively with the GI movement following its growth and provided it with

greater organization and direction than it had on its own.102 As the action gained attention,

everyone from the ship’s captain to the mayor of San Diego held press conferences about the

project. Even Senators were commenting on the action.103 In the end, the effort driven by

antiwar GIs hoping to express their opposition to the war through nonviolent means resulted in

over 56,000 votes being cast saying the ship should not go to Vietnam as well as in the exposure

of significant antiwar sentiment in an area that had previously been thought to be entirely pro-

war.104 Through these measures, GIs were able to express their antiwar views while highlighting

one of the nation’s core values – democracy – which they felt the country was violating in

Vietnam. Though this may not have been a motivator for all the GIs who participated in these

ballots and petitions, it is likely that, at least for some, a principled opposition to the war was a

factor.

100 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 1:05:35. 101 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 1:06:15. 102 "The Connie Vote: The USS Constellation and the Peace Movement in San Diego, 1971," Stanford Libraries, Accessed December 9, 2018, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/fitch/browse/the-connie-vote-the-uss- constellation-and-the-peace-movement-in-san-diego-1971?per_page=100&view=slideshow. 103 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 1:06:15. 104 "The Connie Vote,” Stanford Libraries.

47 All of these means of interaction with the civilian population were aimed at educating the

public about the GI movement and the existence of substantial antiwar sentiment within the

armed forces. Perhaps the biggest efforts at achieving this goal were through focused attempts to

engage in large-scale actions that the media would be unable to ignore. Participants in the

movement generally did this through group actions that saw GIs taking great personal risks in the

name of being able to express their views in a more public space than they would otherwise be

able to. This was achieved through major antiwar actions, such as mutinies and strikes, as well

as through court-cases, including ones where GIs sued the government for violating their rights.

These incidents provided a space for GIs to openly express their opposition to the war, thus

gaining media attention and exposing the oppression of freedoms GIs faced. Though attracting

media coverage was not the only motivation for the GIs who engaged in these activities, it, along

with their sense of having an obligation to end the war, likely factored into their decision

process.

The case of the “Fort Hood Three” was the first major case that involved public support

for resisters who were in the armed forces.105 The case began when Privates David Samas,

James Johnson, and Dennis Mora were told to report to the Oakland Army Terminal in order to be sent to Vietnam on July 13, 1966. Rather than simply privately refusing to deploy to

Vietnam, on June 3rd the GIs stated publicly that they would refuse their orders to go to

Vietnam.106 They then filed a lawsuit against the government in which they challenged the

105 The “Fort Hood Three” is a case that demonstrates the difficulty in creating a linear timeline for the GI movement. Scholars consider it an important part of the movement, but it occurred during the period that was largely made up of individualized actions. Although the incident is an outlier chronologically, it is still an important part of the story of the GI movement. 106 Lembcke, The Spitting Image, 35.

48 legality of the war.107 On June 30th, the men held a press conference in which Dennis Mora

spoke for the three saying, “We have been in the army long enough to know we are not the only

GIs who feel as we do…We have made our decision. We will not be part of this unjust,

immoral, and illegal war. We want no part of a war of extermination. We oppose the criminal

waste of American lives and resources. We refuse to go to Vietnam.”108 Through holding a

press conference and publicizing the motivations for their refusal to deploy to Vietnam, the “Fort

Hood Three” not only gave faces to what at that point were still vague, individual antiwar GIs,

but they also articulated the specific opposition that these GIs felt, demonstrating that they were

not just trying to avoid going to Vietnam to save themselves. Rather than simply going AWOL

or deserting as many other antiwar GIs did, the “Fort Hood Three” took steps to gain public

attention for their antiwar position. Though they ended up in jail, the GIs succeeded because the

brass was forced to respond to them and their antiwar beliefs.109

An act that garnered even more public attention a couple years later was the “Nine for

Peace” action in July 1968. During this effort, nine GIs, who represented the four branches of

the military between them, took sanctuary in a church in Northern California where they chained

themselves to each other and to the ministers saying that they would not go to Vietnam.110

According to Oliver Hirsch, an airman who was one of the nine GIs involved, after the men chained themselves and the minsters together they called the press and said, “We’re refusing our orders, and in fact we’re resigning from the military. Come and get us.”111 It took several days

107 Terry H. Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-War Movement: Essays from the Charles Debenedetti Memorial Conference, ed. Melvin Small and William D. Hoover (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 95-6. 108 Lembcke, The Spitting Image, 35. 109 Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance, 95-6. 110 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 8:10; Patricia Sullivan, "War Resister Oliver Hirsch; Was among ‘Nine for Peace’," Washington Post, January 20, 2007. 111 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 8:10.

49 for the government to figure out what to do with the men and by the time the police came to cut

their chains and remove them from the church, the action had become a media spectacle.112 The

men were sent to the Presidio stockade as punishment, but by then the effects of their protest

were already manifesting themselves with the event demonstrating to the public, many of them

for the first time, that dissent was not coming just from outside the war, but also from within

it.113 Like the “Fort Hood Three,” the “Nine for Peace” developed a protest guaranteed not to be

ignored with the hope that their message would be heard more broadly.

Following the “Nine for Peace” came what some scholars say is the most well-known event of the domestic GI movement: the Presidio mutiny.114 On October 14, 1968, twenty-seven inmates at the Presidio stockade near San Francisco broke their ranks during roll call formation, sat down outside, linked arms, and started singing.115 As participants in the GI movement, the men had been waiting to take some kind of action that would gain media attention for some time.

When a guard at the stockade shot and killed an imprisoned GI, it was the final straw. The GIs inside the prison decided they needed to hold a demonstration. The event was intentionally entirely peaceful and as the guards attempted to break up the men, the GIs just continued to calmly sing songs including “We Shall Overcome” and chant phrases like “We want the press.”116 At the time of the protest, mutiny was a capital crime; meaning that there was no limit

to the punishment the men could receive for their action.117 The GIs engaged in the act of

dissent knowing this and, in the end, the risk paid off. The event gained international publicity

112 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 8:40; Sullivan, "War Resister Oliver Hirsch.” 113 Sullivan, "War Resister Oliver Hirsch.” 114 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 74. 115 Bibliography from: "Presidio Commemorates 50th Anniversary of the Presidio 27 'Mutiny' at the Stockade," Targeted News Service, September 24, 2018. 116 Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 13:10, 14:15; Robert C. Jensen, "Mutiny at the Presidio: Ordeal and Challenge," The Washington Post, Times Herald, March 19, 1969. 117 Randy Rowland, "Randy Rowland: Antiwar and Radical History Project," interview by Jessie Kindig and Steve Beda (2008), video 9, 2:30-2:45; Jensen, "Mutiny at the Presidio.” The GIs ended up getting varied sentences that were as high as sixteen years of hard labor for their nonviolent, hour-long protest.

50 with many people expressing shock and dismay at the treatment of the nonviolent GIs.118 The

protest showed the world not only that there was significant antiwar feeling within the armed

forces, but also that the GIs experiencing those feelings were willing to risk death in the name of

their beliefs. Importantly, the event proved that meaningful and impactful protest was possible

even under the worst conditions.119

One final act of GI resistance that garnered substantial public attention was the case of

the “Fort Jackson Eight” at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 1969. Here, what began as an

attempt to create a dialogue about the war on the base quickly blew up into national news

resulting in a new military policy for dealing with GI dissent. The incident began when eight

antiwar GIs circulated a petition asking for permission to hold an open meeting on the Fort

Jackson base to “freely discuss legal and moral questions related to the war in Vietnam.” Even

though the petition received over 300 signatures, the GIs’ commanding general, James

Hollingsworth, refused to let them hold the meeting. However, on March 20th, an impromptu

gathering occurred where GIs met unofficially to talk about the war. With so many GIs hanging

out of their barracks and standing around, the brass could not do anything to stop the meeting.

Instead, they responded by putting the eight men who had circulated the original petition up for court-martial. By this point, the incident was gaining substantial public attention with the result that the GIs were just given undesirable discharges instead of full court-martials. The GIs then used their momentum to try to make more substantial changes within the military structure that would give greater freedoms to antiwar GIs given that they now had an audience that would allow their antiwar voices to be heard. They began a legal attack against the Pentagon and the

118 William E. Skinner, Samuel E. Allerton, and Pearl Rudolph, "Letters To The Times," Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1969; Steven V. Roberts, "Soldiers Protest Trial For Mutiny," New York Times, March 10, 1969; John Landry and James Kosvanec, "Army Deserter Emerges 'Hero' During Mutiny Trial Protests," The Hartford Courant, March 19, 1969. 119 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 74.

51 Army with ten soldiers from Fort Jackson suing both the Army and Hollingsworth specifically

for harassment and intimidation. Though the Army won, the lawsuit was still effective in

making the Defense Department worried about the impact of the growing GI movement and in

demonstrating that the GIs were willing to use all the legal means available to them to spread

their message.120 Following the incident of the “Fort Jackson Eight,” the Pentagon released a

directive on May 27, 1969 affirming that GIs had First Amendment rights and that they would be

permitted to have dissident literature on base as long as it was written off-base when the GIs

were off-duty, which was in line with how most underground papers were already being produced.121 Perhaps even more importantly, the incident increased national awareness of the GI

movement and promoted the movement on military bases.122

The incidents of large-scale GI protest discussed here were by no means the only

examples of coordinated GI actions on bases. As the movement grew, gaining both increased

support from fellow GIs and from outside antiwar organizations, large protests aimed to grasp

public attention grew in frequency with major incidents of dissent occurring at Fort Dix, Fort

Leavenworth, Fort Pendleton, and Fort Bragg just to name a few, reports of which would be spread through the underground press.123

By the time of its large-scale public actions, the GI movement had developed into its final

form. The participants had discovered ways to make their opposition known to the broader

public despite efforts to silence them or to obscure their message. They had also found avenues

through which they could speak directly to the people, whether through teach-ins or speaking at

protests, and where they could clearly articulate their points of view, explaining how they came

120 Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance, 100-1. 121 Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance, 101-2. 122 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 94. 123 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 74.

52 to have them. The movement no longer existed in relative isolation. It now had support from many civilian antiwar groups and individuals who appreciated the importance of the GI voice as part of the protest movement. The movement’s collective opposition was unified and reports of its actions were spread within the military community and beyond thanks to the flourishing coffeehouses and underground press.

The participants in the GI movement felt it was their duty to oppose the war and, thanks to their collective consciousness and their thriving coffeehouses and underground press, they were able to perform that duty much more effectively than ever before. The commonly held view of participants in the GI movement as being un-patriotic, self-serving, and motivated by defeat in the war is, then, inherently flawed.124 In fact, it was their firm belief in America’s core values that turned them against the war that their leaders were telling them to fight. In protesting the war in Vietnam, antiwar GIs saw themselves as adhering to American ideology and making substantial personal sacrifices in its name. Soldier Skip Delano expressed the sentiment of many

GI movement participants well when he said, “I thought and believed very much that since I had been in Vietnam, I had every right to comment on it to other people. In fact, I had a responsibility, and I took it seriously.” 125 For many GIs, the sense of responsibility to protect their country would lead them to continue their antiwar efforts even after leaving the armed forces. For them, the next logical step came in the form of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group in which they would be able to use the same advantages they had as soldiers, including

124 Shelby L. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965-1973 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985); Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 1, 171. Moser cites a number of sources including Richard Boyle, The Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army During the Vietnam Era (San Francisco: Ramparts, 1972); and Stuart H. Loory, Defeated: Inside America’s Military Machine (New York: Random House, 1973). 125 Delano, interview by Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 42.

53 their unique knowledge of the war and their dedication to protecting their country, as they continue their fight against the Vietnam War.

54 Chapter Two: “The Highest Form of Patriotism”: Vietnam Veterans Against the War1

We believe that the conflict in which the United States is engaged in Vietnam is wrong, unjustifiable and contrary to the principles on which this country was founded. We join the dissent of the millions of Americans against this war. We support our buddies still in Vietnam. We want them home alive. We want them home now. We want to prevent any other young men from being sent to Vietnam. We want to end the war now. We believe this is the highest form of patriotism.2

This is the statement Jan Barry (see images 1a,b,c) drafted during the summer of 1967

that served as the starting point of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In it, Barry

expresses the central tenets that came to define the organization. These include its focus on

ending the American presence in Vietnam and the belief that working to end the war was the

greatest possible expression of patriotism. Based on this original statement, VVAW went on to

become one of the most visible antiwar groups of the era.3

Following its 1967 founding by Jan Barry, VVAW became the first organization in

American history made up of veterans protesting the war they had just returned from. It was also

the only organized veteran group to consistently oppose the war. 4 Remarkably, 57% of the

veterans who joined VVAW had seen combat in Vietnam. This is a noteworthy statistic given

that, like in most modern wars, the majority of the military personnel during the Vietnam War

were in support positions.5 In order to be a member of VVAW, a veteran had to have “served in

Indochina as a member of the armed forces of the United States, regardless of rank or branch of

1 Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 14. 2 Hunt, The Turning, 14. 3 Hunt, The Turning, 14. This original statement by Jan Barry later appeared in a slightly altered form in a New York Times advertisement signed by 65 Vietnam veterans. 4 VVAW, "VVAW: Where We Came from, Who We Are," http://www.vvaw.org/about/. (Accessed January 4, 2018); Richard Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 193; Hunt, The Turning, 194. 5 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 3.

55 service” and demonstrated opposition “to the involvement of the United States in military action of any kind in Indochina.”6 From an initial membership of just a handful of veterans, the organization grew to over 25,000 members by the early 1970s.7 Throughout the war, VVAW was nonviolent and it maintained a commitment to democratic processes, meaning a dedication to pursuing the changes its members hoped to achieve (specifically an end to the American presence in Vietnam), through voting and electing antiwar politicians. This reflected the continuing faith of VVAW members in the democratic system that they had been told they were defending in Vietnam, and which they were now defending at home.8 As Rusty Sachs, a Marine

Corps Captain, put it, “The real motivation at the core [of VVAW] was to end the war; to bring the national opinion to a point where people would realize that national values are not being furthered by continuing this particular war.”9

Through grassroots organization, VVAW members worked to educate the American population about the realities of the war in Vietnam. They entered a political landscape in which many war supporters had previously brushed off antiwar activism quite easily by saying it was just made up of radical hippies who knew nothing of the actual war.10 However, veterans, unlike other protestors, had an authority, based not only on their firsthand knowledge of what was happening in Vietnam, but also on the substantial value placed on military service in American society. They leveraged their position as credible protestors who could not be entirely ignored or

6 Hunt, The Turning, 14. This was the criteria for eligibility that was laid out at the first meeting of VVAW. 7 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 10, 2019); Hunt, The Turning, 2- 3, 197. 8 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 193; Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008), 114. 9 Rusty Sachs quoted in Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, directed by George Butler, THINKFilm, 2004, 37:00. 10 Jonathan Neale, The American War: Vietnam 1960-1975 (Chicago: Bookmarks, 2001), 122.

56 easily demonized.11 As Ben Chitty, a VVAW organizer, described it, “To have in [the antiwar

movement] people who had served in the military…who were in fact patriots by the pro-war folks own definition, was a tremendous thing…[the veterans] took away little by little the response people had not to listen to the antiwar movement.”12 The result was significant.

Though VVAW could not turn everyone against the war, it was able to lend some legitimacy to

the peace movement.

As members of VVAW explain, participation in the movement involved serious

challenges, including facing their own memories of atrocities in Vietnam, acknowledging their

own complicity in what they experienced, and, often, creating conflict with their families.

VVAW member Jerry Lembcke (see image 2a) described the response to his participation in the

antiwar movement, saying, “It was alienating me…from almost all of my friends and family

from pre-draft years. I was really out with them.”13 Perhaps even more difficult than this

alienation was the acknowledgment that a veteran’s own sacrifices and those of their friends

were for nothing. Veteran Jack McCloskey articulated this feeling saying, “You also have to

realize how painful it was for me to get up and say this war was wrong…If you’re saying this is

wrong, then my buddy died for nothing.”14 For some, like VVAW leader John Kerry, there was

also a difficulty in the contradictions that were present in choosing to reject a military experience

11 Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013), 128. Even Middle America, which was largely pro-war, both historically and specifically when it came to the Vietnam War, and opposed to any form of antiwar protest, was forced to give the veterans some grudging respect. 12 VVAW, "VVAW: Where We Came from, Who We Are;" Neale, The American War, 121; Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 218; Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 67; Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 132. 13 Jerry Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 15, 2019). 14 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 217. In Going Upriver, Butler, 1:09:20, VVAW member Bobby Muller echoed this feeling saying, “It was harder for us to give expression to the antiwar movement because what it meant was saying that the sacrifices that we went through…were for nothing.”

57 and a war while still having admiration for the national military history they were part of.15

Though painful, many veterans recall these sacrifices as having been worth making in the name of service to their country; service they had been told they would be performing in Vietnam and which they now realized had to be performed in the United States itself.

The members of VVAW felt an obligation to take part in antiwar protests. They understood their own participation in the antiwar effort as being a continuation of the service and sacrifice in which they had partaken as GIs. In both cases, they were making sacrifices for the good of the country by protecting it from an enemy that was threatening it. Many of them had initially believed the government’s line on the war to the point that, for some, it was a factor in their decision to join the armed forces in the first place. One such person was Marine Corps veteran W. D. Ehrhart (see image 3a) who said, “I understood the war in Vietnam exactly the way my government was telling it to me: that you have the peace-loving people of South

Vietnam that were staving off an invasion by the outside aggressors from North Vietnam.” Now, after having been in Vietnam and seeing the disconnect between that message and the reality, veterans like Ehrhart believed that the biggest threat to their country came from the government that had orchestrated an unjust war on false premises.16 Discharged from military service, they

now had an obligation to fight the enemy at home. In joining VVAW, they were joining an

organization through which they believed they could help protect the country, just like they had

done when joining the military. Through their antiwar efforts the veterans redefined the very

meaning of duty, service, and sacrifice for the country. Building on the respect afforded to

veterans in American society, they worked to reclaim their images, transforming them from

15 Nicosia, Home to War, 141. 16 W. D. Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 14, 2019).

58 symbols used by government officials to support the war into ones that represented a credible opposition to its continuation.

This chapter will focus on the first years of VVAW, from 1967 to 1971, which encapsulate the organization’s founding in 1967, its rebirth in 1969, and its most significant year,

1970 to 1971, which saw its three most visible antiwar actions. The chapter concludes before the group began experiencing significant shifts in its leadership as the original leaders stepped down and more politically radical and left-leaning leaders took charge, causing divisions in the organization and a shift away from the ideals and methodology of the original movement.

The period from 1967 to 1971 can be broken down into two phases. The first phase begins with the founding of the movement in 1967 and ends with the election cycle of 1968 in which the VVAW-backed antiwar candidates did not receive the presidential nomination at the

Democratic National Convention (DNC) and where Richard M. Nixon eventually won the presidency.17 After this, VVAW experienced a significant drop in morale and involvement in the antiwar movement as a whole, bringing the group’s first phase to a close.18 VVAW’s second phase began in the fall of 1969 following the publication of the atrocities at My Lai, which caused a major resurgence in interest in the group as veterans across the country were spurred to action. This second phase came to an end in the fall of 1971, following VVAW’s three biggest antiwar actions (Operation RAW, the Winter Soldier Investigation, and Dewey Canyon III), when two of the group’s key leaders, Jan Barry and John Kerry, took a step back from the organization in part because they felt it was moving away from their vision.19 Barry and Kerry

17 Hunt, The Turning, 27-31. 18 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 204; Jan Barry, "Interview with Jan Barry," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 4 and March 4, 2019). 19 Joel Roberts and David Paul Kuhn, "The FBI’s Eye on Young John Kerry," CBSNews.com, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-fbis-eye-on-young-john-kerry/;

59 resisted engaging with the more radical, left wing components of the larger countercultural

movement and instead sought to cultivate a conservative, mainstream image for VVAW and its

members as a means of capitalizing on the credibility traditionally afforded military personnel.20

As one veteran explained after the war, that conservative image “was the one that the

establishment figures could relate to” and “the one that the public would listen to.”21 For Barry

and Kerry, their intent was to work within existing political systems to address a range of issues

related to veterans. Most importantly this meant bringing an end to American involvement in the

war, but it also included efforts to lobby the Veteran’s Administration to provide support for

those who had been wounded in Vietnam.

Phase One (1967 to 1968)

Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded by Jan Barry in 1967 in New York City

following an April 15 march organized by the Veterans for Peace, an antiwar group made up of

veterans of all wars. He and several other veterans marched under a banner they had picked up

with what would become the name of the organization written on it.22 Barry, like other veterans,

had experienced a moment in which he realized he had to get involved in antiwar activism. For

him, this occurred when he read an article in the New York Times that said the United States had

bombed yet another friendly village, a mistake that kept occurring without any visible efforts to

stop it.23 Barry had served in Vietnam during the period of advisors, before ground troops

John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 436. 20 Scholars use the term “conservative” to describe the image cultivated by VVAW in its early years and it is used as a counter to the “radical” components of the mainstream antiwar movement. 21 Bobby Muller quoted in Going Upriver, Butler, 53:25. In Barry, "Interview with Jan Barry," Jan Barry echoed this point saying, “In the first year, from June 1967 to spring 1968…we did a lot of radio/TV and public debates, wearing suits and ties because that was what one wore in those days to be taken seriously. Most of us came from conservation backgrounds and our intention was to speak to conservative audiences.” 22 VVAW, "VVAW: Where We Came from, Who We Are;" Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 244; Jan Barry, "When Veterans Protested the Vietnam War," New York Times, April 18, 2017. 23 Clara Bingham, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its

60 technically started being sent into the region, with the goal of having a military career. He

gradually turned against the war both during his time in Vietnam and upon his return home when

he began attending West Point. At the Veterans for Peace event, he saw the amazing response

that he and his fellow Vietnam veterans received as they marched through the city and he

realized that there needed to be an organization specifically for veterans of the Vietnam War,

whose experiences were so different from those of the veterans of other wars.24 Following the

march, Barry began reaching out to other Vietnam veterans and invited them to an organizational meeting at his apartment on June 1, 1967. That meeting resulted in the official founding of

Vietnam Veterans Against the War with Jan Barry as its elected president. This position existed more on paper than in terms of actual authority, given that Barry wanted to establish a democratic organization of equals rather than one in which a strict hierarchy dictated operations.25 Following that meeting, Barry worked to recruit as many veterans as possible to

join the new group.26

During the first phase of the movement, VVAW was less defined in its identity and in its

methods for achieving its goals than it would later be.27 Its central principles, which would

continue into its second phase (namely a belief in nonviolence and in the efficacy of democracy),

were already established, but the best ways to engage with those principles were still unclear.

When Barry first began thinking about how to start his organization, he was unaware of any

models for speaking out on such a major issue or for dissenting with the official line as a simple

civilian, not a politician. He turned to the examples he found in novels by war veterans like

Mind and Found Its Soul (New York: Random House, 2016), 273. 24 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 244; Barry, "Interview with Jan Barry;” Hunt, The Turning, 12-13; Nicosia, Home to War, 15-6; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 193. 25 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 244; Nicosia, Home to War, 17-8. 26 Hunt, The Turning, 13-4. 27 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 245.

61 Norman Mailer and, as he became aware of them, he also turned to the models he saw in the

Civil Rights movement and the greater antiwar movement. “Clearly,” he said, “their aim was to

educate and gain the support of fellow Americans and federal officials. That was a good model

of civic activism, I felt.”28 Based on these examples, as the movement began to grow through

1967, its focus landed on education and on telling the truth to the population from which it was

being hidden.29 Barry described this focus by saying: “Our goals were to educate the public to the reality of what was going on in Vietnam so a better decision could be made.”30 That

education was focused on countering the lies of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration

surrounding three key points: the fact that the United States was helping the desperate South

Vietnamese people by fighting communism in Vietnam, that a loss in Vietnam would result in a

direct threat to the United States, and that, as Johnson put it in a 1967 speech, “We are making

progress. We are pleased with the results we are getting. We are inflicting greater losses than

we are taking.”31 Based on their experiences in Vietnam, the veterans knew all of these points to

be false. With the aim of sharing that knowledge with the public in mind, VVAW began taking

concrete steps to expose the truth of the war that so much of America knew nothing about. For

Barry, the first step involved creating a speaker’s bureau.32 He and his fellow members hoped

that by educating the public about the reality of the war, they would encourage Americans to

take it upon themselves to vote antiwar politicians into office, thus bringing about its end.

28 Barry, "Interview with Jan Barry." 29 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 129. 30 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 200-1. 31 "President Johnson on the Vietnam War," November 17, 1967, 36:44. ; Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, "How the Vietnam War Broke the American Presidency," The Atlantic, October 2017; Richard Cohen, "Vietnam, a War between Truth and Lies," NY Daily News, September 18, 2017; Daniel Ellsberg, "Lying About Vietnam," New York Times, June 29, 2001; Karl Marlantes, "Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust," New York Times, January 7, 2017. 32 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran."

62 In order to begin exposing the truth to the public, the members of VVAW first worked to educate themselves. They knew that in order to have any chance of being taken seriously, they needed to be far more knowledgeable about the issues than their audience so that they could handle the intense scrutiny they were inevitably under.33 They studied international law and the

Geneva Accords and, armed with this knowledge, members of VVAW then took every possible opportunity to be seen through media appearances, talks, and teach-ins. Sometimes, despite their societal status as veterans, they would be disrespected and treated as troublemakers and communists by their audience. Occasionally, this disrespect reached the point of violence when audience members would become aggressive, even throwing rocks at the speakers in one instance.34 Despite these setbacks, VVAW continued to work to educate the public and to highlight the less pleasant aspects of the war, like the atrocities being committed against the

Vietnamese, because they believed that this was a key way to erode support for the war.35 As

John Kniffin, a Marine veteran, put it, “I think a lot of us felt that the silent majority were an unenlightened majority, that if they knew what was going on, and they knew it was wrong, then the people of the United States would stop it. That’s supposedly the way a democracy works.”36

During the first years of VVAW, work was focused on enlightening and educating that silent majority, often in the face of flagrant disrespect, so that they would best be able to express their democratic freedom to make a change.

VVAW’s emphasis on education went hand in hand with its core belief that a fully informed American populace would vote antiwar politicians into office. The leadership believed that such civic engagement was the way to save the country from itself. This conviction that the

33 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 201. 34 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 202-3. 35 Wilbur J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 12. 36 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 229.

63 people could affect real change was central to the workings of VVAW throughout its existence,

but especially during its first phase. The organization also sought to educate sitting politicians,

in addition to the populace, in an effort to change policy. Beginning in 1967, Barry and other

VVAW leaders began reaching out to senators, including J. William Fulbright, on the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee to ask them to include Vietnam veterans in the hearings on the

war. The responses they got ranged from sympathetic indifference to full out contempt, yet the

veterans persevered in their belief that their future success lay in the democratic system.37

As the violence escalated in Vietnam throughout 1967 and 1968, VVAW’s leaders

realized that the organization had to be more than simply an educational tool and speaker’s

bureau. It had to become directly involved with politics to affect the democratic change it

sought. Thus, VVAW’s single largest focus during its first phase became the election of 1968.

During this election, members of VVAW focused on removing incumbent president Lyndon B.

Johnson from office and installing an antiwar politician in his place. They found that politician

in Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota who was clear in his criticism of the war.38

Though the support of VVAW helped the McCarthy campaign, which achieved its biggest victory when McCarthy posed a serious challenge to Johnson in a primary in New Hampshire,

contributing to the latter’s withdrawal from the presidential race, McCarthy himself was a bit of

a dead-end candidate who was already slowing his campaign before the Democratic National

Convention (DNC) even occurred.39 VVAW’s initial efforts at supporting Robert Kennedy

37 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 233; Going Upriver, Butler, 31:15; Nicosia, Home to War, 114. John Kerry, a Navy veteran who joined the movement later feeling that he had an obligation to the country itself to share what he knew with the public, may have believed this more strongly than almost anyone else. Whenever anyone asked him what they could do to help the antiwar effort, he would tell them that the best thing they could do was to go out and vote. 38 Nicosia, Home to War, 27. 39 Nicosia, Home to War, 30-1; Hunt, The Turning, 28.

64 before his murder also faltered given that Kennedy was so slow in announcing an antiwar stance that by the time he did, VVAW had already wasted substantial energy on McCarthy.40

Despite these setbacks, VVAW remained committed to the antiwar cause. Barry and his fellow VVAW leader Carl Rogers enlisted 50 veterans, one from each state, to come to Chicago for the DNC to lobby their delegates. However, by the time the convention finally came around, the cause was lost and the efforts of more moderate antiwar groups like VVAW were immediately overshadowed by the violence in the streets following the Democratic nomination of pro-war, incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey.41 This loss hit VVAW very hard. After months of VVAW’s members putting all of their energy and resources into the election, the nomination of Humphrey and eventual election of Richard Nixon left them feeling both hopeless and powerless. Morale was so low that, as Barry explained, “When Carl [Rogers] and I called a

VVAW meeting in NYC after the convention, no one else came.”42 This dealt a serious blow to

VVAW and it ushered in a year of relative quiet for the organization.43

By the end of its first phase, VVAW had established some of the core principles that would guide its actions once it was revived in 1969. The leadership understood the importance of educating the American people to shake them out of their complacency. Also, despite their failure in the election of 1968, they still appreciated that the best way to effect change was through nonviolent efforts that worked within the existing democratic systems. They had learned the importance of visibility and, especially after seeing how they were overshadowed at the DNC by the violence that occurred there, appreciated the importance of media attention. In these ways, the first phase of the movement was a stepping-stone for what was to come next.

40 Nicosia, Home to War, 28-9. 41 Hunt, The Turning, 27-30. 42 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry;” Hunt, The Turning, 30; Nicosia, Home to War, 29-30; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 204. 43 Nicosia, Home to War, 41; Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 129.

65 However, the second phase would usher in a demographically different membership base that would transform the character of the organization. VVAW’s politics were more moderate in its early years in part because its members were largely college-educated. It was suspicious of counterculture groups and strove to differentiate itself from them by having the members embrace a constructed conservative image by wearing suits to public appearances and keeping their hair short.44 All of these things would change when the organization came back to life in

1969 and 1970 as the voices from the bottom of the organization began to hold more power and as the members, both old and new, started to appreciate the lessons of counterculture groups and urge VVAW to take more radical action.

Phase Two (1969 to 1971)

In VVAW’s second phase, one of the key motivators for many veterans to join the group and contribute their voices to bringing about an end to the war was that they were directly confronted with the reality that the government was lying about the truth of the Vietnam War and that, as one VVAW member put it, “All these people are dying for a myth.”45 For many, this realization first occurred during their regular service in Vietnam. Veteran Bill Ehrhart said that when he was leaving Vietnam, “I certainly knew that what was going on was not that I had been told.”46 For veterans like Ehrhart, the events of 1968 through 1970 just served to confirm what they already knew. As people around the nation saw that the tumult urgently needed to be addressed, the veterans among them realized that they had a voice that might help in confronting the problems the country was facing. Their understanding of the government’s lies already existed, but now they felt a need to act on them. Given that VVAW had already established

44 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 129; Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry.” 45 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran." 46 Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart."

66 itself as a vehicle for taking that action effectively, the group saw a substantial influx of veterans as the events of 1968 to 1970 began to unfold.

Like in the GI movement, the 1968 Tet Offensive was a major trigger for action. The event clearly demonstrated that the North Vietnamese enemy was far from defeat and that the administration had been knowingly hiding that information. Many veterans who became active in VVAW were in Vietnam during Tet and then joined the antiwar movement upon their return home.47 One example of just how strongly Tet affected veterans is the case of former Lieutenant

William Crandel, who had supported the war until he heard General Westmoreland refer to Tet as a huge victory. This was so clearly a lie that Crandel immediately began organizing and opening chapters of VVAW as a way of resisting the war.48 For many veterans, like Crandel, Tet was a wakeup call in which they not only realized the blatancy of the government’s lies to the

American people, but which also made them appreciate that it was their duty to spread the truth and to counter these lies that were blinding the populace to the reality of the events in Vietnam and thus preventing them from taking the democratic action necessary for ending the war.

Again similarly to the GI movement, My Lai was a major trigger for veterans to begin participating in the antiwar movement. When news of the My Lai massacre broke, the country was suddenly faced with the fact that it was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent

Vietnamese citizens, a possibility they had previously been reluctant to acknowledge.49 It also forced many veterans to consider their own complicity in war crimes during their time in

Vietnam and to engage in new ways with a past that they might have been trying to forget. As for many participants in the GI movement, the atrocities of My Lai were just one step in a larger

47 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 245-6. 48 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 245. 49 Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 151- 2; Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 2.

67 process of disillusionment for veterans of the war that made them decide it was time to take action.

For some, like Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave, My Lai, and specifically the trial of

Lieutenant William Calley, who was being used as a scapegoat for the military as a whole, was the final jolt that showed them that they could no longer shield the military through their silence and they had to speak out. Musgrave expressed his feelings saying, “We didn’t kill because we liked it…we did the job that they laid out for us. We did what they asked us to…And if they couldn’t be any more loyal to us than that, then they didn’t deserve our loyalty.”50 For

Musgrave, as for others, the fact that the military and the government would not protect a man who had committed atrocities as a result of their own policies meant that those institutions were not worthy of the veterans’ devotion. VVAW utilized this increase in veteran outcry as an opportunity to demonstrate the ways that the American government forced individuals to commit war crimes (something VVAW had known before the massacre ever reached the public’s attention, but which they now had a platform and sufficient membership to spread more broadly).51

The final major trigger for action for many veterans was the murder of students at Kent

State and Jackson State Universities during protests following Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970.52 Kent State was particularly emotional for many veterans due to the involvement of the National Guard, essentially government soldiers, who had been called in ahead of the campus protest by Governor James Rhodes after a mob had set the

ROTC building on fire two days earlier. On May 4, 1970, around 3,000 students gathered on the university commons, some to protest, and some just because they were moving between classes.

50 Nicosia, Home to War, 292-3. 51 Huebner, The Warrior Image, 218. 52 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 212.

68 The students did not leave when told to disperse and though tear gas caused some of them to

walk away, many continued to stand their ground. Then the National Guardsmen opened fire.

Within thirteen seconds, sixty-seven rounds were shot killing four students, two women and two

men, including one ROTC scholarship student who had simply been an innocent bystander

looking on from the parking lot nearby.53 The graphic videos and photos of the event were all

over the news, shaking many veterans out of their complacency. The government was now

“killing our own children,” as John Musgrave put it, and the veterans had to do something about

it.54

The emotional response to the events of Kent State was nationwide. Across the country

448 campuses were shut down amid massive protests by over four million students. In sixteen

states, the National Guard was called in and at Mississippi’s Jackson State University, state

police shot at a dormitory, killing two students.55 These events convinced many veterans that the war could no longer be justified in any way.56 Bill Ehrhart described the feelings of many veterans following the events of Kent State saying:

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the murders at Kent State. When the Ohio National Guard murdered those kids…I was completely devastated. I just thought, it’s not enough to send us halfway around the world to die; now they’re killing us in the streets of our own country. And I wanted to know what the hell is happening.57

The war had now come home completely and it was threatening the very freedoms, like the right

to peaceful protest and freedom of speech, which the United States was supposed to be defending

abroad. For many veterans, like Ehrhart, they realized that they had a duty to defend those

liberties at home in order to save America from itself. As Ehrhart put it, “I did not want my

53 The Vietnam War, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Public Broadcasting Service, 2017, ep. 8, 1:42:00. 54 Nicosia, Home to War, 292. 55 The Vietnam War, directed by Burns and Novick, ep. 8, 1:43:00; Neale, The American War, 112. 56 Nicosia, Home to War, 52. 57 Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart."

69 country to die. I had to do something. It was time to stop the war.”58 Veteran Jerry Lembcke, who also joined the movement during its second phase, expressed a similar sentiment. He said,

“I thought I had an obligation…I came home feeling obligated to do whatever I could: to speak out, to oppose the war…I came home looking for opportunities to do what I thought was the moral and conscientious thing to do.”59 By the time of the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, VVAW had already established itself as the organization that would allow veterans to fulfill their objective of effectively speaking out against the war and so, following these major triggering events, the group saw a sudden increase in membership. In April 1970, VVAW had around 600 members. The shootings occurred in May of the same year and by September

VVAW had over 2,000 members.60 “America needed a wake-up call,” to quote John Musgrave, and an increasing number of veterans were prepared to provide it.61

The interest in resisting the war that these events all contributed to revived VVAW as GIs returning from Vietnam began to seek out the organization so that they could get involved in antiwar activism.62 A study conducted during Dewey Canyon III, VVAW’s weeklong antiwar protest in Washington D.C., reflects the new demographic makeup of the organization following its resurgence in 1969. The study found that of those members who returned the survey, the group was largely made up of veterans who had voluntarily enlisted in the military (65.7% of the total), rather than of draftees.63 While impressive, it is important to keep in mind that this statistic does not entirely represent the reality. It is true that some of those veterans likely shared

58 W. D. Ehrhart, Passing Time quoted in Nicosia, Home to War, 53. 59 Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke." 60 Nicosia, Home to War, 52-3. 61 The Vietnam War, directed by Burns and Novick, ep 8 (1:46:00-1:46:20). 62 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 133. 63 John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The New Soldier, ed. by David Thorne and George Butler (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 172-3. This survey was based on a series of questionnaires that were distributed to veterans camped out on the Mall. There were around 1,000 vets camped out. 200 questionnaires were distributed of which 172 were returned and tallied for the study.

70 the views of Bill Ehrhart, who described his experience volunteering in support of the war

saying:

When I joined the Marines, I was doing God’s bidding. I was making Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy proud. I was quite literally not asking what my country can do for me, I was asking what I can do for my country and my country needed me to save the Vietnamese from the communists…When I signed up, I thought I was really doing the right thing and everyone was going to be better off now.64

Not all of the members of VVAW who volunteered for the armed forces did so with the same

fervor, though. Some volunteered in an effort to beat the draft rather than as a result of a desire

to fight in Vietnam. One such veteran, John Ketwig (see image 4a), explained this view saying,

“I was made to go against my will and I can’t stress that enough, that this was not ‘I

volunteered,’ you know. I did what I had to do to try to make the best of a bad situation.”65

Thus, while the statistics on volunteer membership in VVAW are high, this does not mean that two-thirds of the veterans fully supported the war effort before joining the military.

The study also found that over 75% of the veterans who were camped out on the National

Mall came from a working class background.66 It showed that the majority of veterans entered

the war with more conservative views and were then radicalized by their experiences in Vietnam.

Almost 60% of the veterans surveyed were politically moderate or conservative when they

entered the war while only 5.4% identified themselves as moderate or conservative when

describing their current feelings. According to the survey, the biggest reasons for these political

shifts were “personal contact with Vietnam and the Vietnamese” and “personal contact with GIs

and Americans in Vietnam.” These types of interactions, in which the veterans had either

witnessed for themselves that the Vietnamese were being mistreated by Americans or that they

had no interest in what political entity governed them (or where they heard about these

64 Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart." 65 Ketwig, "Interview with John Ketwig," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 11, 2019). 66 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 129.

71 circumstances from other GIs who had experienced them firsthand), were what brought many of

the 76% of veterans who had either no strong opinion on American intervention or believed that

the intervention was justified before entering the war to Washington D.C. in 1971 to protest that

same intervention. Thanks to these interactions, the veterans came home from Vietnam already

politically transformed and primed to take action. The events between 1968 and 1970 were the

triggers that pushed them into active roles.67

In short, the VVAW that came back in the fall of 1969 was different from the one that had existed previously. After the relatively limited success of its first phase, VVAW’s leadership realized that more dramatic action was needed to effect change. The group now faced internal conflict between the more radical elements at the bottom of the organization and the more conservative leaders at the top thanks, in part, to the fact that it was now predominantly working class in its membership and that it saw an influx of veterans who had embraced “hippie culture,” as Barry described it.68 The movement shifted from being heavily guided from the top

to being driven largely from the bottom. During VVAW’s first phase, leaders at the top, like

Barry, guided the general organization of the movement and emphasized the group’s

conservative image.69 When the movement was reborn in 1969, there was a large influx of

members who were uninterested in maintaining the short haircuts and formal appearances that

they had left behind when they finished their military service. They wanted to engage with the

more radical antiwar movement and some were interested in taking actions that fell outside the

established systems and were intended to shock the public out of their complacency.70 These

67 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 174. 68 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry;” Going Upriver, Butler, 51:15; Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 129. 69 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry.” 70 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 432; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 258-260. One example of a more radical action taken by VVAW members that fell outside VVAW’s norms and which was

72 two factions, the more conservative at the top and the more radical at the bottom, were in conflict

for much of the movement’s second phase with both sides getting the upper hand at different

points, though the more conservative leaders maintained ultimate control during the period with

Kerry making real efforts to manage the strong emotions of the other, more radical veterans.71

The movement’s shifting power dynamics and the need for the conservative leaders to

adapt to the desires of the members at the bottom could be seen in the changing physical

appearances of many VVAW members during the second phase. While the veterans originally

cut their hair short and wore suits to public events, the dress code now became less strict.

Though the members wore their military fatigues in public in order to be seen as genuine

veterans, they also grew their hair long and made no efforts to groom themselves like GIs.72 Part

of what then brought the second phase to an end was the final shift away from top-down

leadership when Kerry and Barry, two of the main proponents of the conservative image, stepped

away from the movement.73 Kerry in particular had been facing resentment by some of the

members given that, with his clean-shaven face and neat appearance, he did not look the part of

the counterculture protestor that many other members were cultivating.74 When he and Barry

took a step back, they ushered in a new shift in the power dynamics by leaving a vacancy that

rejected by the leaders including John Kerry was the action of the self-named “Chickenshit 20” who dumped a hundred pounds of chicken feces onto the steps of the Pentagon with the intent of shutting down the government. The men were arrested for this action. 71 Going Upriver, Butler, 51:15. In Home to War, 118, Gerald Nicosia describes the differences between the two groups well by referring to them as “the confrontational or revolutionary faction and the orderly reform faction.” 72 Nicosia, Home to War, 106-7. 73 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry.” Barry expressed some of his reasoning for stepping back saying, “I felt burned out again by early 1971 and sent a letter to the VVAW national and regional coordinators that I planned to retired as national president as of June 1. I’d served in that capacity through VVAW’s ups and downs since June 1, 1967. I wanted also to set a precedent of change of leadership in an orderly way.” 74 Going Upriver, Butler, 53:00.

73 was filled by the more radical members who had been driving for changes in the movement from

the bottom.75

These shifting power dynamics between the first and second phases affected the

movement’s methods in addition to its leadership structure. While education continued to be a

central focus, the members had to start coming up with new ways to spread their information.

They now had a savvier understanding of how to grab the nation’s attention and how to reach a

wider audience. Terry DuBose, a veteran enlistee, explained the thinking saying, “What we were

also doing was just trying to get the media’s attention. Protest was a media thing. It served a

real purpose if you had the eye of the media. That was the only way to communicate with

anybody. We couldn’t buy attention. So we had to generate those situations to grab their

attention.”76 By the second phase, VVAW had learned the importance of the press and that the

only way they could have a real impact would be by getting the nation’s attention, which could

only be done by first getting the attention of the media. With this new understanding, VVAW’s

methodology shifted toward organizing large-scale protests meant to catch the public’s eye.

Using media liaison committees, VVAW worked to try to make the nation hear its message.77

Though it continued to participate in teach-ins and local speaking engagements, especially as the

organization grew across the country and regional groups began springing up, the central

leadership’s focus became organizing larger actions that would shake the country out of its

complacency and force it to face the reality of the war.78

The first large-scale action undertaken by VVAW occurred over the three days of Labor

Day weekend 1970. The action was called Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal) and it

75 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 295. 76 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 228. 77 Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke." 78 Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke;" “Interview with an Anonymous Veteran.”

74 consisted of a march from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania by over 100

VVAW members carrying toy M-16 rifles and dressed in jungle fatigues. During the march, the veterans would engage in guerrilla theater that was meant to interrupt the viewers’ daily lives.79

As Jan Barry described it, “The idea was to point to the American Revolution as inspiration for challenging the American government’s imperial war in Indochina and to demonstrate to small town, rural America what a US infantry patrol through a Vietnamese village looks like (minus the bombing and artillery attacks).”80 By having civilians in the towns agree to participate beforehand, the veterans were able to stage mock combat operations that involved pretending to seize homes and terrorize their occupants as well as acting out “search and destroy” missions as they had done in Vietnam.81 After the demonstrations in each town, VVAW members would pass out flyers saying, “A U.S. infantry company [sic] has just passed through here” that then listed numerous atrocities that may have been committed had the civilians been Vietnamese.82

The march also consisted of stops with antiwar speeches by veterans, like Navy veteran John

Kerry, who was quickly becoming the public face of the movement, and celebrities including

Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.83

Operation RAW marked the beginning of a new and more visible VVAW. It saw a shift in tactics for the organization, which was now looking to engage in larger, media-getting actions,

79 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 230; Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 13; Bingham, Witness to the Revolution, 464-5. In his memoir, John Kerry, Every Day Is Extra, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). 124, Kerry described his experience first learning about Operation RAW saying, “Looking at the flyers for the event, I thought immediately of the powerful link between the Vietnam veterans marching in 1970 and the original revolutionary patriots whose endurance was essential to the survival of a democratic experiment in its infancy.” 80 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry.” In Edward Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 10, 2019), veteran Edward Damato, one of the participants in Operation RAW, echoed Barry saying, “The idea was to bring the war home. To show people this is what happens in Vietnam.” 81 Ronald Sullivan, “Veterans for Peace Simulate the War,” New York Times, September 5, 1970 quoted in Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 13. 82 Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 14. 83 VVAW, "Operation Raw," 1970.

75 but it also saw a continuation of the key principles that had guided VVAW from its founding. In order to get the populace to vote for an antiwar candidate, the veterans needed to prove that continuing the war was not a choice that could be made in good faith, which meant forcing people to face the realities that were being hidden from them and that they might be ignoring when confronted by them through events like Tet and My Lai. Through Operation RAW,

VVAW made the realities of Vietnam impossible to ignore for the people who witnessed the march and the guerilla theater. Its success marked the beginning of even more visible attempts at education and truth telling by the organization.

VVAW’s second major action was called the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI). It was a direct response to the events of My Lai and specifically to the trial of Lieutenant Calley, who was being used as a scapegoat by the administration to excuse the larger military policies that had caused him to commit the atrocities there. The veterans wanted to demonstrate that the horrific murders were not an aberration, but that they were the norm and that Calley did what countless other men would have done under the circumstances based on the government’s policies. VVAW’s leaders decided that they wanted to organize a large action to expose the military policies that were at fault for allowing the events of My Lai to occur. They hoped to emphasize the abundance of atrocities as a way of protesting American military policy in

Vietnam and thus protesting the war as a whole.84 They chose to base their national event on the local VVAW-sponsored Winter Soldier Investigations that had occurred in thirteen cities around the country throughout 1970 and which would continue to be organized following the national event.85 After some debate, the leaders decided to hold the event in Detroit, Michigan instead of

Washington D.C., highlighting that their central mission was still to motivate the people of the

84 Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 19. 85 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 234; Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato."

76 country to create change by voting antiwar politicians into office rather than to directly pressure congress themselves.86 The national event, which was held from January 31 to February 2, 1971

and which included testimony from over a hundred veterans from across the country, would be

the greatest challenge to the conduct and morality of the war that VVAW had made up to that

point.87

The members of VVAW were aware that they walked a very fine line in terms of having

their unique perspectives on the war be acknowledged and respected. From the time of VVAW’s

resurgence, the Nixon administration was constantly trying to tear down the organization,

primarily by targeting the legitimacy of the veterans by saying that they were lying about their

own status as Vietnam veterans.88 Because of this, VVAW had to be sure that it would not

provide any kind of opportunity for the organization to be discredited as a result of WSI. This

meant that before veterans could testify, VVAW had to try to close any possible holes that

naysayers might grab onto. Barry described the selection process, saying, “Vets were asked to provide documentation on when and where they served and an event they wanted to talk about.

The screening process included being interviewed by combat vets who looked to weed out stories they felt were dubious. The best collaboration was often a buddy who said he was there too.”89 VVAW also had to be cautious in planning WSI when looking at the potential legal

trouble that the veterans who testified might face. Given that the intention was to have veterans

86 Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 130; Kerry, Every Day Is Extra, 127. 87 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 234; Huebner, The Warrior Image, 224; Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato." 88 Nicosia, Home to War, 119. 89 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry;” Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 237-8; Going Upriver, Butler, 33:10, 34:20. In Frank Toner, "Interview with Frank Toner," By Alexandra Gudaitis (February 13 and 28, 2019), VVAW member Frank Toner provided a similar description of the thinking behind WSI and the screening process. He said, “I do know that the goal of the event was to have multiple soldiers who either committed or witnessed war crimes testify about the war crimes. The idea is that we would show that the war crimes were not individual random events but were promoted or sanctioned by the U.S. Military. Reach out was done to find soldiers who would testify. Persons who wanted to testify had to first show their DD214 (their official record of the military service) and their testimony had to be corroborated by at least one other person.”

77 confess to either witnessing or participating in war crimes, the organizers had to be sure that the

veterans would not face any legal trouble for their confessions. This meant that extensive

research was conducted beforehand to make sure that the veterans could not be tried for their

testimonies.90 Only once VVAW could be sure that their stories could not be discredited and

that the veterans who testified would not be in legal trouble could the leaders proceed with the

event.

In some ways, the veterans who participated in WSI had some advantages tied to their

involvement compared to their counterparts in the GI movement. They, unlike any GIs who

might want to expose America’s problematic military policies, had the freedoms afforded to

civilians, which meant that they were at liberty to speak about their experiences without fear of retribution from the military authorities. At the same time, the individuals still faced difficulties when deciding whether to testify about their experiences. Just because they did not face legal retribution for their confessions, that did not mean that speaking about atrocities that they had witnessed or participated in was an easy thing to do, especially given that, following the war, some veterans had tried their best not to think about their most traumatic experiences. During

the three days of hearings, some veterans relived significant trauma as a result of their own

testimonies and those of others.91 One example of this was a veteran who, during his testimony,

projected a photo of himself onto the wall. In it, he was holding a dead body up for the camera

with a huge smile on his face. As the veteran shared the photo he said, “I’m extremely shameful

of [this photograph]. I’m showing it in hopes that none of you people that have never been

90 Tod Ensign, "American War Crimes and Vietnam Veterans," Chap. 17 In Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists, edited by Mary Susannah Robbins, 214-23 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 217. This research was conducted by Tod Ensign. He was a trained lawyer who was part of a more radical group that ended up splitting off from the VVAW-organized WSI because they felt that it did not have enough of a leftist political angle. 91 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 234.

78 involved ever let this happen to you. Don’t ever let your government do this to you.”92 In the video recording of this testimony it is apparent that sharing this shameful picture and experience is taking a toll on the veteran, yet, for him this toll was worthwhile if it meant he might protect others from following in his footsteps.93

The Winter Soldier Investigation ended up being a powerful event where, over the course

of three days, veterans testified to a range of horrendous atrocities from the needless destruction

of property and animals that the Vietnamese people relied on for sustenance to reports of rape

and murder.94 VVAW was confronting America with the most graphic and disturbing truths of

the war in the hope that people would be forced to realize that the government was lying to them

and that atrocities like My Lai were systematic, not accidental. These truths were so horrifying

that they even surprised some of the veterans in attendance, like Army veteran Frank Toner.95

Despite the shocking nature of the testimonies, the event received disappointingly little press

attention and, as a result, most of the public was only vaguely aware that it occurred, if at all.

WSI did have two significant effects, though. First, in conjunction with an advertisement run in

Playboy contemporaneously, WSI led to even more veterans joining the organization.96 Second, the leaders of VVAW used the fact that the media largely ignored the event as leverage for greater press coverage of their next major event, Dewey Canyon III, in the hope that they could finally show America that there was a large population of veterans who had been to Vietnam and

92 Anonymous veteran quoted in Going Upriver, Butler, 36:00. 93 Going Upriver, Butler, 36:00. 94 Vietnam War Crimes Allegations Case Files, Case Numbers 165-182; War Crimes Allegations Case Files, 1969-1975, Record Group 319: Records of the Army Staff, 1903-2009; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 95 Toner, "Interview with Frank Toner." 96 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato." VVAW received the space for the advertisement for free from Hugh Hefner.

79 were saying that, based on their own, real experiences, what the country was doing there was not

right and needed to be stopped.97

Dewey Canyon III was the biggest protest undertaken by VVAW. It lasted for six days,

from April 18 to 23, 1971, and it involved participation from around 3,000 veterans in addition

to other supporters including Gold Star mothers (mothers whose children had been killed in the

war) and sympathetic civilians.98 As Jan Barry explained, the event was organized by veterans

“who were outraged that the national news media ignored or downplayed covering the vets’

testimony about US war crimes [at WSI].”99 Right after WSI ended, VVAW’s leadership got

together and began thinking about what their next step should be and how they could gain greater

press attention. John Kerry came up with the idea of a march on Washington and he and the

other leaders began planning it immediately.100 They decided to name the event Dewey Canyon

III after two previous military incursions into Cambodia and Laos named Dewey Canyon I and

II. The administration had referred to Dewey Canyon II as “a limited search and destroy incursion into Cambodia and Laos.” As a response to this, VVAW referred to Dewey Canyon III as “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.” 101 The leaders planned for the event to

consist of guerrilla theater, lobbying, marches, and, importantly, providing a way for the veterans

to return the medals they had received for their military service to the government.102 The entire

event would stay true to the movement’s core principles of nonviolence and working to educate

the public. With these efforts the veterans aimed to engage with the democratic system both

97 Nicosia, Home to War, 102-3. Through its newly created press office, VVAW demanded that press outlets give Dewey Canyon III press attention to make up for overlooking the Winter Soldier Investigation. 98 Nicosia, Home to War, 99, 108. 99 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry.” 100 Nicosia, Home to War, 98-9. Some of the other leaders, like Mike Oliver, dispute Kerry’s claim of having come up with the idea, but both Kerry and Barry claim that Kerry was the one who had the original idea. 101 Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 20; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 240. 102 Nicosia, Home to War, 100.

80 through their regular means of trying to persuade the population to vote and through a direct

effort to pressure politicians to create policies to end the war. To do this, VVAW worked to get

as many veterans as possible to come to Washington D.C. for the event. Though they were not

able to raise the funds to bring everyone who wanted to come, with the result that many veterans

had to pay their own way and many others were unable to attend at all, VVAW was still able to

bring thousands of veterans representing almost every state in the country to Washington to

participate. With Dewey Canyon III, VVAW had finally created an event that the media could

not ignore.103

VVAW was determined that the protest not be a failure in terms of impact on the larger

public in the way that the Winter Soldier Investigation had been. The leaders knew they needed

to create an event too big to overlook and that, even then, they needed to work with the press to

guarantee that they would not be disregarded. They created a press office to get the word out

about the event, approaching both regular papers and GI underground papers to spread the

details. They also approached papers that had overlooked WSI and demanded that they give

better coverage to the movement’s future projects to make up for the oversight. Not only did this

work to get the attention of major periodicals like Newsweek and Time, it also got the attention of

smaller papers in Middle America, thus increasing VVAW’s reach to the generally pro-war audience they had been desperately trying to connect to.104 In addition to this, on March 16,

1971, a month before the events in Washington were to begin and the third anniversary of the

massacre at My Lai, VVAW staged a national press conference in Washington to promote the

coming action. Reporters from some of the nation’s top papers, including the Washington Post

and the New York Times, attended the conference. The speakers included General David M.

103Nicosia, Home to War, 104-5, 108; Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 60. 104 Nicosia, Home to War, 102-3.

81 Shoup, a Medal of Honor winning General, and John Kerry, who spoke passionately about the

goals of the event in calling for an end to the war and demanding an array of benefits for

veterans before saying America’s youth were being “given the chance to die for the biggest

nothing in history.”105 The press conference was a success with publicity growing in the month

leading up to Dewey Canyon III and support and interest coming from all over the country. The

growing interest was so significant that new local Winter Soldier hearings began popping up

across the United States.106 VVAW had always known the important role that media coverage

would play in spreading their message to the country and by the time veterans began arriving in

Washington in April, they had finally begun to get the hang of it.

While great for the organization, the fact that VVAW had finally begun to get significant

visibility in the press was a cause for concern for the administration and especially for President

Nixon who had been concerned about the organization since its resurgence, even going so far as

to have the FBI report on the members.107 When it came to Dewey Canyon III, Nixon’s efforts

to discredit and damage the veterans’ efforts reached new heights. First, Nixon was suspected to

have leaked a rumor that two-thirds of VVAW members were not actually veterans of the war.

Discrediting VVAW by attacking the legitimacy of the veterans was a major tactic for the

administration throughout the organization’s existence, but at Dewey Canyon, the veterans were

able to respond to the accusations head-on. VVAW told the attending veterans to come to

Washington wearing their uniforms and to bring both their discharge papers and any medals they had.108 The result was a group that New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson

described as “an eccentric, a strange-looking army, wearing fatigues and field jackets, helmets

105 John Kerry, quoted in Nicosia, Home to War, 103. 106 Nicosia, Home to War, 103. 107 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran;" "Complete VVAW FBI Files;” Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 515. 108 Nicosia, Home to War, 101, 119.

82 and their old boonie hats, the same boots they had worn in Vietnam…All came with their

discharge papers so their bitterest critics could not accuse them of being imposters, although

some did anyway.”109 This appearance, as Emerson indicates, was not enough to stop the

administration from continuing its attack on the veterans, though. They soon decided to take

their actions beyond mere rhetoric discrediting the legitimacy of the veterans as they moved into

a more concrete assault.

The most significant and direct attack that VVAW faced from the administration during

Dewey Canyon III was related to the sleeping arrangements for the hundreds of veterans who

needed a place to stay for the week. The original plan had been for the veterans to camp out on

the National Mall following a precedent set by previous groups who had been allowed to stay there. However, before VVAW could set up camp, District Court Judge George Hart issued an initial ruling prohibiting the vets from sleeping on the Mall. After VVAW filed an appeal, Judge

Harold Leventhal ruled in favor of VVAW on April 19 based on the precedent set by the Boy

Scouts who had been allowed to camp on the Mall before. In response to this, the Nixon administration took the case to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Warren Burger reversed the

decision, once again prohibiting VVAW from sleeping on the Mall. The next day, after VVAW

rejected two proposed alternate locations, Judge Hart, who had issued the initial prohibitionary

ruling, reversed his original ban. He criticized the Nixon administration for taking the case to the

Supreme Court and thus “degrading the federal judiciary.”110 In the end, the veterans were

allowed to sleep on the Mall – something they had voted to do no matter what the final verdict

was given that, as one veteran put it, “They made me fight the war and that’s gotta be more

109 Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War (New York: Random House, 1976), 30, quoted in Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 234-5. 110 Nicosia, Home to War, 107, 116, 124, 129, 139; Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 20-1.

83 illegal than sleeping in a park.”111 Though the final result was positive, the events had

demonstrated Nixon’s vengeful determination to undermine VVAW at every turn, something

that would continue to impact the proceedings of Dewey Canyon throughout the week.

Though the contentions over the National Mall were a significant part of Dewey Canyon

III, they were not the event’s focus. During the week the veterans spent in Washington D.C.

they engaged in a variety of actions to spread their message and to attempt to bring an end to the

war. One of the main activities they engaged in was lobbying Members of Congress. VVAW

tackled this systematically with members of each regional delegation approaching their own

representatives to urge them to pass legislation to take the United States out of Vietnam.112 In most cases, the veterans’ voices were ignored as Senators and Congressmen told VVAW delegates that their votes simply reflected the desires of their constituents. The politicians had no interested in listening to, or being potentially influenced by, the veterans who had actually experienced the war that they were prolonging, the irony of which was not lost on veterans like

Mike Milligan who observed: “The politicians sent us to Vietnam…now they don’t want to hear us.”113 One example of the veterans being disrespected by their politicians occurred when

veteran Edward Damato (see images 5a,b), the head of the New York region of VVAW, went to

see conservative New York senator James L. Buckley along with a group of fellow New York

111 Anonymous veteran in footage from Going Upriver, Butler, 46:40; Toner, "Interview with Frank Toner.” In the middle of all of these court rulings, the veterans set up camp on the Mall and had a vote to determine whether they would defy the ban and sleep there or if they would leave. Following a narrow victory in favor of staying, the veterans voted again to make the decision to stay unanimous. VVAW member Frank Toner described the event saying, “We were told by authorities that we must end our encampment on the Washington Mall or we would all be arrested. I did not want to be arrested, but I felt that we must stand up for our right to protest. The vote was something like 475 to stay and 450 to not stay—it was very close. Our encampments were set up by states and each state counted up their vote and it was collected. The vote results were read back to everyone one state at a time. When the grand total was announced there was cheering but the person who read the votes said he would just like to see a show of hands to show solidarity. He then said “All in favor of staying on the Mall say Aye”’ that’s when –as it was one person speaking—everyone said Aye as they thrust their hand into the air.” 112 Nicosia, Home to War, 111; Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 22. 113 Nicosia, Home to War, 112; Mike Milligan quoted in The New Soldier, 58.

84 veterans.114 When they arrived at Buckley’s office, they were told he was not there that day.

After they told the secretary that they were going to stay in the office until he came, Damato

recalled: “Somebody told us that they saw him leaving from another door. So I don’t know if

that actually happened, but that’s what we felt. And it made sense…He obviously didn’t want to

see us. And it makes sense that he would’ve left through a side door.”115 As Damato himself

acknowledges, it is possible that the senator did not actually sneak out a side door in order to

avoid seeing his constituents, but the fact that it seemed reasonable indicates that politicians who

wanted to avoid speaking to the veterans engaging in similar behaviors so as to make this

incident seem plausible.116 The efforts to contact politicians were undertaken from the bottom to the top of VVAW with Jan Barry and John Kerry even going to the State Department to give a briefing before reading a list of demands on the steps of the Capitol.117 Despite these efforts, the

only politicians who seemed interested in speaking with the veterans were those who already

shared their antiwar views, such as Edward Kennedy, Jacob Javits, and Paul McCloskey, many

of whom came to the National Mall to speak directly with the members of VVAW and hear their

views.118

As Jan Barry explained in an interview after the war, many of the men who came to

Washington naively thought that just by showing up and demonstrating that the veterans of the

Vietnam War were opposed to it, they would suddenly bring an end to the war. The disrespect

that they faced from their own politicians was disheartening to many of them. The result was

114 Damato, “Interview with Edward Damato.” Edward Damato served in the United States Army from 1966- 68, spending a year in Vietnam (February 1967-February 1968) with Headquarters, 2nd Brigade, 9th Infantry Division operating on the rivers of the Mekong Delta in the joint Army/Navy Mobile Riverine Force, with the rank of Specialist 4th Class. 115 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato." 116 In Nicosia, Home to War, 112, Nicosia notes: “Often the vets found that congresspeople [sic] known for their hawkish views were ‘out’ when they came calling.” 117 Nicosia, Home to War, 111; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 245. 118 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato;” Going Upriver, Butler, 45:30, 47:40.

85 that, following Dewey Canyon III, a large number of veterans became much more radicalized

than they had previously been.119 One such veteran was Barry Romo, a future leader of VVAW,

who said, “We lobbied, all of us lobbied…We went and saw our congressmen and stuff. We

decided lobbying just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t dramatic enough.”120 In response to this feeling

of a greater need for dramatic action, Romo, along with a group of other veterans, decided to sit

on the steps of the Supreme Court in protest of the war, leading to their arrest and garnering

substantial media attention for the action as a whole. The current VVAW leadership was

concerned by the event, but they could do nothing about it other than continuing on with the

plans for their more conservative protests.121 In the lead-up to Dewey Canyon, they had hoped to be able to separate those veterans who wanted to engage in civil disobedience from those who did not, who made up the majority of the group.122 In proceeding with their events as planned,

they were making the best of a difficult situation in which the cracks in the organization were

starting to show. Though VVAW remained in one piece through the end of Dewey Canyon III,

the disheartening failure of lobbying efforts and the actions taken as a response by the more

radical members of the group signaled the shifts that were to come in a few short months.

Although Dewey Canyon III was failing in its efforts to effect change through direct

contact with the politicians in Washington, VVAW was succeeding in one crucial way: they

were getting substantial, positive media attention. VVAW’s members understood that

confronting people with the reality both of the war and of the fact that veterans were protesting it

was the only way to make them take action and vote pro-war politicians out of office. As Barry

Romo put it, “People’s experience was not being in a rice paddy, but watching someone in a rice

119 Nicosia, Home to War, 112; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 251. 120 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 246-7. 121 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 246-7. 122 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran."

86 paddy. We had to interrupt their seeing war on TV with their seeing veterans demonstrating

against the war on TV…you’ve got to bring people home.”123 For years they had been trying to achieve that goal and with Dewey Canyon III they were finally starting to bring the war home.

As already discussed, the effort at getting the press to pay attention to the event began long before the veterans arrived in Washington in April. However, once Dewey Canyon began,

VVAW’s leaders did not rest on their laurels, instead continuing to strive to spread the message of the protest on their own terms. The most significant means of doing this was by holding daily news briefings called the “Five O’clock Follies” after the military’s daily, and often misleading, briefings of the same name.124 Through these briefings, VVAW demonstrated their savvy in

making sure that, for once, they could have real influence on how their story was being told.

The members of VVAW knew that they had finally succeeded in bringing their protest to

the public in a positive light through two major events of Dewey Canyon III. The first was when

Jan Barry was given a copy of the news story that Walter Cronkite, the famed CBS Evening

News anchorman, would be reading that night. The story was very positive and, given

Cronkite’s influence, it succeeded in turning the protest into not only a major national story, but

into a story that even reached international audiences.125 The second event was that Senator J.

William Fulbright, the man VVAW leaders had been pressuring for years, finally agreed to let a

Vietnam veteran speak at the Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. It was only after seeing the

mass of favorable media attention that the event was getting that Fulbright agreed and had it not

been for that press coverage, one of the two most important events of Dewey Canyon III, John

Kerry’s speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might not have occurred.126

123 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 247. 124 Nicosia, Home to War, 108. 125 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 250-1. 126 Hunt, The Turning, 17; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 235.

87 John Kerry’s speech on April 22, 1971 was one of the most important and impactful

moments in VVAW history. Kerry came to deliver the speech in his military fatigues, with his

somewhat long hair, and with a calmness and gravitas that forced those around him to listen to his words seriously. As veteran Bobby Muller explained, “He was the projection of our movement that worked in getting our message across.”127 During his speech, which VVAW later

published in a book about the entire week of Dewey Canyon III titled The New Soldier, Kerry

spoke to the realities of the war as he and the other veterans had experienced it.128 He laid forth

the demand to withdraw from the war immediately and he placed the blame for the continued

murder of America’s children onto the politicians themselves. He set the reality of the war

clearly before the senators and the public and asked them to make the changes that were needed

to save the country from itself. “The country doesn’t realize it yet,” he said toward the beginning

of his speech, “but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been

taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest

nothing in history.”129 This quote, like several others from the speech, has since become iconic

within the veterans’ antiwar effort thanks to it highlighting just how worthless they understood

the war to be.

In his speech, Kerry spoke about the invisible threat of communism both from the

perspective of the Vietnamese, who did not understand the difference between communism and

democracy and who “only wanted to work in the rice paddies without helicopters strafing them

and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart,” and from the

127 Bobby Muller quoted in Going Upriver, Butler, 53:25. 128 This speech can be found in several slightly different forms, first as a transcript of the actual speech given at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and second as a version published and spread by VVAW through pamphlets distributed to supporters and in their book, The New Soldier. For this paper, I will be using the version found in The New Soldier because that is the version that VVAW chose to spread. 129 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 12.

88 perspective of the perceived threat to America.130 Kerry responded to this latter argument for

continued war by saying, “In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South

Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom…is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy.”131 Importantly,

he brought VVAW’s central message of fighting against the government’s lies to the senate

when he said, “We watched the United States’ falsification of body counts, in fact the

glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the

enemy was about to break.” 132 Through this he addressed two major points of dishonesty on the

part of the administration, the realization of which had caused many veterans and GIs alike to

turn against the war.

Importantly, Kerry made the speech personal by putting the onus to make a change on the

people listening to him, both in the committee room and anywhere else in the country where they

might be watching or reading the speech. First, he appealed to emotion by essentially asking the

country as a whole, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you

ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”133 Second, he appealed to the principles of

democracy, both on behalf of the Senate and on behalf of the people, and to the idea that

Americans can and should dictate the functioning of their country. He did this by saying, “We

have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body [the Senate] can be

responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we

130 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 14, 16. 131 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 14. 132 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 16. 133 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 18.

89 should be out of Vietnam now.”134 Through the speech as a whole, Kerry employed the techniques and beliefs of VVAW to create a compelling narrative meant to move the listeners to action. He took a risk in becoming the public face of the veteran’s antiwar movement, especially as a man who was looking toward a future in politics, yet his belief in his own obligation to serve his country made him take on that risk anyway. The end result was a speech that the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said was one of the most elegant antiwar pleas they had ever heard. The speech became a centerpiece of VVAW’s image such that the organization printed thousands of copies of it and whenever anyone wrote in expressing interest, they would be sent a copy of the speech.135

In addition to Kerry’s speech, the second most important action of Dewey Canyon III, and arguably one of the most important actions of the antiwar movement as a whole, was the medal turn-in ceremony on April 23, 1971 during which hundreds of veterans lined up outside the Capitol and threw their war medals over a fence that had been constructed the night before by the administration to keep them out. Through this action the veterans rejected the notion of their military experience representing their patriotism and service to the country. Though always intended to be a large, closing event that would gain the press’s attention, the medal turn-in was never expected to become the spectacle that it ended up being or to create the images that would come to define the veterans’ antiwar movement. The original plan for the event was to put all the medals into body bags and bring them into the Capitol. However, when the veterans got there, they saw that a wood and wire fence had been erected around the building to keep them out.136 The decision was made on the spot to throw the medals over the fence and back at the

Capitol. In building the fence, the administration ended up creating the best photo opportunity

134 Kerry and VVAW, The New Soldier, 22. 135 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato." 136 Scott, The Politics of Readjustment, 23; Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, 235.

90 VVAW could ever have hoped for. The veterans had come to Washington to peacefully appeal

to their government to make a change and that very same government demonstrated that it was

so scared of its own soldiers that it built a fence to keep them out.

Once the decision to throw the medals was made, a microphone was set up outside the

fence and around 800 veterans dressed in their fatigues calmly lined up and waited for their turn

to return the medals they had brought with them (both their own and those of their friends who

had been unable to make the trip to Washington) to the institution that had given those same

medals to them in the first place and told them that they represented their bravery and sacrifice

for their country.137 One by one, the veterans came to the microphone in front of the hundreds of

spectators and the camera crews that were reporting on the event and introduced themselves,

announced the medals that they were returning, and, in some cases, the reason why they were

doing so. Jack Smith, the first veteran to return his medals, articulated the feelings that many of

his compatriots waiting in line behind him shared by saying that the medals were “a symbol of

dishonor, shame, and inhumanity” as he threw them over the fence.138 Bobby Muller further

explained how many veterans felt when he later said, “It was, I think for a lot of us, an act not

only of defiance, but an act of honor to throw the symbols of that bogus war away.”139

The incident was more than just a great photo opportunity for VVAW. It was also an

incredibly emotional experience for many of the participants. Edward Damato described his own

experience in throwing his discharge papers over the fence (which he was forced to do because,

unbeknownst to him, his brother had removed his medals from his uniform with the result that

Damato could not find them) by saying:

137 Nicosia, Home to War, 140-1; Neale, The American War, 121; Toner, “Interview with Frank Toner.” 138 Cristina Alsina Rísquez, "Dissent as Therapy: The Case of the Veterans of the American War in Vietnam / La Disension Como Terapia: El Caso De Los Veteranos De La Guerra Americana En Vietnam," Atlantis 37, no. 2 (2015): 99-117, 106; Nicosia, Home to War, 141. 139 Bobby Muller quoted in Going Upriver, Butler, 1:10:40.

91 I remember, like, walking up there…I remember, like, when it was my turn to go there, that it was something that I, I don’t even remember what I said, but just the thing of throwing those medals, uh, you know, at the Capitol Building. Here’s your medals back. That, I felt like Superman. You know, like there was, I had such a rush of adrenaline throwing that stuff and then, like, when I walked away, I could feel that I was, like, tired, like that the energy went, you know, like, down, you know, the adrenaline. And it was probably like that for everybody. And some guys just threw the stuff away, and some people made some passionate statements. It was a, it was a great experience for us.140

For some veterans, like Frank Toner, who had been against the war since before he entered it, the experience was less emotional than Damato’s, but the visual impact of the action was universal.141

No matter how a veteran responded to the action of throwing his medals, there was sacrifice involved in the decision. Veteran Rusty Sachs described the experience saying: “For each one of us, it was a terribly difficult thing to do. The decorations we’d received…represented a very intense and difficult period of our life. But it was vitally important to do something visually symbolic showing our rejections of this war.”142 For some veterans there were further sacrifices involved in the rejection of the medals that the country had bestowed upon them. One such veteran was Ron Ferrizzi, who came away from the microphone sobbing and for whom the experience came with a sense of purging his guilt for surviving the war at the cost of the lives of his friends.143 As he threw his medals, he said, “My wife is divorcing me for returning these medals. She wants me to keep them so my little sons can be proud of me. But three of my best friends died so I could get that medal.”144 Though his wife did not actually divorce him, Ferrizzi’s experience in having loved ones become angry over veterans rejecting their medals and throwing them back was not uncommon. Within American

140 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato." 141 Toner, "Interview with Frank Toner." 142 Rusty Sachs, quoted in Going Upriver, Butler, 1:08:00. 143 Going Upriver, Butler, 1:10:00. 144 Neale, The American War, 121.

92 society, military medals carry a symbolic power that few other objects do. They come with

respect built-in and, in a society where many of the veterans had relatives who had fought

bravely in America’s previous wars, specifically World War II and the Korean War, rejecting the

medals was perceived by some as a betrayal of the nation. Another veteran for whom returning

the medals was a difficult decision was John Musgrave, who was undecided on whether he

would participate in the event until the veterans were blocked from entering Arlington to honor

their dead on an earlier day of Dewey Canyon III, something that was perceived by many of the

members of VVAW who were present as being a symbol of utmost disrespect by the

government.145 As he threw his medals, Musgrave said, “The main thing that I wish I could

return are the lives I took in their name.”146 Through messages such as these, members of

VVAW were able to articulate some of their antiwar feelings with a more direct avenue to their desired audience, the people of America, than they had ever had before. As Dewey Canyon participant John McDonald put it, “We’re vets…and they’ve always had such faith in their veterans.”147 Now they, the American people that is, were seeing that the very individuals in

whom they had put their faith were rejecting the symbols that embodied that faith and saying that

they were meaningless within the context of the Vietnam War and the actions they were forced

to take as part of it.

One final major struggle that some veterans faced in returning their medals was that they were rejecting the symbols that their nation, a nation that they still believed in and that they were trying to protect through their protest, had imbued with value and which represented the

145 Nicosia, Home to War, 109-10. On April 19, members of VVAW, accompanied by Gold Star mothers, marched to Arlington Cemetery. They first held a ceremony for the dead outside the gates and then, when two vets and two Gold Star mothers tried to enter to lay wreaths on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in honor of both the American and Vietnamese dead, the gates were shut, blocking them from entering the cemetery. Though Kerry pleaded with the police to let them in, the gates remained closed. 146 Nicosia, Home to War, 293. 147 John McDonald quoted in The New Soldier, 38.

93 sacrifices they and their fellow soldiers had made when they had believed in service to the

country being achieved through military duty. One veteran who struggled to connect his antiwar

sentiment with his respect for the general institutions and the country that had bestowed his

medals upon him was John Kerry. As a leader of VVAW, he felt it was his duty to return his

medals, but his continued love of his country made it difficult for him to reject them. In the end,

he threw back the ribbons that hung above the medals, not the medals themselves (something

that a number of other veterans did as well), and even that he did only after first throwing the

medals that had been entrusted to him by two veterans who could not attend the event.148

Kerry’s experience highlights the difficulty and contradictions that many antiwar veterans faced in their desire to serve their country. They knew that protecting their country was something that had to be done through protesting the war, not by participating in it. Yet, for many of them, that same desire for service that drove them now had played a role in motivating them to join the military and to get those medals that they were now rejecting in the first place. Though a sense of duty compelled them to protest, that sense could not fully erase the fact that the medals made them part of a military history that was not entirely shameful and which some of them had engaged in due to the same love of country that now forced them to protest.

While there was substantial difficulty attached to the experience of rejecting the medals that the veterans had received for their service in Vietnam, the event also served a therapeutic purpose. As Frank Toner said, the veterans now “realized that everything they did [in Vietnam] was for the wrong reason.”149 Throwing the medals allowed some of the veterans to make peace

with their moral cores by rejecting the actions they were forced to engage in as they rejected

their medals. The feeling of purged guilt that Ferrizzi described and the rush of adrenaline

148 Nicosia, Home to War, 143. 149 Toner, “Interview with Frank Toner.”

94 Damato experienced highlight the visceral nature of this rejection.150 Many of the veterans had

been holding onto their experiences with an inability to leave them in the past. In discarding the

symbols of what the government perceived as their military success, veterans were able to

experience a form of liberation in reconciling their past actions with their current ones.

Throughout the entirety of the movement, VVAW and its members were trying to take

control of their own bodies and the symbolic power they carried as veterans. They worked to dictate how the nation would interpret them so that they would not be used as images of bravery and patriotism to promote the war as veterans historically were. After years of working to shift that image, the medal turn-in was the physical embodiment of that effort. As the veterans threw their medals at the Capitol, they publicly spurned the symbols of military success that were used to perpetuate the war and that helped fuel the delusional idea that the United States was on its way to victory. Through the medal turn-in ceremony, the members of VVAW were trying to show America that the image of service to one’s country was not a man in uniform, standing at attention and ready to “kill anything that moves,” but rather a longhaired veteran in fatigues rejecting the very object that epitomized success in the first role.

Dewey Canyon III ended on April 23, 1971, bringing to a close VVAW’s most significant action and signaling the beginning of the end of the organization as it had existed for the past several years. In 1971, the internal discord and conflicts that had been bubbling ever since the beginning of the movement’s second phase started coming to the fore. The voices at the bottom of VVAW’s leadership structure, who tended to represent more radical positions and a greater desire to engage in civil disobedience, started gaining strength. These tensions manifested themselves in a number of ways. There were conflicts between the national and regional leaders on what types of actions to focus on and how to keep up with the massive influx

150 Going Upriver, Butler, 1:10:00; Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato."

95 of new members that the organization was experiencing.151 There was also significant conflict

within the leadership itself, especially between John Kerry and the more radical Al Hubbard.

Throughout the year, and especially following the treatment of veterans who attempted to lobby

their representatives during Dewey Canyon III, a number of members of VVAW were also

becoming more radicalized and frustrated by the movement’s relatively conservative practices.

The old leaders, like Barry and Kerry, were discovering that they no longer had as much of a

place within the organization. One of the original members echoed this feeling saying that when

he went to the VVAW office following Dewey Canyon III, he realized, “I really don’t relate to

some of these guys anymore,” and so he decided, “That’s it,” and never went back again.152

Similarly, by the middle of 1971, Kerry and Barry felt burned out and like the movement was no

longer what it used to be and that it was time to take a step back from the organization before it

became unrecognizable.153 On November 16, 1971 Kerry officially resigned from VVAW,

leading to the effective end of the movement’s second phase.154 After that, the organization

experienced many shifts including an increase in a regional, rather than national, focus and

several name changes as those members who had once been at the bottom of VVAW rose to the

top. The group became more radical and in the following years many of the original members

left, though many others stayed and continue to be part of the group to this day.155 During the

Vietnam War, many movements experienced these types of rifts, but VVAW was rare in that the movement was able to rise above them and, though it did change, it continued to do its work as

151 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 435. 152 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran." 153 Barry, “Interview with Jan Barry;” Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 435-6; Nicosia, Home to War, 115, 126; Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 251; Hunt, The Turning, 127; "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran." 154 Roberts and Kuhn, "The FBI’s Eye on Young John Kerry." 155 Nicosia, Home to War, 226-7, 273, 303, 309-12; Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato;" Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart."

96 an organization.156 VVAW strove to raise awareness of veteran issues throughout the rest of the

war and it continued to maintain a veteran presence in the antiwar movement. Though it had

changed from its first two phases, when it centered on a more conservative image and on non-

violent efforts at education, VVAW continued to do important work throughout the duration of

the war driven by, as John Kerry put it, “Men who hated the war but still loved their country.”157

156 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 435. 157 Kerry, Every Day Is Extra, 127. The complete quote from which this excerpt is taken is, “Almost to a member, VVAW consisted of men who hated the war but still loved their country.”

97

98 Conclusion: “I Have No Regrets”1

The GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War movements shared more than just their

cause of ending the American war in Vietnam. Together they transformed the very meaning of

service to one’s country, increasing its reach to include civil service as well as military service

while simultaneously reclaiming the symbols of the GI and the veteran to represent opposition to

the war rather than unwavering support. From their inception, the two groups were intertwined

and studying them together is critical for understanding the impact of military personnel, both

active-duty and veteran, on the larger antiwar movement. For this reason, there is clearly a

falsehood in studying them in isolation.

The two movements had several points of direct overlap that highlight the importance of

studying them together. On an individual basis, many participants in the GI movement joined

VVAW once they were discharged.2 VVAW actively backed this path to membership by

supporting GI efforts on local bases through coffeehouses among other means. For some

members of VVAW, the connection between the movements was natural. VVAW members

appreciated the benefits of internal resistance within the armed forces and they also understood

the advantage they had over GIs in having the freedom to engage in resistance without fear of

military reprisal. As a result, they made efforts to support the GI movement, and their shared

antiwar message, as best they could. As Barry Romo, a later leader of VVAW, explained, “We

gravitated right toward…working with GIs at coffeehouses …helping to publish newspapers;

1 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 10, 2019). 2 David Cline quoted in Richard Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 225.

99 distributing the papers, having barbecues with the GIs; providing the network that they couldn’t

have because they were in the service, to do the organizing they wanted to do.”3

While some of the engagement that Romo refers to was carried out informally by VVAW

members, the leaders of the movement, especially Jan Barry, became aware of and interested in

GI dissent early on, steering VVAW to engage in more organized forms of support. Barry’s

involvement with the GI movement began in August 1967 when he wrote a letter to the ACLU

asking for help in defending Roger Priest, a seaman who was facing three months in jail for

wearing a peace sign on his uniform.4 From that point on, VVAW maintained interest in the GI

movement, leading it to support one of the first, and at one point most successful, GI

underground papers: Vietnam GI, first published in January 1968.5 The paper was written by and

for enlisted men and, as such, it focused on GI, rather than veteran, issues.6 Despite this focus,

VVAW soon began publishing the paper with Barry serving as an editor.7 VVAW would

distribute copies at demonstrations, raising awareness both about the existence of the GI

movement and about the specific issues with the war that the GIs raised.8 Through acts like this

it is clear that VVAW was committed to supporting GI resistance.

VVAW support of the GI movement manifested itself even more clearly in the

development of LINK (The Serviceman’s Link to the Peace Movement) by Barry, Carl Rogers,

and Steve Wilcox following the unsuccessful 1968 Democratic National Convention and the

3 Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 215, 218. 4 Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008), 42-3. 5 Sir! No Sir! directed by David Zeiger, (London: BBC, 2005), 1:21:00; Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 96; Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 23. 6 John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 245; "Snapshots of a Short but Interesting Life II," February 11, 2016, https://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/. 7 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 245. 8 Hunt, The Turning, 23.

100 ensuing pause in major VVAW activity.9 Like the distribution and publication of Vietnam GI,

LINK was intended to raise awareness of the major revolt occurring within the military among

both veterans and civilian activists. The group served as a bridge between civilian and GI

protestors, with a focus on connecting GIs who were in trouble with the military authorities as a

result of their activism with civilian peace activists who could support them in their trials. From

the fall of 1968 through much of 1969, Barry and other veteran members of LINK worked to

defend GIs facing court-martial, including by getting involved in some of the biggest trials of the

period like those of the Presidio 27 and of Susan Schnall. Most importantly, LINK worked to

legitimize GI dissent not only among civilians, but also among other GIs, many of whom viewed

attacks on the war as attacks on themselves. When pro-war GIs heard that same antiwar rhetoric

being espoused by veterans who had gone through experiences similar to theirs, the pro-war GIs

had a harder time ignoring it.10 This act of legitimizing the antiwar movement through veteran

participation was an important part of VVAW’s approach to activism throughout the war and

through LINK the veterans were able to apply similar efforts to the GI movement.

When considering the broader impact of these two movements, it is important to look at

the impact they had on the participants themselves. In both cases, the participants faced

significant costs and sacrifices, whether at the official level of risking court-martial or at the

personal level of facing familial discord, all of which they needed to weigh when making the

decision to engage in antiwar activism.11 Yet, the participants willingly took on the risks. They

were motivated to action by a sense of duty to serve their country and their belief that this service

needed to be performed by opposing the war, not supporting it. By protesting, they fulfilled their

9 Nicosia, Home to War, 41; "Interview with Jan Barry," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 4 and March 4, 2019). 10 Nicosia, Home to War, 41-6. 11 Jerry Lembcke, "Interview with Jerry Lembcke," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 15, 2019); Joseph P. Fried, "Following Up," New York Times, July 21, 2002; Sir! No Sir! Zeiger, 5:20, 6:15.

101 need to serve their country. For many, the performance of dissent seemed to serve a redemptive

role in allowing the participants to reconcile the deplorable actions they had engaged in or

witnessed with their own moral cores, which, in many cases, guided their activism, thus helping

to release themselves from those experiences. For the participants in both movements, the

experience of the war was very raw and emotional, a fact that is best exemplified by the clear

emotionality of the Winter Soldier Investigation and the medal turn-in ceremony at Dewey

Canyon III and in video interviews with GI movement participants. While involvement in the

antiwar movement could include reliving trauma, it could also serve as a form of catharsis in

allowing participants to reconcile their past actions with their current ones and in bringing

together GIs and veterans who were working to cope with the same difficult realities. Through

events like the medal turn-in ceremony, participants rejected what their bodies were forced to do and reclaimed the image of the soldier not as an image of support of the war, but as one of opposition.

Participants in the two movements felt that they had performed their service to the country with the result that many of them, when they look back on their experiences, recall their antiwar activism as a worthwhile experience of which they remain proud to this day. One member of VVAW I spoke to concluded, “I have no regrets about what I did. None whatsoever.

I just wish I had done more at the time.”12 Other veterans echoed his feelings of pride. Edward

Damato summed up his experience in VVAW by saying, “The veterans were fired up to say our

piece. And it was just a thrilling experience and such a memorable thing, you know, for me, in

my life, and to this day I’m still so proud of it.”13 Similarly, Bill Ehrhart closed his interview by

saying, “I am very proud of my VVAW and Veterans for Peace membership cards;” cards that

12 "Interview with an Anonymous Veteran." 13 Edward Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 10, 2019).

102 he carries around in his wallet to this day.14 The fact that the participants in these movements continue to express such pride in their activities nearly 50 years after the fact demonstrates the two movements’ success in providing a meaningful avenue for service to the country by means of resistance.

In addition to the personal impacts that the movements had on participants and the broader impacts that they jointly had, each movement individually contributed to changes in the attitudes toward and treatment of dissent in the spheres in which they operated. The GI movement, in particular, helped bring American social values related to democracy and freedom of expression into the military. Actions taken by participants in the movement, including absenteeism and avoidance of orders, resulted in the development of a new command technique called “working it out” in which GIs and officers would negotiate orders rather than officers just giving orders that must be followed. This was seen as a way of dealing with the discontent among the GIs. By 1970 the practice had become reasonably prevalent and was even reported on in the popular press.15 Some commanders went even further than just altering the relationships within the military, allowing for the distribution of underground press publications on their military bases.16 The movement also changed how the military dealt with resistance. As jails quickly became overcrowded with antiwar GIs, many were released and, as the war progressed, the threat of court-martial or less-than-honorable discharge decreased significantly.17

All of these changes came together when, on May 27, 1969, the Pentagon released a directive

14 W. D. Ehrhart, "Interview with W. D. Ehrhart," By Alexandra Gudaitis (January 14, 2019). 15 Moser, The New Winter Soldiers,132-3. 16 Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 274. 17 Terry H. Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-War Movement: Essays from the Charles Debenedetti Memorial Conference, ed. Melvin Small and William D. Hoover (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 98; Alan Klein interview by William Short, Willa Seidenberg, and Addison Gallery of American Art, A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1992), 28; Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 73.

103 affirming that GIs had First Amendment rights and that they would be permitted to have

dissident literature on base as long as it was written off-base when the GIs were off-duty.18

The GI movement also had a long-term impact by setting a precedent for GI expression of antiwar sentiment that has been built upon in the years since the Vietnam War. For example, the Gulf War saw substantial GI resistance from the start with 2,500 service members having requested conscientious objector status by the time it began in January 1991. The legacy of the

GI movement can be seen in the fact that many of these resisters gave reasons for their opposition that mirrored those given by military personnel who opposed the Vietnam War.19

Many GIs publicly spoke out against the Gulf War despite the risk of court-martial and

imprisonment just like their counterparts had done during the Vietnam War years earlier.20 The

legacy can also be seen in the fact that to this day, active-duty GIs take part in GI and veteran

organizations that protest the wars they are fighting, including the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan.21

Like the GI movement, VVAW’s impact on future generations is also evident in the new

veteran organizations that have sprung up as a response to America’s more recent wars. In

particular, the creation of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently renamed “About

Face: Veterans Against the War” to better include veterans from Afghanistan and other post-9/11

wars, in 2004 reflects the lasting impact of VVAW in setting a precedent and establishing a

model for antiwar activism by veterans of the wars being protested. The group makes clear that

they are a continuation of the legacy of VVAW by stating on their webpage: “Deeply informed

by Vietnam Veterans Against the War before us, we are part of a legacy of service members

18 Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Give Peace a Chance, 101-102. 19 Nicosia, Home to War, 611; Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 69. 20 Short and Seidenberg, A Matter of Conscience, 69. 21 Iraq Veterans Against the War, "Iraq Veterans against the War: About," http://ivaw.org/about.

104 organizing against the wars that we served in.”22 The relationship between the former Iraq

Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and VVAW goes beyond just the name; it is also apparent in the actions taken by the group in protesting their wars and in the reasoning behind their opposition to the war.23 Beyond IVAW’s rhetoric, the clearest influence of VVAW can be seen in the ways that the organization as a whole is modeled after VVAW, which is evidenced in their direct repurposing of VVAW’s actions. For example, like VVAW’s Winter Soldier

Investigation in 1971, IVAW held their own event, also called “Winter Soldier,” where, over the course of four days, veterans testified about their experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.24 This event, from its name to its intent, clearly shows the lasting influence of VVAW.

It is clear that the legacies of the GI movement and VVAW continue into the present, which is a point of pride for members of the original movements. When asked at the end of his interview if there was anything else he would like to add, VVAW member Edward Damato said:

One of the things that just thrills me is that, from out of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a group of veterans formed a group called ‘The Iraq Veterans Against the War’…and they of course modeled their groups after us. And we met with and, and work with them still, you know, uh, but that, I, I, I remember going to a meeting that they were introducing themselves, to the veterans groups like Vets for Peace and VVAW and it was, it was so heartening to me that here’s another generation of veterans that are opposed to the war that they fought in and, and, and took a lot of their inspiration from us. It was like, you know, like a father turning his company over to his son… We handed down this tradition to these new guys, you know, again we’re going through this. So that, that’s something that really makes me you know really proud that we did, that it was something that we never anticipated but it happened.25

For the participants in the GI movement and VVAW, the fact that they created a precedent for military personnel opposing their own wars might be their most meaningful impact in the long

22 About Face, "About Face: Who We Are," https://aboutfaceveterans.org/who-we-are/. 23 Iraq Veterans Against the War, "Iraq Veterans against the War: Why We Are against the Wars," http://www.ivaw.org/why-we-are-against-wars. 24 Iraq Veterans Against the War, "Iraq Veterans against the War: Winter Soldier," http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier. 25 Damato, "Interview with Edward Damato."

105 term. By redefining the meaning of service and reclaiming the symbols of the soldier and the

veteran they created a space in which subsequent generations of GIs and veterans could use their

unique knowledge to express opposition to other wars.

The GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War movements have gone from being viewed

as un-patriotic during much of the Vietnam War, to being viewed with some academic interest in the late 1990s, to being somewhat brushed aside again in the years since then. As VVAW member and historian Jerry Lembcke points out: “The history of GI and veteran dissent during and after the war in Vietnam has faded from public memory.”26 I believe it is time for that

public memory to be jostled.

26 Jerry Lembcke, "The Contradictions of 1968: Drafted for War, The Westmoreland Cohort Opted for Peace," The American Historian (May 2018): 11.

106 Images

Jan Barry1

Image 1a: Driver’s license for PFC Image 1b: Barry (left) with future colonel WT Jan Barry (née Crumb) from the “Tom” Carter at Ft. Rucker Alabama, spring 1965. Republic of Viet-Nam, March 1963.

Image 1c: Barry with his future wife, Paula Pierce, at Operation RAW in September 1970.

1 Images and captions included with permission of Jan Barry from http://www.janbarry.net/disc.htm.

107

Jerry Lembcke2

Image 2a: Lembcke near An Khe, Vietnam 1969.

2 Image and caption included with permission of Jerry Lembcke from https://soundcloud.com/workingclasshistory/gi-resistance-in-vietnam-part-1.

108 W. D. Ehrhart3

Image 3a: Ehrhart at Con Thien, November 1967.

3 Image and caption included with permission of W. D. Ehrhart.

109 John Ketwig4

Image 4a: Ketwig at base camp on the outskirts of Pleiku in the central highlands of South Vietnam.

4 Image and caption included with permission of John Ketwig from http://www.johnketwig.com/.

110 Edward Damato5

Image 5a: Damato in his tent at Dong Tam.

Image 5b: Damato onboard the USS Benewah.

5 Images and captions included with permission of Edward Damato.

111

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