Dangerous Grounds
Page 7
In the days leading up to the convention, black soldiers at Fort Hood began to organize in opposition to these orders. A group of sixty black soldiers assembled at Fort Hood on the night of August 23, drew up a list of grievances, and discussed whether they should refuse their orders to deploy to Chicago. Private Guy Smith, a Vietnam combat veteran, describing the mood of the gathering, recalled that “a lot of black GIs knew what the thing [in Chicago] was going to be about and they weren’t going to go and fight their own people.”15 The meeting went on through the night, to the consternation of military authorities, and when forty-three men remained in the morning, all of them were arrested by military police.16
Organizers at the Oleo Strut coffeehouse immediately leapt into action to support the arrested soldiers, helping mount the group’s defense and media strategy. In addition to providing a safe meeting space, the coffeehouse staff raised funds to hire a civilian lawyer and publicized the soldiers’ situation in Fatigue Press and other underground media outlets. The case of the Fort Hood 43, as it became known, was another instance in which army authorities were caught off guard by the amount of publicity and sympathy given the defendants.17 The case was prominent in the mainstream press for over a year as the various courts-martial progressed for the men who faced dishonorable discharges and in some cases prison time. The publicity brought further attention to the growing resentment toward riot control duty expressed by American soldiers and helped reveal the military’s significant internal problems with morale and insubordination.18
For Josh Gould and the staff of the Oleo Strut, the lead-up to the highly anticipated Chicago convention provided an opportunity to express solidarity with black soldiers who had resisted riot control deployment. A group of white soldiers who regularly visited the Strut and who were among the 6,000 Fort Hood troops ordered to Chicago had the idea to wear stickers on their helmets that would show that they were on the “side” of the demonstrators, despite their service in the military. The sticker itself, which depicted a white hand giving the peace sign, backed by a clenched black fist, employed the specific political iconography of the era while hinting at some of the underlying tension and division within the antiwar movement.19 Gould himself planned to drive to Chicago to help distribute the stickers and spread word to antiwar demonstrators about their symbolic significance.
Three hours before his plane left for Chicago, though, Gould drove to the Oleo Strut for a final visit. On the way, he was pulled over by Killeen police for making an illegal right turn. The police searched his car, claimed to find “grains” of marijuana in the vehicle’s floor carpets, and arrested him. He was held in the Killeen city jail for eight days, through the duration of the convention in Chicago, until the police admitted that no marijuana was found in the car after all. Gould was released the day after the convention concluded and suspected (though could not prove) that the timing of his arrest had been orchestrated to disrupt his political activities.20
Despite the Oleo Strut staff’s attempts to reach out to radical black soldiers at Fort Hood through the summer of 1968, significant racial problems among soldiers posed barriers to the kind of unity they hoped to build. Physical altercations between black and white soldiers were commonplace on post, both in the barracks and in the stockade. A series of fights at Fort Hood in the spring of 1969 eventually escalated into what authorities characterized as “race riots” in April. Amid the increased racial animosity and violence, the coffeehouse staff redoubled its efforts to promote solidarity among soldiers of different races, inviting a group of black soldiers to the Strut in hopes of brokering some kind of racial peace. As one staff member explained, “We talked about bringing together a large group of EMs (200–300), black, brown and white[,] to sign a peace treaty amongst themselves, which would recognize the hostilities and would serve to focus attention on a common enemy.”21 The groups eventually agreed upon a meeting at the coffeehouse in July 1969.
The black soldiers who came to the meeting were part of a group who identified with the “5%” movement, a radical black Islamic organization that had begun in Harlem in 1964.22 According to Oleo Strut staff, the Five Percenters, as they referred to themselves, had a drastically different perspective on the racial situation at Fort Hood. According to a Strut staff member, “The specific group of blacks we talked to made it clear to us that because of the anti-white feelings of most blacks on post (which did not distinguish between EM and sergeant, between individual racism and institutional racism) . . . there could be no cooperation or alliance between black and white. In fact, the riot that we [Strut staff] and most whites dreaded was viewed as beneficial by the blacks, their first chance to strike back.”23 After the July 1969 meeting, the staff and GI activists at the Oleo Strut recognized that organizing black and white soldiers into a single unified movement would be a difficult, if not impossible, undertaking. “We finally dropped the idea,” a follow-up report stated, “and concentrated on 1) serving as a resource place for the black organizers—literature, books etc.; 2) continuing to talk to white guys on a one to one basis, mainly about racism. We are also intending to start a literature campaign on fort. The forthcoming issue of the Fatigue Press is going to be a special Racism issue.”24 Alongside these educational efforts, coffeehouse staff continued to seek ways to address racism on post in more tangible ways.
Twenty-six-year-old private Richard Chase had been drafted and assigned to the Second Armored Division at Fort Hood in January 1969. Chase was ordered to participate in “Operation Garden Plot,” Fort Hood’s training program for urban riot control. Before beginning his training, he wrote a letter to his commanding officer and first sergeant, explaining his personal and political objections to riot control duty: “Riot control is the way guys in the Army are used by the government against people struggling for valid demands. I refuse to be used against people I support.”25 After reading his letter, authorities pulled him from training in Operation Garden Plot and gave him a job as an office clerk. In June, Chase began to regularly visit the Oleo Strut and quickly became one of the coffeehouse’s most tireless GI organizers.
Chase talked to other GIs, both on post and at the Oleo Strut, about the Vietnam War and the soldiers’ right to dissent. He organized petitions, assisted with the operation of the coffeehouse, and helped write, publish, and distribute Fatigue Press.26 As his earlier letter indicated, Chase did not hide his antiwar orientation, and over the summer of 1969 authorities at Fort Hood began to pay closer attention to his activities. On September 11, he received direct orders to report to riot control training: “I was given the order by my commanding officer, who knew that I wouldn’t comply because of my beliefs and political activity. The order was given to try to end my involvement in the GI movement.”27 When he rejected the order, Chase’s commanding officer read him court-martial charges for refusing duty and sentenced him to “pre-trial confinement” in Fort Hood’s stockade. According to Chase, his stay in the army’s prison, while he awaited trial, was a particularly brutal experience; he was beaten by guards on four separate occasions and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement.28
In the months leading up to his trial, GI and civilian activists organized support for Chase, forming the Richard Chase Defense Committee to raise funds for legal defense and to publicize his case. The Oleo Strut coffeehouse was the center of the “Free Richard Chase” campaign, as organizers saw the case as another chance to unite white and black soldiers against the deeply unpopular program of riot control training at Fort Hood. Strut staff members created and circulated a petition demanding Chase’s release and the end of riot control training at Fort Hood. More than 100 soldiers (both black and white), a majority of Chase’s company at Fort Hood, signed the petition.
The Chase trial, which centered on the issue of riot control, created a significant amount of political momentum and media attention for the GI movement at Fort Hood. The defense committee sponsored several local rallies and events to demonstrate support for Chase and activist G
Is, with prominent antiwar veterans speaking and folk and rock musicians performing at the Oleo Strut. Many Fort Hood GIs were present in the courtroom throughout Chase’s trial and showed their support with clenched fists and peace signs. Richard Chase’s act of resistance and the accompanying press coverage revealed that riot control training was not just hated by a small group of radical black soldiers but was in fact unpopular among a wide section of soldiers on post.29
Despite concerted efforts, led by the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, to have charges against him dropped, Richard Chase was convicted in military court on December 20, 1969, and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Leavenworth.30 Although the defense committee failed to achieve its specific objectives (freeing Chase and ending riot control training), the case was a significant milestone in the development of antiwar activism at Fort Hood and provided activists with an organizational base from which they hoped to build an even larger movement. Most of all, the case signaled the possibility for greater racial unity at Fort Hood, as soldiers of all colors began to question being part of the government’s first line of defense against the unrest breaking out in American cities. A staff member of the Oleo Strut explained that, even long after the trial was over, Chase’s imprisonment continued to resonate with GIs as a symbol of the fight to end programs like Operation Garden Plot. Over the next few years, “when a GI demanded ‘free Richard Chase’ he was in essence demanding an end to riot control.”31
THE OLEO STRUT DRAWS NATIONAL ATTENTION
With the momentum from the Chase trial, the Oleo Strut coffeehouse continued to attract more GIs from Fort Hood throughout 1969 and 1970, many of whom became involved in the publication of Fort Hood’s increasingly popular underground GI newspaper. A July 1970 issue of Fatigue Press lists the names of ten active-duty Fort Hood soldiers as just “some of the GIs” working on newspaper staff. That anonymous attribution was not an affectation. For the active-duty soldiers who frequented the Oleo Strut and carried copies of Fatigue Press, their activism made them extremely vulnerable to institutional harassment of all kinds. They took many steps to minimize the dangers. Because the GI movement had, by 1970, existed for several years, organizers had developed a more sophisticated approach to publication and distribution of underground literature, learning from their fellow activists’ experience with military repression. The lessons in survival came “at the cost of considerable harassment, courts-martial, and transfers to Vietnam,” but over time organizers became much savvier about their activities. In 1970, the pacifist WIN magazine published a guide for GIs working on newspaper projects. The author, a Marine lance corporal, stressed that writing antiwar articles was protected by free speech, but distribution was murkier legal territory. Depending on the judgment of his local supervisors, any GI caught distributing literature could be subject to prosecution. WIN magazine urged GIs to either distribute newspapers covertly or employ civilian support networks (such as coffeehouses) for distribution.32 Despite these warnings, GIs personally smuggled hundreds of copies of Fatigue Press and other underground publications from the Oleo Strut’s back office to the army post at Fort Hood throughout the later years of the Vietnam War.
Dave Cline, stationed at Fort Hood after being wounded in Vietnam, became one of Fatigue Press’s most active promoters on post. He later described the sometimes harrowing experience of bringing antiwar newspapers into what he considered enemy territory:
The way we would distribute literature is: We’d go on hits through the base and go through the barracks late at night and put them on wall lockers, put the papers on bunks, and stuff like that. We’d do hits and do an area and get through quick. We handed them out at gates and in the town. I was questioned by military authorities on a number of occasions. They would do wall locker searches. You could have anything you wanted in your locker. I had all sorts of shit . . . LA Free Press, underground papers, a book on Buddhism, radical books, stuff like that. [But] if they found more than one piece of literature in your wall locker, they could charge you with distribution of literature.33
On one occasion, Cline’s commanding officer entered the barracks and demanded to search his locker. The officer carried a shotgun with a bayonet attached to the barrel and pointed the weapon at Cline as military police dug through his belongings. The tense confrontation reflected the vicious, personal tone of division among soldiers on base, with the Vietnam War serving as the fulcrum of a whole set of tensions and frustrations:
I’m standing at attention and he’s telling me shit like he hopes he sees me when he gets out of the service. I was responding, but in a way that I couldn’t get in trouble. I said “I hope I see you too, sir.” He started talking about the Viet Cong. I said, “I fought the Viet Cong, sir. I was wounded on several occasions.” He’s waving the bayonet in my face. I knew he wasn’t going to stab me, because there were witnesses. He eventually turned and stormed out because they couldn’t find more than one copy of any of the literature. We were careful about that. We were organizers.34
The dangers for activist soldiers at Fort Hood were not limited to overzealous authorities. As the Oleo Strut coffeehouse became more widely known in Killeen as a gathering place for antiwar radicals and local hippies, some Killeen residents directed aggression and anger at its staff and customers. Most of this harassment came from juvenile delinquents and took the form of obnoxious but relatively minor pranks: broken windows, stolen property, and thrown beer bottles.35 On a few occasions, however, the threat of physical violence became much more serious.
On October 3, 1969, a group of more than twenty Fort Hood GIs piled into six separate cars and started the five-hour drive to Houston to participate in a peace rally in the city’s Hermann Park. Shortly after leaving Killeen city limits, a vehicle pulled alongside the caravan’s lead car and opened fire with automatic weapons, blowing out the tires and damaging the engine before speeding off. The shaken soldiers, determined to attend the rally, returned to Killeen, informed Texas Rangers of their situation, and obtained permission to carry one weapon per vehicle for self-defense on their way to Houston. When they returned to the Oleo Strut coffeehouse the following day, the GIs found on the front window of the damaged car a sticker that read “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are watching you.”36
Despite this intimidation, by the fall of 1969, a little more than a year after opening, the Oleo Strut had gained national recognition as the home base for a rising antiwar movement among soldiers at Fort Hood. The wider GI movement had also evolved dramatically, from a few isolated cases in the mid-1960s to a larger and more organized national phenomenon in the late 1960s, and mainstream media coverage accompanied this growth. In 1968, major national publications like Look, Life, and Esquire magazines featured cover stories on soldier antiwar activism with headlines that warned, “Protest in the Ranks! The Military’s New Dilemma,” and “Antiwar G.I.’s and Army Head for Clash over Vietnam.”37 Because of the increased publicity, there was a growing public awareness of dissent within the American military, and the GI movement became one of many widely recognized social and political movements that sprang up within the landscape of late-1960s activism.
Continuing his work as a writer, Fred Gardner promoted the GI movement as the leading edge of antiwar activism. In addition to countless newspaper and magazine articles, Gardner published a book, The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case, detailing the case of twenty-seven military prisoners who faced courts-martial for a sit-down protest against the war. In 1969, Gardner’s notoriety as a writer on radical politics and counterculture caught the attention of Hollywood producers who recruited him to cowrite the screenplay for a new film by renowned Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. The film, Zabriskie Point, turned out to be one of the more memorable cinematic disasters of the era, but the experience allowed Gardner to make connections with a number of influential individuals. One of these was actress Jane Fonda, who approached Gardner at a San Francisco party for the film in early 1970.
Fon
da was in the midst of a very public transformation from apolitical celebrity to outspoken antiwar radical and was particularly interested in becoming more involved in the GI movement. While living in Paris in the mid-1960s, she had met American GI activists and members of their civilian support network and returned to the United States in 1969 with a desire to become more directly involved in organizing GIs: “[I had] a commitment to ending the war, and I sensed that working with antiwar soldiers was the best way I could do that. The movement of antiwar soldiers and returned Vietnam veterans was potent, because these men and women were from America’s heartland. They had enlisted as patriots; they returned as patriots. They had been there, and this made them more believable to Middle Americans than other groups in the antiwar movement. It was GI resisters, after all, who had brought me into the antiwar movement. I became even more committed to making these new heroes, the new warriors, the focus of my efforts.”38 At the party for Zabriskie Point, Fonda asked Gardner about the coffeehouse network he had founded. Gardner promised to send her a map of all the network’s locations. She left the party determined to visit the GI coffeehouses herself.39
Jane Fonda arrived at the Oleo Strut coffeehouse on the morning of May 11, 1970. After speaking with several GI organizers and civilian staff members, Fonda gathered a stack of Fatigue Press papers and some antiriot control pamphlets and drove to the gates of Fort Hood. She began handing out the material to stunned GIs, who immediately recognized her as the actress perhaps best known for starring in 1968’s campy sci-fi sex comedy Barbarella (as well as for being the daughter of actor Henry Fonda). Fonda’s visit to Fort Hood, one of her first public political actions, was intended to challenge the army regulations she had heard about at the coffeehouse. In that sense, Fonda got exactly what she wanted when military police lieutenant John T. Hoffman approached her and told her that she was under arrest for breaking post regulations. After taking her by car to a Fort Hood police office, Hoffman gave Fonda a letter warning her that if she returned to the base, she would face six months’ imprisonment. Upon her release later that afternoon, Fonda immediately returned to the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, where a number of journalists and media figures had assembled, having caught word of a celebrity’s presence in town.40