The North Coast times-eagle., December 01, 2006, Page 7, Image 7

PAGE 7
NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, DECEMBER 2006
JAVA & Gl JOE
A NEW COFFEEHOUSE MOVEMENT?
BY TOD ENSIGN
GARY MARTIN
HOW Gl RESISTANCE
CHANGED HISTORY
BY PAUL ROCKWELL
When actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland organ­
ized an antiwar review, touring U S. military bases and towns
around the world, the Gl rebellion against the war in Vietnam
was already in full force. In one theatrical episode, evoking
laughter and applause from thousands of soldiers and Marines,
Fonda played the part of an aide to President Richard Nixon.
“Richard,"she exclaims, “There's a terrible demonstration
going on outside.”
Nixon replies, “Oh, there's always a demonstration going
on outside. ”
Fonda: “But Richard This one is completely out o f control.
They’re storming the White House."
“Oh. I think I better call out the 3rd Marines," Nixon cried.
“You can't, Richard," says Fonda.
“Why not?” says Nixon.
She answers; ‘because they ARE the 3rd Marines!"
Archival footage of the Fonda tour appears in David
Zeiger’s new film, Sir, No Sir.
Sir, No Sir, the untold story of the Gl movement to
end the war in Vietnam, is a documentary. It’s not a work of
nostalgia. It’s an activist film, and it comes at a time when Gl
resistance to current war is spreading throughout the United
States. There are more than 100 films — fiction and nonfiction
— about the war in Vietnam. Not one deals seriously with the
most pivotal events of the time — the antiwar actions of GIs
within the military.
The three-decade blackout of Gl resistance is not due
to any lack of evidence. Information about the resistance has
always been available. According to the Pentagon, more than
500,000 incidents of desertion took place between 1966 and
1977. Officers were fragged. Entire units refused to enter battle.
Large social movements create their own “committees of
correspondence” — communication systems beyond the control
of power-holders and police authority. Despite prison sentences,
police spies, agent provocateurs, vigilante bombing of their
offices, coffeehouses and underground papers sprung up in
the dusty, often remote towns that surrounded U.S. military
bases throughout the world. “Just about every base in the
world had an underground paper,” Director Zeiger tells us in
Mother Jones.
When the first coffeehouse opened in Columbia, South
Carolina, near Fort Jackson, an average of 600 GIs visited each
week. Moved by the courage and audacity of soldiers for peace,
civilians raised funds to help operate the coffeehouses and to
provide legal defense.
When local proprietors, like Tyrell Jewelers near Fort
Hood, fleeced GIs, Gl boycotts were common. At one point,
the Department of Defense tripled its purchase of non-union
products in order to break the United Farm Workers (UFW)
boycott. American GIs, many from the fields and barrios of
California, immediately joined the UFW pickets Mocking signs
appeared on military bases saying, “Officers Buy Lettuce "
A counterculture blossomed inside the military
Affinity groups, like “The Buddies" and “The Freaks" were
formed. Afros, rock and soul music, bracelets and beads, the
use of peace signs and clenched fists — a culture antithetical
to the totalitarian culture of military life — proliferated Prison
riots in stockades, from Fort Dix to the Marine brig in Da Nang,
were common by 1970.
In response to a detested recruitment slogan — “Fun,
Travel, Adventure "— GIs named one penodical “FTA," which
meant, “Fuck the Army." When GIs ceased to cooperate with
superiors, the military lost control of culture and communication
Military attacks on Gl rights — the right to hold meetings, to read
papers, to think for themselves, to resist illegal orders — did not
subdue the growing anti-military movement Repression actually
widened the resistance
Like Pablo Paredes, Kevin Benderman, Kelly Dougherty,
Camilo Mejia — to name a few war resisters of our time — the
Gl resisters of the 1960s and 1970s showed incredible courage.
Pvt David Samas, one of the Fort Hood 3, who refused to serve
in Vietnam, said in one impassioned speech: “We have not been
scared. We have not been in the least shaken from our paths.
Even if physical violence is used against us, we will fight back.
The Gl should be reached somehow. He doesn’t want to fight.
He has no reason to risk his life. And the peace movement is
dedicated to his safety.”
In July 1970, forty combat officers sent a letter to
the commander-in-chief. If the war continues, they wrote,
“Young Americans in the military will simply refuse enmasse
to cooperate." That’s exactly what happened. Nothing is so
fearful to power-holders as non-cooperation. In 1971, even
the Armed Forces Journal published an article by a former
Marine Colonel, entitled, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.”
A point was reached when the resistance became
infectious, almost unstoppable. It spread from barracks to
aircraft carriers, from Army stockades and Navy brigs into the
conservative military towns where GIs were stationed. Even elite
colleges like West Point were affected by revolt. Thousands of
defiant soldiers went to prison. Thousands went into exile in
Canada and Sweden.
In the end the Gl antiwar movement — enlisted youth,
draftees, poor kids from ghettos, farms and barrios — paralyzed
the biggest death machine of modern times. In short, people
power altered the course of history. (The book Soldiers in Revolt
by David Cortright makes an excellent companion to Sir, No Sir.)
Sir, No Sir is organized around the testimony of prom­
inent war resisters. Yes, there are a lot of talking heads in Sir,
No Sir. But their revelations, backed with images and footage
of rebellion, are unforgettable We meet Donald Duncan, the
decorated member of the Green Berets, who resigned in
defiance in 1963 after 15 months of service in Vietnam. His
article in Ramparts, “I Quit,” generated great excitement in the
student movement
We also meet Howard Levy, the Green Beret doctor who
refused to use medical practice as a political tactic in war. His
court martial caused a huge impact on Gl and civilian conscious­
ness. The troops supported him.
“When the court martial began on base," he tells us
on film, “it was the most remarkable thing when hundreds and
hundreds would hang out of the windows of the barracks and
give me the V-sign, or give me the clenched fist Something had
changed here, something very important was happening."
That something was Gl revolt. Thousands of separate,
individual acts or moral defiance eventually merged into a
collective movement with a specific goal: end the war.
Sir, No Sir is not a preachy film Zeiger does not lecture;
he tells a story. Yet we cannot afford to miss the built-in lesson
from the eventual triumph of the Gl resistance, a lesson that
goes against media ideology and conventional wisdom. In the
words of George Lakey, “People power is simply more powerful
than military power Nothing is more important for today's
activists to know than this the foundation of political rule is the
compliance of the people, not violence People power is more
powerful than violence. The sooner we act on that knowledge,
the sooner the U S empire can be brought down."
Of course, times have changed The 1960s are over.
And while every generation determines its own destiny in its own
way, while history itself is but "a light on the stern" — it is still true
that “The spirit of the people is greater than man’s technology."
Sir, No Sir is a work of hope
Paul Rockwell, formerly assistant professor of
philosophy at Midwestern University, is a writer who lives in
Oakland, California He wrote this for In Motion magazine
One of the greatest achievements of the Vietnam
antiwar movement was its creation of a Gl coffeehouse and
counseling network. The first coffeehouse was opened outside
Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in late 1967, two-and-a-half
years after American troops invaded Vietnam. Within weeks,
hundreds of GIs had visited during their off-duty hours. Over
the next year, similar projects sprang up outside 20 other major
U S. bases.
These projects embodied the “countercultural” spirit of
the times. Sex, psychedelic drugs, and rock&roll coexisted with
a strong antiwar message. Civilian activists, mostly recruited
from the antiwar movement, worked in tandem with active-duty
Gis, some of whom had just returned from Vietnam. At some
projects, the soldiers played a leading role in setting political
goals, providing counseling and putting out the antiwar news­
paper that was a staple of every coffeehouse project.
Today, antiwar organizers are again discussing how
active-duty Gis can be recruited to play a more active part in
the struggle against the war. A Le Moyne College/Zogby Inter­
national survey of soldiers fighting in Iraq, released in February,
found that 72% of them wanted to be withdrawn within a year,
while 29% favored immediate withdrawal.
Organizers from Citizen Soldier, a Gl/veterans rights
advocacy group, recently met with antiwar veterans and Gis
in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg, where
40,000 combat troops are stationed. They discussed the
prospects for establishing a coffeehouse and counseling project
near the base — the largest in the Eastern United States.Their
hope is that a successful pilot project at Bragg could stimulate
the creation of similar efforts at other key posts.
Both the U.S. military and American society have
experienced enormous change since the Vietnam era. Fore­
most is the transformation of a conscript-driven military to one
that is entirely composed of “volunteers.” This has made the
armed forces much less representative of America as a whole.
One of the primary reasons why advocates of an “all-
volunteer” military wanted to junk the draft was their belief that
it fueled much of the antiwar opposition — especially among
young people. When one compares the size and intensity of
today’s movement against the war in Iraq with that of the Viet­
nam War, this analysis appears to be accurate.
The transition to a volunteer force has had two other
significant consequences. One, women were integrated into
most military jobs, except for the infantry and armor. Today,
every sixth soldier is female, except in the Marine Corps.
Second, the shrinkage of active-duty force levels, which became
necessary once competitive wages were being paid, has meant
that reservists and Guard troops must shoulder a much greater
combat burden when the military deploys into combat Today,
one out of three Gis serving in Iraq is a reservist. These soldiers
are older, have family obligations and are less accustomed to the
rigors of military life.
These demographic changes are central to any
discussion of how a coffeehouse project could attract the
participation of Gis today. During Vietnam, the average low-
ranking soldier was paid less than $300 a month. They lived
in austere barracks and ate their meals in dingy chowhalls.
These conditions made an off-base coffeehouse seem attractive
as an off-duty refuge from the tedium of the “green machine”
and its grinding routines.
Today, half of all soldiers are married and many have
children. Their relatively good pay and benefits allow them to
buy expensive cars and vans and many choose Applebee’s
and Mickey D’s over the chowhall.
To counter serious problems with recruitment and
retention, the Pentagon now offers a series of robust bonuses
that range from $10,000 to $40,000, payable over the life of
an enlistment hitch. Elite “Delta Force" troops can get up to
$100,000 if they’ll sign for another tour. (A note to those who
believe that recruiting shortfalls may force a reinstitution of the
draft: the Pentagon has shown that it will spend whatever it takes
to induce [bribe?] low-income youth to fill its combat slots.)
One of the main attractions of the Vietnam-era coffee­
houses was that Gis identified them with the “countercultural”
changes that were sweeping America at the time. Psychedelic
paraphernalia and drugs fanned the latent anti-authoritarianism
of soldiers. This, in turn, sparked challenges to all forms of
authority — sexual mores, gender roles, social conventions
and the military's vaunted chain of command. One key demand
of the American Servicemen's (sic) Union was “an end to sir-ing
and saluting.” Explicit antiwar organizing, while important, was
only one item on the project’s agenda
Popular culture today is much more diffuse, blending
many different strands: rap, punk, heavy metal, Goth, hippie,
traditional rock&roll, and country-western. In lifestyle, openly gay
couples (not on a military base, however!) co-exist with super­
straight engaged couples who flaunt their pre-marital chastity.
Organizers concluded that a coffeehouse/counseling
project could succeed in attracting significant numbers of
soldiers assuming that it provided internet access, good java,
and plenty of free parking Many young soldiers today quest for
intellectual, cultural and political fulfillment, as they always have.
A coffeehouse that combines an alternative bookstore with a
lively mix of free musical performances, stand-up comedy and
poetry (with some political speechifying thrown in) could become
highly popular with many Gis
A number of important questions remain Who will
finance the cost of one, not to mention a dozen such coffee­
house projects today? Certainly Gis can be expected to provide
more than a small portion of the budget. During Vietnam, the
United Servicemen’s (s/c) Support Fund (ISSF), raised substan­
tial sums, which it then parceled out to the local projects to help
them pay the rent and staff salaries. Nothing like the ISSF exists
today, but something along these lines will be needed if these
projects are to thrive. Important first steps have been taken, but
much more needs to be done
Tod Ensign is director of Citizen Soldier, a Gl/veterans
rights advocacy group, and a longtime antiwar activist involved
with dissenting veterans, such as Vietnam Veterans Against the
War with whom he helped organize Vietnam veterans' antiwar
tribunals including the 1971 Winter Soldiers Investigation. He is
the author of America’s Military Today.