Ep 4 : GI Resistance During the Vietnam War

Willa Seidenberg  00:19
Hello and welcome to A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War.
 
[MUSIC: Fixin’ to Die Rag]  00:32
 
Willa Seidenberg  00:47
I’m Willa Seidenberg
 
William Short  00:48
And I’m Bill Short. In this episode, we’ll feature stories of two men who couldn’t be more different, and yet both came to the same conclusion that the war in Vietnam was wrong.
 
William Short  01:09
Donald Duncan and Howard Levy were two of the earliest war resisters, and they were both high profile cases. And just a warning, this episode has lots of profanity and descriptions of war.
 
Willa Seidenberg  01:30
There’s a photograph of Donald Duncan on the cover of Ramparts magazine in February of 1966. It’s from the waist up. His arms are folded over his khaki-colored uniform, and Green Beret fits tightly over his forehead. Part of his face is in shadow, but his square jaw, jutting chin, and penetrating eyes are the very picture of a heroic soldier. It could have been an army recruiting poster, except for the words above him, which say, “I Quit.”
 
William Short  02:15
We interviewed Donald Duncan in 1990. It took some convincing to get him to talk to us. It was only after I told him about my background, he agreed to an interview. Duncan had long since retreated into obscurity in a small town in southern Indiana, where he co-founded a non-profit to help low-income people find jobs. We met with him one summer evening after driving through a torrential rainstorm. By then, he was in his early 60s, but his memories were still sharp. He told us about the exploits that had turned him from a gung-ho anti-communist warrior into an outspoken anti-war speaker and writer.
 
Donald Duncan  03:07
My big ambition in life when I was a kid growing up was to be like my grandfather and join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. My grandfather had come over to this country fairly penniless, although as an educated man. Something he instilled in my father and certainly I grew up with, along with milk and corn flakes and oatmeal — honor, honesty, duty, all of that good stuff.
 
Willa Seidenberg  03:55
Duncan’s dream of joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was dashed when he was convicted of assault for a street fight. He’d married a girl from Rochester, New York and moved to the United States. It was the early 1950s and the United States still had the draft in place.
 
Donald Duncan  04:14
You have six months to register with the draft when you come to this country. And I think I had 20, 25 minutes to spare. Sure enough, it wasn’t 30 days, it was three days later, I got my notice. I couldn’t believe it.
 
Willa Seidenberg  04:26
Duncan described himself as a rebellious kid, but it turned out the military was a good place for him. He was inducted into the Army in 1954 at the age of 25. He was one of 123,000 new army recruits sent to Fort Riley, Kansas to revamp the 10th infantry division. That was a combat unit that had been deactivated after World War II. Now they were being trained to resist the Soviet Union, if necessary.
 
William Short  05:13
That basic training was where recruits learned the art and science of killing, and when they’re stripped of their individual sense of identity. Don then received advanced military training and because he was smart, the army kept promoting him.
 
Donald Duncan  05:14
There was a reward system in the military. You played the game, you got these assignments that you wanted, and they nobody argued with you, and they’d look the other way when you were kind of slipping around the corner. And so I got suckered in pretty good.
 
Willa Seidenberg  05:45
Don was moving up the ranks and eventually became a master sergeant. That’s a senior rank for a non-commissioned officer. The army sent him all over the world, and eventually he was assigned to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, where he had a brush with fame.
 
Donald Duncan  06:10
I gave Elvis his combat proficiency test.
 
Willa Seidenberg  06:16
Yeah, that Elvis,
 
William Short  06:19
Before he got to Fort Hood, Duncan had been hearing about the expansion of a new elite unit called the Special Forces.
 
Donald Duncan  06:26
Volunteered for and got to the Green Berets.
 
William Short  06:28
The Special Forces were initially formed in 1952 under the Army’s psychological warfare division. It grew out of special operation units that worked with resistance movements in Europe during World War II.
 
Donald Duncan  06:41
It was at a time when new language was being invented in the military and having something to do with the Bay of Pigs and other affairs in Latin America, called counterinsurgency. All that new language was starting up and winning the hearts and minds of the people, was becoming a topic of conversation and psychological warfare, and da da da da da da da.
 
William Short  07:04
At first, the army didn’t sanction wearing the beret. The Army brass thought it looked too European, but President John F Kennedy embraced the Green Beret as a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.
 
[MUSIC: Ballad of the Green Berets  07:18
 
William Short  07:32
This song, Ballad of the Green Berets, by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, came out in 1966. I remember hearing it being played constantly on the radio. It was a huge hit. It sat in the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks.
 
Willa Seidenberg  08:05
Donald Duncan was a believer. He was excited to be part of the Green Berets and itching to get out in the field. But when the army sent him to Vietnam, he got stuck behind a desk.
 
Donald Duncan  08:18
My good god, I went through all this training, whatever, to belong to a headquarters company of Green Berets in Saigon, give me a break, you know, I was just absolutely horrified.
 
Willa Seidenberg  08:29
Don talked his way into an operation called Project Delta. Its mission was to infiltrate neighboring Laos to find the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
 
Donald Duncan  08:40
Sort of like looking for Shangri La, you know, or whatever you know, like, like, there’s going to be road signs on it. And it’d be pure luck if you ever stumbled across anything, really.
 
Willa Seidenberg  08:52
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was known to the Vietnamese as the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route. It was an elaborate network of trails that stretched from north to south, winding at times, through Laos and Cambodia. The Vietnamese started building the trail in 1959. When Duncan was there in 1964 it was still rather primitive. But over the course of the war, the Vietnamese made lots of improvements, enough so that some sections could even handle heavy trucks.
 
Speaker 4  09:28
Boys, I’ll tell you a tale of the pilots who fly on the Ho Chi Minh trail of Nimrod and Covey and blind bat you’ve heard span end of nail and of Moon Yellow Bird.
 
William Short  09:43
Troops and supplies moved back and forth daily on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, though it could take up to a month to complete the journey. The Americans continually bombed the supply route using intelligence supplied by units like Project Delta. Don told us about an operation he was part of outside the Michelin Rubber Plantation near the Cambodian border. His team found a battalion of Viet Cong fighters, so they radioed headquarters and sat back to wait for American troops to come in.
 
Donald Duncan  10:12
The next goddamn thing we knew, the whole world exploded on us, and for twelve straight hours they bombed this place, with us there.
 
William Short  10:23
When they got back to headquarters, they were called to a debriefing.
 
Donald Duncan  10:26
Started congratulating us what a wonderful job we’d done.
 
William Short  10:29
His team was handed a perplexing summary of their mission. Perplexing because Don had no idea where headquarters had come up with the number of casualties.
 
Donald Duncan  10:37
I said, we didn’t report these. I said, Did you send a team? You know, I thought maybe they had actually sent somebody in, and we didn’t know they were there, to do a count or something, Naive me. But no, they went to the map and they showed how they had drawn these grids and how many bombs they had dropped in each one of those squares. I mean, just knowing how patently fabricated this was, I just started to look at a lot of things more carefully.
 
Willa Seidenberg  11:07
Don went into the military staunchly against communism. The Special Forces was an Uber anti-communist outfit. But it only took a short time in Vietnam for Don to make an important realization — despite all the money and troops the United States was pouring into the war, the Vietnamese weren’t buying it.
 
Donald Duncan  11:32
So the only thing that was really operating was anti-communism, And it already pretty well determined that that was bankrupt. You couldn’t sell them anti-communism. You want to get rid of communism, you better get something out there as a substitute for it.
 
Willa Seidenberg  11:50
Don was becoming more and more disillusioned, but he ended up re enlisting.
 
Donald Duncan  11:56
I didn’t go back with the enthusiasm I originally started out with, I will assure you. But thought, well, I’ll go back and I’ll finish with this other hitch. And, oh, I was being offered things, God. I was offered a direct commission to captain. I was too old to be a second lieutenant, all kind of heady stuff. And if you’re going to make a career, and by that time, I kind of thought I might make a career out of the thing, and didn’t really know what the hell else I wanted to do anyway.
 
William Short  12:25
But the last straw came when a new guy was brought in to head the Delta Force unit, Charlie Beckwith.
 
Donald Duncan  12:33
If I needed any convincing that maybe it was time for me to get out of the service, Charlie did it for me.
 
William Short  12:40
Beckwith’s nickname was Chargin’ Charlie. Don and his team hadn’t seen themselves as cowboys, and they always tried to carry out their mission with the least amount of jeopardy to themselves.
 
Donald Duncan  12:52
And Charlie just didn’t seem to have that kind of sensitivity and I was forever telling him that, “Charlie, goddamnit, one of these days, you’re going to get a lot of people killing one of them, may be yourself.” Well, I just finally, quietly put in my papers for discharge, and knew that I had enough favors coming. I wasn’t going to have any problem processing those, and I did until they came back faster than I thought they could even get to Saigon, much less back.
 
Willa Seidenberg  13:36
If Donald Duncan was the epitome of an army man, Howard Levy was anything but. His dark hair, glasses, and casual manner are more college professor than military man. He’s excitable, swears a lot, and has an infectious laugh. When Howard was finishing up medical school in New York, he decided to sign up for something called the Berry Plan.
 
Howard Levy  14:03
It was just the plan whereby doctors could defer their being called into the army to allow them to finish whatever sub-specialty training they were doing. That was a good deal for the army. It was a good deal for the doctor, basically. If you had to go, that was the way to go.
 
Willa Seidenberg  14:19
It sounded like a good deal in 1961 since the United States still had a draft.
 
Howard Levy  14:26
And at the time that I made the commitment, the war in Vietnam was just little this little blip out there.
 
Willa Seidenberg  14:33
But by 1965, the Berry Plan didn’t look so appealing, and two years later, a photo of Captain Howard Levy was splashed across newspapers all over the country. It shows him being led away from an army courtroom in handcuffs on his way to prison. The war was just amping up as Dr. Levy was faced with his dilemma. But let’s back up a bit.
 
Howard Levy  14:59
My name is Howard Levy. I was born April 10, 1937, in Brooklyn, New York.
 
William Short  15:04
Howard grew up as an only child in a Jewish working-class home. He described his childhood as fairly typical, except for one thing: his father volunteered to serve in World War II.
 
Howard Levy  15:17
Like a lot of Jewish people at that point, there was sort of a very intense loyalty that they felt concerning that particular war.
 
William Short  15:28
The kids of Howard’s generation were confronted with the specter of World War II constantly. There are blackouts, air raid drills, and ads in movie theaters supporting the war effort.
 
Archival Ad  15:39
The management of this theater pledges that we will keep the planes flying, the guns booming, and Old Glory waving. For this theater is an American institution.
 
William Short  15:50
Most of his classmates’ dads were too old to be drafted, but Howard’s father enlisted.
 
Howard Levy  15:55
I was very fearful that he would not come back.
 
William Short  15:58
His father came home safely, and like a lot of veterans, he didn’t talk much about his wartime experience. When World War II ended, communists replaced Germans and Japanese as the new boogeymen.
 
Archival Ad  16:11
In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing. If he openly declares himself to be a communist, we take his word for it.
 
Howard Levy  16:23
If someone accused you of being a communist. That is about as low a blow as anyone could have accused you of doing anything that was about the worst thing anybody could have said about anybody.
 
Archival Audio  16:36
Serious situation now and communist infiltration of the CIA disturbs me beyond words,
 
William Short  16:41
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy captured headlines in 1950 when he claimed communists and Soviet spies were working within the federal government, the film industry, at universities, and even in the military.
 
Archival Audio  16:55
Communist infiltration of atomic hydrogen bomb plants …
 
William Short  16:59
Howard suspected one of his neighbors was a communist.
 
Howard Levy  17:03
But I remember going over to his house and seeing volumes of Marx and Lenin, and boy, the first time I ever saw that I got so scared I didn’t go back there for months. I mean, I just thought the books alone were scary.
 
Willa Seidenberg  17:17
Howard wasn’t political or studious. In fact, he says he was kind of an immature kid who had never left home, and that’s why he enrolled in a hometown school, New York University, where he majored in science.
 
Howard Levy  17:31
Probably because I couldn’t see myself doing anything that was more intellectual than that.
 
Willa Seidenberg  17:38
NYU opened up new worlds to him, and like many young people in the late 1950s, the Bohemian scene in Greenwich Village attracted him and his friends.
 
Howard Levy  17:55
And we began to hang out, if not quite in the Beat scene, pretty close to it — bars, coffee houses, stuff like that. So, I was spending enormous amounts of after-school hours, dissipating myself, and it was terrific.
 
Willa Seidenberg  18:23
Howard was exposed to the folk music scene, radical theater, and leftist political thought.
 
Howard Levy  18:29
By the time I was in medical school, I was pretty thoroughly undermined. I mean, I was not like any other medical student there. I mean, I had very strange ideas at that point. By the criteria I did.
 
Willa Seidenberg  18:54
And there was another movement calling him.
 
Howard Levy  19:04
This was the very, very earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement, and I was already much into it.
 
Willa Seidenberg  19:17
During medical school, Howard was confronted with the injustices faced by poor people of color in the health care system. He worked in hospitals in Brooklyn and elsewhere as part of his medical training.
 
Howard Levy  19:30
And I think it didn’t take me too long to draw the connections between the South and the North then.
 
Willa Seidenberg  19:36
By this point, Howard was thoroughly radicalized. He was learning about leftist politics, civil rights, and the war in Southeast Asia. And now it was 1964.
 
Howard Levy  19:47
As the time began to approach for me to honor the commitment that I had already made and signed a contract on by now, there was no question at all where I was coming from with regard to Vietnam and Southeast Asia.  And the only question was, what the hell do I do about it?
 
Willa Seidenberg  20:02
Howard figured he had three options. 
 
Howard Levy  20:05
Go to Canada. That was one option. Second option was going to the army. The third option was go to jail.
 
Willa Seidenberg  20:12
Going to Canada seemed to Howard like a cop out. And jail. Well, who wants to go to jail?
 
Howard Levy  20:19
So I went in, figuring number one, I’ll buy time and postpone the decision. Number two, I worked it out so that I would be sent down South, at least, where I figured I could rationalize this by doing some civil rights stuff that I’ve been wanting to do anyhow. And number three, I figured I’ll draw the line somewhere down the line. Well, but I knew where that was going to be. It was going to be when they wanted me to go to Vietnam. There’s no question that that’s where the line was.
 
William Short  21:01
So Howard got ready to report to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. He put four new tires on his old Chevy Bel Air and packed up the car.
 
Howard Levy  21:11
And I packed up, you know, kind of an overnight case, like I’m going away for overnight. Terrific realism involved in this.
 
William Short  21:23
 Howard’s car apparently didn’t want to go to the army either. He had flat tires along the way and it overheated before finally dying in Newport News, Virginia. Howard was in agony. He hit the bottle and had a bad night.
 
Howard Levy  21:38
My conscience was killing me, and I just didn’t want to, I knew I shouldn’t be doing this, and didn’t want to do it, and everything was starting off wrong anyhow.
 
William Short  21:47
Howard finally got to Fort Jackson a few days late.
 
Howard Levy  21:50
I arrived and walked into the shiny sun out of Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I thought I’d die. That was the first thing that impressed me, was that I was going to die here, that this is no place for a Jewish kid from Brooklyn to be. That, first of all, it was too much fucking grass, too many trees, too much sun, too much blue sky, and everything was all wrong about this. The whole setup was wrong.
 
Howard Levy  22:30
The last shine my shoes saw was the first day I put them on.
 
William Short  22:44
You could hardly call Howard military yet, he was an officer, a captain, in fact. The first time someone saluted him, he laughed.
 
Howard Levy  22:53
I just thought it was the funniest goddamn thing I’d ever seen. I mean, it wasn’t that I was discourteous. I mean, I just sort of waved to them,  and I didn’t salute, of course, people superior to me. But then again, I didn’t know who was superior to me.
 
William Short  23:05
To be fair, Howard didn’t know much about military protocol because he didn’t get much training. Usually, Army doctors spend six weeks in what’s called an indoctrination period. But Howard only got six hours of training. Nevertheless, he settled into his clinic, and soon he was processing people out of the Army, right and left.
 
Howard Levy  23:28
I read the rule books very, very carefully. Figured out exactly what all the exemptions were. And there were a lot of dermatologic exemptions, a lot of them, a ton of them. I was getting guys out, it was unbelievable how many people I was getting out.
 
Willa Seidenberg  23:40
It’s not that the army didn’t notice Howard’s high rate of exemptions. And one day, as he and his commanding officer, Colonel Henry Fancy, were doing rounds with patients, Fancy called him on it.
 
Howard Levy  23:53
We see this big, strapping young guy that’s as strong as an ox. And Colonel Fancy says, Well, okay, doctor, where’s the skin problem? And I pointed to, I mean, this thing must have been less than a 10th of an inch patch on his both elbows. It was minute. And I was having great fun with this. And I take his nails, and I say look, I want to show you this. See that little pit over there. See that tiny, tiny, tiny, little, pinpoint pit over there? That’s it, Colonel Fancy. That’s psoriasis.
 
Willa Seidenberg  24:32
Psoriasis. Colonel Fancy then asked the question that you’re probably thinking: why would a small patch of psoriasis keep the soldier from going to Vietnam?
 
Howard Levy  24:44
And I said, well I don’t understand that either, to be perfectly honest with you, but that’s what the rule book says, 906.1, psoriasis, exempt if found within the first 60 days, or 30 days, or whatever the fuck the regulation said. Exempt cannot be allowed in the army. He said, But Dr Levy, don’t you understand that it’ll just mean another man will have to serve in his place in Vietnam? I said, Well, Colonel, that’s true. This is a speech in front of the whole bay of 50 guys. I said, you know, Colonel, I really feel real bad about that, because I don’t think any of these young men we have here in this bay here oughta be going to Vietnam.
 
Willa Seidenberg  25:24
Howard says most doctors didn’t want to be in the service, but the army desperately needed physicians, so it tolerated violations of army protocol.
 
William Short  25:42
Howard was feeling desperate, and he was drinking a lot, but he perked up when he happened to see a notice in the local newspaper.
 
Howard Levy  25:49
And I saw in the very, very bottom of the paper, it just was a tiny little paragraph, and it says something like 400 Negros registered to vote yesterday in wherever, Prosperity, South Carolina.
 
William Short  26:02
Howard drove down to Newberry County and found the offices of SCOPE which stands for Summer Community Organization and Political Education.
 
Howard Levy  26:11
I was out in the street that afternoon registering people to vote, and did that for the next eight hours, and wound up staying over that night and sleeping with this Black family in the civil rights group, and stayed there the whole weekend, and I suddenly felt like, Wow, this is kind of nice.
 
26:26
We shall not. We shall not be moved. We shall not. We shall not be moved like a tree. Let’s plant planted by the water, we shall not be moved.
 
William Short  26:54
Howard spent his weekends registering voters, and during the week, he was head of the Dermatology Clinic at the U.S. Army Hospital in Fort Jackson. A turning point came in 1966. That’s when the army assigned him to train Green Berets in how to treat skin problems.
 
Howard Levy  27:10
I got to know these guys pretty well, and in some ways, I always thought they were among the more interesting people that I knew in the army, because at least they had some gumption.  And they were crazy, and they were a little fucked up, and you know, but at least they weren’t strait-laced, and you could have a good time with them, right?
 
Willa Seidenberg  27:27
The more Howard got to know the Green Berets, the more he learned about what was happening in Vietnam. Special Forces often operate outside the rules of traditional combatants, and the stories he heard from them were frightening and disturbing. They were so upsetting that he finally told them not to come to the clinic again, that he wouldn’t train them anymore. When new guys would come in, he’d give them the same spiel. After a few months, Howard was called into Colonel Fancy’s office.
 
Howard Levy  28:01
He says, Look Howard, I’m going to, in a moment, give you a direct order to do it. You know what the consequences of not refusing that is, don’t you? I said, Yeah, sure, I understand the consequences. Why don’t you go ahead and just give me the order? So he just gives me the order, and I said, Good, I refuse. Now what are you gonna do about it?
 
Willa Seidenberg  28:21
At this point, Howard only had a few months left in his commitment to the army.
 
Howard Levy  28:27
And I realized, in retrospect, that the brass was just squeezing me for as close to the two fucking years as they were gonna get, right. And I hadn’t quite been that cynical to think that through.
 
William Short  28:38
The other thing Howard didn’t know was the army was tracking his movements. He was being followed by an army intelligence officer named James West. He was with the CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps. Its job was to monitor and report on dissidents and malcontents in the army. You know the guys that spy on you. There was so much surveillance on Howard, that the army gathered an intelligence file on him that was 578 pages long.
 
Howard Levy  29:07
In the mind of the army, they said that they felt that, you know, there was something un-American about doing the civil rights stuff in the first place.
 
William Short  29:18
Agent West certainly seemed to think the Civil Rights Movement was un-American. One white informant called West one of the worst bigots he had ever known. Another testified that West told him every civil rights organization was just a Commie front. This was the South in the mid 60s. Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation only ended in 1965.
 
Willa Seidenberg  29:51
It appears that Colonel Fancy was not only getting pressure from Agent West but also from his higher-ups. They wanted Fancy to get tough on Levy.
 
Howard Levy  30:01
And it turns out from the trial testimony that even after I had refused to train the Green Beret guys, Colonel Fancy was going to give me a slap on the wrist. He wasn’t going to court-martial.
 
Willa Seidenberg  30:13
Fancy was going to give Levy an Article 15, a mild, non-judicial form of punishment. Except one thing happened.
 
Howard Levy  30:21
They threw the CIC report on his desk at that point, which detailed the fact that I was a fucking communist. That’s basically what it said. At that point, he decided that it was going to be a court martial.
 
Willa Seidenberg  30:35
 Howard had an army lawyer, but he also brought on Charles Morgan.  Morgan had established the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union based in Atlanta. Here he is in an oral history recorded in 1995.
 
Charles Morgan  30:52
But the fact of the matter is that the war got in the way. And so when Howard Levy gets in difficulty and asks for help, or somebody asked for help, sure I went up and defended him.
 
Willa Seidenberg  31:01
Morgan tried to negotiate with the army, but he ran up against a brick wall.
 
Howard Levy  31:07
He just called me one day and said, Howard, look, it’s time to blow the whistle on this shit.  I’m tired of talking these bastards. I mean, they ain’t gonna move. And I’m sending the New York Times down to Columbia today.
 
William Short  31:26
The story broke on the front page of The New York Times and other major newspapers, and much of the coverage was favorable. In May 1967, Captain Levy went on trial in a military court. Criminal cases in the military fall under the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or the UCMJ. Howard DeNike spent more than 20 years representing GIs in legal cases against the military.
 
Howard DeNike  31:55
In contrast to a civilian criminal justice system, the UCMJ always has an additional factor of maintaining good order and discipline in the ranks. So the matters that get referred to court martial, and in particular the sentences that are resulting, usually take into account the impact of those decisions and those sentences on the question of good order and discipline in the ranks.
 
William Short  32:30
Under the UCMJ, defendants are not judged by a jury of their peers. In Howard Levy’s case, his jurors were 10 career officers of higher rank.
 
Howard Levy  32:39
There were no nurses, there were no doctors, there were no paramedics, there was nobody like that on the court martial board. [question] And some of them were combat veterans? Many of them were combat veterans.
 
William Short  32:51
Howard’s legal team used the defense that what the Green Berets were doing in Vietnam violated medical ethics.
 
Howard Levy  32:58
What’s wrong with it is that the Green Beret people were using medicine in Vietnam as just another political propaganda tool. Right?
 
Willa Seidenberg  33:08
This tactic is known as “winning hearts and minds,” and it was one of the strategies the U.S. military tried to use in Vietnam to get support from the Vietnamese people.
 
Howard Levy  33:19
They were simply saying that if you had a bunch of kids in a poor village in Vietnam and you gave them all a shot of penicillin, and you cured them all of their impetigo, and suddenly they looked much healthier, that you would probably make some friends in the town. And that was the reason for doing it, which strikes me as rather illegitimate, actually, because obviously it can be taken away as easily it can be given. I mean, that’s not a basis for doing medicine. Shouldn’t be anyway.
 
Willa Seidenberg  33:52
Legal scholars say Levy’s case was the first to raise a so-called Nuremberg Defense, that it’s okay to disobey orders if it would lead to war crimes.
 
Howard Levy  34:04
We tried to put the war on trial, but they wouldn’t accept that as a defense.
 
Willa Seidenberg  34:09
Levy’s lawyers brought in three witnesses to testify about war crimes the United States was committing in Vietnam. One of those testifying was Donald Duncan. He testified about the way U.S. forces tried to get villagers on their side by using medical personnel who could gain the trust of local people. This medical assistance could easily be withheld if villagers did not cooperate with U.S. forces. It’s a typical carrot and stick approach that runs counter to international rules of wartime engagement. But the judge ruled against admitting any testimony about war crimes.
 
William Short  34:49
The trial took about three weeks. Howard was found guilty of disobeying a direct order and engaging in conduct unbecoming of an officer in the military. Judges also convicted him of making statements that were designed to promote disloyalty and disaffection among the troops. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
 
Howard Levy  35:11
The only shock was that it wasn’t nine.
 
William Short  35:13
By the time of his conviction, Howard realized he was part of a movement much larger than himself.
 
Howard Levy  35:23
Just like there were going to be casualties for people who supported the war in Vietnam, there were also going to be casualties for people who opposed it. There was no way of being politically involved in those days, seriously politically involved, and not accept the possibility that you may be a casualty.
 
William Short  35:38
The Army put Howard in a locked room in an abandoned wing of the Fort Jackson hospital. And they stationed a guard outside.
 
Howard Levy  35:46
See, they wouldn’t put me in the regular stockade. They said it was to protect me, because I was an officer. But that’s bullshit. The real reason is that they knew that everyone there supported me, so they didn’t want me anywhere near that place, for sure.
 
Willa Seidenberg  36:01
Meanwhile, Howard’s legal team was submitting appeals to the military.
 
Howard Levy  36:05
As soon as my appeals in the military were exhausted, and I mean, as soon, I mean to the hour, they came and picked me up like two, three o’clock in the morning, and transported me secretly in handcuffs to a civilian jail. They wanted me out of the military as fast as they could get me the hell out of the military.
 
Willa Seidenberg  36:23
Early one rainy morning, Howard was flown to the infamous army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
 
Howard Levy  36:30
They took me up in this fucking plane that didn’t take off from any runway. It took off from a grass field. It was a one engine plane, scariest goddamn plane I’ve ever been in my life.
 
Willa Seidenberg  36:41
It was a white-knuckle flight, but Howard arrived safely at Leavenworth prison right around dinner time.
 
Howard Levy  36:48
So they walked me into the cafeteria at Leavenworth, and the enlisted guys were there already, and they all got up and cheered. It was just unbelievable.
 
William Short  36:57
Howard felt kind of at home in Leavenworth because the prison was filled with a lot of anti-war GIs. The Fort Hood 3 were there. They were a group of early resisters who refused to go to Vietnam in 1966, and there were lots of recruits who had gone AWOL because they didn’t want to go to Vietnam. Howard became an inspiration to other resisters like Randy Rowland.
 
Randy Rowland  37:20
I had a picture of Howard Levy on my wall locker when I was stationed at Madigan. He was absolutely indirectly inspirational to me.
 
William Short  37:27
Randy took part in the Presidio Mutiny. More on that in a later episode. Howard was eventually transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. While he was there, he wrote a book with David Miller, who was the first person to be prosecuted for burning his draft card. The book is titled, Going to Jail: The Political Prisoner.
 
37:49
The Supreme Court today upheld the 1966 conviction of Dr.Howard Levy. The Court held five to three that his conviction under the Uniform Military Code of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman was valid.
 
William Short  38:02
After he got out of prison, Howard continued to work with the GI movement and eventually went back to practicing medicine in New York.
 
Willa Seidenberg  38:22
Meanwhile, Donald Duncan’s exit from the army was processed quickly.
 
Donald Duncan  38:27
I got off the airplane at Travis Air Force Base, and I didn’t know really what the hell to do with myself.
 
Willa Seidenberg  38:31
Don stayed in the Bay Area and began having conversations with a friend who inspired him to speak out against the war. This was late 1965. The anti-war movement was just picking up steam, spurred on by student protesters at the University of California in Berkeley. In November, Don was asked to speak at an anti-war rally in DeFremery Park, not far from the Oakland Army Base. It was there that he met Bob Scheer.
 
Robert Scheer  39:02
I’m Bob Sheer, and I was the managing editor, and later editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. In that capacity, I went to Vietnam, I covered the war, and I interviewed and ran articles by a lot of people connected with the war.
 
Willa Seidenberg  39:19
Ramparts was a glossy, lefty magazine that called itself a publication for mature American Catholics. One thing led to another, and soon Don was writing an exposé about war crimes in Vietnam for Ramparts, the one with his photo on the cover. It was called, The Whole Thing Was a Lie.
 
Robert Scheer  39:40
And he was this perfect figure for us, because we looked like Life magazine or something, and he had all the medals, and, you know, he was the highest ranking of a non-officer type.
 
Willa Seidenberg  39:53
Scheer says the article made big news.
 
Robert Scheer  39:56
It contradicted the storyline on every campus that these irresponsible students are undermining the patriotism and commitment of decent Americans who want to save freedom and save our country. And here was this guy with all the medals saying it’s bullshit, and we’re not saving anybody, and we’re manipulating public opinion. It’s all a big lie.
 
William Short  40:20
The Ramparts article led to a book contract. The New Legions was published by Random House in 1967. It inspired later GI resisters like Dave Cline. He found the book after he was wounded in combat and was recuperating at a hospital in Japan.
 
Dave Cline  40:37
When I read that book, that made a lot of sense to me, because, like, that’s what I saw, was that we, the people were either afraid of us or fighting against us, unless they were like lowlifes that were just trying to get your money and forced into prostitution or something. That made a lot of impact on me.
 
William Short  40:53
Don became the military writer for Ramparts, which took him back to Vietnam. In 1968, he began speaking all over the world at war crime tribunals and demonstrations, including the GI and Veterans March for Peace in San Francisco in 1968.
 
Donald Duncan  41:10
Those that protest within the military do so without a lot of the protection that we can protest with. Those of you who think that due process of law in our community is something of a bad joke should sit in on a court martial just one time.
 
William Short  41:26
After the war ended, Don just wanted to get on with his life and forget about his military service and the war. He died in 2009 at the age of 79.
 
William Short  41:48
Next time on A Matter of Conscience.
 
Skip Delano  41:50
In the beginning it was mostly sort of individual acts of resistance. And then at a certain point it took a leap into where things took on much more of a mass character. It wasn’t just a one person standing up and saying, I refuse. But instead, you know, whole groups of people.
 
William Short  42:05
We’ll look at how the GI movement grew with GI newspapers and coffee houses and much more.
 
Willa Seidenberg  42:17
This podcast is independently produced with crowdsourced funds. We thank the dozens of people who so generously donated, and you can join them by going to our website amatterofconscience.com, you can also see a glossary of terms and show notes for this episode. This episode was written, edited and produced by Willa Seidenberg, Bill Short and Polina Cherezova. Dylan Purvis is the associate producer. The assistant producers are Ruben Flores and Aubrey Jones. Thanks to Country Joe McDonald for giving us permission to use his song as our theme music. Original music arrangements are by Danny Seidenberg. Sound design is by Polina Cherezova. We thank the Kazan McLain Partners Foundation for their generous support. Our fiscal sponsor is the International Documentary Association. Thanks also to Denise Abrams, Bill Belmont, Sam Short and Susan Schnall and Veterans for Peace. And finally, our gratitude to all the veterans who shared their stories with us.