THE UNQUIET AMERICANS: GI DISSENT DURING THE VIETNAM WAR BY DEREK W. SEIDMAN B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, 2002 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2005 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Derek W. Seidman This dissertation by Derek W. Seidman is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ____________ ______________________________ Robert O. Self, Director Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ____________ ______________________________ Elliott J. Gorn, Reader Date ____________ ______________________________ Naoko Shibusawa, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ____________ _______________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Derek W. Seidman was born in St. Louis, Missouri on May 3, 1980 and grew up in Rochester, New York and San Francisco, California. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a B.A. in History with a Minor in Political Science in 2002. He received an A.M. in History from Brown University in 2005. While at Brown, he specialized in the social, cultural and political history of the 20th Century United States, with an emphasis on social movements. His dissertation research was funded by Brown University, the Center for the United States and the Cold War at New York University, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served as a Teaching Assistant for courses on U.S. Foreign Policy, Early American History, U.S. Political Movements, the Modern Middle East, and the Post-1945 United States. From 2008 to 2010 he was a Co-Instructor for a Brown Summer Studies course on the 1960s. He will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut during the 2010-2011 academic year. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to many people who helped me get through this dissertation. Robert Self was a brilliant, thoughtful advisor whose feedback made this project significantly better. It was a truly rich experience to work with him as both an advisee and Teaching Assistant. His example as a teacher, scholar and mentor deeply shaped my intellectual and personal development throughout graduate school. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I could not have asked for a better, more supportive advisor than Robert. Naoko Shibusawa has been a wonderful mentor and ally during my entire time at Brown. She always shed light on important things I overlooked in my work, and her upbeat character and personal example as an engaged scholar and teacher helped sustain me throughout the past half-decade. Elliott Gorn, from beginning to end, was always there to boost my morale and offer meaningful, to-the-point advice. When I was feeling low, he made me believe that I had an important story to tell, and that I was the one to tell it. Paul Buhle offered much encouragement in the early stages of this project. Mary Beth Bryson, Julissa Bautista, Cherrie Guerzon and Joan Richards have always been friendly and helpful, and I owe them many thanks. I am grateful to the institutions that supported my research and the archivists and librarians who helped me along the way. This includes, especially, Michael Nash at the Tamiment Library and the Center for the United States and Cold War; Wendy Chmielewski at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection; Jim Danky and Christine Pawley at the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America; Harry Miller and the other archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Tom Garver and the Friends v of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries; and James Lewes for making such wonderful sources available on the “Sir! No Sir!” website. I also owe huge thanks to the great people at the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, especially the Interlibrary Loan staff. I am indebted to the many people who let me interview them for this dissertation. Their reflections, memories and advice gave this project greater nuance and texture. I owe thanks to many friends and colleagues who helped me get through this dissertation in one way or another. I am grateful to Farid Azfar, Caroline Boswell, Jessica Foley, Gill Frank, Sheyda Jahanbani, Paige Meltzer, Mark Robbins and Mike Siegle. I owe special thanks to Chris Barthel, Oded Rabinovitch and Stacie Taranto, fellow members of my cohort who have all been wonderful and helpful friends throughout graduate school. Will Brucher, Sean Dinces and Wen Jin are irreplaceable comrades who let me vent and kept me sane. Jake Hess is a true mensch who constantly picked my spirits up when I was feeling flattened. Pat Resta and Jim Daley helped me to better understand the nuances of military life. More importantly, their examples as public antiwar veterans helped draw me to this project in the first place. Many thanks, also, to David Addlestone, Michal Belknap, Adam Berliner, David Cortright, Howard De Nike, Michael Foley, Beth Hillman, Richard Moser, Adolph Reed, Bob Sharlet, Sunka Simon, Max Watts, Marilyn Young and David Zeiger. Thanks to my family for their support: My parents, Debra Wolf and Joe Seidman; my siblings Alison, Michelle and John; my step-parents, Ian Mackler and Nitsa Papouras; my grandparents, Phil and Shirley Seidman and Milton and Norma Rubin; Popie Papouras; and Aunt Miki and Aunt Sharyn, who both put me up during my research. vi Finally, Alma Carrillo lived and experienced all the anxiety and stress that went along with this dissertation. I am very grateful for her support and companionship, and I’m glad she stuck it out with me. She is the most resilient, sunshiny person I know, and I am so happy to have her in my life. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction: The “New GI” and the Crisis of the 1 Late Vietnam-Era Military Chapter 1: “Don’t Let the Pentagon Court-Martial 33 the First Amendment!”: GI Rights and Military Justice during the Vietnam War Chapter 2: The GI Antiwar Coffeehouse Movement 72 Chapter 3: The Global GI Underground Press 122 Chapter 4: “The Quiet Mutiny”: GIs and Lifers 173 in the Late Vietnam-Era Military Chapter 5: Black Solidarity in the Late Vietnam- 222 Era Military Conclusion: “A Struggle for Survival as an Institution”: 264 Toward an All-Volunteer Force Bibliography: 268 viii INTRODUCTION: THE “NEW GI” AND THE CRISIS OF THE LATE VIETNAM-ERA MILITARY A February 1970 Newsweek article reported “a curious new phenomenon” in the United States Armed Forces. The military, it stated, contained a growing number of “young antiwar warriors” among its ranks “who flout the conventional ‘my-country- right-or-wrong’ military values of yesteryear.” These “New GIs” opposed the war, embraced the counterculture and identified with protest politics. They wore beads, grew out their hair and flashed peace signs (which commanders soon learned were not “V for Victory” gestures). They “prefer[ed] pot and peace posters to the beer and pin-ups of their more traditional comrades.” This “growing spirit of dissidence” was also directed towards military authority. Not only were young troops “increasingly outspoken in their opposition to the war,” but they were “openly irreverent toward their superior officers.” 1 These New GIs were, in large part, a post-1968 phenomenon, shaped by the unique intersection of an unpopular, stalemated war and the late 1960s generational rebellion. Soldiers with different experiences – from disillusioned grunts to non- combatants, from pot-smoking “heads” to African-American “bloods,” from Army and Marine foot soldiers to stateside airmen and seamen – filled their ranks. They used the language and symbols of the counterculture and protest politics to fashion themselves as lower-ranking soldiers – as “grunts,” “freaks” and “Black Power GIs.” They identified with Eldridge Cleaver and Country Joe McDonald, not John Wayne. They connected with Jane Fonda’s “Free The Army” antiwar vaudeville instead of Bob Hope’s USO 1 “The New GI: For Pot and Peace,” Newsweek , February 2, 1970, 24. 1 show. Some actively protested the war and tried to forge a “GI movement.” These were, as Newsweek described them, the “draftees of the Woodstock generation who thumb their noses at Army tradition.” 2 The New GI was at the center of what one Colonel called the “The Collapse of the Armed Forces” during the late Vietnam-era. In the final half-decade of the Vietnam War, the military was plagued by the widest and deepest wave of soldier dissent and disobedience in decades. “Not since the Civil War,” stated the Washington Post in 1971, “has the Army been so torn by rebellion.” In huge and in some case record numbers, soldiers went absent without leave, deserted, rioted, refused or avoided combat, and openly protested the war and military for which they served. One pro-Pentagon think tank found that 47% of soldiers sampled at five major bases had participated in acts of “dissent” or “disobedience” in the early 1970s. Morale plummeted, many believed, to an all-time low. The relationship between commanders and their lower-ranking subordinates often degenerated into pervasive, open conflict—including “fragging” attempts aimed at injuring or killing higher-ups. Some military leaders openly questioned the reliability of American troops. It was, as two journalists noted, “an Army in Anguish.” 3 The Unquiet Americans tells the story of the New GI. It explores GI protest during the late Vietnam-era: the forms it took, the issues it gravitated around, and the 2 “The Troubled U.S.