Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  That month, the Tet Offensive had captured the attention of the nation; its scenes of intense urban violence were being broadcast into living rooms, which created a sharp drop in public support for the war. Seizing the moment, GIs at Fort Jackson translated their frustrated conversations at the coffeehouse into the first major organized action against the Vietnam War on an American military base. The organizers, led by Specialist Martin Blumsack, had received permission from Fort Jackson’s post chaplain to use the post’s chapel for an “hour of meditation” to express “grave concern” about the war.28 The pray-in, as it came to be known, was initiated and planned by soldiers at the UFO coffeehouse, who used the space to hold meetings and distribute information.29 In the days leading up to the planned pray-in, Blumsack and other soldiers distributed leaflets at bus stops, on post, and at the UFO, encouraging GIs to assemble at Chapel #1 to express their doubts about the war and to pray for peace. Word of the demonstration spread rapidly on post, and Blumsack was told by his commanding officer to cancel the event after army authorities objected to the word “doubt” printed on the flyers. The following day, Tuesday, February 13, 1968, a group of thirty-five GIs showed up at the chapel, unaware that the meeting had been canceled. Military police closed the post, surrounded the chapel, and ordered the crowd to disperse. Two soldiers kneeling in prayer were detained and charged with disturbing the peace.30

  Although official charges against the meeting’s leaders and participants were eventually dropped, the army found other ways to discipline the soldiers who had expressed antiwar views on post. Just a week after the pray-in, two of the men were sent to combat in Vietnam. Another was shipped to Korea. Blumsack himself was arrested two weeks after the chapel meeting, charged with a variety of driving violations, and, because he was too short to legally send into combat, eventually demoted to a lower pay grade.31 The army authorities at Fort Jackson sent a strong message that antiwar activity would be met with severe retribution and that the military leadership had the seemingly unlimited power to disrupt the lives of soldiers who spoke out against its policies.

  SUMMER OF SUPPORT: BUILDING A COFFEEHOUSE NETWORK

  In the wake of the pray-in action and its fallout, Fred Gardner’s GI coffeehouse concept finally captured the attention of leaders within some of the nation’s prominent antiwar organizations. He began receiving calls and letters from activists who wanted to see it develop into a larger project, hoping to harness the energy of antiwar soldiers.32 Gardner himself felt vindicated, excited that the “official” antiwar movement was interested in engaging with soldiers and in growing his coffeehouse idea. At the time, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam was one of the country’s more well-funded and visible antiwar organizations. The “Mobe,” as it was known, was in fact a loose coalition of more than 150 antiwar groups from around the country whose leadership had organized the Spring Mobilization demonstrations that had featured the debut of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Mobe was also responsible for an impressive set of actions on October 21, 1967, that brought more than 100,000 protesters to the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital. In one of the more memorable antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam era, about 30,000 of these protesters made their way across the Potomac for a highly spirited march on the Pentagon later in the afternoon, an action immortalized in Norman Mailer’s 1968 account The Armies of the Night.33

  After the momentum gathered by the Pentagon event, Mobe leaders Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden sought to link their civilian antiwar activities with the rapidly developing GI movement. The UFO coffeehouse, in the news because of the chapel pray-in, seemed the perfect way to unite their antiwar principles with their desire to more directly engage with the military itself.34 Mobe representatives visited the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia shortly after the pray-in made national headlines. They told Fred Gardner that they wanted to create a network of antiwar coffeehouses, just like the UFO, outside military bases around the country. These efforts would be kicked off by a “Summer of Support” campaign to help provide the publicity, fund-raising, and staff needed to sustain what they imagined would be a major support structure for a developing antiwar movement in the U.S. military. During the Mobe’s visit to the UFO, Gardner helped the organization draft a press release that outlined an ambitious plan to expand his original coffeehouse idea:

  This summer, students and veterans will bring a new kind of support to GIs. By June 12, Summer of Support (SOS) plans to open coffeehouses, USOs for Peace, near all nine major US Army posts with training programs.

  The coffeehouses will be similar to the one in Columbia, S.C., where Ft. Jackson GIs met and planned the Feb. 13 pray-in at the base chapel. They will provide a place where anti-war GIs can get together, relax and talk about activities not reported in the Army—a place where they can air their gripes, plan and organize.

  In addition, SOS will offer day care centers for children of military personnel, legal counseling, theater, newspapers, rock concerts and academic programs. Entertainers like Judy Collins, the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish and Phil Ochs will be invited to participate.

  SOS is being sponsored by a group of veterans, students, journalists and entertainers who believe the US should withdraw from Vietnam. They feel that “it is the soldier who suffers most directly from the war and who has the most to gain from it coming to a fast, unambiguous end.”35

  The press release was published in antiwar newspapers and sent out as a fund-raising letter to New Left organizations and activists around the country, promoting the UFO coffeehouse as a model for the off-post support of antiwar soldiers.

  The Mobe’s coffeehouse announcement outlined the organizers’ general philosophy on the coffeehouse network’s appropriate relationship to GIs: “The coffee-houses are not designed to organize soldiers; they are designed to provide soldiers with a resource institution through which they can organize themselves, when they are ready. The qualities needed in coffee-house staff are not those of a political activist; they are those of friend and soda-jerk. Warmth, friendliness, openness, and a willingness to listen are the qualities needed to make soldiers feel at home and unthreatened in the coffeehouse. The coffeehouses give movement people an opportunity to make their rhetoric of fraternity real—but nothing more.” Sensing the resistance that coffeehouses could face in military towns, Davis warned prospective staff that “any explicit proselytizing by movement people who worked there would be inappropriate and even threatening to the coffeehouse’s continued existence.”36 Besides, he argued, proselytizing was not necessary; soldiers were the last group of Americans who needed to be educated on the impact of the war.

  The June 1968 press release marked the beginning of a new phase in the coffeehouse network’s development, with financial and material support coming from a host of different organizations within the national antiwar movement.37 The most prominent of these organizations was the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), which spent millions of dollars over a period of six years in support of various GI coffeehouse projects.38 The USSF was created in the last months of 1968 by Fred Gardner, Howard Levy, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Noam Chomsky, and other prominent antiwar activists. As the main umbrella organization gathering civilian support for the GI movement, the USSF exerted major influence on the direction of the coffeehouse network it intended to build, providing political direction, cultural support, and, perhaps most important, fund-raising for GI coffeehouses around the country.39 The USSF’s first major expansion of the GI coffeehouse network, in late 1968, set the ambitious goal of opening projects near all nine major army training posts within the United States.40

  “IT’S OUR JOB TO LEND THEM SUPPORT”: THE CHALLENGES OF ON-BASE ORGANIZING

  As the USSF and other antiwar organizations envisioned building a larger, more politically active coffeehouse network, its leaders discovered some of the intense complicating factors involved with political activism among active-duty military service members.41
One unavoidable reality had to be addressed: political work was extremely dangerous for GIs, who exposed themselves to significant risks by becoming active against the war. The army administrations of the late 1960s were particularly restrictive when it came to antiwar activity in the ranks. At U.S. Army posts throughout the world, regulations specifically forbade virtually all forms of political expression, including public assembly, distribution of literature, and the wearing of political symbols. The Uniform Code of Military Justice provided for several degrees of official punishment, including arrest and imprisonment, for those soldiers whose political activities were deemed “breaches of law and order.”42

  Beyond these formal regulations, though, an informal system of harassment and intimidation further reinforced the military’s intolerance of political expression, particularly the antiwar variety, among the soldier rank and file.43 As one historian-activist pointed out in 1975, there were many different ways that local posts dealt with dissent: “It would probably be safe to assert . . . that nearly every serviceman seriously attempting to resist war and injustice has suffered some sort of privation. Whether it be the loss of a security clearance, removal from a job, transfer to an isolated post, discharge under less than honorable conditions, or outright imprisonment, GI activists have paid a stiff price for their commitment. The certain knowledge of such consequences has deterred many would-be participants.”44

  The USSF’s mission was further complicated by the transitory nature of service in the armed forces, particularly among the population of young soldiers most likely to engage in antiwar activities. GIs rarely stayed in one location for an extended period of time. The high degree of turnover made the task of creating lasting political institutions a difficult one. Even if active-duty soldiers were willing and able to take the risk of becoming politically active, the likelihood of their impending transfer or discharge meant that their effectiveness had a time limit.45 This political impermanence was one of the key factors that groups like the USSF hoped to address by using civilian activists located in off-post coffeehouses to provide stability for a transient population of soldiers.

  No one could be more aware of the difficulties and risks involved with GI political activism than Dr. Howard Levy, who served nearly three years in military prison for his refusal to provide medical training to Special Forces heading to Vietnam. Despite being incarcerated between 1967 and 1970, Levy remained politically engaged and active in the GI movement, even holding covert meetings with antiwar organizers while still imprisoned. Levy was instrumental in the formation of the USSF, helping raise funds for the opening of two “Support Our Soldiers” field offices in Oakland, California, and New York City in late 1968. He became an articulate spokesman for the civilian wing of the GI movement, penning numerous USSF newsletters and other communications, his comments appearing often in interviews throughout the underground and alternative press. Levy frequently emphasized, like Gardner, the importance of soldiers organizing themselves, with the civilian antiwar movement offering material and ideological support. “The GIs are taking the risks. We therefore feel that they should be running their own programs. It’s our job to lend them support,” he told a reporter.46 Levy had a wide definition of what “civilian support” could mean, and his strong voice within the USSF helped guide the national coffeehouse movement to embrace a variety of strategies in its relationship to soldiers.

  By mid-1969, the USSF had settled on a loose blueprint for the overall direction and purpose of the GI coffeehouse network: “educating GIs about the war and the nature of American society, bringing together GIs who are opposed or become opposed to the war and the brass and helping them form more cohesive political organizations and serving as a base out of which these organizations can operate.”47 But the organization also stressed the importance of maintaining a youth-oriented, alternative culture at GI coffeehouses: “a prerequisite to this kind of political organizing has been to provide the kind of music and general atmosphere in the coffeehouses which would attract the constituency in which the potential political GIs could be found.”48 The USSF was betting that a counterculture coffeehouse would attract the kind of young disaffected soldiers who could, with direction and support, become more active and informed antiwar GIs.

  In addition to scheduling political presentations, usually in the form of guest speakers and films, civilian coffeehouse staff was expected to encourage and promote discussions among soldiers and other patrons afterward. These discussions were designed to duplicate the kinds of “rap sessions” that were nearly impossible for soldiers to hold on post and were meant to help GIs discover that they were not alone in their concerns and grievances. While the organization was careful to point out that “soldiers [should] be encouraged to develop their own thinking,” it was clear that the USSF envisioned coffeehouse staff members as more than passive sources of information and coordinators of cultural activities; civilian staff were to serve as active political organizers working directly with GIs to build an antiwar movement within the military.49

  As the coffeehouse network began to expand, the USSF’s role in day-to-day operations was minimal; its main responsibility was providing financial and material backing for coffeehouses and related GI projects. According to the USSF’s fund-raising letters, though, the high cost of opening and sustaining GI coffeehouses around the country was a complicated financial and logistical undertaking. In addition to opening costs (which included the purchase of furniture, legal and licensing fees, and security deposits), the USSF helped provide coffeehouses with paid entertainers, films, projectors, typewriters, mimeograph machines, and a near-constant supply of radical books and periodicals.50 Particularly in the coffeehouse network’s early years, the USSF’s support was vital to the young activists who began cautiously stationing themselves in army towns around the country in the summer of 1968.

  HIPPIES IN THE HEART OF TEXAS: THE OLEO STRUT OPENS IN KILLEEN

  Josh Gould was twenty-three years old when he arrived in Killeen, Texas, in June 1968. A civil rights and peace activist, he had traveled around the country for several years, mainly working with college political organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society. After briefly working at the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, in the spring Gould had joined with twenty-one-year-old activist Janet (“Jay”) Lockard in attempting to open a similar GI coffeehouse in Leesville, Louisiana, outside Fort Polk. Going it alone proved difficult, though, so when Gould and Lockard heard that Fred Gardner and a small group of friends had rented a storefront in Killeen and were turning it into another off-post counterculture and antiwar coffeehouse for soldiers stationed at Fort Hood, they immediately headed to Texas to join them.51 The two young activists, upon arriving in town, quickly recognized that Killeen, like other military towns, maintained a powerful connection to the American military establishment that stretched down into the very root structure of the town’s history.

  The story of Killeen, as the title of one local history suggests, is a “tale of two cities,” one a tiny rural community centered almost entirely on agriculture, the other a bustling military town serving the needs of one of the largest army posts in the country. When Killeen was first settled in 1882, it functioned as a railroad depot just forty miles north of rapidly expanding Austin. A conglomerate of railroad companies sponsored a national media campaign, promoting Killeen as a central shipping point for goods like cotton, wool, and grain, attracting local farmers, small businessmen, and their families. By the turn of the twentieth century, the town had grown from a small shipping outpost to include six general stores, three cotton gins, three blacksmiths, two hardware stores, and a jeweler.52

  Killeen sustained a small population, never more than 2,000 people, for the first sixty years of its existence. The virtually homogeneous white Protestant community specifically discouraged settlement by blacks and Catholics, and Killeen remained a relatively insulated rural town until the Great Depression initiated a proces
s of rapid evolution. Various New Deal public works projects expanded Killeen’s physical infrastructure, and as roads, sewage systems, and larger highways were constructed, the city’s population naturally increased. Perhaps more important for Killeen’s future, though, the New Deal projects also cemented the city’s friendly relationship with the federal government, a relationship that grew closer through the twentieth century. In 1942, Killeen became the site of a new army training base constructed to serve the demands of World War II. The hardship of the Depression made the idea of a new army camp attractive to many Killeen residents, who saw an opportunity for economic growth and stability.