In its early months the Shelter Half went out of its way to project a GI-friendly atmosphere. An elaborate free Christmas dinner, advertised by leaflets at Fort Lewis’s gates and in the local underground press, was an early success; about twenty GIs from post came to share a meal and conversation with their radical civilian hosts. In a handwritten letter to the Shelter Half staff, a GI later expressed his gratitude for the feast, explaining that he and a friend had been driving aimlessly around Tacoma on Christmas Day, tired and hungry, when they stumbled upon the coffeehouse: “Here waiting for us [at the Shelter Half] we find free coffee, good music, something to read & heat too . . . Wow! Q: What else could a G.I. want? A: Not have to ride back to Ft. Lewis and eat their shit. And their food too. Well we didn’t have to, the great people at the Shelter Half solved the problem by serving a Christmas dinner that couldn’t be beat. Wine, fruit, nuts the whole bit. Gratis, free, on the house, on the good half. For all this, all I can offer is our thanks.”76
With the holiday dinner serving as a kind of formal introduction to Tacoma’s military community, the Shelter Half project entered the new year, 1969, with a certain amount of local word-of-mouth and a growing number of curious servicemen showing up to sample the atmosphere. This burst of popularity led directly to increased political activism in Tacoma. After visiting the coffeehouse and learning that it supported a local branch of GIs United, an air force pilot identified only as “W. R.” felt compelled to offer a financial contribution:
Peace Brothers—
Wandered into the coffee house last night and I heard you just formed a GIs United. So am sending $10.00 to help out and plan to attend your next meeting. Hope you can use the money to put out some more copies of leaflets or such. We really need to spread the word. I’m on McChord and I just found out about you guys this week. I’m sure I know many more guys who would dig a group like yours, so I’ll spread the word. Keep up the good work.77
Within the first few months of business in Tacoma, the Shelter Half gained the attention of its target audience of GIs, service members, and military veterans from around the Tacoma area, and its organizers discovered that a significant portion of this population was willing to lend its support, in various ways, to the operation of the coffeehouse itself.
Stan Anderson, then a twenty-two-year-old army veteran who had been stationed at Fort Lewis, became the Shelter Half’s first manager and unofficial spokesperson in 1968. When a local newspaper reporter visited the coffeehouse during its first week of operation in Tacoma, Anderson explained the establishment’s function in terms that echoed Fred Gardner’s original vision of coffeehouses as open discussion spaces: “We want to provide a free atmosphere where military personnel can associate with students and other civilians. The Shelter Half will provide an open forum for the exchange of ideas, free from any restrictions on political or ideological discussion. . . . The direction we take locally will be decided by the people who use the place.” Anderson acknowledged that the coffeehouse had an undeniable “peace orientation” and stressed that, since the expression of antiwar opinions by active-duty personnel was often met with severe harassment and reprimand, the coffeehouse could offer a safe place for those soldiers alienated by the sometimes narrow cultural and political environment both on post and in the string of local bars that dotted Tacoma’s downtown. In Anderson’s view, the Shelter Half coffeehouse could begin to address the alienation many young soldiers (such as Anderson himself) experienced in the small military town. That alienation, Anderson pointed out, was often exacerbated by the Vietnam War’s deep unpopularity among young people throughout the nation: “When I was at Fort Lewis, there were few activities that brought me into contact with members of the local community. It really boiled down to a choice of staying on the post or making the bar rounds. . . . I felt the people of Tacoma were interested in soldiers only because of the money they spend here. I had nothing here I could relate to and felt like a second-class citizen. The war, though, has resulted in the drafting of many students and college graduates who understand and want the sort of dialogue that a coffeehouse can offer. We want to give these people a place where they can feel at home.”78
As the Shelter Half gained notoriety in Tacoma and surrounding areas, civilian antiwar activists began heading to the Pacific Northwest to help out. Playwright and antiwar activist Barbara Garson had first heard about the GI coffeehouse concept from her friendship with Fred Gardner in Berkeley, California, in 1968. Garson had just come off a recent success with the political satire MacBird!, a controversial play in verse that cast the Johnson presidency and the Kennedy family in a subversive adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After overseeing a successful year-long run of MacBird at the Village Gate Theater in New York City in 1967, Garson returned to the San Francisco Bay area, eager to find new ways to contribute to the antiwar effort. When she heard about the Shelter Half’s need for new staff members, Garson moved up the coast to Tacoma in early 1969 to work at the coffeehouse and help build the GI movement at Fort Lewis.
Though she very much opposed the Vietnam War and wanted to work to stop it, for most of the 1960s Garson felt alienated from the organized antiwar movement. Like Gardner, she envisioned herself as providing material and spiritual support for a movement led and organized by GIs rather than by civilians, later recalling her distaste for the way civilian left-wing activists often approached GI organizing: “The last thing they were interested in was stories about GIs standing up for themselves. And that’s what I was there for: the American people would be standing up for themselves. I actually thought that that [direct kind of] antiwar work was a step back. I thought the best way to be involved in the antiwar effort was to be involved with American people fighting for themselves.”79 Beyond the opportunity to interact with GIs, one of the more appealing aspects of working at the Shelter Half, to Garson, was that the coffeehouse provided an ideal environment in which to simultaneously work and raise her young daughter. “It was a very good place to work with a child. You could be in political work, doing important things, and yet be separated less from your child than if you were a stay-at-home mother. And for my daughter, it was like being in Mom and Dad’s candy store.”80
Though Garson may have characterized the Shelter Half as a “candy store,” to many of Tacoma’s citizens the coffeehouse’s intentions appeared sinister, even threatening. Among these citizens was the director of the city’s Department of Tax and License, D. H. McLellan, who began investigating the Shelter Half almost immediately after it opened its doors on October 4, 1968. Over the course of its first months in business, local police visited the coffeehouse on several occasions, presumably inspecting for various code violations. On February 6, 1969, two Tacoma police officers physically removed a pair of young boys (aged fifteen and eleven) for playing a coin-operated foosball machine set up in the Shelter Half’s recreation room. Stan Anderson and another member of the coffeehouse staff, Miranda Bergman, were arrested and charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” The next day, McLellan drafted a letter to the Shelter Half staff that announced his intentions to revoke the coffeehouse’s business license. Defending his decision to a New York Times reporter, McLellan insisted that the city had the right to deny licenses to “any person believed to desire such license to enable him to practice some dishonest or immoral act.” While McLellan did not itemize the Shelter Half’s perceived “dishonest” or “immoral” acts, he evidently spoke for many Tacoma officials and residents when he insisted that the Shelter Half’s operators “think different than some of us.”81
When Anderson and Bergman returned to the coffeehouse after being released from city jail, they discovered that their car had been set on fire, the wreckage left smoldering in its parking space in front of the coffeehouse. Though the coffeehouse staff never discovered the precise circumstances behind the car’s burning, the sight of the destroyed vehicle seemed like one more sign that, only months after arriving in town, the Shelter Half had made som
e determined enemies in Tacoma. Like the other GI movement organizers then establishing coffeehouse projects in military towns around the United States, the Shelter Half staff refused to allow local resistance to deter them from their mission. As 1968 turned to 1969, the Summer of Support had successfully set up three major coffeehouse projects. For the organizers at these projects, it was time to settle in to the real work: building a political movement of civilians and GIs against the war in Vietnam.
2: Getting Together
Political Activism at GI Coffeehouses
Coffeehouses were the first form used to provide a place where active-duty servicemen and women could congregate in a military town without having that old gnawing feeling that you were being ripped off for your money. When public attention was first focused on the new attitudes among service people, and the developing struggle against the war within the military, coffeehouses were often pointed to as the visible symbol of that movement.
About Face! The U.S. Servicemen’s Fund Newsletter 2, no. 1 (November 1971)
“GIS UNITED”: THE UFO AND THE FORT JACKSON EIGHT
In Columbia, South Carolina, where Fred Gardner had opened the UFO coffeehouse before leaving town to open others, the GI movement in and around Fort Jackson continued to gain momentum throughout 1968. Gardner and other activists knew the coffeehouse had struck a nerve when, shortly after the UFO gained popularity among GIs, Fort Jackson opened its own “counterculture” coffeehouse, decorated with posters of Hollywood stars (including Sophia Loren) and hosting folk singers who performed live.1 GI and civilian organizers were both amused and encouraged by this development and viewed the army’s attempt to create a hip hangout on post as a sure sign that their movement was gaining traction. Indeed, within a year of its opening, the UFO coffeehouse became involved in one of the GI movement’s most explosive cases. In the early months of 1969, a group of antiwar soldiers on post challenged the military’s right to restrict the constitutional liberties of active-duty soldiers. The case of the Fort Jackson Eight, as it became known, gained national media attention. The UFO coffeehouse played a key role in the case, providing both an organizational base and material support for the soldiers in their struggle against Fort Jackson authorities.2
The case began when a young black activist named Joe Miles, drafted and sent for training at Fort Jackson, arrived in town in January 1969. At his draft induction, Miles made it clear that he was an activist in the antiwar movement and a member of the Young Socialist Alliance, writing a letter indicating that he would obey all orders and regulations of the army while simultaneously using every legal opportunity to express his political views. True to his word, Miles began organizing black GIs at Fort Jackson the same week he arrived, forming a group called GIs United Against the War in Vietnam.
During the first few months of 1969, GIs United Against the War in Vietnam became highly visible at Fort Jackson and in Columbia. Participants held regular meetings at the UFO coffeehouse, finding its space especially suitable for the kinds of large group gatherings that were virtually impossible to sustain on post.3 The main thrust of their activity was to circulate letters and petitions, hoping to demonstrate wide on-base opposition to the war and support for the individual GI’s right to express that opposition. The group’s “Statement of Aims,” which was distributed at Fort Jackson and other army training posts, captures the organization’s efforts to appeal to a wide constituency: “Do citizens in uniform have the protection of the First Amendment? Can they meet and discuss the war in Vietnam, even take positions on it? Others, even Congressmen and Senators, oppose the war; can the men required to fight it not legally do the same?”4 In their public pronouncements, members of GIs United declared a straightforward, civil liberties–centered position that was effective in winning the support of a large number of soldiers at Fort Jackson.
On March 20, 1969, little more than a year after the chapel pray-in had brought together 35 antiwar soldiers at Fort Jackson, GIs United held a meeting outside a barracks that included nearly 200 soldiers. Organization members Jose Rudder and Andrew Pulley addressed the crowd while soldiers leaning out of dormitory windows raised clenched fists and shouted words of support. The increasingly raucous assembly eventually dispersed without major incident, but the following day Fort Jackson authorities labeled it a “riot” and arrested nine leaders of the GIs United organization, bringing them up on charges that included disrespect, holding an illegal demonstration, and disobeying orders.5 The group was reduced to eight after it was revealed that GIs United member Private John Huffman had been working as an army informer. Placing an informer in GIs United indicated the level of concern the Fort Jackson group had created within the military establishment.6 This revelation, along with the significant media publicity given the movement at Fort Jackson (including a live on-base interview of GIs United members featured on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report), led to a public relations and legal embarrassment for army officials, who in June dropped all charges against the remaining defendants and instead attempted to hasten their quiet exits from the military.7
Apart from being a significant victory for the GI movement, its civilian supporters, and the soldiers themselves, the fact that the army dropped all charges against the Fort Jackson Eight also signaled an important shift in how the military handled internal dissent. Just three years earlier, in 1966, the average GI activist convicted in military court was sentenced to forty-five months of hard labor. Howard Levy’s three-year sentence for refusal to train medical staff had been one notable example.8 The case of the Fort Jackson Eight was a major landmark in a continuum of events from 1967 to 1969. Those in the GI movement, together with civilian antiwar activists at the UFO coffeehouse, engaged the national media in their campaign, creating public and legal pressure for the army to reduce the harassment and imprisonment of soldiers who spoke against the war. Marveling at the group’s rapid success at gaining widespread public support, influential antiwar activist (and the Socialist Workers Party’s 1968 presidential candidate) Fred Halstead noted that the Fort Jackson Eight had paid “careful attention to what ordinary Americans would think of their actions, getting news out to the massive antiwar movement, and appealing to the civil-liberties traditions which are taken seriously by millions of Americans.”9 By focusing their defense on one issue, their right as American citizens to discuss the war in Vietnam, the Fort Jackson Eight won sympathy from a large section of the American public.10
The UFO coffeehouse was instrumental in the group’s victory, providing meeting space, access to equipment like mimeograph machines, and networks of civilian supporters. While Joe Miles, Jose Rudder, Andrew Pulley, and other core leaders of GIs United had been activists before stepping foot in the UFO coffeehouse, the UFO’s protected environment and its staff’s access to funds, lawyers, and media outlets immeasurably helped the group’s efforts to avoid military prison.11 The army was clearly done dealing with Joe Miles, though. Immediately after the Fort Jackson Eight case was dismissed, Miles was shipped, on three hours’ notice, to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, where he frustrated military authorities by establishing yet another chapter of GIs United before finally being redeployed in October to Anchorage, Alaska, the most remote army post in North America.12
“RIOT CONTROL? HELL NO!” THE FORT HOOD 43 AND RICHARD CHASE SHAKE UP KILLEEN
Echoing the UFO coffeehouse’s successful role in the Fort Jackson Eight case, the Oleo Strut coffeehouse near Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, became involved in a similarly precedent-setting case that tested the limits of political expression in the U.S. Army. Political energy among GIs had accelerated dramatically after the Oleo Strut coffeehouse opened its doors in 1968. In Killeen, though, the explosion of GI activism took on a particularly intense racial tone. A significant number of the post’s population of black soldiers had begun organizing their own movement in the summer of 1968, reacting to national events with increasing anger and resistance. Black soldiers at Fort Hood were under a particular and immed
iate set of pressures that summer. Riots had erupted in black communities in more than 100 American cities in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April. Thousands of American troops were dispatched to quell the violence throughout the year, with Fort Hood becoming the main training and deployment base for riot control duty.13 Black soldiers, many of whom had recently returned from Vietnam, were especially angry, and increasing numbers resented their role in what the army called “civil disturbance control.”14
The resentment felt by many black soldiers at Fort Hood first peaked in late August 1968 as the base made preparations to send soldiers to Chicago during the Democratic Party’s national convention. After the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January had laid waste to his constant claim of “victory around the corner,” Lyndon B. Johnson made the decision not to pursue another presidential term, throwing the party into disarray over the war issue. Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, imagining massive numbers of marauding antiwar protesters descending on the city, promised to keep order by any means necessary, and Illinois governor Samuel H. Shapiro declared his support. In addition to troops from the Illinois National Guard, soldiers from Fort Hood were to be mobilized and sent to Chicago for riot control duty.
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