Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  The Oleo Strut became the setting for an informal press conference that afternoon, as reporters questioned Fonda about her intentions at Fort Hood. Speaking with clarity and confidence, Fonda proved an articulate spokesperson for the basic goals of the GI movement, declaring, “I’m not here as a movie star—as a publicity stunt. I am a person who is fighting against the war and for GI rights. I went on Fort Hood because GIs aren’t allowed to distribute literature there. I think it’s appalling that men who are sent overseas to fight and die for their country are denied the constitutional rights which they are supposed to be defending.”41 Photographs of Fonda sitting with Dave Cline and other Oleo Strut staff appeared in both underground and mainstream newspapers. The story of her coffeehouse visit and subsequent arrest helped introduce the GI movement’s ideas to a larger section of the American public than ever before.42

  “THE WHOLE FUCKING TOWN SHUT DOWN”: ARMED FARCES DAY(S) IN KILLEEN

  At the time of Fonda’s visit, GI activists and their civilian supporters were mobilizing for a series of nationally coordinated antiwar demonstrations near military bases around the country. Organizers had chosen the date of May 16, the military’s Armed Forces Day, to mark their day of protest.43 Armed Forces Day was a traditionally sacred day in Killeen, when citizens publicly expressed their patriotism and support for Fort Hood and the American military in general. Killeen’s business community made a particular effort to come out strongly on Armed Forces Day, sponsoring local parades and other events to mark their appreciation for the military’s presence in Killeen. Activists at the Oleo Strut, however, viewed the day as a chance to express organized opposition to the war. Leaflets and articles in GI newspapers promoted the march as “Armed Farces Day.” Demonstrating resistance was particularly urgent, according to the event promoters, in the wake of President Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State just days earlier.44

  The 1970 Armed Farces Day march ended up being a much larger event than its organizers anticipated. Several hundred GIs, many in uniform, assembled at the Oleo Strut before marching fifteen blocks (almost the entire length of the town) to a rally at nearby Condor Park. A significant number of counterdemonstrators waved American flags and jeered the parade until Killeen police intervened to separate the groups. At the rally, speakers included veteran Dave Cline, who talked about the spiritual and political transformation he had experienced after killing a young Vietnamese soldier at close range. A group of black soldiers spoke of racism at Fort Hood and their efforts to organize resistance, and Oleo Strut staff members promoted the coffeehouse as the support center for the growing antiwar movement in Killeen.

  As Cline later recalled, the unusually large demonstration shocked the Killeen community, which had been relatively insulated from the radical political activism of the era: “The day of the march, all the stores in Killeen closed up and boarded up their windows because they thought there was going to be a riot. The whole fucking town shut down. I’d never seen a whole military town shut down. It was unbelievable.”45 Local media accounts estimated that more than 1,000 GIs and other activists were in the streets of Killeen for the Armed Farces Day event.46 Despite reports that the majority of the demonstrators were radical civilians “from out of town,” photographs from the event, published in the local newspaper, show large numbers of uniformed GIs raising fists, carrying antiwar placards, and flashing peace signs.47

  On a national level, the 1970 Armed Farces Day event was a tremendous success for its organizers and a significant embarrassment for the military. In anticipation of the day, authorities at more than forty military installations canceled their official celebrations.48 Staff members at the Oleo Strut were excited about the local possibilities suggested by the surprisingly massive turnout for the parade. As Fatigue Press proudly reported, “Everyone understood that May 16 was the first time GIs at Fort Hood had stood together and that a process had been set in motion which could well prove to be unstoppable.”49

  In the months after the Armed Farces Day parade, the Oleo Strut staff worked to expand the kinds of political support and services they could offer to Fort Hood GIs. The goal was to transform the space into a resource center that could serve a wide variety of GI needs, a “kind of living, vibrant, organizational source.”50 The most visible component of this expansion was the opening of a military counseling office in the building’s upstairs office space, which was rented with a grant from the Civil Liberties Legal Defense Fund, an organization then raising money for GI movement projects. David Zeiger, a civilian coffeehouse organizer, spent a month in Los Angeles taking a counseling course offered by Ken Cloke, an attorney active in antiwar and civil liberties causes, and returned to Killeen in January 1971 to head the Oleo Strut’s legal support campaign. Zeiger helped produce a pamphlet, GI Legal Self Defense, that aimed to provide a straightforward summary of a soldier’s rights within military law. The pamphlet’s wide distribution on post helped promote the Oleo Strut’s new legal counseling center, which quickly became a focus of political activity at the coffeehouse.51

  The counseling center offered three major services: assistance with discharges and applications for conscientious objector status; general education on GI rights, filing harassment complaints, and military law; and direct legal aid for specific cases. A group of Fort Hood GIs began to regularly visit the Oleo Strut counseling office soon after it opened, inquiring about their legal options against a particularly antagonistic commanding officer who had torn a soldier’s antiwar posters from his personal locker. Together with activists at the Oleo Strut, the group formed the Spring Offensive Committee (GI-SOC) to organize actions protesting conditions at Fort Hood. In April 1971, GI-SOC circulated a series of petitions that resulted in official investigations and the transfer of several commanding officers. Just a few months into the Oleo Strut’s expansion efforts, and in part due to the coffeehouse’s increased focus on legal counseling and education, activist soldiers at Fort Hood began making substantive progress in their campaign to address harassment and racism on base.52

  The spring and summer of 1971 were, as one organizer characterized it, the “heyday” of the Oleo Strut, when the political and cultural energy activists had hoped to create was at a peak. GI-SOC, made up of at least twenty Fort Hood soldiers, met regularly at the coffeehouse to discuss plans for continued actions. As May approached, the group coalesced around the idea of a “second annual” Armed Farces Day parade, building on the success of the previous year’s demonstration. GI-SOC structured the parade and rally as the kickoff for an ongoing program of activism and events at Fort Hood and in the larger GI movement. In keeping with the Oleo Strut’s new mission to become a “vibrant organizational source,” GI-SOC attempted to transform the Armed Farces Day event from an isolated demonstration to the beginning of a more advanced political movement.53

  The Armed Farces Day event that took place in Killeen, Texas, on May 15, 1971, turned out to be the largest public demonstration in the city’s history.54 David Zeiger happily reported that it was “the most spirited day in the history of the GI movement at Fort Hood.”55 After parading through Killeen, marchers assembled at Condor Park to hear guest speakers and a performance from folk singer Pete Seeger. The day was not without tension. Roughly 200 city police, in riot gear, surrounded the marchers at all times. When one of the guest speakers, a GI from Fort Hood, referred to the police as “motherfuckers,” he was pulled from the stage and handcuffed. The large crowd immediately began loudly chanting “Motherfuckers!” in unison, prompting the police to release the soldier, who remounted the stage to triumphant cheers. Even if it took the form of screamed obscenities, the energy at the second annual 1971 Armed Farces Day event in Killeen reflected the GI movement’s growing local momentum.

  CONFRONTING ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION: THE TYRRELL’S JEWELRY STORE BOYCOTT

  Riding high on the success of the 1971 Armed Farces Day event in Killeen, the Spring Offensive Committee decided to direct its politi
cal energy toward some of the city’s local stores, hoping to stop the predatory sales practices of a number of downtown businesses that depended on GIs for their customer base. To antiwar organizers, the most egregious offender was Tyrrell’s Jewelry, part of a national chain of jewelry stores that had cut out a niche in military towns throughout the American South and Midwest. According to a pamphlet handed out at the rally, Tyrrell’s business depended on the exploitation of a vulnerable population: “Their philosophy is simple: GIs are there for the taking. Their practice is less simple: it involves psychological warfare playing on guilt, homesickness, love of family, fear of death, and other exploitable emotions shared by most servicemen who are away from home and possibly headed for overseas assignment. Tyrrell’s is one of the most vicious examples of the base town business community: people whose livelihood rests on the exploitation and fleecing of GIs who are trapped in that community.”56 GIs at the Oleo Strut were particularly offended by the store’s macabre “Vietnam Honor Roll” program, which offered to place a soldier’s name on the store’s wall if he happened to be killed in Vietnam; the store would also cover any remaining payments owed by the dead soldier. Dave Cline explained that the “Honor Roll” used the war in Vietnam as a sales strategy—an “outrageous” business practice that “tugged on a lonely GI’s heartstrings” to sell jewelry.57 A boycott, the organizers hoped, would draw attention to the economic exploitation of soldiers by Tyrrell’s and other local businesses.

  In the weeks following the 1971 Armed Farces Day event, large crowds of GIs assembled at the Oleo Strut’s GI-SOC meetings. GIs began standing outside the jewelry store on a daily basis, handing out leaflets that detailed Tyrrell’s sales tactics and discouraged GIs from entering the shop. In the first weeks of summer, the crowd of GIs and organizers outside Tyrrell’s grew, the leafleting turned to picketing, and few, if any, customers walked through the shop’s doors.58 The management at Tyrrell’s, understandably concerned for the health of the business, regularly called city police, who on several occasions cited picketers for disturbing the peace. Other local business owners came out in support of Tyrrell’s. Ted Connell, owner of Killeen’s Connell Chevrolet auto dealership, showed up at the Oleo Strut one evening after he had witnessed activists picketing the jewelry store earlier in the day. He called police from the coffeehouse to make a noise complaint, his local prominence no doubt contributing to the subsequent arrest of a Strut staff member. Tensions between police and picketers escalated over the following days until police finally arrested eight GIs and two civilians for “aiding and abetting an illegal secondary boycott” and “parading without a permit.” The ten were held in jail for three days on $2,500 bail until Cam Cunningham, an attorney who represented the Strut and several local GI activists, was able to lower their bail and win their release three days later.59

  The coalition of activists at the Oleo Strut, with the assistance of Cunningham, filed a suit in federal court demanding that all charges be dropped and that Killeen’s “secondary boycott” law be declared unconstitutional.60 News of the organizers’ arrests and the ensuing federal lawsuit spread through both the underground and mainstream media, and by June 1971 Tyrrell’s Jewelry stores were being boycotted, picketed, and generally maligned by GIs at military bases around the country. In Killeen, GI activists again assembled outside the store on June 30, an army payday and the beginning of a three-day weekend—prime selling time for Tyrrell’s. As the demonstrators assembled, though, the store’s managers removed all the jewelry, locked the doors, and placed a sign in the window indicating that the store would be closed for the weekend. The following week, representatives from Tyrrell’s corporate office came to the Oleo Strut coffeehouse to negotiate an end to the (now national) GI boycott of their stores. While no formal agreement was reached, Tyrrell’s ended its “Vietnam Honor Roll” program at all locations and promised to develop a more “respectful” sales approach. The company’s concession to the demands of a relatively small group of GI and civilian activists operating out of a counterculture coffeehouse was a major victory for GI and civilian activists at Fort Hood.61

  “WE WERE ALL OVER THAT BASE”: THE FORT HOOD UNITED FRONT

  The Tyrrell’s boycott helped sustain the energy created at Killeen’s Armed Farces Day event and led directly to the formation of a permanent GI activist group stationed at the Oleo Strut. Beginning in 1971, the Fort Hood United Front became the dominant force in Killeen’s GI movement, organizing rallies, distributing petitions, and providing legal advice, all out of the Oleo Strut’s expanded upstairs office. In the summer of 1971 the group focused much of its activity on a campaign that sought to win the release of Fort Hood GIs Kelvin Harvey and John Priest. The privates were being held in the stockade on charges stemming from a prison insurrection more than six months earlier; the Fort Hood United Front argued that the soldiers were struggling against the notoriously harsh conditions and overt racism of the Fort Hood stockade and that their prosecution was an attempt to squash their protest.62The case was particularly important to the group because of its racial dynamics; Harvey was black and Priest was white. More than 1,000 soldiers signed a petition circulated on base by United Front members, and flyers promoted a “Free Harvey and Priest” gathering and picnic at Killeen’s Stillhouse Lake on September 12, 1971.63

  Nearly 100 GIs came to the Stillhouse Lake event, which was watched closely by military authorities and local police. At the conclusion of the picnic, GIs and other activists piled into a group of cars and headed back to the Oleo Strut. On the way, police pulled over the entire caravan and arrested thirty picnic attendees for disorderly conduct and other charges. The mass arrest resulted in even more negative publicity for police and military authorities, and three days later all charges against Harvey and Priest were dropped. The pair’s military-appointed lawyer, who was in close contact with the United Front and the Oleo Strut staff, later told the activists that the army had backed off of prosecution because they “didn’t want to deal” with the Fort Hood United Front.64

  As the Fort Hood United Front gained a reputation for addressing a wide set of GI issues, a larger number of black soldiers began participating in antiwar activities at the Oleo Strut. One of these soldiers was Private Wes Williams, a Black Panther from Oakland, California, who had been drafted and stationed at Fort Hood in January 1971. Williams first came to the coffeehouse for a screening of a film about Bobby Seale and became involved with the United Front as a way to address the racism that permeated Fort Hood. After Williams organized a particularly successful black-white antiwar rally on October 25, 1971, he and other United Front members were contacted by the office of Representative Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, then conducting an official investigation of racism in the armed forces. Dellums’s office informed the activists that another representative, Louis Stokes of Cleveland, would soon visit Fort Hood to hold congressional hearings and that the United Front should gather a group of soldiers who might be willing to testify.65

  Williams embarked on his mission with energy and efficiency. He personally walked through the Fort Hood barracks, visiting with hundreds of soldiers in the weeks leading up to the hearings, urging them to testify about post conditions. With the assistance of United Front members in companies throughout the post, Williams directed the distribution of more than 2,000 leaflets over the course of a few days, spreading word to GIs of the rare opportunity to express their grievances directly to the federal government. The army itself made no effort to publicize the congressman’s visit, and authorities initially insisted on private testimony until GIs demanded and won (with Representative Stokes’s support) a public hearing on post.66

  During Stokes’s visit in November 1971, about 200 black soldiers volunteered to testify about racial conditions at Fort Hood. GIs Wes Williams and Bob Paucher (an Oleo Strut staff member) served as Stokes’s unofficial post guides, even leading the congressman through an impromptu tour of the prison stockade against
the wishes of military authorities, who were struggling to keep up appearances. For two days, the atmosphere at Fort Hood became charged with revolutionary energy. One activist described Fort Hood as “liberated territory—you could do or say anything on the base while the hearings were going on. We were all over that base.”67 Political discussions, particularly among black GIs, were held openly in barracks while the hearings progressed. One report of the congressman’s visit described the feelings of anger and tension among black GIs:

  Brother after Brother testified about the racism that is part of everyday life on Ft. Hood. The fact that blacks are given infantry and artillery jobs; the fact that blacks are prosecuted for 5 minutes AWOL; the fact that blacks are thrown into the stockade arbitrarily and with little reason. Anger was high during the hearing, showing the extent and depth of racism on Ft. Hood, the military, and American society as a whole. A number of times Stokes was asked just what he was going to do with the information gathered. “Since racism is necessary to the military, what are you planning to do to combat it?” one Brother asked. “Are you just here to bullshit for awhile, to pacify us and go back and tell your boss what’s happening?”68