We are the Historians: The GI Revolt

The issue was the military itself and the fact that it was inherently an unjust system. A war within the war began to take shape in Vietnam. Sometimes it took quite violent responses, airplanes were sabotaged and fell out of the sky because of this stuff. Narcotics agents were killed on bases. We are the historians, the GI Revolt. I was invited to come and sing in England because some of the air force bases there got organized. Folk singer Barbara Dane, now a vocal in California, performed for several years on the GI coffee

house circuit. The coffee houses were storefronts established outside major American military bases. There were places where active duty GI could meet and discuss issues like the war in Vietnam. Barbara Dane was part of the civilian support for a rank and file GI move. To me one very telling little moment was, I mentioned that I was invited by Vanessa Redgrave to come over to London for this festival. She got me on to a program there, it's a BBC show that's sort of comparable to Johnny Carson show or something. It's the main talk show in the evening. The show was designed to, well, it's funny because when they called me up to ask me to be on the show, the producer said, well, let's see, what could you talk about? Would you be able to tell us about how you encourage them into dessert? I said, no, we don't encourage them into dessert, we're not interested in desertion at all. We want people to be conscious of what they're doing, where they are, what their rights are,

and to become active in place, where they are, in resisting all of this. During the Indochina War era of the late 1960s and early 70s, incidents of mutiny, sabotage and other acts of rebellion reached new heights within the United States armed forces. The authors of articles which appeared in military journals of the time warned of a threat to the very fiber of the defense establishment. The young men and women entering the service were influenced by a society-wide challenge to social norms and institutions. Their grievances often found expression in scores of distant publications. The underground GI press. The primary issues involved or that the harass involved itself in were one the war in general, the politics of the war, and the other was GI rights. New Mexico resident Eli Yates was a staff member in 1970 of the last harass published at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

A lot of the issues involved basic civil rights, which were very often denied in the military. Sometimes, under sanction of the Supreme Court, mostly what we were dealing with were things that affected individuals like having printed material, being able to express oneself to a non-commissioned officer without being thrown into the stockade, things like that. For instance, the last harass, there were a couple of people involved in it who had been involved with groups, established groups in other parts of the country or in the Augusta Georgia area, Fort Gordon area. But by and large, the people who became involved became involved simply because they were angry. One thing we learned, I think, was that when we first tried to copy us, we had these visions

of people coming down 30, 40 in height and just really getting it on and having a good old time and stuff. What we found out was that people really don't care that much unless they know more. So what if we have talks and raps and stuff, people aren't going to come down from the bases, just like here in Waikiki, there's so much other stuff to do for the GIs besides coming to a coffee house. And so what we found out was that we had to spread out. We had to get on base organizing going. Unrest within the military encompassed a wide spectrum of issues besides the war. Grievances were frequently voiced about working and living conditions on bases. Long-term organizing, however, faced many difficulties. Authorities, once aware of organized dissent, often broke up incipient groups and transferred their leadership. For some, defiance was a quick ticket to the brig. Nevertheless, organizations with names like the movement for a Democratic military, concerned officers movement, and American servicemen's union were founded.

And one of the first activities we took on as members of the American servicemen's union was calling for a boycott of the childhood until the conditions improved. Bill Roundtree of Detroit, Michigan, was an organizer for the American servicemen's union, a national organization which claimed a membership in the thousands and published a widely circulated newspaper, The Bond. As a national organizer, I felt it was necessary to expand the union, to work on other, really to travel to other places, to talk to other GIs that were involved in the GI resistance movement, that were forming chapters around the country and so forth. I think I spent the next year, in a sense, took a leave of absence from the military, which they called AWOL, and went and worked on a national level of organizing around the GI movement, attending conferences, talking to GIs at other bases.

I was also active in support for the Black Panther Party, numerous other activities during that leave of absence from the military. The more acted as a national spokesperson for the American servicemen's union, trying to really build the union and so forth during that period, I was still active at Shenuit in the sense of GIs, I took this leave of absence, I was still only like 30 miles away from the base, doing my organizing, and even would go up to the base during that time, this would be enclosed and go talk to GIs and so forth, and we're still actively organizing at the base also. Last summer, I walked into a USO in near Cam Pendleton, California, saying for a bunch of guys who had never been to a GI coffee house, and as far as I know, it had never seen

an anti-war GI paper, just dissatisfied Marines, average dissatisfied Marines. At the end of the song, they're all standing up and clapping their hands and asking, where could they join? Where could they sign up? I am a GI rebel as brave as I can be, and I don't like the Army brass and the generals don't like me. Oh, join the GI movement, come and join the GI movement, come and join the GI movement. A war within the war began to take shape in Vietnam. It was a double battleground, blacks against whites, primarily. From the Civil War period on, blacks and other minorities have faced discrimination, segregation and racial insult within the armed forces. By the late 1960s, a distinctive black revolt was taking shape in the military. It was a time when the influence of Malcolm X, the black panthers and other nationalist

organizations, was felt even inside the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Wallace Terry is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of Bloods, an oral history of the Vietnam War by black veterans. And it was a reflection of the civil rights unrest that was going on here in the States. It was also brought about because a new black person emerged in the armed forces. Phil was a certain militancy, a certain assertiveness where he was not going to accept the sight of Confederate flags anymore, or to be called boy by sergeant, whether it's a white sergeant or a black sergeant. So there was a great deal of tension. There were crosses burned in Vietnam, there was a wearing a Ku Klux Klan costumes on some rear bases. The sight of Confederate flags was almost commonplace. And this spread from Vietnam into bases around the world, in Europe in the early 70s, as you mentioned, as well as in the Far East, and to some bases here in the States, like Travis Air Force Base, Camp Pendleton, Camp Le Jun, and Ford Hood in Texas, and so on.

Rebellions by black servicemen were commonplace throughout the Indochina War era. Black Air Force veteran Bill Roundtree describes one incident at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado. The stockade I was in was all the guards were white, and 90% of the prisoners were black. We had another, I don't know, participating in another rebellion in the stockade, where we just totally destroyed. We refused to eat in this mess hall. Prisoners were assigned to the most filthiest mess hall I've ever seen in my life, and we organized ourselves that we would, when they marched us out this year's compound, which was the stockade, they would have to march us over this chow hall every day. And one day we refused to go to the chow hall that we normally ate at, and marched over to the officers' chow hall to get served.

And one GI got through the line before the cooks behind the counter realized what was going on, and started to refuse to serve us all, and we just tore up the officers' mess hall. I mean, we just ripped it apart, and then, you know, and are very organized and disciplined way marched out after we tore it up, lined back up, and marched back to the stockade after they called out the dogs and military police and so forth. Racial strife alarmed top officials at the Pentagon. Commissions were dispatched to investigate conditions and race relations programs established in military units. Wallace Terry. For the first time in the history of mankind, a huge population was reeducated in the values of human relations and respect for each other's culture. And this was instituted by the Department of Defense in the early 70s. It was ordered by then Secretary of Defense Melvin Lair, whom I think did a fine job, and it was repeated in command after command by some very forward-looking general officers.

I worked for a couple of them. I'm thinking of Mike Davison, Army General, I'm thinking of the Chief and Naval Operations Admiral Zumwalt, and also the gentleman who would eventually become chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And that's David Jones. I worked for him when he was commander in the United States Air Force Europe. And what they were doing was saying, essentially, every person who works for Uncle Sam in uniform must spend two weeks in human relations training. I think it's healthy because what it did was teach mutual respect. And when men have more pride in themselves and women as well, and gain more respect from other people because their cultures are being respected, then you're going to get a better job from them. When I went into the Marine Corps, I thought I was going to serve my country and be a brave Marine, a good American. As I stepped off the bus at UC MD, San Diego, the first words that greeted me were, the DI came up to me and said, oh, we have a good care today in our platoon. But the racism which permeated the armed forces receded to the background on the front lines

according to Wallace Terry. You know, ironically Martin Luther King had a dream in which he said the sons of former slaves and former slave holders would sit at the same table. I think it happened in Vietnam and it's the only time it's happened in our American history. There were no racists on the front lines in Vietnam, just as there were no atheists. Everybody believed in helping each other just like everybody suddenly believed in God when you heard a Soviet 122 rocket go off. Opposition to the war increased within the various branches of the military. Once our war demonstrations took place in Europe, the United States, and even in Vietnam. In 1971, sailors aboard the USS Coral Sea launched a campaign to prevent the ship from going to Vietnam. A protest rally was held at Alameda, California. In the past three years that I've been here, I've seen plenty of deaths related to Vietnam, I've worked as a Vietnam returning hospital for 17 months. So what I can do to people mentally and physically, come November 12th, I won't be on that

ship. The anti-war sailors were unsuccessful in their attempt to halt the Coral Sea from sailing to Indochinese waters. According to Barbara Dane, resistance continued on the ship's journey. And anyway, Coral Sea did sail. It went to Vietnam and apparently it did put down mines in Haifong Harbor. However, nobody ever heard about a mine going off in Haifong Harbor, and so some time goes on and pretty soon the war is over and wound down and things are, people are getting out of the military and all of a sudden now it can be told. So I got an unimpeachable source told me what had actually happened there is that some of these people in the resistance had taken the detonating devices out of the mines so that they couldn't, the mines were incapable of blowing up. In February of 1969, the United States secretly invaded Laos in an operation called Duy Canyon

1. In 1971, a similar operation Duy Canyon 2 was conducted. From April 19th to the 23rd of 1971, over 1,000 veterans went to Washington DC to inform Congress and the Nixon administration of their experiences in Indochina. For five days of lobbying efforts against the U.S. war in Indochina, they held a demonstration in front of the U.S. Congress during which they threw medals received for their actions at the Congress building. This activity, called Duy Canyon 3, attracted not only veterans but also the families of those who had been killed in action in the war. Robert Jones, New York, I symbolically return all Vietnam medals and other service medals given me, given me by the power structure that has genocidal policies against now-white peoples of the world. I am Evelyn Tarasquillo and I am here to join all of this men which in each one of them

I see my son. My son died, he was killed. I don't have my son with me. I got his medals. It's time to get out and let's stop the war now. 1971 was a peak year of the GI movement. The U.S. Army responded with the so-called Early Out program which allowed low-ranking troops to cut short their terms of duty. This in turn served to greatly weaken or in some cases eliminate GI organizations. New recruits indeed caused the GI movement within the army to reappear on a large scale by the summer of 1972. However, the effects of the Early Out program foretold the difficulty that the various GI organizations would face upon the end of U.S. military activity in Indochina.

The anti-war movement, which had become a powerful forest during the war, disintegrated upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Southeast Asia. The peace movement was also for the most part unreceptive to the returned veterans. Given this overall context, GI and veterans organizations such as the American servicemen Union and the Vietnam veterans against the war ceased to exist, along with the hundreds of groups which had been active at various bases throughout the world. The United States was defeated in Vietnam. Veterans returned home to find their friends, families, and the public in general unreceptive to their experiences. Veterans issues such as unemployment and psychological problems and physical disabilities owed to the war remained hidden from a public which during the 70s seemed most interested in putting the war behind. It would be up to the veterans themselves to come together and raise these and other issues as ones of importance. In the early 1980s, a new organization was formed called the Vietnam Veterans of America. The VVA works successfully for a re-recognition of veterans of the Indochina war and for

improved services on the part of the U.S. Veterans Administration, particularly at issue for the VVA, our GI exposure to Agent Orange de Foliants used during the war and to the psychological effects of combat on veterans. Other vets have gone beyond these issues to address those of U.S. foreign policy as practiced by the Reagan administration. Some groups have worked in support of present U.S. policy in the Third World and have actively raised money for the Nicaraguan Contras or have trained counterinsurgency troops in El Salvador. However, a growing number of vets are concerned that we are in the verge of becoming involved in new Vietnam-type wars in Central America and other parts of the world. One group in the San Francisco Bay Area is working among high school students, sharing their experiences from the Indochina war period. The Veteran Speakers Alliance, formed in 1984, has also become known for its educational pickets of the movie Rambo, which features Sylvester Stallone as a frustrated vet who returns to Vietnam in order to rescue U.S. prisoners of war supposedly still there.

Jack Straun was a medic in Vietnam and is now a member of the Veteran Speakers Alliance. When Rambo had been out for a while, they started coming out with these posters. You know, America's hero wants you, which was a real conscious takeoff on the old John Wayne syndrome, but also Sylvester Stallone started making statements about why he made the movie that he wanted America's Vietnam veterans to feel good about themselves. He was speaking for veterans in this movie and that we should have had a right to win in this. And I took a real personal affront to that. You know, if he had a misplaced sense of shame or some sense of compassion about what Vietnam veterans went through, it was really the wrong vehicle to use for it and it angered me a lot. That's why I got out there. According to Straun, Rambo exhibits a lack of realism which could have a misleading impact on young audiences, a knowledgeable of the history of the war in Indochina. These movies tend to raise a lot of false hopes and they tend to pray on the idea that

while America may have lied to you about certain things, they're probably lying to you about what really happened to the POWs or the MIAs as the issue goes. And that's a very basic thing. No one wants to say, well, we're going to consign a whole group of pilots or whatever MIAs to the okay they're dead and quit looking for their bodies at least as a memorial. On the other hand, the movies aren't very truthful at all about what goes on, either in an aircraft crash which is usually pretty fiery and usually pretty deadly, but also in a lot of other things that go on. Rambo's whole idea of running around in the jungle shooting Soviet advisors to the Vietnamese and shooting millions of Vietnamese. One doesn't shoot that many people no matter what kind of weapon one has and one usually gets killed trying.

He doesn't even get scratched. That's a real basic lie about what goes on in combat. One that I think we all grew up with, I did, you know, the old bite-to-bullet wound in the World War II movies thing and wounds don't hurt and they're all clean and you go on the hospital ship and meet a pretty nurse and everything's all good and good and wounds are real nasty and they take you out. The members of the Veteran Speakers Alliance, like numerous other veterans, see many sectors of US society as being so uninformed about the Indochina War period that they are unable to judge accurately the present course of US foreign policy. Youth are particularly vulnerable to what these vets view as a sense of false patriotism. Here is the central issue for my generation, from probably everybody from age 30 to 45 today. This is the central issue for our generation and they know absolutely nothing about it. Kim Sypes is also a member of the Veteran Speakers Alliance. Although he did not serve in Indochina, he was a Marine in the early 70s and experienced the turmoil in the military of that period.

Like Jack Strahn, he is concerned with these perspectives on the military and particularly with the history of the war in Indochina as it is presented in our schools and in the media. And that's overwhelming. I just don't know how to deal with that. But I think part of this, I think the reason for this, there are a couple of reasons. One is that how the media has dealt with Vietnam during the war and especially since and also the textbooks. The media's coverage, the media goes to things that are flashy. They don't look for the underlying reasons for things. They don't do in-depth things generally. It's just very, very poor coverage. So like, for example, this was the first war where there was a large scale, large number of flaggings of where troopers would use fragmentation grenades to go after senior non-commission officers or officers and with the purposes of baby and or killing them. This happened in its war.

That got into the media a little bit. But like, for example, they know nothing that there was incredible struggles on bases in the United States around the military. They don't know that, for example, there was a race riot at every single major marine base in the world by 1971 except for one. They don't know these things were going on. They don't know that people were getting bad discharges for one grain of marijuana in their possession. They don't know these things. You know, this stuff wasn't in the media and so since it didn't even reach that, it has a much less chance of getting into the history books. As the United States increasingly becomes involved in conflicts in Central America and the Middle East, many of the general characteristics of the military remain the same as those which existed during the Indo-China War period, Wallace Terry. The war in Vietnam was essentially fought by poor people, working class people. Blacks who came from the ghetto or Hispanics from the Barrel or Indians from the reservation

and working class whites who came from the farms in the rural south, they came from towns that shut down because there was no work anymore. Many vets with organizing experience remain active today as members of community, political and other organizations. Bill Roundtree is presently an organizer for the All People's Congress. He predicts that the upheaval within the military of the Indo-China War period may well be repeated in the coming years in today's armed forces. I think many of us who are in the issue and can still remember it, look forward to the day and see the day where this new layer of GIs will problem because of the conditions that exist for GIs and the same as they were doing to be at now more well resurfaced and indication of that is the case of brother Griffin. Alfred Griffin was a Marine Corporal and a Muslim by Creed who in 1983 refused orders to serve in Lebanon, claiming that his religion did not allow him to fight against fellow

members of the Islamic faith. Griffin was court-martial by the Marine Corps, but his case raised issues such as a so-called poverty draft in a racism. Bill Roundtree describes Griffin's case as the tip of the iceberg. He claims that changes in U.S. foreign policy and an internal military policy will come about in large part due to increased activities by present-day GIs. Many members of the ASU saluted brother Griffin and raised the history of the Union and so forth, but that's an indication that that struggle will develop and we feel with our experience that many of us who are in that moment will probably play a role in it again as it starts to develop. We are the historians. The GI revolt was written and produced by Lewis Head and Kent Patterson at the studios of KUNM FM in Albuquerque, New Mexico, engineering by Marcos Martinez, narration by Kent Patterson

and Lewis Head. Special thanks go out to paradigm records and to all of the individuals who cooperated with this project. We are the historians does not necessarily reflect the views of the Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico or the Staff and Management of KUNM. The producers of this program are solely responsible for its contents.