Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  The meeting revealed that many black GIs at Fort Hood shared the conclusion that Representative Stokes, and the federal government in general, could provide “no immediate relief” for the persistent racial problems on base. On the evening the congressman left Killeen, Wes Williams led a raucous meeting of black soldiers at the Oleo Strut, which was used as a safe discussion space despite many black GIs having reservations about the coffeehouse’s reputation as a primarily white hangout. Out of this meeting, a separate black GI organization, the People’s Justice Committee, was formed. While standing in front of a mixed crowd of white and black GIs at the Oleo Strut, Williams explained the need for a black-only organization while stressing that the new committee would work closely with both the coffeehouse and the Fort Hood United Front to maintain consistent pressure on military authorities to address the policies that concerned both black and white soldiers on the base.69

  Shortly after the formation of the People’s Justice Committee, Williams was approached by a post commander, General George Seneff, who wanted him to lead a “racial harmony team” as part of the military’s renewed efforts to address racial issues on post. Williams refused and shortly thereafter was handed court-martial papers by military police for possession of marijuana. The People’s Justice Committee launched an extensive leafleting and petition campaign that helped lead to Williams’s acquittal and quiet discharge several weeks later.70 The army’s quick dismissal of one of the post’s most effective and charismatic political organizers was another signal that, at Fort Hood, the GI movement was triggering alarm among military officials.

  “THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS RESENTMENT OF THE WAR ON BASE”: A YEAR OF CONFRONTATION IN TACOMA

  At the same moment that Killeen, Texas, was experiencing an explosion of political activity centered in and around the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, Tacoma, Washington, witnessed a similar phenomenon bursting out of the Shelter Half coffeehouse. The GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace (GI-CAP), until 1969 a small local organization, grew exponentially in public visibility when the Shelter Half came to Tacoma. The coffeehouse offered a place where GI-CAP could do political work; the organization unquestionably benefited from use of the Shelter Half’s facilities. Through the winter of 1968–69, GI-CAP meetings packed the coffeehouse, as active-duty soldiers worked alongside local activists to plan a large antiwar demonstration in downtown Seattle for February.71

  The scale of the GI-CAP-sponsored antiwar demonstration on February 16, 1969, surprised even its organizers. Led by about 300 GIs, nearly 1,000 people representing a diverse range of local and national antiwar organizations paraded through Seattle’s downtown, gathering at Tacoma’s Eagles Auditorium to listen to a series of speakers on military issues. All of the day’s speakers reinforced the ideas that the GI movement sought to address issues beyond the Vietnam War and that actions taken by soldiers around the country were aimed at winning rights and improving conditions for all soldiers, regardless of their political orientation. Army veteran and Socialist Workers Party member Andy Stapp described his efforts to organize GIs into an institution modeled on labor unions, the American Servicemen’s Union;72 army veteran and Socialist Workers Party organizer Howard Petrick described working with GIs at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to win the right to hold meetings on racism and living conditions on base; and labor leader and political activist Sidney Lens, then cochairman of the National Mobilization Committee, addressed the importance of the civilian antiwar movement’s support for dissenting American soldiers.73 The entire event marked a kind of coming-out party for the Pacific Northwest’s growing movement of active-duty GIs and veterans against the war and, just as the members of GI-CAP had hoped, reflected the rising political and organizational cooperation between civilians and soldiers.74

  As radical groups throughout the Seattle-Tacoma area focused their energies on the GI movement, the Shelter Half coffeehouse played an instrumental role. In addition to providing meeting space, the coffeehouse also became a clearinghouse for antiwar information, mainly by allowing free use of its in-house typewriters, mimeograph machines, and other printing equipment. GI-CAP used this equipment to produce hundreds of issues of Counterpoint through 1968 and 1969, but GI-CAP was just one organization among many that took advantage of the Shelter Half’s facilities and helped it evolve into one of the most active antiwar underground printing presses in the Pacific Northwest region.75 Within a relatively brief period, the coffeehouse helped produce and distribute six different underground newspapers and countless leaflets, posters, and pamphlets. Several of these newspapers, including Vietnam GI, Fed Up! and Bottom, gained recognition on military bases around the world, despite their questionable legal status and entirely improvised underground system of distribution. These newspapers were often smuggled onto bases by GIs willing to risk serious repercussions in order to disseminate alternative viewpoints on the Vietnam War and other military issues.76

  The civilian wing of the GI movement often saw itself as an independent news service, waging a kind of information war with military authorities. At Fort Lewis, this effort largely took the form of leafleting outside the post’s gates, along with the production and distribution of antiwar GI newspapers. In the summer of 1969, however, as a diverse collection of antiwar groups coalesced in and around the Shelter Half coffeehouse, civilian activists (along with a number of active-duty GIs) hatched a plan to dramatically alert the larger Tacoma community about the growing GI movement. The resulting spectacle, dubbed “The Aquatic Invasion of Fort Lewis,” ended up being one of the more bizarre antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam era.

  Though the “invasion” included members of GI-CAP, the Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, and the University of Washington’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, its main organizer was UW-Seattle student and Young Socialist Alliance member Stephanie Coontz. Beginning in 1967, Coontz established a reputation as one of the campus’s most vocal and charismatic antiwar activists. Before the Shelter Half coffeehouse became the center of the Tacoma antiwar movement’s efforts to join forces with GIs at Fort Lewis, Coontz and other UW students had been prodding local antiwar activists to more directly engage with the GI movement. The major result of these efforts was the formation of GI-CAP in the fall of 1968, but in the months prior Coontz had been involved in a series of draft resistance and military counseling actions aimed at the college’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. Coontz was a regular at the Shelter Half coffeehouse during its first year in Tacoma.

  At the Shelter Half, Coontz discovered that the relationships she forged with antiwar GIs could help bridge the wide gaps in class, culture, and politics that existed between active-duty GIs and radical college students. According to Coontz, even though the Vietnam War was wildly unpopular at Fort Lewis, the majority of GIs did not, for a variety of reasons, identify with antiwar college students:

  There was a tremendous resentment of the war on base. Inchoate in many ways, not sure who to resent. The rich white kids who didn’t have to go, who they saw as yelling at them? Or, the army brass who they hated no matter what their politics were? A lot of it was trying to find common ground to talk to them to make it clear you weren’t the press caricature of someone who thinks they’re bad guys. . . . You had to move very quickly into a discussion of “We believe that the best way to support our boys is to bring them home. We believe that the people who tell you they support you and then want to leave you there in a war you didn’t start, those are not people who support you.” And that was so obvious to a lot of GIs, [once] you’d get these conversations started.77

  At meetings in the coffeehouse, Coontz developed the idea for a grand public gesture demonstrating the civilian antiwar movement’s support for disaffected GIs at Fort Lewis. The plan was to stage a “mock invasion” of the base, using guerrilla theater to ridicule military authority and promote solidarity with young soldiers. The tongue-in-cheek spectacle, which took place in July 1969, was designed to coincide with the N
ixon administration’s media campaign promoting American withdrawal from Vietnam, a campaign that had used Fort Lewis GIs as evidence of de-escalation. By scheduling its own publicity stunt in Tacoma on the weekend immediately following the official “Welcome Home” parade in Seattle, Coontz and other antiwar activists intended to subvert the administration’s public celebration of “peace with honor” and lampoon the government’s own propaganda efforts.78

  While planning the Aquatic Invasion stunt, Coontz made sure that a number of press outlets would cover the mock invasion. She shared her plans with Don McGavin, a television reporter for Seattle’s local NBC affiliate, KOMO, who agreed to send a camera crew.79 On July 13, 1969, a group of fifty civilians met on the public side of American Lake in Tacoma, a body of water that shared its shores with the heavily guarded Fort Lewis property. Coontz, wearing a military uniform and sunglasses, led a flotilla of small inflatable rafts, most of them emblazoned with the GI movement’s well-known “FTA” sign. Upon reaching the Fort Lewis side of American Lake, the boats were halted by several confused MPs, who announced, to no one’s shock, that the group would not be allowed access to the base. Coontz and her cohorts assembled on the small beach, handing out leaflets to a group of GIs as Coontz delivered a tongue-in-cheek “victory speech.” The scene culminated when a “frogman” emerged from the water in a peace-sign-decorated Navy SEAL wetsuit and dragged a round “negotiation table” onto the sand. After being held for a brief period, all of the activists were released by military authorities.80 Coontz’s statement, and the leaflets handed out on base, parodied the U.S. government’s own notorious statements on Vietnam. “If we don’t fight them on the shores of Ft. Lewis,” Coontz declared, “we will have to fight them on the shores of American Lake. Our honor is at stake. We must bring freedom to the peace-loving EMs at Fort Lewis. And if it becomes necessary to destroy Ft. Lewis in order to save it, we shall not shrink from that task.”81 The leaflets concluded by speaking directly to GIs, underlining the invasion stunt’s higher purpose: “You all know this invasion is a joke. But your Constitutional rights are not a joke.”82

  A few months after the Aquatic Invasion stunt, in October 1969, the first issues of an antiwar GI newspaper, Fed Up!, were printed at the Shelter Half and distributed on base. The newspaper’s opening editorial put its radical politics up front: “Fed Up! is written and edited by a group of Fort Lewis GIs who can no longer stand the oppression of the US military services. Not just the oppression we all feel as members of the military, but the oppression the US uses to try to control the people of Nam, Korea, Latin America, and the United States. We’re also sick and tired of the lies and half truths the military uses to support their imperialistic actions both abroad and at home. That’s why we decided to get together and print the truth.”83 Though the content found on the pages of Fed Up! was created entirely by GIs, it was produced with the printing facilities and civilian staff of the Shelter Half, who ensured that more than 5,000 copies of the paper’s inaugural issue made their way to the base.84 In its first months of publication, Fed Up! became popular at Fort Lewis and on bases around the country.

  On October 20, 1969, a group of nearly fifty GIs, and several civilians, gathered in the Cascadian Service Club room at Post 35 on the grounds of Fort Lewis. The group discussed the formation of a local American Servicemen’s Union chapter, with union founder Andy Stapp present along with a number of civilian organizers. During the meeting, military police burst into the room and arrested thirty-five soldiers and three civilians, including Stapp. The men were detained for “conducting an unauthorized meeting of a political nature on the post.”85 Although ultimately released, according to organizers at the Shelter Half, many of the soldiers present at the meeting endured subsequent recrimination and harassment, including shipment to Vietnam.86 Seventeen of these soldiers filed a suit in federal court on October 29 “asking the court to guarantee their rights of free speech and assembly under the First Amendment.”87 Stapp and the other civilian organizers filed a similar suit, backed by the Seattle branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Fort Lewis’s GI activism again became a focus of national media attention.88

  In December 1969, after receiving free legal counsel at the Shelter Half coffeehouse, six Fort Lewis GIs filed for conscientious objector status, effectively refusing their orders for service in Vietnam.89 After this unprecedented incident of resistance, combined with the previous months of rising insubordination, the army took an extraordinary step, intervening directly on the operation of the coffeehouse. In a letter dated December 11, 1969, addressed to the “Proprietor” of the Shelter Half, U.S. Navy captain H. W. Stauffacher—the president of the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board, Western Washington-Oregon Area—notified the coffeehouse that he had initiated action to place it “OFF LIMITS” for all military personnel. “The board took this action after receiving information that the Shelter Half is a source of dissident counseling and literature and other activities inimical to the good morale, order and discipline within the Armed Services,” Stauffacher stated, adding that the coffeehouse would have an opportunity to defend itself at a hearing scheduled for January 22, 1970.90 The disciplinary board’s action against the Shelter Half revealed that government authorities had recognized the obvious: interactions between antiwar civilians and GIs at off-base coffeehouses were contributing to a dramatic acceleration of antiwar political activity in the army. As would soon become clear, U.S. military and government officials were only beginning to coordinate a response.

  3: Repression, Harassment, Intimidation

  Crushing the Coffeehouses

  The coffeehouse is an undeniable threat to the military hierarchy because GIs there have the chance to think, to understand how the military is using them to maintain their power over little people around the world and nation. The coffeehouse is a threat to local authority because the army controls jobs for their community and money for their pockets.

  Fun Travel Adventure, no. 17 (May 1970)

  CONGRESS INVESTIGATES THE COFFEEHOUSE NETWORK

  GI coffeehouses created intense concern among military leaders and government officials from the moment they began to appear in and around American military towns. Over the course of the coffeehouse network’s existence, its leaders and support organizations were subjected to intense scrutiny from the federal government, which hoped to neutralize the antiwar movement’s growing influence among active-duty GIs. In responding to the GI coffeehouse phenomenon, though, political and military leaders often found themselves in disagreement over both the origins of the network itself and, more important, how best to deal with it.

  The first wave of federal attention came from the coffeehouse network’s association with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“Mobe”), after the antiwar group’s prominent role in demonstrations at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August 1968. Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, along with several other Mobe leaders and political activists collectively dubbed “the Chicago Eight,” were eventually indicted and tried in federal court for conspiracy, resulting in one of the more memorable public trials of the 1960s protest era. In the months before this indictment, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held a series of hearings to investigate “subversive involvement in the disruption of the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention.”1

  In December 1968, Davis and Hayden testified before HUAC. During their respective interrogations, congressional committee members showed an intense interest in the GI coffeehouse phenomenon and the civilian antiwar movement’s efforts to support military dissent.2 Although both Davis and Hayden repeatedly explained, in their testimony before HUAC, that the coffeehouses were designed to support an antiwar movement already in progress within the army, the committee members refused to acknowledge the possibility of dissent emerging from the ranks of GIs, insisting that “outside agitators” were behind any discontent expressed by soldiers. When Davis was specifically asked i
f his goal was to “encourage disaffection and desertion from the Army,” he denied the charges, explaining that the coffeehouse network’s purpose was not to indoctrinate soldiers but rather to develop an alternative cultural space for young people in the military:

  We do not urge any young soldier to take any action that would put him in legal jeopardy with the United States military, nor do we in any of our coffeehouses counsel young men to desert. Our purpose is to try to provide a place for the young man who has given his body to Uncle Sam so that he does not have to give his mind. Our place is to provide rest and relaxation for basic trainees who around the fifth week of their basic training learn to kill. He has something to escape to, other than the whorehouses and saloons that make up these small towns, like in Waynesville or Killeen, Texas, where there are people who generally care about him and are not trying to extract or steal his body for prostitution purposes. There are people who want to keep his mind alive, and not be totally sold out to the military machine. There are people there who essentially say, “I am from the peace movement because I care about the hell you are going through.” That is the essential idea of the coffeehouse—pretty good.3

  Throughout their testimony, Davis and Hayden repeatedly made connections between youth culture and antiwar politics, portraying the coffeehouse network as a hybrid project that hoped to employ the aesthetics and orientation of youth culture for specific political purposes. As Davis put it, GI coffeehouses were primarily cultural institutions, places “where we can hopefully bring good entertainment, and kind of provide an antidote to the virus of the USO.”4