Dangerous Grounds

by Parsons, David L. ;

  To facilitate the transition to an all-volunteer system, in January 1971 the army initiated a program known as VOLAR (Volunteer Army). The program was, in part, an attempt to address some of the common, everyday dissatisfactions with army life. At four different U.S. Army posts, the VOLAR program introduced a series of “adjustments to administrative and training practices, regulations, and policies governing individual lifestyle and working conditions,” which were meant to make the army “a more satisfactory place in which to work by fostering professionalism, identification with the Army, and greater job satisfaction.” Army leadership hoped that a more relaxed environment would not only attract more new recruits but also induce more soldiers who were already in the army to make a career out of it.7

  As part of the VOLAR program, the army began opening its own GI coffeehouses on bases around the country. At Fort Hood, for example, where the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen had become a popular hangout for local GIs, officials used VOLAR funds to open an on-post coffeehouse called the Right Side in October 1971. The army’s coffeehouse, whose name derived from a passage in the New Testament, was promoted as a place for soldiers to “relax . . . meet friends . . . or just to have a quiet place to think or pray.” At a ribbon-cutting ceremony that opened the coffeehouse, Fort Hood major general James C. Smith explained that its purpose was to “involve the men of the division in the concerns about what is going on around them.”8 At Fort Carson, the Home Front coffeehouse in nearby Colorado Springs had, by 1971, become one of the most popular antiwar GI coffeehouses in the country. When Jane Fonda visited the post with a group of antiwar activists in 1971, local GIs gave them a grand tour of the new VOLAR-improved facilities, including Fort Carson’s own psychedelic—but not antiwar—GI coffeehouse, the Inscape. As Fonda later recalled, she and many of the Carson soldiers with whom she spoke agreed that the Inscape had been created “to keep the men from coming to the GI movement coffeehouse.”9 The Inscape’s walls were adorned with posters of pinup girls and advertisements for “girlie shows” featuring Playboy playmates. On the pages of Life magazine, photos of the army’s coffeehouse depict a large crowd of soldiers sipping drinks at small tables, most of them staring up at a pair of bikini-clad go-go dancers shaking their hips on stage. With the army unrolling flashy attempts to win the hearts and minds of its soldiers, GI and civilian organizers recognized the need to adapt their movement to the VOLAR program and the wider set of policy changes initiated by Nixon’s administration.

  The antiwar movement’s composition and strategies also changed significantly during the Nixon years. While popular memory often locates 1968 as the peak year of antiwar activism, in fact the post-1968 period witnessed some of the movement’s most important developments. As sociologist and political historian Penny Lewis explains, “Post-1968 is the period when the movement formed deeper roots among people of color, religious communities, labor unions, the armed forces, veterans, and students attending second-, third-, and fourth-tier college campuses. The post-1968 rationales for opposing the war shifted from the more historically minded policy critiques and moral condemnations of the early years to include more explicitly grounded criticisms of the varied domestic repercussions of the fight.”10 GI coffeehouses and the wider GI movement were part of this evolution of ideas and tactics in the later years of the war. They took the GI movement in a number of new directions, as the influence of 1970s identity politics (particularly black liberation ideology and the women’s movement) expanded the focus of antiwar activism. While these developments undoubtedly contributed to stronger divisions among activists in the coffeehouse network’s later years, they also helped the coffeehouses become more dynamic political institutions.

  The changing character of the GI movement and its civilian supporters could be seen at a series of movement-wide conferences held during the war’s later years. According to reports from organizers, the movement’s first two conferences, held in December 1969 and May 1970, were dominated by civilian radicals (mainly white males) who had “worked previously in the student and New Left movements,” with very few active-duty GIs and veterans present. The conference held in November 1971 in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, however, almost totally reversed this imbalance; nearly fifty GIs and veterans attended the meetings, far outnumbering their civilian counterparts. The civilian wing had also undergone significant changes, with organizers reporting a “greater percentage of people from blue collar working class backgrounds” as opposed to the middle-class college students who had composed the majority of activists at previous meetings. They also reported an influx of women at various GI projects, whose presence helped contribute to an increased focus on gender issues both inside and outside the military.11 From the perspective of GI and civilian organizers, these developments helped strengthen their movement, making it possible to address a wider set of issues related to military life than ever before.

  During a time when most Americans understood the war in Vietnam to be finally winding down, GI and civilian activists were continuing, and even expanding, their operations. The war’s ongoing impact on soldiers fueled a rising GI movement in the early 1970s. Alongside their antiwar activism, though, soldiers and civilians in this period addressed many other matters, including racial discrimination, drug abuse, housing practices, and the army’s complicated conversion to an all-volunteer force. Coffeehouses were central to these new political directions, helping bring the GI movement to the peak of its influence during the war’s final years.

  “WHY DON’T YOU WRITE AN ARTICLE?”: COFFEEHOUSES AND THE GI PRESS EXPLOSION

  In June 1969, just a few months into Nixon’s first term, the administration announced that 25,000 troops would return from Vietnam by the end of August. To emphasize this point, the Department of Defense staged a “homecoming” ceremony in Tacoma, Washington, where Fort Lewis and its connected bases had been serving as the nation’s main processing center for troops both going to and arriving from the Vietnam War. On July 8, 1969, when 814 American GIs arrived from Southeast Asia at nearby McChord Air Force Base, they were greeted by a group of dignitaries who included army chief of staff (and former commanding general of the war in Vietnam) William Westmoreland,12 ambassador to South Vietnam Bui Diem, and Tacoma mayor A. L. Rasmussen. Adding a festive touch to the occasion was a brass band and a group of beauty queens and princesses from the Washington State area. The war-weary soldiers of the Third Battalion, Sixtieth Infantry, Ninth Infantry Division listened as Westmoreland gave a speech before they were bused to nearby Fort Lewis for the traditional postwar steak dinner. The group of GIs were then informed that in the morning they would begin training for their appearance in a larger “homecoming parade” to be held in downtown Seattle just two days later. The parade’s utility as state propaganda was not lost on even mainstream media sources like the New York Times, which noted that, on the same day that the Third Battalion landed at McChord, 1,000 fresh troops were on the same tarmac boarding planes bound for the war zone, and an additional 10,000 soldiers would follow them in the month of July alone.13

  The local and national media were not the only ones to call attention to the incongruity of the Nixon administration’s Seattle parade. A significant number of antiwar activists were present at the event, many of whom held signs bearing slogans like “Welcome Home! We’ll Stay in the Streets Until ALL of the GIs are Home!” and “Bring All the GIs Home Now!” A group of young women handed flowers to passing soldiers, many of whom accepted the tokens and flashed peace signs in return. Later in the evening, when the troops left the Seattle Center after a dinner of salmon and beer, antiwar activists waiting outside distributed leaflets and GI underground newspapers that urged soldiers to consider how the parade had employed them as political pawns.14

  Challenging the administration’s official narrative, the GI underground press became enormously influential over the course of the war. Beginning in 1967, a handful of GI-produced antiwar newspapers appeared on bases and in military towns. By 1972, the
Department of Defense estimated that 245 different antiwar newspapers were being distributed on bases. Some of the most well-known GI papers, such as the Fatigue Press out of Killeen, Texas, and Bragg Briefs out of Fayetteville, North Carolina, which each had circulations of more than 5,000, were produced and distributed at GI coffeehouses, supported by civilian antiwar organizations.15 Coffeehouses served as the meeting spaces and publishing centers for a loose national network of antiwar, military-oriented newspapers that formed, in the words of one historian and GI movement activist, “the fundamental expression of political opposition within the armed forces” during the Vietnam War era.16

  The GI underground press was part of the larger history of newspaper printing, which underwent significant changes in the mid-twentieth century, deeply affecting the trajectory of New Left and antiwar groups in the Vietnam era. The introduction of new technologies, like cheap offset printing and mimeograph machines, helped make possible an unprecedented expansion of alternative media. Underground publications like the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and the Chicago Seed became significant agents in the promotion of a youth-oriented, antiwar counterculture that ran parallel to the so-called mainstream media. For most editors and producers of underground newspapers, the papers’ physical production was itself a political act; to possess a printing press in the 1960s was to possess a new and powerful weapon in the movement’s arsenal. The spaces where underground newspapers were produced, in which independent editors and writers gathered to discuss articles, exchange information, and physically print the newspaper, often became local centers of political organizing activity. More often than not, underground newspaper offices functioned as simultaneous publishing houses and de facto movement centers.17

  Access to physical space and printing technology was a critical element in the explosion of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but it was especially critical in the development of the GI movement and its underground press network. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, whose rules applied in all branches of the military, stated that GIs could express their opinions in print only if they did so “off post, on their own time, with their own money and equipment.”18 Further, soldiers were restricted from preparing or distributing literature that included criticism of superior officers or members of government, including the president, the vice president, and members of Congress. As the number of GI antiwar newspapers showing up on U.S. military bases increased dramatically in 1968, military leadership issued even stricter policies limiting soldiers’ ability to produce antiwar literature. The Department of the Army’s “Guidance on Dissent” contained a token affirmation of GIs’ “rights to free expression” but further limited those rights by stipulating that all printed materials be submitted to local commanders for approval before distribution.19 While enforcement of these policies varied from post to post, subject to the whim of local commanders, GI organizers had good reason to tread carefully when producing and distributing literature.

  Paul Cox, an active-duty Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, along with two other soldiers, started a small underground paper called Rage after returning from Vietnam in 1969. Cox recalled that, because of local military restrictions, the success of a GI press was dependent on several related factors: the availability of an off-post workspace, access to printing technology, and financial support from civilians:

  There were three of us. We started writing letters to everyone we could find, asking for help. Two hundred forty-three letters. We got two responses. One was from Bragg Briefs in Fayetteville and one was from Up Against the Bulkhead in San Francisco. We got a visit from the people in Fayetteville, who recruited two guys to move into town. They got some money from somewhere and bought a house—they figured no one would rent to us—and opened a bookstore to support our work putting out this paper. There was a movement that was intent on assisting with the awakening of GIs. The U.S. Servicemen’s Fund—we would send them a completed paper and they would send us $100. The first one, we mimeographed five hundred. Then we found a printer and went to tabloid, printing a thousand.20

  Rage was one of many GI newspapers that benefited greatly from the material support of antiwar civilians, who were often able to provide the essential tools needed to make up for the severe limitations placed on soldiers’ political expression.

  At the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, where the Fatigue Press offices took up nearly half the space, the staff worked to create an atmosphere that would stimulate work on the newspaper. Vietnam veteran and Fatigue Press editor Dave Cline later explained that the coffeehouse staff encouraged visiting GIs to express their opinions in writing, regardless of their training or skills. “We started writing the paper, and the idea was for people just to write their ideas. When you would go in the coffeehouse, they would say, ‘Why don’t you write an article?’ It was mimeographed, and the production was piss poor, but the idea was that we were putting something out.”21 The Fatigue Press ultimately became one of the country’s most widely circulated GI papers, largely because of strong financial support from the USSF and other antiwar organizations that considered the Oleo Strut’s role as an underground publishing center to be one of its most important functions. Activists at these organizations were encouraged when Fatigue Press’s coverage of Operation Garden Plot, Fort Hood’s training operation for quelling urban riots, helped stir outrage among GIs on post and led to some of the GI movement’s most effective early political actions.

  The GI underground press also developed a unique political aesthetic, using the visual iconography, crass humor, smart-aleck attitude, and psychedelic imagery of the 1960s counterculture to subvert, provoke, and educate its readers. Many papers self-consciously copied the look and attitude of popular counterculture publications like the Berkeley Barb and East Village Other, connecting the GI movement’s politics to the subversive humor of 1960s youth culture. Having grown up reading Mad magazine and its many antecedents, artists in GI underground newspapers persistently used the comic medium to make fun of the military establishment. Virtually every GI paper contained over-the-top comic images satirizing military authority.22

  The most common target of these comics were “lifers,” the GI movement’s preferred term for career military men. In contrast to enlisted GIs, officers were not simply serving their required time before discharge but had made a career out of military service. The large numbers of “lifers” during the Vietnam era was the result of the military’s post–World War II policy shifts that promoted the army as a viable career. As the Cold War expanded in the early 1950s, the Officer Corps, which functioned as the army’s central group of “middle managers,” grew to become the centerpiece of a new and more professional military. It was during this period that the army began advertising the “military career” as a way to express patriotism while earning a living. By the Vietnam War era, the increased numbers of career officers meant greater competition for jobs and promotions, which helped contribute to an atmosphere of behavioral conformity, including a pressure to align their attitudes with the goals and ethos of the military establishment.23

  As the Vietnam War brought an unprecedented number of draftees into the U.S. military, frequent clashes between enlisted GIs and officers became symptomatic of larger class, racial, and generational divides in the nation’s armed forces. A GI stationed in Vietnam, when interviewed in the New York Times, expressed a seemingly common sentiment: “The grunt’s the one who has to go through all the hell[;] . . . lifers sit back in their air-conditioned rooms” and tell GIs to “go out there and fight the war” while they “draw their combat pay for doing nothing while they’re sitting on their butts.”24

  Since so much of this tension stemmed from the war’s unpopularity, the enlisted soldier/officer divide took on particular resonance for antiwar GIs. According to psychiatrist and writer Robert Jay Lifton, for soldiers opposed to the war and alienated by military values, career officers came to signify “not only the counterfeit universe of the immedi
ate environment and the larger military establishment, but also the misguided older generation responsible for sending him to fight the war, and indeed for the war itself.”25 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, officers were depicted on the pages of GI underground newspapers as pigs, rabid dogs, grotesque old men, and, in at least one case, anthropomorphized toilets. By targeting “lifers,” the GI movement expressed its contempt for the entire concept of military service, using cultural differences (crew cuts versus long hair, alcohol versus marijuana, country music versus rock and roll) to cast traditional military values (and those who willingly embraced them) as hopelessly old-fashioned, square, and out of touch with the younger generation. These images, along with countless articles, editorials, and letters printed in the GI underground press during the Vietnam era, were a powerful reflection of the military’s “morale crisis,” providing visual evidence of a cultural breakdown that alarmed military leaders and led to substantial policy changes. With coffeehouses serving as its central production and distribution centers, the GI press created a brief but remarkable phenomenon on military posts around the country, providing GIs with an unrelenting stream of alternative information and perspectives.