Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  The arrival of the U.S. Army dramatically transformed Killeen, ultimately initiating a wholly new chapter in the region’s history. The construction of Camp Hood, as it was first called, “hit Killeen like a bolt of lightning” as the government purchased over half of the area’s farms and trading centers, and virtually overnight a small agricultural economy became a military economy.53 The need for farm service businesses like cotton gins, grain warehouses, and corn weighers was severely reduced, replaced by businesses that supported an exploding population of soldiers, construction workers, government employees, and their families who flooded into the city by the thousands through the 1940s and 1950s. By 1955, a population of 24,000 compelled the building of new schools, a hospital, and nearly 300 local businesses.54

  Along with this dramatic expansion came an equally dramatic shift in Killeen’s economic and cultural orientation. The town’s fortunes, for better or worse, became inextricably tied to the presence of the U.S. military. As a local historian described the relationship, “the complete economic foundation of the town, its very reason for existence,” had been “replaced by an economy dependent upon the federal government.”55 In the early years of Fort Hood, this fact was starkly demonstrated by a series of economic recessions that coincided with troop cutbacks during peacetime. The mid-1950s, for example, saw difficult times in Killeen, as the end of the Korean War hastened a severe downturn in military activity at Fort Hood. Business boomed again, however, in 1959, when the First Armored Division returned permanently to the post. The increased tensions of the Cold War indirectly provided Killeen with a lasting economic stability, which became even stronger as the Vietnam War developed through the 1960s. During the height of the war, Fort Hood housed a rotating population of more than 40,000 soldiers, and Killeen itself grew to include nearly 35,000 permanent residents. Killeen’s small downtown commercial district increasingly oriented itself to serve the needs of Fort Hood GIs, as rows of dry cleaners (for uniforms), jewelry stores, pawn shops, and bookstores sprang up next to a movie theater, several pool halls, and a pinball arcade.56 It was in this area of town that antiwar organizers decided, in 1968, to open Killeen’s first counterculture coffeehouse based on the model created by Fred Gardner in Columbia, South Carolina.

  When Gould and Lockard arrived in Killeen, Gardner and his friends had just rented an old TV repair shop at 101 Avenue D in the center of the commercial district. Gardner wanted the new arrivals to take over the project, freeing him to move on to other military towns to repeat the same pattern of organizing the coffeehouse’s practical elements (like securing space and business licenses) before giving the coffeehouse over to a staff of volunteer antiwar activists. Within a week, Gould and Lockard were put in charge of designing, staffing, and managing the coffeehouse project in Killeen. After decorating the place with psychedelic “spinning colored lights,” personality posters of celebrities like Raquel Welch, and a stage for live performances, the Killeen group decided on a name for the coffeehouse: the Oleo Strut, referring to the vertical shock absorber on the underside of a helicopter. The Strut, as it came to be known, hoped to absorb the shock of service in the Vietnam-era American military.57

  The name was particularly appropriate for an establishment near Fort Hood, where 65 percent of the post’s 40,000 soldiers were recent returnees from service in Vietnam.58 Often referred to as “short-timers,” these veterans had completed their required thirteen-month tours in Vietnam but still had months left in their overall service requirement and spent their remaining time hanging around American bases with little to keep them occupied. As the army itself soon recognized, short-timers were the soldiers most likely to engage in political activism against the war, and the staff of the Oleo Strut coffeehouse were eager to use these veterans’ war experiences and ample free time to stimulate a more vigorous antiwar discourse at Fort Hood.

  The Oleo Strut’s grand opening celebration, held in Killeen’s Condor Park on July 5, 1968, showed off the youthful counterculture and radical politics that characterized much of the coffeehouse phenomenon. Strut organizers, along with activists from the University of Texas Veterans’ Committee (an Austin-based antiwar group), held a “love-in” that included folk and rock performances, antiwar speeches, and copious amounts of marijuana. Approximately 800 people attended the event, among them more than 200 soldiers from Fort Hood. By the end of the day, Killeen police arrived in riot gear and broke up the party, but the Oleo Strut coffeehouse and its organizers had succeeded in making a highly visible entrance onto the town’s cultural scene.59

  A few weeks after the Oleo Strut’s opening festivities, an editorial titled “The Big Smear” appeared in the town’s one local newspaper, the Killeen Daily Herald. The paper’s staff disputed the coffeehouse’s assumption that Fort Hood was teeming with dissident GIs and reminded citizens of the community’s historical connection to the military base and wider ideological alignment with U.S. foreign policy: “We must not forget that this Central Texas fortress during World War II, the Korean War, and now the Vietnam War, has a proud record of achievement. The training instilled in thousands of troops has helped bring battlefield victories in the highest military tradition, and in the end, will help win the final battle. We must always remember that Fort Hood and Killeen are inseparable, and that the happiness, the sorrow, or the mission of one becomes that of the other.”60 By registering its disgust with the coffeehouse from the moment it opened, pitting it against the community’s traditions and long-term interests, the town’s newspaper helped ensure that the Oleo Strut would become a subject of significant local controversy.

  That 200 soldiers would show up to an event billed as a “love-in” was a testament to Fort Hood’s special status among soldiers of the era, many of whom were aware of the post’s notoriety for extensive drug use and insubordination. One reason for the post’s unusually high levels of marijuana use was a case of environmental serendipity: the intoxicating plant grew naturally in large amounts throughout the area. As one GI reported, “It grows wild all around the base, so when you go out on tank maneuvers you just reach out and grab all you want, dry it, and start smoking.”61 The post was so well known among the military’s growing number of regular pot smokers that in hip circles it earned the nickname “Fort Head.”62 The staff of the Oleo Strut coffeehouse hoped that the post’s outlaw reputation could be channeled into a more coherent challenge to the local leadership and the larger military establishment.

  Events like the Strut-sponsored love-in may have attracted a large crowd of soldiers and young people, but many Killeen residents were deeply offended by such public displays; some of them were moved to violence. Small bands of local vigilantes (often joined or supported by city police) regularly attacked the coffeehouse and its organizers in its early days. These groups mainly comprised Killeen high school students, who wreaked often alcohol-fueled havoc throughout town. Kicking off their campaign of terror against the Strut by smashing musical equipment at the love-in, the teenagers repeatedly broke the coffeehouse’s front windows, stole the Strut’s sign, and generally menaced the staff in the first weeks of the coffeehouse’s existence. The activists working at the Strut initially took a nonviolent approach to the aggression, until local GIs convinced them to stock the store with baseball bats and a shotgun for self-defense. The attackers finally relented in their harassment after those on the staff displayed their willingness to fight back.63

  Despite violent juveniles and other dangers, political activity organized by Fort Hood GIs began developing at the Oleo Strut coffeehouse throughout the summer of 1968. Private Bruce “Gypsy” Peterson began regularly leaving his post at Fort Hood to spend time at the coffeehouse, eventually founding and editing an underground antiwar newspaper for GIs, Fatigue Press, out of the Strut’s back office. Fatigue Press formed a vital link between activists at the coffeehouse and soldiers at Fort Hood; Peterson, with the help of Strut staff, mimeographed hundreds of copies of the paper before smuggling them on post to covert
ly distribute them to fellow soldiers. Peterson’s work as an underground newspaper editor caught the attention of post leadership, and he soon discovered that his actions had provoked military and city authorities to wage their own campaign of repression against him.

  In the first weeks of August 1968, just two months after the first hand-drawn issues of Fatigue Press had been brought on post, Peterson began to find small bags of marijuana in his locker. Each time he discovered another bag, he threw it away, disturbed by the sense that he was being set up. Over the course of the next month, Killeen city police arrested Peterson for marijuana possession three different times. The final arrest occurred as Peterson stood in front of the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, where police claimed to have found a microscopic amount of marijuana mixed in with Peterson’s pocket lint. Despite the lab technician later admitting that the evidence was completely destroyed upon examination, Peterson was convicted in military court and sentenced to eight years of hard labor at Leavenworth federal penitentiary.64 The severe sentence failed to quell dissent at Fort Hood, however. Fatigue Press continued in Peterson’s absence (he was released on appeal two years later), edited and published by a staff of volunteer soldiers at the Oleo Strut coffeehouse.65

  By the end of the summer of 1968, the Oleo Strut had established firm roots in Killeen despite local resistance, and USSF organizers began looking into the possibility of establishing coffeehouses in other military towns. After sizing up several options, they set their sights on one of the largest and most critical areas of domestic military development in the United States: the Pacific Northwest. In Tacoma, Washington, just outside of Seattle, the Vietnam War was omnipresent, as the area’s two major military bases (Fort Lewis army post and McChord Air Force Base) became central to the war effort. Unlike the army towns in which Gardner and others had opened the first GI coffeehouses, Tacoma carried a history of working-class radicalism that existed alongside, and within, its military-industrial development. As coffeehouse organizers soon discovered upon landing in town in late 1968, the mix of military service and left-wing activism that permeated the Pacific Northwest would provide a more welcoming environment for the kind of subversive institution they envisioned.

  “GRIT CITY”: FINDING FERTILE GROUND IN TACOMA

  The town of Tacoma, Washington, was built around Commencement Bay, a large inlet off the Puget Sound that made the area a prime seaport for international trade. After the Northern Pacific Railway, the first transcontinental railroad in the northern United States, decided to locate its western terminus at Commencement Bay in 1873, Tacoma quickly grew into a small but booming port town. Fort Lewis’s construction in 1917 secured the region as a permanent military installation and helped continue Tacoma’s rapid expansion. Due to its high concentration of working-class residents, beginning with the railroad workers of the nineteenth century and continuing with the longshoremen of the twentieth, Tacoma had a long history of blue-collar labor organizing, earning its image as the West’s “Grit City.”66

  Tacoma’s Fort Lewis army post served a central role in the Pacific theater of World War II and later evolved into a critical training and processing center for American troops as the United States escalated its military campaign in Southeast Asia through the 1960s. In May 1966, military officials established a $6.3 million “Army Personnel Center” at Fort Lewis that ultimately handled the induction of more than 2.3 million soldiers before closing in 1972. In addition to processing new recruits, the post was also transformed into the army’s central training grounds for Vietnam combat, with GIs participating in simulated war games on a meticulously constructed 15,000-acre “Vietnam Village” complex featuring thatched-roof “hootches” and American soldiers role-playing as the Viet Cong.67

  Though Fort Lewis in particular developed into one of the U.S. Army’s most important domestic bases of operations throughout the Vietnam War, the entire Washington State area in fact played a critical role in the military’s overall war effort. The region’s natural, human, and economic resources made an ideal location for military activity of all kinds. The Puget Sound area, which included both Tacoma and nearby Seattle, held high strategic value, and during the 1960s all four branches of the military had active bases that took advantage of the region’s deepwater bays and vast swaths of undeveloped land. In addition to Fort Lewis, the area housed McChord Air Force Base, Fort Lawton army base, Pier 91 Naval Station, Sand Point Naval Air Station, and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. All of these bases contributed to a ubiquitous military presence in Washington, a presence that became even more pronounced as the Vietnam War brought an influx of military personnel to the state beginning in 1964.68 The impact of the Vietnam War on Fort Lewis was felt most strikingly by the losses sustained by its Fourth Infantry Division, a group of more than 70,000 soldiers who had been stationed, in rotation, at the Lewis base beginning in 1956. The Fourth Infantry was called to combat duty in Vietnam in July 1966. Over the course of four years, the Tacoma-based division lost 16,844 men to death and injury before being relieved of service during Nixon’s initial troop withdrawal in early 1970.69

  Tacoma’s deep involvement in the operation of the Vietnam War, including the Fourth Infantry’s losses, made for a strong local connection to military issues. In many ways, the war itself became a kind of hometown story, as local newspapers promoted Fort Lewis’s commitment to the war effort as a point of particular strength and pride. As was true of other American military towns, Tacoma’s business community directly benefited from the region’s identification with nearby military bases. This identification was frequently celebrated and reinforced by Congressman Floyd V. Hicks, who represented Kitsap, King, and Pierce Counties (which included Tacoma) and served on the House Armed Services Committee from 1964 to 1975. Hicks was a tireless promoter of the military’s presence in the Tacoma area, and his efforts to convince the federal government to expand military allocations to Fort Lewis contributed to the local economy’s dependence on the army post. Even though the Vietnam War would ultimately inflict heavy casualties on the men and women who passed through Fort Lewis, for Tacoma’s business and political elite the war was an opportunity for increased profit and local prestige.70

  Tacoma’s social and political atmosphere was also shaped by its proximity to Seattle, a major center for New Left and counterculture activity. A New York Times reporter, visiting Tacoma in 1969, highlighted its location along a corridor of West Coast highways well traveled by young radical activists, noting Tacoma’s high population of activists “drawn from the virtually endless supply of New Politics leftists around San Francisco Bay.”71 In addition to the pipeline of radicals from Northern California, many activists also emerged from the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. During the 1960s, UW-Seattle experienced significant growth in both its physical infrastructure and its faculty and student composition; the tenure of university President Charles Odegaard contributed to a dramatic expansion of the institution’s operating budget and national prestige, and by the end of his term the student population had more than doubled, from 16,000 in 1958 to more than 34,000 in 1973. The influx of new students also helped bring about a rising level of political activism, most notably the establishment of a large and influential chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which often stood at the center of a lively youth antiwar movement in and around the Washington state area.72

  In addition to Students for a Democratic Society, other radical organizations more closely associated with the “Old Left” maintained a significant presence in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1960s, and it was the influence of these groups, most prominently the Socialist Workers Party and its youth corollary, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), that initiated a more direct relationship between the antiwar movement and American soldiers.73 In Seattle, the Young Socialist Alliance’s relatively small membership nevertheless aggressively promoted GI activism as part of the Socialist Workers Party’s larger political strategy. To alliance members, students could more effectiv
ely stimulate revolutionary social change by directing their movement toward the military’s working class: “Our work in support of GI antiwar fighting will give our movement an avenue to real POWER for the first time.”74

  Inspired by the growing antiwar resistance from within the military, evidenced in well-publicized cases such as the trial of the “Fort Jackson Eight,” the small but active Socialist Workers Party chapters in Seattle helped lay the groundwork for coffeehouse organizers’ plans to build a movement at Fort Lewis. In the fall of 1968, student activists at the University of Washington, working directly with the Young Socialist Alliance and other antiwar organizations, initiated one of the country’s first direct campaigns to link the civilian Left with the varied acts of resistance then permeating the armed forces. By forming the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace, young antiwar organizers hoped to demonstrate their solidarity with young GIs alienated from military authority and the war in Vietnam.

  The formation of the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace caught the attention of Fred Gardner and other national coffeehouse organizers. Because of the early activities of the alliance (which included the creation of a GI underground newspaper, Counterpoint, and a near-constant presence outside the gates of Fort Lewis), in addition to the robust antiwar movement taking place at the nearby University of Washington, Tacoma was, more than any other military town in the country, primed for the creation of an antiwar coffeehouse.75

  “MOM AND DAD’S CANDY STORE”: EARLY DAYS AT THE SHELTER HALF

  The Tacoma coffeehouse was modeled after the other Summer of Support coffeehouses then establishing their own roots in Columbia, South Carolina, and Killeen, Texas. Honoring the practice of co-opting a military term for their project’s name, organizers christened the coffeehouse the Shelter Half, the name derived from an army term that referred to a small piece of sticky canvas (a “shelter half”), carried by all soldiers, which was effectively useless unless two soldiers joined them together to form a two-man tent. By naming the coffeehouse after this particular piece of equipment, its organizers hoped to evoke a sense of strength through solidarity and cooperation. Of course, the coffeehouse would also serve as a literal “shelter” from the particular military culture at Fort Lewis, and, like other GI coffeehouses, the organizers covered its walls with personality posters of counterculture celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara, and even Charlie Chaplin. Serving coffee, soft drinks, and inexpensive meals made from a small kitchen, the Shelter Half initially presented itself as a hip environment where military men were welcome to relax, listen to music, and talk with friends.