GI Underground Press
Mainly written by rank-and-file active duty or recently discharged GIs, AWOLs and deserters, these publications were intended for their peers and spoke the language and aired the complaints of their audience.
[7][8] In 1969 this phenomenon had become so evident it prompted the New York Times to comment, "a startling number of servicemen – some so sophisticated that they cite the Nuremberg trials as their guide – have decided to do their own thinking.
Others expressed existential angst like Why in Okinawa or anxiety with Up-Tight at Fort Bliss, while one out of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard warned about the future with Calm Before The Storm.
They were mailed around the world, including in bundles disguised "to look like 'care packages' from families or church groups back home", which were then passed out in mess halls, mailrooms and barracks.
The accompanying table contains over 400 newspapers or newsletters which historians have been able to locate and document, and a few that have been reported by one or more reputable sources (like US Senate and House investigations), even when there are no known existing copies.
The total number of GI publications, which includes one time pamphlets and leaflets, would climb well into the thousands, but, given their clandestine nature and the difficult circumstance under which they were produced and distributed, it is probably impossible to know for sure.
Eighteen soldiers joined the case U.S. District Court in October 1969 where Specialist Fifth Class, Hal Noyes, a GI United member, claimed that the paper was merely a vehicle to "counteract Army propaganda."
Noland humorously related the eight-month battle waged with the Army before receiving limited permission to distribute the paper "in an isolated corner of the post for a few hours".
The battle involved learning the regs, avoiding violent or revolutionary rhetoric, requesting official permission, appealing to a Senator, contacting the Civil Liberties Union, alerting the press, and still waiting eight-months.
Only two issues seem to have been published, and for good reason – what was the point; there was, after all, an ongoing underground newspaper on the base called FTA, which with no little irony really meant Fuck The Army (as described above).
They even set up tables in front of the main base exchange, or retail store, where in one day, July 31, 1971, they gathered 540 signatures, including "143 Vietnam veterans and twenty-three officers."
Kauri was a poetry newsletter published in New York City and dedicated, among other things, to young men who were refusing the draft or who, already in service, were not taking part in U.S. aggression against other peoples, especially in Vietnam.
Stapp, stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, was already in trouble with the Army having faced two highly publicized courts martial for disobeying orders and flouting military discipline.
Together with Fayette Richardson, a World War II paratrooper, and Bill Smith, a Vietnam veteran, both located in New York City, they released the first fully GI produced issue of The Bond on January 28, 1968.
[47] The San Francisco Bay Area, a hotbed of antiwar and counterculture activity anyway, which contained several key Army, Naval and Air Forces bases, had an astonishing 31 different GI and veterans publications.
Located in Killeen, Texas, it was no accident that Fort Hood became an early center of antiwar GI activity, as it was a major training ground and return destination for soldiers heading to and from the war.
The base had begun training soldiers to be used against civilian demonstrators at the convention and the strong consensus at the meeting was, as the Fatigue Press put it, the "moral conviction that they could not kill fellow Americans in Chicago."
[13]: 144–159 The two most active antiwar groups on the base, GIs United and the Concerned Officers Movement (COM), were both cited in the Army's fiscal year 1971 official history as causing the "most troublesome display of dissension and indiscipline."
For one, the issue was dedicated to the "great American soldier and patriot Private Joseph D. Miles" who had just been transferred to Fort Richardson, Alaska above the Arctic Circle, "the U.S. Army's equivalent of Siberia.".
Bragg Briefs played a central role in bringing soldiers to the event where they listened to Jane Fonda, Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis and folk singer Barbara Dane.
One was the 1967 trial of Captain Howard Levy, an army doctor, charged with "refusing to teach medicine to Green Berets and for 'conduct unbecoming an officer' in criticizing the Vietnam War".
It had a very seat-of-the-pants appearance, but its content set it apart from its peers, with long articles analyzing the war or discussing radical politics and racism, poems, book reviews and letters from GIs.
[77] In March 1972, Liberation News Service printed an interview with David Smith and Jeff Dinsmore, two sailors on shore leave from the USS Coral Sea aircraft carrier.
GI movement historian David Cortright notes that just as in the larger society, "women in the military are excluded from positions of authority and are disproportionately assigned to low-skill, service occupations."
It was created by the women of the Defense Committee in the Norfolk area, which had been formed to defend a Navy sailor, Jeff Allison, who they felt had been unjustly blamed for a fire on board the USS Forrestal.
Hew-Kecaw-Na-Yo is dedicated to Indian unity; united we stand, divided we fall.The issue included articles from several Native American soldiers describing their experiences in the Army and explaining why they were resisting.
Ironically, on September 30, 1971, the Confidence was ordered to intercept and board a boat which turned out to be the original Greenpeace on its way to protest a powerful U.S. nuclear underground test on the island of Amchitka.
It served as a "financial linchpin" for a number of the larger and longer lasting newspapers and it received "contributions from major players and organizations in the civilian antiwar movement."
As they told it, a Guild attorney prevailed on a Military Judge at Fort Huachuca in Arizona to finally dismiss, after 51 pretrial motions, the charges against a Private Adam Wall for disrespect to an officer.
Another significant LNS contribution to the GI press was a 1969 image by one of their photographers, David Fenton, who captured a sign hanging over the entrance to the Fort Dix stockade—"OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW IS FREEDOM".
