Ep 5: By and For GIs

Transcript for Episode 5

Willa Seidenberg  00:00

A note before we start this episode. If you appreciate this independently produced podcast, please subscribe and give us a review, and please tell your friends about it.

Willa Seidenberg  00:15

Hello and welcome to A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. I’m Willa Seidenberg.

William Short  00:24

And I’m Bill Short. In this episode, we look at how opposition to the war in Vietnam grew from a few acts of dissent by individual soldiers into a full-blown movement.

[Music: Fixin’ To Die Rag]  00:46

William Short  01:00

This podcast uses interviews we did some 35 years ago with former military resisters. In 1992, the interviews and portraits became a book and a major exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. And a warning:  you’ll hear some explicit language in this episode,

Speaker  01:27

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.

Willa Seidenberg  01:35

The Declaration of Independence was an early act of resistance in the founding of the United States of America. The signers risked their lives by advocating a break with the powerful British Empire.

Speaker  01:48

Declare the causes which impelled them to the separation.

Willa Seidenberg  01:53

The Declaration of Independence was the framework for American democracy. It inspired movements all over the world. In 1945 Ho Chi Minh based Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence from France on the American document. You could say it’s as American as apple pie invoked on that most American of holidays, the Fourth of July, Independence Day. Terry Irvin and some fellow GIs set out to test the hypocrisy of the US military.

Terry Irvin  02:35

We decided that a fun thing to do for the Fourth of July would be to pass out copies of the Declaration of Independence on base.

William Short  02:46

We interviewed Terry in 1990. He was part of the anti-war GI newspaper called the Free Press. When a fellow soldier pulled out a copy of the Declaration of Independence, they all thought.

Terry Irvin  02:57

This is great stuff.

William Short  02:58

The words they were reading resonated with them. Being in the army meant not having the same rights as other Americans.

Terry Irvin  03:09

So, we underlined the things that we would have highlighted, like certain unalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and whenever any form of government becomes

Speaker  03:20

destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to

Terry Irvin  03:27

institute government, duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security, depriving us of many cases of benefits by trial of jury, which was a big complaint of ours,

Speaker  03:39

long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.

Terry Irvin  03:45

We went to the main PX on payday. It was lunchtime. Word got out within 20 minutes, and the MPs showed up, swarmed all over us, and I was hauled off with my friend Henry Valenti, singing America the Beautiful together.

Terry Irvin  04:16

I’ll never forget that. Henry and I singing America the Beautiful as they’re hauling us away for passing out the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July.

Archival Sound  04:32

Last week, six GIs at Fort Lewis, Washington, passed out on the post copies of the Declaration of Independence. They called it a demonstration of free speech. Today they were given lectures of reprimand and extra duty. The army says it has nothing against the Declaration of Independence, but the soldiers aren’t allowed to distribute any literature without permission.

William Short  04:52

But GIs had asked over and over again for permission to distribute papers on base with no luck.

Terry Irvin  05:00

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 mean, heck.

William Short  05:11

One of the ways the military tried to tamp down dissent within the military was to limit the way GIs could distribute their newspapers. The rule was you could have only one copy of any kind of publication you wanted. It could be Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It could be Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be the Bible. It could be anything, but only one copy. That meant each GI was limited to one copy of a newspaper. So, if soldiers tried to distribute more than one copy, they could be brought up on charges of disobeying orders, and that could carry a sentence of up to six months in a military prison.

Willa Seidenberg  05:48

Terry Irvin was facing a court-martial and time in jail for his part in the Fourth of July escapade, but all the publicity helped protect him. One day, his attorney told him:

Terry Irvin  06:00

They can’t come up with any witnesses that said they saw you passing these things out. They have no proof against you. Now, 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 marshal’s office, but they couldn’t come up with a witness that said they’d see me doing this, so they dropped the charges.

[MUSIC: Join the GI Movement]  06:28

Archival Sound  06:45

A new phenomenon is cropped up at several army bases these days, a so-called underground GI press, which consists largely of anti-war newspapers. Military authorities are clamping down hard on the papers.

Willa Seidenberg  06:58

That CBS report downplayed the number of GI newspapers. It’s documented there were more than 300 of them produced at U.S. military bases throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sometimes they only produced one or two issues. They all reflected the concerns that GIs had at the time. David Cortright is author of one of the first books on GI resistance, called Soldiers in Revolt. He’s also an Army veteran.

David Cortright  07:30

We all could speak the language of military culture, and we used that to kind of show our bona fides. You know, that we were legitimate, and we understood each other as part of the military culture.

Willa Seidenberg  07:39

That military culture is what inspired the names of the newspapers. David worked on the newspaper Gigline at Fort Bliss in Texas.

David Cortright  07:49

On inspection, you know, they look at your gig line, how your shirt and your pants and everything has to be in exactly a straight line, you know. So, you have to standing tall and rigid against communism. For us, it was standing tall for opposing the war. Do you measure up and follow the line for the soldiers who oppose the war?

Paul Cox  08:09

We started printing this paper.

William Short  08:10

Marine veteran Paul Cox was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Paul Cox  08:15

And we chose the name Rage, and we just figured we’d print the truth.

William Short  08:18

There were also names like Attitude Check, Up Against the Bulkhead, and Left Face.

Skip Delano  08:24

Called it Left Face, because though we were all pretty inexperienced with politics…

William Short  08:28

Army veteran Skip Delano.

Skip Delano  08:30

It was real clear that our views were on the left. That’s what we were looking to the left. So, we called our paper that.

William Short  08:37

Another successful paper was at Fort Carson, Colorado.

Curt Stocker  08:40

Like someone was saying, Hey, you’re going to do an underground newspaper. And I said, No, we’re going to be totally above ground.

William Short  08:46

That’s Army veteran Curt Stocker, a co-publisher of Aboveground. On the masthead of many GI newspapers was the phrase, “This is your personal property and cannot legally be taken from you.” Here’s Skip Delano again. This is from an interview we did this past year.

Skip Delano  09:08

A lot of times we’d leave the paper laying around in the barracks somewhere so people might find and pick it up, because higher sergeants would come around and take them from people. So we wanted to let people know that you have certain rights as an American citizen to have that paper, whether you’re a soldier or not, and to have free speech in the military.

Archival Sound  09:31

Edward Lytton, 19th century contention that the pen is mightier than the sword is being mightily tested. At perhaps a dozen or more of these bases, what is going on is the phenomenon of the anti-establishment or underground GI newspaper.

William Short  09:47

Since GIs couldn’t openly distribute the papers on base, they had to get creative and be sneaky.

Paul Cox  09:53

I had a little Volkswagen Bug. We’d fill up the back seats of these things with these newspapers, and we’d go on to the bases. We would take four guys, and we’d hit a barracks, and one of us take each of the squad bays. This is like three o’clock in the morning. We’d start throwing these things out on the racks while people were sleeping, down to the next barracks, in and out that end, and then get in the car and split and go someplace else and do the same thing.

Skip Delano  10:16

I can remember running out and jumping in the trunk of a car and laying in the trunk, and the MPs would come and people would be hiding trunks of cars and hoping they wouldn’t get caught or under cars, and because if you got caught, the potential was to get six months in the stockade.

Dave Blalock  10:29

We had supporters in the military police who would tell us, go through gate three. I’m on the gate that day, and we’re supposed to search all cars.

William Short  10:36

That’s Army veteran Dave Blalock, who also worked on Left Face.

Dave Blalock  10:40

We’d go through, and they’d do a fake search of the car, but there’d be bundles of paper in the back seat and in the trunk, and a guy would just pretend like he’s looking and let you go through. And within a matter of several hours, you’d have almost every bunk on a base with a newspaper on it.

David Cortright  10:53

One night, I was over in one of the artillery areas, you know, around midnight or something, putting them on tables, going into the latrine. And there was an armed guard patrolling the barracks, and he says, Who goes there? I walked over, and he says, What are you doing? So, I handed him a copy of the Gigline. He looked it over, handed it back to me, and says, Carry on.

Willa Seidenberg  11:15

There were supporters in the military, but GIs took great risks to work on and distribute the newspapers. The founder and editor of Fatigue Press, Bruce Peterson, spent two years in Leavenworth Prison. He’d been convicted of trumped-up charges of marijuana possession. His conviction was eventually overturned.

Skip Delano  11:37

They could just always find infractions to screw you around with. The military had started coming after me and I’d never really been in any serious trouble while I was in, and I’d been in almost two and a half years at that point.

Willa Seidenberg  11:51

Skip Delano had served a year in Vietnam and was assigned to Fort McClellan in Alabama when he came back. It was there he helped start Left Face.

Skip Delano  12:01

I mean, I thought that since I’d been in Vietnam, I had every right to comment on that issue to other people. In fact, I had a certain responsibility to, and was really shocked to find out that that wasn’t reality or freedom in America.

Willa Seidenberg  12:25

The GI papers took their inspiration from the civilian underground press. Most major cities had one. The GI papers were irreverent, filled with anger against the military and the war, and featuring photos of peace-loving soldiers in uniform. Cartoons and graphics were an integral part of the papers. In one cartoon, President Johnson is sitting at a desk talking on the phone. Behind him is a man in a top hat with an arm full of missiles. Johnson says, Maybe it ain’t much of a war. Maybe it’s even a dirty war, but it’s the only war we got right now. So, keep it going.

William Short  13:06

The cartoons of underground artist R Crumb were popular at the time. Aboveground published one called Pacification.

Curt Stocker  13:13

It had a bunch of GIs sitting in a foxhole rolling doobies in Vietnam. They had these looks on their faces of pacification.

Tom Roberts  13:22

You’re pacified.

Curt Stocker  13:23

There’s a water buffalo looking at ’em. They had a big bag of dope, and they were rolling big reefers, and they were pretty pacified.

William Short  13:23

The GIs reported and commented on what was happening in the war and on their military bases.

Skip Delano  13:37

For example, in the paper was to be in a column every month with a thing called Lifer of the Month, or Pig of the Month, and look on the base for somebody who was just really a real, out-and-out pig and dog and had done certain things to the men that needed commentary, to link up, not only the opposition to the war with struggles on the base, more directly affecting some of the people and stuff.

William Short  14:00

Fatigue Press was a newspaper out of Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Army veteran Dave Cline was stationed at Fort Hood after he was wounded in Vietnam. He was awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.

Dave Cline  14:13

I made a decision that I was going to come back to the United States and start working against the war, because I felt that we were wasting American lives and Vietnamese lives pointlessly.

William Short  14:28

Dave quickly got involved with Fatigue Press.

Dave Cline  14:30

From the very beginning, the banner of Fatigue Press said, “By and for GIs,” and that was pretty much all it was.

Harry Haines  14:37

The editorial process was largely egalitarian.

William Short  14:40

Army veteran Harry Haines worked on Aboveground at Fort Carson.

Harry Haines  14:44

Basically, the content of the newspaper reflected people who were willing to be vocal and argue their points in weekly meetings,

William Short  14:54

The editorial staffs would often get leads for stories from GIs on their bases. Dave Hettick worked on Bragg Briefs at the army base Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Dave Hettick  15:05

They’d come to us and they’d say, you know, you got to do a story about this, you know, some racist incident or something like that. And we got a lot of stories that way. Even guys who didn’t really approve of us, I don’t think, saw us as kind of the voice of the people. Yeah, they could come to us and get a story about some injustice that had happened somewhere.

Willa Seidenberg  15:27

Black GIs produced their own papers, most notably in West Germany, where the United States had a number of bases. The longest-running paper by Black GIs was A’bout Face, and a few publications were produced by women, such as Women Hold Up Half the Sky at a naval base in Japan. Some of the papers, like Aboveground, even did investigative journalism. Here’s Curt Stocker and Tom Roberts of Aboveground.

Curt Stocker  16:01

The general was flying this chopper around. He had no pilot’s license or anything like that, no official training, yeah, and we caught him doing that, and had witnesses that spilled their guts. And when we were ready to run that one, they sent the FBI around to see our printer down in Colorado Springs and basically, like, threaten to shut them down.

Richard Valentine  16:21

We also ran articles to politicize people too, not just about the army.

Willa Seidenberg  16:28

Richard Valentine, an Army veteran, worked on FTA, published at Fort Knox in Kentucky,

Richard Valentine  16:35

We knew the people that were the local organizing committee for the United Farm Workers. So, we started trying to encourage people not to eat lettuce on the base and to see the connection between us stupid cannon fodder and the field fodder. The only difference is one gets sprayed with insecticide and the other gets sprayed with bombs.

Willa Seidenberg  17:05

The newspapers were of mixed quality.

Paul Cox  17:08

Oh, we’d sometimes lift articles from other sources, and then we would write stuff ourselves. And the articles that were lifted were good, and the ones we wrote ourselves were terrible. God, it was a horrible rag. We used a lot of obscenities and were really quite rude and quite obscene. We were just so full of anger. I think as a newspaper, it wasn’t very effective. As an indication of disaffection, I think it was quite effective.

Archival Sound  17:37

From Fort Dix to Fort Jackson, from Fort Benning to Fort Lewis, the underground journals are being turned out by mimeograph or by offset printing.

William Short  17:46

Mimeograph was how the world made duplicate copies before photocopy machines. You would type or draw on a carbon master coated with a distinctive purple dye.

Archival Sound. 17:55

When this master is run through a spirit duplicating machine, it transfers the carbon to the paper, which is moistened with a special fluid.

Dave Cline  18:04

And they looked pretty lousy, you know, like you’d have to really work to read them.

William Short  18:08

Mimeograph was low cost and very accessible. So even GIs at remote places, like ships or bases overseas, could put out some kind of publication.

Harry Haines  18:22

I think Aboveground was one of the better undergrounds that I’ve seen in terms of layout and just journalistic style, because the army had trained the two publishers of this newspaper. So, they knew their job real well.

William Short  18:36

Harry is referring to Curt Stocker and Tom Roberts. They had attended the Army’s Defense Information School, which trained military personnel in journalism and public relations.

Tom Roberts  18:47

That was where I learned the phrase “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Willa Seidenberg  18:57

Tom and Curt had met briefly in Vietnam and shared some common experiences. So, when they found themselves at Fort Carson after their tours in Vietnam, they decided to launch Aboveground. They didn’t use their names in the first issue.

Curt Stocker  19:13

After we came out with that first issue, like they figured out who we were just pretty much straight away.

Tom Roberts  19:18

Within two days, I think, after we distributed it, they had us on the carpet

Willa Seidenberg  19:21

Just as they were about to publish the second issue, the Army split them up. Tom remained at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. Curt was sent 70 miles away to an army hospital in Denver. It was harder to coordinate, but it didn’t stop them from publishing. Nor did the fact that their printer told them he wouldn’t print the paper anymore.

Tom Roberts  19:45

I said, why not? And he goes, Well, the army came in here and the FBI and they wanted proofs of this and that, and they wanted to see the thing, and it was just too much of a hassle. We’re just not going to do it. A lot of press coverage about that incident, and. an editor and a publisher of a small paper in Littleton, Colorado, offered to print the newspaper for us, but he said, I disagree with what you guys are saying about the war, but I believe absolutely in your right to say it without interference from the FBI or from the military intelligence. You know, that you have the First Amendment right to say that, and I very much support that.

Willa Seidenberg  20:30

They were printing three to five thousand copies of the paper each month.

Harry Haines  20:35

One thing we learned almost immediately was that these newspapers had tremendous hand to hand circulation, like one soldier would read it and then pass it on, and they’d be spread throughout the entire unit, and this newspaper was perceived as a real threat by the military command, largely because Roberts and Stocker had the credibility of being Vietnam veterans.

William Short  21:03

The papers were often funded by the GIs themselves.

Dave Cline  21:07

You know, we were always having a money problem too, because it was all, you know, we weren’t making that much in the service, and so we were always trying to solicit funds.

Tom Roberts  21:16

For the third issue, a woman that I ran into whose husband had just been killed in Vietnam through, you know, friendly fire, and she donated enough money for one issue from the GI life insurance policy that she got.

Archival Sound  21:35

Shakedown, like most underground papers, is published with the cooperation of civilian peace groups. It receives small contributions by mail. It gets help of one sort or another from the Students for a Democratic Society.

William Short  21:49

The main source of moral and financial support came from the United States Servicemen Fund, the USSF.

Hal Muskat  21:58

They were crucial.

William Short  21:59

Army veteran, Hal Muskat.

Hal Muskat  22:01

No paper could have made it without them. No coffee house could have made it without them.

William Short  22:06

The United States Servicemen’s Fund was started in 1968 by several anti-war activists, including Fred Gardner, Howard Levy, who you heard from in episode four, and Dr. Benjamin Spock. It provided funding and logistical support to GI newspapers, coffeehouses and other GI organizations.

William Short  22:37

Activists in the GI movement had to confront spies and informers in their ranks.

Skip Delano  22:42

One time, I picked somebody up, another GI thumbing somewhere in Alabama. Later on, through the Freedom of Information Act, got some of my files back from the military and found out this guy had informed on me, that I had advocated violence against the government, which wasn’t true. But it was just an example of how they try to use informers to undermine people and prosecute them.

Dave Cline  23:07

Guys are doing literature distribution. You’d always be worried about getting a new guy, because you go in teams and you don’t know if the new guy’s a agent setting you up, you know.

Willa Seidenberg  23:25

The GI newspapers were largely grassroots expressions of GIs’ disaffection with the military and the war. Sometimes the papers were produced at GI coffeehouses in towns where there were military bases. The idea for the coffee houses came from civilian Fred Gardner. Remember, he was also one of the founders of USSF.

David Parsons  23:48

He was living in San Francisco by the time it was the mid 60s.

Willa Seidenberg  23:53

David Parsons wrote a book on the coffee houses called Dangerous Grounds,

David Parsons  23:58

And he had the idea to open a coffeehouse network. He thought that the coffeehouses of San Francisco that were sort of the counterculture coffeehouses with the rock and roll posters and poetry readings.

Willa Seidenberg  24:20

Gardner said he didn’t necessarily want the coffeehouses to try to sway the opinions of soldiers. Here he is in 1970 talking to WIIS-TV in Columbia, South Carolina, home of the UFO coffeehouse.

Fred Gardner  24:36

What’s wrong with Bob Hope and Martha Ray and ping pong? Nothing. It’s just there’s another culture in this country. If and when men got a sense of their true numbers and realized how many hundreds, how many thousands of them were choking with shame and angry and unwilling to go to Vietnam, they would find ways of expressing their own feelings.

William Short  25:07

When I was stationed at Fort Jackson for basic training and advanced infantry training, I heard about the UFO coffeehouse. I heard it was a comfortable place for GIs to hang out and not have to talk about the army or about the war, and not be hassled. I went there a couple of times. It was on Main Street, and the outside of the building looked like an old storefront. It had a big glass window with psychedelic rock posters pasted to it, texts with big globby letters that looked like they were dripping. The kind of thing they might see in San Francisco. I thought it was very cool. Since it was a military town, if you went to town with a shaved head, you’d be immediately identified as a GI. But we put on civilian clothes because we didn’t want to wear our uniforms. Once we were off base, we just wanted to be as far away from the army as we could get. And the farthest place we could get psychologically from the army was inside the UFO. It didn’t seem very big. It had lots of underground newspapers, and I remember seeing underground comics by R Crumb. They played a lot of music, mostly contemporary rock of the time. You know, like Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater. There would be flyers for demonstrations or music events. There was a can on the table next to the door for donations. We GIs didn’t make very much money in the army, but I threw in a dollar or two just to support the place. I remember sitting there drinking a Coke and wondering what was going to become of me. Was I going to go to Vietnam? Would I survive it if I did? I wondered about what my friends were doing back home., if anybody was thinking about me. Will I go back to college after the army? Will I ever finish my degree? I guess I was just trying to think about my future, or if I was even going to have one. I probably spent two or three hours just sitting there reading or talking to people. Nobody hassled you. Nobody was trying to promote their politics or trying to convert you or convince you of their point of view. It was just one of those places where I could feel free and not think about being in the fucking army.

Willa Seidenberg  27:22

The UFO was the first coffeehouse, but others soon followed.

David Parsons  27:27

The U.S. military and federal officials and people in the towns were very wary of a counterculture coffee house coming to their towns and anti-war activists coming to their towns.

Willa Seidenberg  27:39

One of the most successful coffeehouses was the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas, home of Fort Hood.

[Film: Sir, No Sir!] 27:48

The dusty Texas town of Killeen, just outside Fort Hood, which housed over 20,000 troops, became home of the GI coffeehouse known as the Oleo Strut.

Willa Seidenberg  27:58

That’s a clip from Sir, No Sir!, a documentary on the GI movement, produced and directed by David Zeiger in 2005. During the war, David went to Killeen to work at the Oleo Strut.

David Zeiger  28:12

Oleo strut was a vertical shock absorber to keep the helicopter from wobbling. So that was the idea of Oleo Strut, it was a place that would be a shock absorber for the GIs.

[Film: Sir, No Sir!] 28:24

Being in the army, I can get over here and I can sit down and write poetry, and I can sit here and listen, and I can forget I’m in the army for about 15 minutes to an hour, or something like this.

David Zeiger  28:36

The Strut was like a big box. You know, we had coffee, and we sold pieces of cake and whatever. There was a stage, a small stage in it.

Willa Seidenberg  28:45

Many of the GIs at Fort Hood were soldiers who had already served their one-year tour in Vietnam. They’d come back to the base to serve out the rest of their enlistment.

David Zeiger  28:56

It was the guys who had come back from Vietnam who were getting very radicalized and very much wanted to do something to end the war. GIs wanted porn, and they wanted to know about the revolution. We eventually opened up a bookstore in the back of the Oleo Strut. We were the only place in town that had entertainment and that you could come and really relax and it was a rocking place

Dave Cline  29:30

In Fort Hood, it wasn’t like there was too much to do there.

Willa Seidenberg  29:33

This is Dave Cline again.

Dave Cline  29:35

Downtown was disgusting. It was like they have a few porno movies, a few pinball joints, a pool hall, a couple jewelry stores that were trying to rob you out your money, a USO, the coffeehouse and the cops. Wasn’t much of a town.

William Short  29:50

After Dave was discharged from the military, he continued to work on GI organizing. He worked with David Zeiger at the Oleo Strut. 

David Zeiger  29:58

Dave Cline had invented a dance called the Oleo Strut. There was a very popular cartoon at the time that was, Keep on Truckin’, and it was the guy was kind of low to the ground, and he had his legs out. We would imitate that move, and we would, you know, it was a lot of lot of fun.

William Short  30:18

It was fun, but they could also be targets.

David Zeiger  30:26

I was arrested eight times in about a three-month period. They were just kind of grabbing me whenever they could get their hands on me. I spent a night in jail for having a dirty license plate.

David Parsons  30:37

Many of them were actually housing their publishing infrastructure at the coffee houses, and that actually became a problem for some of them. When vigilantes and police and military officials came to the coffee houses, they were interested in taking or destroying those mimeograph machines. There are a couple cases of coffee houses who were actually burying and hiding their mimeograph machines in you know, behind the coffee house, because it was that important and that vital.

William Short  31:15

The coffeehouse near Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho suffered intimidation, vandalism, and violence. It was burned to the ground in 1971. The USSF helped it reopen in another location. 

[Music: Covered Mountain Musicians] 31:41

William Short  31:41

This is a song by the Covered Mountain Musicians. They were a group of active-duty soldiers who released an album in 1972.

William Short  32:03

Some GI activists were skeptical of the value of the coffee houses.

Hal Muskat  32:15

The GIs who had more consciousness or more awareness, who were doing the best organizing on the bases were then spending less time on base and more time at the coffeehouse. Once you take us, as GIs who are organizers, to begin to defend the right of these coffeehouses to exist — which it has every right to exist. — then our efforts are thoroughly off-base and forget the struggles of other GIs on base and the war and all that. Now we’re defending a coffeehouse’s right to exist,

William Short  32:42

But often the coffeehouses were sources of support and information for GIs. When Carl Dix was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington State, he happened to meet two other GIs who were also having doubts about going to Vietnam.

Carl Dix  32:55

I had heard about a coffeehouse, but I had never really thought about what went on there, or whether that would fit into it. So, then we talk about it and I say, Well, look, there’s this place, it’s called the Shelter Half. Let’s go there. So, then the three of us go down to the coffeehouse, and they refer us to these people who do military counseling in Seattle, who tell us how to file for CO.

David Parsons  33:23

I think it’s an important part of understanding this movement, is understanding that there were different visions of what it should be. There was never a monolithic united front. And that may have been somewhat of a weakness of the movement, but to me it seems inevitable, particularly in an atmosphere that is very, very challenging and adversarial.

Willa Seidenberg  33:47

Officials at the Pentagon realized they were losing the psychological battle as more and more soldiers believed it was an unjust war. The military was so worried about GI coffeehouses, they often pressured local law enforcement to go after them. In Columbia, they used an obscure South Carolina law to prosecute the owners of the UFO. In January of 1970, three of the owners were indicted on a common law misdemeanor charge. The prosecution argued that the coffeehouse was “detrimental to the peace, happiness, lives, safety and good morals of the people of South Carolina.” After a quick trial, the judge sentenced the three men to six years in prison. He said that by operating an anti-war coffeehouse, the men were creating a public nuisance. The defendants argued they were victims of a conspiracy against their right to free speech. One of those young men was William Balk.

William Balk  34:57

There is no way for anyone to convince me that the court that I sat in was a fair judicial situation. There’s no way for me to believe that that served law and order.

Willa Seidenberg  35:08

While the case was pending in the South Carolina Supreme Court, the defendant struck a deal with the prosecution and avoided imprisonment. The GI coffeehouses eventually became a victim of the movement’s success.

David Zeiger  35:28

Knowing how much resistance there was the war inside the army, especially, first thing they did was after, you know, six months training, a year in Vietnam, they were just sending people home, and then shortly after that was when they stopped sending army to Vietnam. People who were coming in knew they weren’t going to go to Vietnam. So, the whole basis for the movement was kind of undercut.

Willa Seidenberg  35:55

The unpopularity of the war led President Nixon to shift to an air war, lessening the need for combat troops. And in 1973 the U.S. military switched to an all-volunteer force.

David Parsons  36:09

A lot of these coffeehouses hang on and aren’t just giving up and leaving, but instead sort of shifting what they’re doing.

Willa Seidenberg  36:16

One way the coffee houses shifted was to recognize there were other parts of the military experience that should be addressed.

David Parsons  36:24

They beginning to talk about the veteran experience, they’re beginning to talk about the VA and benefits and health care. They’re beginning to talk about women in the military, not just as people within the military itself, but as dependents and wives, and children of veterans and active-duty soldiers. There’s even beginning to talk about gay men and women in the American military.

[Music: Join the GI Movement]  36:51

Willa Seidenberg  37:00

Free speech issues are not new in the United States, but they’ve taken on a disturbing prominence today, especially on college campuses.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez  37:10

My name is Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez. I’m a student journalist at the University of Texas at Dallas, the former editor-in-chief of The Mercury before it was destroyed.

Willa Seidenberg  37:20

The Mercury’s demise came after it reported on campus encampments to protest the violence in Gaza. When the paper would not agree to the University’s demand for prior review of its coverage, the administration fired Gregorio and his staff and even removed the paper’s kiosks on campus. The parallels to the free speech movements of the 1960s are not lost on Gregorio.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez  37:50

It’s this really kind of like inspiring example to look at. These are people in the middle of the Vietnam War who are choosing to go against what they are being told to do, and that is absolutely imperative for successful student journalism.

Willa Seidenberg  38:06

When the paper was shut down in early 2025, the staff of The Mercury started their own independent newspaper. They call it The Retrograde. We have more with Gregorio and the current day issue of free speech in an upcoming bonus episode,

William Short  38:28

The GI newspapers and coffeehouses were cornerstones of the GI movement, but there are other expressions of anti-war sentiment among GIs. We’ll have part two on the GI movement in an upcoming episode.

William Short  38:41

And we’d like to take this moment to note that two of the veterans you heard in this episode have passed away: Dave Cline in 2007 and Tom Roberts in 2003.

William Short  38:53

David Parsons, the author of Dangerous Grounds has a podcast you might want to check out called Nostalgia Trap. David delves into American history, radical politics, pop culture and the apocalypse. You can find a link on our website under the show notes.

Willa Seidenberg  39:26

Next time on A Matter of Conscience.

Oliver Hirsch  39:29

There was no illusions that we were going to jail. We didn’t know for how long, but I think there was a real spirit of, you know, whatever it took, and certainly buoyed by the breadth of the protests that we were involved in and everything that was going on.

Willa Seidenberg  39:43

We’ll have the story of the Nine for Peace.

William Short  39:49

This podcast is independently produced with crowdsourced funds. We thank the dozens of people who donated, and you can join them by going to our website a matter of conscience. Com. You can also see a glossary of terms and show notes for this episode.

Willa Seidenberg  40:07

This episode was written, edited and produced by Willa Seidenberg, along with Bill Short and Polina Cherezova.  Dylan Purvis is the Associate Producer. Many thanks to Country Joe McDonald for giving us permission to use his song as our theme music. Musical arrangements are by Danny Seidenberg. Andrew Patinkin performed the guitar music. The song, Join the GI Movement is by Barbara Dane. The sound design for the podcast 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, Susan Schnall and Veterans for Peace, and David Zeiger. And finally, we give our appreciation to all the veterans who shared their stories with us.