Roger Broomfield

        ​​I was drafted at 19 years old.  My friend and I picked MP school — we thought of Market Street in San Francisco, wearing our MP dress uniforms and walking down the street, talking to the girls and all.  Not knowing that most all MPs went to Vietnam and had a high casualty rate.  After serving some time in Germany, the Army assigned me to the Presidio stockade as a guard.  Within weeks I became the senior guard.  I had absolutely no training to be a stockade guard.  I was trained to be a street policeman, to do traffic primarily.  We started out with 40 or 43 prisoners at the Presidio and quite rapidly it was up to 130.  These guys were there for being AWOL and refusing to go to Vietnam.  And they were just people, just like me, except that I didn’t refuse to go to Vietnam because I didn’t have to make that choice.  If I had had to, I think they would have put me in the stockade — full time instead of as a guard.  The place was extremely overcrowded and we spilled over into another barracks next door.  The conditions were atrocious.    

​​        So they bring in this prisoner, Richard Bunch, and he was like a deer; flighty, nervous tension bound up.  He must have been 19, but he seemed like a 12- or 14-year-old kid.  This guy’s in bad shape.  Probably within a week of the time he came in — it was one of my days off — they had him out on work detail and he started to run.  It was the guard’s orders if somebody runs to shoot him.  And they shot this guy with a 12-gauge shotgun with “00” buckshot, and killed him.  The prisoners were real upset about it.  That could have been any one of them, because evidently these guards would taunt them when they were out on detail and say, “I could just blow you away, say you were trying to run.”  

​        I was torn by all this, because I did respect the prisoners’ position and many times thought of saying, stick me in the stockade, I ain’t going to cooperate because I don’t believe in this.  But my fear always prevailed.  I also felt it was good for me to be there because there were a few other guys who were not too bad, but there were a lot of bad guards.  So I helped these guys by being a fellow human being, by not piling more stuff on, but indeed trying to lighten the load that they were carrying.  For many years I didn’t know if anyone realized this.  And recently the “Presidio 27,” as they came to be known, had a reunion and told  me they recognized my efforts.   

​        Terry Hallinan, a lawyer for the Presidio 27, contacted me to ask me to be a defense witness at the mutiny trial, and I agreed.  I talked to him about the conditions and the things that had gone on and what had happened, and he seemed to think those things needed to be brought out.  The trial was front page news, day after day and over and over again the Army looked ridiculous.  People were protesting more and more, and I think the Army pretty much had their fill of this bad publicity.  I was real fortunate in that.  If this had been a more isolated incident, I think they would have hung me.  If this would have happened six months earlier, I wouldn’t have had a prayer.  Or if it had happened in Texas instead of San Francisco.  

​​        I wasn’t political, I was just a guy who found myself in this position where the psychic brutality was more than I could handle.  It was turds in the showers, the lousy conditions, the overcrowding, the brutality of killing people, the psychic games, it was a pressure cooker, the place was incredible.  It’s affected me to this day, 20 years later it still affects me … and God only knows what might have been my life otherwise.