Spreading awareness about important issues facing soldiers, mainly through articles in the underground press, was just one part of the support system developed at the Shelter Half coffeehouse as VOLAR came to the Tacoma area. Beyond these publicity efforts, the coffeehouse delivered free legal advice and, when necessary, representation to GIs in need. Legal services were offered most often by PCS lawyers who, according to a report distributed to national GI organizers, “provide servicemen and women with counseling and reference materials on GI rights, dependent rights, discharge policies, legal defense, and ways to file grievances and submit petitions. Much of the legal counseling deals with redress of grievances for manifestations of military repression such as illegal imprisonment, bad living and working conditions, and beatings in the brig.”97 By providing practical, material assistance to soldiers engaged in a variety of disputes, the services offered at the Shelter Half aimed to ameliorate some of the major points of dissatisfaction among GIs in a transitioning military.98
In September 1971, after battling with landlords over the coffeehouse’s lease, the Shelter Half moved to a different building at 1902 Tacoma Avenue. The new location was much farther toward the north end of the city, placing it closer to McChord Air Force Base. Greater proximity to McChord seemed like a logical step to the Shelter Half’s owners, who recognized that the momentum for antiwar organizing and other GI movement activities was shifting quickly to the air force and navy. From its second location, the Shelter Half became involved in a series of important resistance campaigns during the Vietnam War’s final years. In May 1972, the coffeehouse provided publicity and support for “Project Air War,” the first large-scale antiwar demonstration by airmen at McChord in the base’s history.99
The Shelter Half’s later period was also marked by a continued broadening of the regional GI movement, with organizers increasingly turning their attention to issues of community development and employment conditions. In late 1971, coffeehouse staff and activists from the GI Alliance launched a campaign to improve off-base housing conditions for GIs and their families, focusing specifically on the tiny, economically ravaged community of Tillicum, just outside Fort Lewis’s main gates. Civilian organizers helped form the Tillicum Tenants’ Committee, which pressured landlords through public demonstrations, leafleting, and the publication of articles exposing landlord abuse in both the Lewis-McChord Free Press and the committee’s own newsletter, the Tillicum News and World Report.100 In the spring of 1972, military officials responded to the controversy, and the Fort Lewis housing referral office began making significant improvements and ceased working with the realty offices singled out by GI organizers. The Shelter Half–sponsored effort to secure more equitable housing conditions in Tacoma reflected the changing nature of military service, which created more permanent off-base residents in need of housing for themselves and their families. By lending its support to the housing struggle, the coffeehouse signaled that its services were not limited to antiwar activism. In its later years the coffeehouse also participated in several other GI-led campaigns to improve the community, which often targeted stores and car dealerships for overcharging and otherwise exploiting naive young soldiers.101
The Shelter Half coffeehouse remained open in Tacoma until the summer of 1974, years after virtually every other civilian-sponsored GI project had disappeared. The coffeehouse had transformed from a psychedelic refuge for war-weary local GIs to a robust community-organizing center designed to ease the difficulties of the postwar transition to an all-volunteer force. The Shelter Half’s success was made possible by the strong antiwar and radical community that existed in and around Seattle, Tacoma, and the Pacific Northwest, which helped sustain the coffeehouse and provided a constant stream of material support and activist energy. In 1974 the coffeehouse was still hosting popular free dinners on Sunday (a remnant of the New Left’s communal impulses), along with daily “fifty-cent lunches” designed to serve Tacoma’s low-income community. Over the course of six years, the Shelter Half went from a “GI coffeehouse” born out of the chaos of the Vietnam War to a resource center focused on a wide variety of local issues.102
Throughout its various phases, though, the Shelter Half directed a consistent radical voice toward local military affairs, raising concerns about life in the armed forces that continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. Perhaps most presciently, the Shelter Half regularly called attention to the complicated dynamics of gender and sexuality present in a post-1960s military. While nearly every GI coffeehouse around the country expressed some level of political feminism, the Shelter Half staff took its gender orientation to another level. In addition to leading groundbreaking campaigns focused on women in the armed forces, staff members at the Shelter Half also worked to raise awareness about the treatment of gays in the military. During the coffeehouse’s final years, a gay male staff member wrote a series of articles for the Lewis-McChord Free Press that argued for drastic changes to official military policy regarding homosexuality and predicted that the fight for gay rights would become a critical component of future progressive efforts aimed at the armed forces.103
Though the Shelter Half project, along with the GI movement itself, eventually faded as the Vietnam War came to an end, its history reflects the lasting appeal of Fred Gardner’s original GI coffeehouse model, which was flexible enough to survive the drastic political shifts that marked the early 1970s. Even after the Vietnam War no longer constituted the major focus of GI and activist concern, the coffeehouse was still providing a source of comfort and support for troubled soldiers. Aided immeasurably by a strong surrounding community of radical activists, the Shelter Half, like other GI coffeehouses throughout the Vietnam era, helped shine a light on the problems experienced by soldiers stationed at bases around the country and foreshadowed some of the central issues of American military life that would be faced by future generations.
Epilogue
Support Our Troops
When Fred Gardner and Donna Mickleson opened the doors of the nation’s first GI coffeehouse, the UFO, in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1967, the idea inspired the creation of a whole network of coffeehouses and similar projects near military bases throughout the country. During the relatively brief time that these antiwar coffeehouses dotted the American landscape, they brought the civilian antiwar movement in direct contact with U.S. soldiers and in the process became potent symbols of a significant crisis for both the military and the nation itself. The Vietnam War had a dramatic impact on the American armed forces, and nothing demonstrated this impact more sharply than the rise of the antiwar GI movement, which created a set of institutions and resistance activities that sought to organize soldiers’ anger toward the unpopular and devastating war.
The decades since the end of the Vietnam War have not witnessed a rebirth of a GI movement as profound as the one that shook the U.S. Army in the 1960s and 1970s. As wars in the Middle East take a heavy toll on American soldiers in the post-9/11 era, however, a number of antiwar GI support projects have appeared throughout the country. In the tradition of the Vietnam-era GI coffeehouse network, these new activists have created a loosely connected set of GI coffeehouses and resource centers in the same military towns that hosted these establishments at a different point in history. Places like Under the Hood Café in Killeen, Texas; Coffee Strong in Lakewood, Washington (near Joint Base Lewis-McChord); and Norfolk Offbase in Norfolk, Virginia (near Norfolk Naval Base, the largest naval base in the world), provide soldiers with an alternative set of spaces designed to address the issues faced by twenty-first-century American soldiers and veterans.1 Rather than envision themselves as providing support for an antiwar rebellion in the armed forces, as the original coffeehouse organizers once did, these new GI coffeehouses and military support organizations focus instead on offering alternative routes through which soldiers can access help with specific issues related to their military service.
The largest of these support organizations is the GI Rights Netwo
rk, a coalition of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations formed in 1994 by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.2 Offering free, confidential information for military service members, veterans, and their families, the network operates a national hotline and website with a particular focus on discharges and filing grievances. Like the GI coffeehouse network of the Vietnam era, the GI Rights Network is supported by a wide range of individuals and institutions, including veterans’ organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War and the National Veterans Legal Services Program, organizations specializing in abuse and trauma like the Suicide Prevention Hotline and the National Sexual Assault Hotline, women’s organizations like the National Women Veterans United and the Service Women’s Action Network, and antiwar/antiracism groups like the War Resisters League and the National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth.
Organizations like the GI Rights Network differ from large government-chartered charities like the Wounded Warrior Project, a multimillion-dollar veterans service organization for soldiers injured in war, and Operation Homefront, which offers emergency support services to soldiers and veterans. These groups are among a number of officially sanctioned support organizations that have arisen since September 11, 2001. Mainstream charities like the Wounded Warrior Project are distinct from left-oriented organizations like the current crop of GI coffeehouses, which offer support for soldiers independent of official military channels, in the context of an antiwar political framework. These GI support organizations follow the model of left outreach to soldiers that reached its fullest expression during the Vietnam War, combining practical and material support within a larger critique of American war policy. More important, though, they offer soldiers a support network that exists outside of the military’s institutional structures. This outside role is especially critical when dealing with sensitive issues like sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, gender- and race-based harassment, psychological trauma, and a host of other problems faced by modern GIs.
Creating spaces where soldiers can access information and resources, off the record and away from military administration, has evolved into one of the most critical functions performed by activist GI projects. While a large number and variety of charitable groups aim to help American soldiers deal with the fallout of war, the Left’s contribution remains a prominent and unique one. Recognizing the role that antiwar activists have played, and continue to play, in offering GI support disrupts the popular image of soldiers and left activists pitted against one another, an idea that has often played out politically through the concept of “support.”
In the decades since the Vietnam War came to an end, the notion of “supporting our troops” took on a powerful place in public discourse. Along with the start of the Gulf War in 1990, conservative politicians, pundits, and citizens popularized the slogan “Support Our Troops” in an attempt to make up for the perceived disrespect directed at soldiers in the Vietnam era. The historical revisionism embedded in the phrase conflates respect for soldiers with support for war policy and dissent with contempt for the troops. In this reactionary version of history, in times of war the American Left stands on the sidelines, jeering and spitting at soldiers, while patriotic Americans offer nothing but their steadfast “support” for our brave troops. But the history of the GI coffeehouse network of the Vietnam years, along with the many associated movements and institutions created by the Left in the ensuing decades, contradicts this dominant narrative. Since the 1960s, while conservatives engaged in a concerted effort to own the “Support Our Troops” brand, activists on the Left have been building networks and organizations that, in both practical and material terms, accomplish just that. Drawing inspiration from the GI coffeehouses that first dotted the landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, peace activists in the twenty-first century continue to create dynamic institutions to counter the heavy toll of war and militarism felt by the men and women of the nation’s armed forces.
Of course, the culture and politics that surround activist-operated GI support projects, including GI coffeehouses, have shifted dramatically since the Vietnam War era. Organizers at the Different Drummer Café, a GI coffeehouse that opened near the Fort Drum army post in upstate New York in 2007, struggled to come to terms with how changes in military service since Vietnam have affected their work. After the coffeehouse officially closed in 2009, its owner and operator, Tod Ensign, reflected on these changes:
We carefully compared the US military during Vietnam to the present “all volunteer” force. The most obvious difference is that after conscription was ended in 1973, our military no longer represented a cross-section of American society. One third of the troops in Vietnam were draftees with another third being “draft induced” volunteers. Today, virtually all enlisted soldiers are from working class or poor families. Secondly, they receive pay and bonuses which in most cases are competitive or superior to what they would earn in civilian jobs. During Vietnam, many soldiers earned $120 a month, lived in crowded barracks and took their meals in dismal chow halls. Only a few were married or owned a car. Today, over half of all Army soldiers are married and most of these are also parents. You won’t find many soldiers today who don’t own a cell phone, a lap top computer as well as a car or a truck. They use this mobility to escape the base whenever possible, often travelling hundreds of miles.3
As Ensign points out, the often dismal conditions faced by American soldiers during the Vietnam War inadvertently contributed to and helped build a movement of soldiers against war. But, as he also explains, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, in many ways, demanded more sacrifice from GIs than ever before.
I believe that combat soldiers from these current wars suffer more stress and mental dysfunction than even those who served in Vietnam. Their rates for PTSD, depression and suicide so far confirm this conclusion. This is partly because they are forced to endure multiple deployments in combat zones where the tension and danger never lets up. However, I’ve learned in my forty years of activism that the level of oppression someone experiences is not predictive of whether he or she will fight back or instead seek escape through self-destructive behaviors.4
While the Different Drummer Cafe, like Fred Gardner’s original GI coffeehouse network, enjoyed only a brief existence, other GI organizers and activists have carried on the coffeehouse tradition. Navigating a very different political and cultural landscape from the one in which the coffeehouse organizers of the 1960s and 1970s first operated, the latest group of GI support projects focus their efforts on addressing the specific issues faced by soldiers in today’s U.S. military. With the men and women of the nation’s armed services continuing to bear the brunt of America’s seemingly endless military engagements, these projects build on the legacy of GI support modeled by the GI coffeehouse network of the Vietnam War era, working to create places where soldiers can find resources and support for the serious issues they face.5
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Lewis, Hard Hats, Hippies, and Hawks, 35–45. Lewis profiles a number of canonical works, including Gitlin, Sixties; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets; Albert and Albert, Sixties Papers; and Sayres et al., 60s without Apology.
2. See Lembke, Spitting Image.
3. Small, Give Peace a Chance, 96.
4. Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 12–13.
5. Ibid., 201–7.
6. Chambers, Oxford Companion to American Military History.
7. Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 40.
8. Bailey, America’s Army, 130–71.
9. “Return to Fort Dix,” Shakedown, vol. 2, no. 2, May 1971, Underground GI Newspapers, The Sixties Project digital archives.
10. GI News and Discussion Bulletin, no. 8, August 1971; “Report from the Fort Bragg Collective (Haymarket Square Coffeehouse),” box 1, folder “Project Description (Internal),” Cortright Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection; McCallum, Yes to the Troops, 127–34.
11. Goldman, “Changing Role of Women in the
Armed Forces.” See also Herbert, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat.
12. William Yardley, “Andy Stapp, Who Tried to Unionize the Military, Dies at 70,” New York Times, September 14, 2014.
13. Halstead, Out Now!
14. Lutz, Homefront, 146.
15. Enke, Finding the Movement, 2.
16. Appy, Working Class War, 51.
CHAPTER 1
1. “Frederick H. Gardner Writer Profile,” Harvard Crimson website, http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/5771/Frederick_H._Gardner/, accessed July 11, 2010. The site contains an archive of all of Gardner’s writings from 1961 to 1963.
2. Fred Gardner, interview by author, January 15, 2011.
3. Fred Gardner, “Hollywood Confidential, Part I,” Vietnam Generation Journal and Newsletter, vol. 3, no. 3, November 1991, 36.
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