GI resistance during the Vietnam War
By John Catalinotto
"Keep asking me, no matter how long
On the
war in Viet Nam, I sing this song
I ain't got no
quarrel with them
Viet Cong."
-- Muhammad Ali
Heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali
stunned U.S. ruling-class opinion when, as a member of the
Nation of Islam, he refused to go into the army in 1966 and
spoke publicly against the war on Vietnam. His comments both
reflected the developing consciousness among African Americans
and contributed to spreading and deepening Black resistance to
this oppressive war.
Between 1965 and 1969, the U.S. land forces grew to over
500,000 troops in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese revolutionaries
continued to fight and to win battles. Both passive and active
resistance within the ranks of the U.S. military grew along
with the civilian struggle here against the war. Black troops
often took the lead.
Such military resistance was widespread in Vietnam by 1970.
The French daily Le Monde reported that over four months, 109
soldiers of the First Air Cavalry Division were charged with
refusal to fight. "A common sight," Le Monde reported, "is the
Black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war
he has never considered his own."
A chronicle of Black military resistance would require a
book of its own. At first individuals spoke up, then there were
mass refusals to obey orders and even strong actions against
the hated officers, often racists, who gave those orders to go
into battle.
Many of these hundreds of struggles occurred with little
written comment at the time. This article will focus on three
that wound up in court battles and defense campaigns that left
a paper trail, but were born of struggle.
Harvey and Daniels
On July 23, 1967, a rebellion in Detroit's African American
community began. U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division
were sent in. Forty-three people were killed and thousands
injured.
On July 27, four days into the rebellion, Corporals Bill
Harvey and George Daniels were with the Second Infantry
Training Regiment of the U.S. Marine Corps in Camp Pendleton,
Calif., where thousands of young men were preparing for combat
duty in Vietnam.
That day at lunch the Marines began discussing the war in
Vietnam and that other war, the one against Black people in the
United States. Many Black Marines knew they could be sent to
the cities of the U.S. and ordered by their officers to shoot
down Black people these troops saw as brothers and sisters in
the struggle against racism.
Some of the troops wanted out of the Marine Corps. Others
were reported to have stated that under no condition would they
bear arms against the Black people. Some wouldn't fight in
Vietnam.
They asked for a "mast," a formal meeting with the
commanding officer, to discuss these questions. The Marine
officers considered this request a first step toward mutiny.
They decided to crack down.
The next day 18 Black Marines were ordered to fall out and
proceed to the Company Office. They were threatened with mutiny
charges, then harassed and intimidated. The brass singled out
two Black men, George Daniels and William Harvey, and arrested
them on Aug. 17.
The brass couldn't make the charge of promoting disloyalty
stick on Harvey, but still found him guilty of "disloyal
statements" and sentenced him to six years in prison. For
allegedly saying that "the Black man should not fight in
Vietnam because he would have to come back and fight the white
man in the United States," Daniels received the maximum
sentence of reduction to the lowest rank, forfeiture of all
pay, dishonorable discharge and 10 years in military
prison.
Daniels and Harvey received heavy prison terms simply for
what they said. The Marine brass tried to keep the case secret.
But news got through to the American Servicemen's Union, which
broke the story in the June 11, 1968, issue of its newspaper,
The Bond.
Melvin L. Wulf of the American Civil Liberties Union, with
Edward F. Sherman of the Harvard Law School and attorney Conrad
Lynn, began preparing appeal briefs. On March 7, 1969, the New
York Times reported that the appeals, presented the day before
to two Navy appeals boards in Washington, D.C., were "a test of
the military's power to punish enlisted men who dissent against
the Vietnam War." Daniels and Harvey won and the two were
released by that September.
The Fort Hood 43
In 1968, the Tet Offensive shook U.S. forces in Vietnam,
leaving thousands killed. A workers' general strike nearly led
to revolution in France. At home, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated and Black rebellions erupted in 160 U.S.
cities and towns. Among the forces used to suppress these
rebellions were 15,000 Army and 45,000 National Guard
troops.
Following King's killing, some 5,000 GIs from Fort Hood,
Texas, were sent to Chicago. There the notoriously racist Mayor
Richard Daley, a Democrat, ordered "looters and arsonists" shot
on sight. At least nine Black civilians died.
By August 1968, Chicago was preparing for massive anti-war
demonstrations set to confront the Democratic National
Convention. And Fort Hood was preparing to send troops from the
First Armored Division, many of them combat veterans recently
returned from Vietnam, to Chicago. There they were to be ready
to use maximum force in the Black community, should it join the
protests.
When Black troops heard of these orders, they spent the
night of Aug. 23, 1968, in an all-night assembly of protest.
General Boles, commander of the division, pleaded with the
troops to disperse. He even offered to allow them to discuss
the question all night.
When morning came, however, Military Police arrested 43 of
the troops for failure to report for reveille. Twenty-five of
the 43 were combat veterans; eight had been decorated for
bravery.
The news quickly reached the outside world this time. An ASU
member at Fort Hood called the ASU office in New York. A Black
MP supplied the names of the 43 soldiers. Within three days the
Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the ACLU were supplying
legal help while the ASU went to the base to visit the arrested
troops and get the stories for publicity and to build
support.
The courts-martial took place in groups of five or six
soldiers. The six troops the military brass considered the
ringleaders of the assembly were tried at the end of October
1968. Their civilian attorney was top ECLC lawyer Michael
Kennedy. Life Magazine's Roger Vaughn was at the trial covering
the case.
The Army would have liked to put the troops away for the
kind of sentence the Marines gave to Daniels and Harvey. With
so much attention on the case, however, a too-harsh sentence
could backfire.
The brass settled on giving short sentences and letting many
of the GIs off on a technicality. They saved face without
discouraging further resistance. In the October trial, two were
given three-month sentences and bad-conduct discharges, two got
just bad discharges, and two were acquitted.
One of the GIs, Pfc. Guy Smith, had spent his last two
months in Vietnam in the stockade for refusing the order of a
racist non-commissioned officer who assigned him guard duty
when he was due for time off. Smith told the court, "I
demonstrated against Army policy here and in Vietnam. ... There
is racism and prejudice here. General Boles said he would do
something about it, but nothing has been done. ... Too many
Black people are taking too much now." (Workers World, Nov. 22,
1968)
The Army prosecutor's only answer was, "This United States
Army, this United States cannot survive without law and
order."
Instead of the obedience implied by that plea for "law and
order," the Pentagon got more "assemblies" of the Fort Hood
type, from Europe to Vietnam. One, which became known as the
Darmstadt 53, wound up in a victory for the troops. Four of the
Black troops even got to visit Paris and meet with the famous
Vietnamese negotiator Madame Nguyen Thi Binh.
The Vietnamese revolutionaries--the "Vietcong" with whom
Muhammad Ali had no quarrel--fought like hell against any units
that fired on them. But they had a political approach to the
war. They knew there was a difference between the rank-and-file
U.S. soldiers and their officers. And they knew that Black
people were oppressed in the United States and were more likely
to sympathize with another oppressed nation. Stories spread in
the services that sometimes when guerrillas ambushed a unit of
U.S. troops they would let the Black troops live with the
appeal, "Why do you fight us, Black soldiers?"
Billy Dean Smith
In Vietnam, another form of struggle arose alongside passive
resistance and mass assembly. It involved a sort of
counter-terror to the power the officers had to order you into
dangerous combat zones in Vietnam.
It was "fragging," that is, killing your officer or
non-commissioned officer by throwing a fragmentation grenade in
his tent at night. By 1970, this was being done so often it
could not be considered an act of individual terror. An
Associated Press article at the time said the Army investigated
96 alleged fraggings in 1969 and 209 in 1970, totaling 101
deaths. GIs said this told only a small part of the story.
On March 15, 1971, another fragmentation grenade exploded,
this one in an officers' barracks in an Army artillery unit in
Vietnam, killing two lieutenants and wounding a third. The unit
commander, Capt. Rigby, and First Sgt. Willis, who usually
slept in these barracks, decided they knew who did it.
They would blame a Black GI who had been giving them
trouble, Billy Dean Smith. Smith was outspoken against racism
and against the war. He objected to the segregated bars and
clubs in Vietnam. He was for taking decisive action against
uncontrollable racist officers and was accused of threatening
Rigby and Willis.
There was no physical evidence against Smith. But Rigby and
Willis had him charged with the murder and he wound up spending
almost a year in solitary awaiting trial. Smith pleaded not
guilty to the charges.
What was significant was the amount of support Smith was
able to attract, both inside and outside the military. Daniels,
it should be remembered, in 1967 first got a 10-year sentence
simply for what he said. The leaders of the Fort Hood assembly
in 1968 got a few months for organizing.
In 1971 the U.S. military was so much on the defensive that
they had to at least make it look like Billy Dean Smith would
get a fair trial. He was moved to Fort Ord in California. He
received effective legal support. And in the end, he was
acquitted for lack of evidence connecting him with the
fragging.
Though he was found not guilty of fragging, Smith
nevertheless became a symbol of the militant resistance to
racism and the war that fragging usually represented. Released
from prison and the Army, he joined the ASU as a veteran, and
also visited Cuba to show solidarity.
Under those conditions, it is no surprise that the U.S.
military had to leave Vietnam and the Vietnamese finally
liberated their country.
Catalinotto was a civilian organizer for the ASU from
1967 to 1970. He helped organize the defense of the Fort Hood
43 and attended the October 1968 trial.
Reprinted from the Feb. 19, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS ::
SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page