It might
be said that GI protest against the war in Vietnam first came to public
attention in South Carolina at Fort Jackson. At least that was the locale of
the first major indication that not all soldiers wanted to ‘get with the
program’.
The war
was well underway in the fall of ’66 when Captain Howard Levy, a physician,
refused to train Special Forces because the Green Berets committed war crimes
against civilians. America was again in a hot war, the first since Korea, and
the Army was in a no-nonsense mood. Levy was brought before a court-martial and
sentenced to three years in federal prison.
His
martyrdom to conscience made him a cause
celebre in the national media – it was not every day that a medical officer
was sent to prison. But the unflagging US escalation continued, and the Levy
case was soon swallowed up in a cascade of combat stories coming out of
Vietnam. Was it then nothing more than a futile, isolated gesture?
Actually
no, since Dr Levy had been preceded by other GIs breaking ranks. In June
’65, just months after President Johnson’s initial dispatch of the first US
combat units, a West Point graduate in Vietnam refused to board a plane for a
distant outpost, stating that the war was not ‘worth a single American life’.
He was court-martialed and dismissed from the service. Later in the year,
another officer participated in a civilian peace demonstration stateside carrying an antiwar sign. He was given two years at hard labor.
Several
months before Capt Levy spoke up, three privates at Fort Hood TX announced they
would not participate in an immoral war. They too were imprisoned. Just days after
Levy’s conviction in ‘67, two Black Marines were arrested for questioning the
war and in short order sentenced to six and 10 years. In early ’68 an Army
lieutenant was arrested for picketing the White House.
Capt Levy being escorted to the
courtroom, 1967
Other
than the Levy case, these incidents made barely a ripple in the media – the
public barely noticed. The juggernaut rolled on – by December ’65, 165,000
troops had been deployed, and by the end of ’67 the total had topped 485,000. As Soviet
leader Khrushchev aptly noted, America had staggered into a bog and was caught
in a quagmire.
However,
listening to US commander General Westmoreland (Westy), you wouldn’t have known
it. By late ’67 he was speaking optimistically of our progress in the war, but only
a month later the Viet Cong (VC) launched the Tet Offensive against every major
city in South Vietnam. They were defeated militarily, but achieved a tactical
political victory by piercing the illusion of Westy’s rhetoric.
The VC
had penetrated the US Embassy compound in Saigon, and it was seen live on
television back home. After three years of war the American public got its
first sense that all was not going well. To put a fine point on it, the
country’s most trusted broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, concluded a nightly
newscast with the statement, “we are mired in stalemate.”*
By ’67
the public, still largely supportive of the war, had become aware of the
burgeoning civilian antiwar movement – massive marches had been mounted in New
York and Washington – but the notion of unrest over the war in the military had
not registered, not even with civilian activists. No one reading a newspaper or
watching television could have missed the fact that the nation had grown
increasingly divided over the war, but the various isolated incidents of GI
protest – mostly hidden away on military installations – had not resonated.
Then in
’68 amidst the swirl of dramatic political events, a series of incidents at the
Army stockade, the military prison at the Presidio of San Francisco, at last
called attention to rising GI opposition to the war. However, those events
couldn’t have involved men less likely to have spiked interest in the emerging
GI antiwar movement.
Presidio stockade, San Francisco
The
prisoners in that stockade were not antiwar activists. Only a few of the 27 men
involved were even conscious of or interested in the war issue. A couple of the
prisoners had served in Vietnam and were proud of their service while the vast majority
consisted simply of maladjusted young men at odds with the regimentation of
military life.
It was
the Army itself in the person of the commanding general of the Sixth Army who,
through wild overreaction to their behavior and his own exceptionally poor
judgment, managed to convert a gaggle of relatively apolitical prisoners into
martyrs of GI protest.
The
event became known by the misnomer, the ‘Presidio Mutiny’. Originally an 18th century Spanish
fortress, the Presidio of San Francisco sat on a cliff overlooking the Gold
Gate Bridge. Within the complex was the stockade where soldiers violating military
discipline in one way or another were confined to serve short sentences.
Most of
the stockade inmates had gone AWOL – an acronym for ‘away without leave’, a
common offense – and had been caught. The stockade – usually well over capacity
– sometimes had to ration food when the prisoner count soared. Conditions were
miserable – serious overcrowding, too few toilets that regularly backed up, and
arbitrary punishments.
Add to
that poor, if not incompetent, prison administration and grudging, surly guards
– some cruel and sadistic – and the stockade became a potential tinderbox of
unrest and unruly prisoner behavior. One prisoner thought the place resembled
an 1850’s insane asylum.
Daily
routine involved prisoners leaving the barracks under guard for work details on
the grounds of the base – usually mowing lawns, washing cars, chopping firewood,
and the like. Guards were armed with shotguns and had standing orders to shoot
anyone trying to escape. There had been two shooting incidents in the summer of
’68.
_____________________________
The heavy caliber
buckshot hit him in the back,
blowing a hole the size of a grapefruit
_________________________________
That
fall, a mentally unbalanced young GI asked another prisoner for advice on
attempting suicide – a fairly common occurrence at the stockade. He was told half-facetiously that, if all else
failed, he could make a run for it and get shot by a guard. The next morning on
a work detail after taunting the guard, the prisoner did just that – started to
run and was fatally wounded by a shotgun blast.
Looking
at the profiles of the victim and the shooter, there was almost a strange
inevitability that their intersection that day would end in death. Private James
Richard ‘Rusty’ Bunch was a frail, seriously disturbed boy of 19 who had been
in trouble on and off since enlisting in the Army. Caught AWOL, he had arrived
at the Presidio stockade just a few weeks earlier in the fall of ’68.
Even by
the standard for eccentric behavior in the stockade, Rusty stood out as quite
bizarre. He appeared to be living in a fantasy world complete with flying
saucers and Martians. He told fellow prisoners he could walk through walls and
often sat on his bunk conducting two-way conversations with himself and writing
incoherent notes. Before his arrest, he had told his mother he had died twice
and been reincarnated as a male witch.
The
guard in charge of Bunch’s detail was a 22-year old Mexican-American who reportedly
had served as a military policeman (MP) in Vietnam and was due for discharge in
the next few months. He had little experience with the shotgun he carried. The
guard was well aware there had been a recent rash of escape attempts and that a
fellow guard was being court-martialed while two others were being charged for
escapes occurring on their watch.
During a
smoke break, Rusty Bunch speculated aloud to the other three prisoners in the
work detail whether the guard would actually shoot anyone. Hearing this, the
guard said that if he didn’t open fire on someone trying to get away, he
himself would be punished. There were several versions of what Rusty then said
to the guard:
- Will you promise to shoot me?
- I won’t run unless you promise to shoot me.
- Aim for my head.
- You’d better shoot to kill.
And If I run, will you shoot me? to which
the guard replied, You’ll have to run to
find out.
The
guard thought he was kidding – often prisoners would taunt their minders – but
then Rusty started to run. The guard chambered a round, shouldered the weapon,
aimed, and pulled the trigger. Later he said he intended to shoot at the
fleeing man’s buttocks, but the heavy caliber buckshot hit Bunch in the back,
blowing a hole the size of a grapefruit. He died enroute to the hospital.
The brutal
death of Rusty Bunch set off a rumble in the detention barracks – beds were
tossed, windows broken, latrines trashed. That night the prisoners held a
meeting about the killing. All agreed that the victim had been off his rocker.
In a place where behavioral outbursts were not infrequent, Bunch’s strange
pronouncements about supernatural powers and space ships had set him apart.
Confirming his self-destructive intent, death notes were found in his bunk.
Nonetheless,
the inmates were outraged and decided that a non-violent protest against the
shooting and to air their grievances against stockade conditions was called
for. The next day, following morning roll call, 27 of them stepped out of the
ranks, walked to the lawn, and sat down in a circle. They were quickly
surrounded by guards, and the stockade commandant was summoned.
When he
arrived, a prisoner stood up and began reading the list of grievances they had
drawn up, but the officer almost immediately interrupted him. Holding a copy of
the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the commandant began reading aloud
the article on mutiny. When the prisoners started singing to drown him out, he
moved to a command car with a loudspeaker and continued.
Demonstration at
the Presidio stockade, 1968
The group
was ordered to disperse and return to the barracks. Most complied, but some
remained sitting and were carried away by the MPs who had arrived. The 27 were
confined to the barracks while the stockade commander conferred up the chain of
command. In an over-reaction to a peaceful protest, the politically
conservative commanding general of the Sixth Army confirmed the decision to
press mutiny charges against the 27.
A
preliminary inquiry was held before a military judge – the equivalent of a
civilian arraignment – to determine if charges were justified and, if so, under
which article of the UCMJ to proceed in a general court-martial. Army defense
counsel for the 27 argued cogently for a lesser offense than mutiny – willful disobedience
– but the prosecutor, echoing the command line, insisted on going forward with
the extreme charge of mutiny.
A mutiny
conviction in the event of violence carried a maximum penalty of death by
hanging – in other instances life imprisonment. The lesser offense of willful
disobedience entailed a max of three years confinement and a dishonorable discharge.
Obviously, having gotten the word from on high, the presiding judge came down
for mutiny.
Normally,
soldiers charged under the most serious articles of the military code are court-martialed
individually before a military tribunal, but the 27 were broken up into several
groups for a series of collective trials, a procedure which effectively made
defense more difficult.
The
first batch tried – the alleged three ringleaders – were defended by both
military and civilian counsel. Prominent among the latter were Terence Hallinan
and Howard DeNike of the San Francisco bar. Defense counselors did their best
on behalf of their clients in the face of command bias in a system aptly described
as ‘military justice is to justice as military music is to music’. At the heart
of the proceeding were differing perceptions of what had happened to Pvt Bunch,
whose death was the catalyst for the alleged mutiny.
Attorney Terence Hallinan, San
Francisco, 2003
There
was a Rashomon-like quality to the
conflicting versions of prosecution and defense. To an outside observer in
retrospect, the victim had clearly set out and managed to achieve so-called
‘suicide by cop’ or in this instance by armed guard. The competing versions of
Rusty Bunch’s death, however, were irreconcilable – justifiable homicide vs
murder.
Argument
then turned to motive for the ensuing protest, at the core of which was whether
it was simply a peaceful demonstration (the defense), or a mutinous assembly,
an ‘unlawful concert’ in the language of military jurisprudence (the
prosecution).
From
the defense table, motive was described as a reaction to a fellow prisoner’s
death, but the prosecution held a radically different view. For the Army, the intent
of the unlawful concert was antiwar, anti-military, and in opposition to the Johnson
administration.
______________________________________________________
Was the motive
simply a peaceful protest or a mutinous assembly?
_____________________________________________________
The
latter assertion of intent prevailed despite defendant testimony that at the
barracks planning meeting the night before there had been absolutely no
discussion of US policy in Vietnam. In fact, the list of grievances drawn up
had entirely concerned local stockade conditions and the guards’ inhumane
behavior.
The
first trial concluded predictably with a verdict of guilty of mutiny by the
panel of officers. Taking note that no violence had occurred, the court abjured
the maximum penalty but handed down extremely stiff sentences of 14 to 16 years
imprisonment. The defendants were stunned. The San Francisco press promptly ran
news of the heavy sentences, and public outrage in the Bay Area – a hotbed of
antiwar sentiment – was immediately ignited.
The news
and reaction to it soon went national and reached the halls of Congress.
Several members took to the floor in protest, and the phones began ringing at
the executive suites of the Pentagon. It was felt in Washington – both in senior political and military circles – that
the Presidio 27 had been over-charged under the UCMJ and that the sentences
were wildly excessive for what had transpired.
The
Secretary of the Army felt the heat and reacted swiftly. The Sixth Army
commandant was contacted and urged to tone things down in subsequent trials,
but, given the Pentagon’s policy of not interfering in courts-martial within
commands, the general ignored the signal and proceeded with mutiny
prosecutions. But exercising command prerogative, he reduced the sentences to
two to five years, which, however, did not quiet the negative public and
political reaction to the case.
Having
received thousands of letters protesting the sentence, the Secretary of the
Army took action. The Army’s top jurist, who normally reviews all court-martial
verdicts, with barely time to glance at the long trial record quickly reduced
the five-year sentences to two years.
Shocked
by the outcome of the initial proceeding, defense counsel mobilized for the
ensuing courts-martials. Studies were made of the backgrounds of the 27,
and psychiatric expertise enlisted. The survey of the defendants presented a
sad picture of young men from checkered personal situations who were almost
uniformly unfit for military service and unable to adapt to Army life.
___________________________________________
Undeterred,
military justice ground on;
all remaining defendants were convicted.
___________________________________________
They
were largely small town boys from unstable families where alcohol abuse was
rife and children suffered violence. Some of them were runaways, truancy was
not uncommon, and several had been abandoned by one or both parents. Many were
school dropouts or had been expelled. The median education for the 27 was 10th
grade. Some of the soldiers had exceptionally low IQs, well below the Army’s
minimum.
Individual
stories were horrific. One defendant’s mother had been involved with a dozen
men before he was 15 while another never lived in one place longer than 18
months. Most had enlisted to escape from the family or to get out of trouble
with the law. The deceased, Rusty Bunch, who, according to his mother, was a
quiet, religious boy, had joined up when his best friend was drafted.
All of
the 27 had been AWOL, some multiple times. One man went AWOL on his first day
of Basic Training, another took off after just three days in the Army, while
seven others never made it through the eight-week course.
Once in
the stockade, suicide attempts were not infrequent – usually by cutting one’s
wrists – one prisoner who did so was bandaged up and sent back, only to hang
himself with his bandages – or drinking
toxic liquids. In some instances guys were trying to get a psychiatric discharge,
a so-called Section 8, but others were seriously trying to kill themselves, one
man five times.
The
stockade authorities classified all suicide attempts as ‘suicide gestures’
merely designed to gain attention. Usually the man would be patched up and
thrown in an isolation cell on reduced rations. No surprise then that an Army
psychiatrist examining one of these individuals exclaimed, “My God, you’re
insane – what are you doing in the Army?”**
Testifying
for the defense at a follow-on trial, a prominent civilian psychiatrist told
the court that at the time of the demonstration, all 27 “if given proper
psychiatric testing by military authorities, would have been declared unfit for
service.”***
Undeterred,
military justice ground relentlessly on, and all remaining defendants were
convicted. However, the public furor and Pentagon concern over adverse
publicity for the Army had reached such a level that the heretofore obdurate
General Larsen had abandoned his crusade. Sentences went from one extreme to the
other – from the original 16 years to a few months. The rest of the 27 ended up
with three to 15 months confinement time.
By the
conclusion of the final court-martial in June ’69, Pvt Bunch had gone from a
tragic figure to an unintended public martyr to the rise of GI protest against
the Vietnam War. Given his heavy-handed reaction, General Larsen had nearly
singlehandedly stimulated GI antiwar protest and the public’s awareness of it.
No
longer isolated acts, by ’68 GI opposition had begun to come together into at
least an inchoate movement spanning stateside bases, European and Far Eastern
installations, and the military’s most vulnerable point – among the troops in
Vietnam.
Early in
the year, brother Jeff Sharlet, back from his Nam tour, had founded the first
GI-edited antiwar paper addressed to the troops – Vietnam GI (VGI), which,
along with The Bond and The Ally, formed the trio of papers that
inspired the creation of dozens, eventually hundreds, of GI underground base
and unit papers. As the Presidio trials proceeded, VGI and the local GI papers seized on the case as a rallying point.
In 1970
the Presidio Mutiny case gained an enduring place in the annals of the GI
movement thanks to Fred Gardner’s still definitive book – The Unlawful Concert: An Account
of the Presidio Mutiny Case – dedicated to “Jeff Sharlet, founder of Vietnam GI, dead at 27.”
No one
put the impact of the case better than Hal Muskat, a major GI activist of the
day, speaking years later,
The Presidio 27 was the best thing that ever
happened to the GI
movement – it put us
on the front page. ****
_________________________________________________
*CBS
television news, February 27, 1968.
**R
Sherrill, Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music
(1970), 31.
***Ibid, 21.
****G
Nicosia, “The Presidio 27,” Vietnam
Generation, vol 2, no 1 (1990), 77.
