Terry Irvin

        GI Alliance and the GIs, Sailors and Airmen’s Coalition had joined forces at Fort Lewis and McChord Air Base in Washington.  In 1971 we decided a fun thing to do for the 4th of July would be to pass out copies of the Declaration of Independence on base.  Somebody found a copy of the Declaration of Independence and said, “have you ever read this thing?  This is really great stuff.”  And so we underlined things we wanted highlighted: certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … and whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute a new government … and it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security … and he has erected a multitude of new offices, sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eke out their substance, is combined with others to subject us to jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, imposing taxes without our consent, depriving us in many cases of benefits by trial of jury — which was a big complaint of ours.  Military justice is almost as big an oxymoron as “military intelligence.”  

        ​​We went to the main PX on pay day when everybody would be there.  There were probably a dozen GIs and three or four civilians. Word got out within 20 minutes and the MPs show up, swarms of them all over us.  I was hauled off with my friend Henry Valenti and somehow we ended up having these leaflets with us.  We were throwing them out of the window of the cop car as they hauled us off singing America the Beautiful.  

        ​​We were charged with distributing unauthorized literature on base.  It hadn’t been approved by the brass.  We had tried and tried to get approval to distribute the Lewis-McChord Free Press on base and could not do it.  Hell, they had skin magazines that were ten times more offensive than anything we put out, and they were everywhere.  So why couldn’t we put out our newspaper on base?   I was the only guy who didn’t take an Article 15, I decided I was going to fight this.  I said I wanted to waive trial and elected to go to a general court-martial.  

        ​​Now, in the meantime, the press is having a field day with this.  We got on Walter Cronkite, we were his closing story on the CBS Evening News, this group of GIs that was arrested for passing out the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July at Fort Lewis.  And the brass’s response to this was that all the charges had been dropped and “just pay no attention to these people, we’re not going to press charges.”  Yet I’m still up for general court-martial, facing three years in Leavenworth.  

        ​​Finally, I went to see my lawyer and he said, “Something very interesting has happened.  They can’t come up with any witnesses that said they saw you passing these things out.  They have no proof against you.”  Now, like I said, we had these pamphlets with us in the police cars, in the jail cells, we’re shoving them through the bars of the jail cell, passing them out to the MPs there in the Provost Marshall’s Office.  But they couldn’t come up with a witness who said they’d seen me doing this? … So they dropped the charges.