Eight More Characters in Search of Jeff

Paulann Sheets, one time revolutionary

Taking a break on the Mediterranean coast, Paulann Sheets, 1966

          
          Paulann Sheets, nee Hosler, and I first met in an arty town in the Hudson valley north of New York. She was staying at the Morning Glory B+B on Upper Tinker run by an attractive Chinese woman with freckles named Pansy.

          Once an all-American girl, then a student revolutionary, now a counselor of the law with leftward bent, Paulann knew my brother Jeff Sharlet at Indiana University (IU) some 40 years back. She was of good memory.

          Paulann’s life has been an interesting journey. Entering IU as a freshman in ’59, a politically conservative young woman – a Goldwater Republican – within a short time she was an ardent Marxist.

A Nixon supporter in the 1960 presidential campaign, by ’62 Paulann had become a committed Trotskyist. The FBI field office took note, enlisting 11 confidential informants at IU to keep track of her activities. Initially a rah-rah sorority girl, she became a key player in the two most salient events on the left in the history of the university at that time.

Paulann joined the tiny campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), junior affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. IU YSA in turn founded a local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in support of Castro’s Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up in ‘62, YSA and FPCC supported Cuba. When President Kennedy (JFK) blockaded the island to stop Russian missile-carrying freighters, Paulann and comrades announced a protest march against US policy.

Gathering on the steps of the campus auditorium to begin their march, the small band of brothers was stunned to see a sea of angry, shouting students lining their route. Facing the dozen demonstrators were well over a thousand counter-protestors.

The situation was dangerous so the guys decided to defer the protest, but Paulann and Polly Smith, the only women in the group, disagreed and declared their intention to march. With little choice, the young men joined them, and they set off brandishing their colorful signs – Paulann’s, ‘a fierce JFK head on a huge eagle with its talons sunk into the small island of Cuba’.

Within minutes, ugly catcalls began, punches were thrown, and the provocative signs ripped up by enraged young ‘patriots’. Miraculously, the protestors made it to the library and escaped the raging mob.

Several months later the group invited a YSA national officer to speak on campus. Although his remarks were fairly moderate – ‘a sedate, academic affair’ in Paulann’s words – the politically motivated county prosecutor saw it differently.

Partly as payback for their ‘un-American’ pro-Cuban march, he indicted the YSA leaders under Indiana’s anti-communism statute for attempting to overthrow the Government of the United States.

Paulann organized the defense of the ‘Bloomington 3’ (B-3), whose lives would be disrupted for the next two years. She led the ‘Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students’, or CABS, which involved her taking a leave of absence, traveling extensively to publicize the case and raise defense funds. Thanks to her leadership, a prominent radical lawyer joined the case and soon brought to an end the trumped up charges.

Back from the Vietnam War, Jeff returned to IU as the B-3 case was winding down. Paulann well remembered him for his charisma as chair of the campus SDS group. I noted that several others had also referred to Jeff’s charisma. Paulann’s comment—‘How could anyone have missed it’.

Spooks at the rifle range

Specialist-3 John Buquoi (haloed),rifle range, outside Saigon, 1963

 Looks like a picture of regular GIs, doesn’t it? The time late ’63, the place South Vietnam, specifically an Army rifle range. The guy haloed in the middle is John Buquoi, a great friend of brother Jeff.

John and Jeff were soldiers, although in name only, part of the Army Security Agency (ASA)—an autonomous intelligence outfit. ASA’s priorities did not include good marksmanship. The agency prioritized a very different set of skills—training young men, usually college boys, as linguists, cryptographers, and intelligence analysts—a far cry from combat, the heart of the warrior profession.

I too had served in ASA, but in the ‘50s. The setup however was the same John and Jeff experienced—eight weeks of minimal military training before we were sent off for up to a year to acquire specialized skills.

Since John and Jeff looked like regular GIs—ASA was the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington—their superiors occasionally paid lip service to the soldierly calling with a little close-order drill or a tune-up trip to the rifle range.

John Buquoi followed Jeff at the Army Language School where they met. Completing his Vietnamese language course, he was dispatched to Saigon. Jeff met him on arrival and gave John a kind of social introduction to Vietnam, a tour of Saigon’s great bars and cafés.

Taxiing into town, they set off on a whirlwind pub crawl starting at the Papillon and ending many hours later at the Happy Bar. Along the way, they dined at the Peacock where 60 piasters (50 US cents back then) bought them a steak (probably water buffalo), fries, salad, and a Vietnamese beer to wash it down.

On another night out, they were approaching one of Jeff’s favorite places—French style, Vietnamese run—and were stunned by an explosion at the café just ahead on the street.

Two Viet Cong (VC) ‘cowboys’ had sped by on a motor scooter and rolled a grenade into the place. Injuries were fortunately very minor. The guys peeked in and walked on. VC street bombings were not infrequent in the South Vietnamese capital.

Later both John and Jeff were assigned to Phu Bai in the far north of the country. Occasionally they borrowed a jeep and drove down Highway 1 for a weekend in Danang on the coast, staying at a hotel.

Another time driving over the high mountain pass enroute, they turned on to a side road. Down below poking into the South China Sea was a small verdant peninsula. The two young GIs mused, wouldn’t it be a great place to set up a gambling casino after the war.

That was early ’64, and of course neither could foresee the war would go on for many years.  

John later told me that some of their buddies became Vietophiles while others were Vietophobes, but Jeff was neither. He was a realist, skeptical about the US mission in Vietnam, and critical of the emerging war.

Fred Gardner, antiwar impresario

Fred Gardner in recent times

           Fred Gardner never got the credit he deserved for the rise of the GI movement against the Vietnam War. Trained as an Army reservist, he remembered the sleazy GI town near the base with its grungy bars and dives. With that and his growing opposition to the war in mind, Fred came up with the idea of setting up coffee houses for GIs near major base camps as alternative hangouts.

They’d be pleasant places where a GI could get away from the military milieu – to drink coffee, listen to some music, and, especially, peruse the small but growing number of underground antiwar papers, notable among them brother Jeff’s Vietnam GI.

Start-up capital was needed, so Fred turned to the New Left antiwar movement for help. He got a cold shoulder—the New Left at the time was hostile to GIs, saying they were ‘no better than cops’. Like Jeff, Fred knew differently—there were many GIs with doubts about the war.

With $10,000 of money he raised, he and two friends opened the first GI coffee house near Fort Jackson, SC. In a play on the WWII USO canteens offering troops sandwiches and a little entertainment, they called their place the ‘UFO’. It soon attracted hundreds of off-duty GIs. 

More such venues followed, the next one outside Fort Leonard Wood, MO; then another near the gates of Fort Hood, TX – the lively Oleo Strut. The Army took notice and, in collusion with local authorities, orchestrated a harassment campaign against the new GI gathering places.

Nonetheless, Fred’s idea took off and new GI coffee houses began springing up at bases all over the country. With few exceptions, harassment was the norm, and in some instances anonymous violence— in Idaho the Covered Wagon was firebombed one night, while a grenade was tossed into the coffee house near Fort Dix, NJ.

Fred has had an extensive career as a writer and editor. Starting with the Harvard Crimson, he wrote for the critical magazine of the day, Ramparts; served as an editor at Scientific American; and frequently contributed to other publications.

In 1971, he published a widely read, still definitive book, The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case, an account of a major event in antiwar history. Fred dedicated his book to Jeff:

Jeff Sharlet, founder of

Vietnam GI,

dead at 27

Once upon a time in Indianapolis

 (Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, as the saying goes.  That is precisely what happened to Karen Grote Ferb on July 23, 1966.  Here’s the story she related to me.)

Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Indianapolis, IN

In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) made a Midwestern swing for the off-year congressional elections that included Indianapolis (Indy) IN in the heartland.

My old friend Jeff Sharlet was spending the summer there working on the railroad, and I often went up from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington to spend weekends with him; one of those weekends LBJ spoke at Indy’s downtown Monument Circle. 

The IU New Left planned to welcome the president with a peaceful antiwar protest. I went up to Indy to join them the night before.  Jeff, disappointed that he had to work that sultry Saturday, dropped me off at the rally point early. 

I joined a handful of protesters, parade permit in hand and antiwar signs at the ready.  That’s as close as we got to protesting.  In short order, cops arrived and told us to move. Showing our permit, we refused. Then they returned with Chief Jones, a good-sized man wearing a tan trench coat, a brown fedora, and an annoyed expression.

Unbeknownst to the IU activists, the feds and local law enforcement had worked together to preempt the protest. License numbers of their cars had been relayed ahead, and the Indy police arrested them on arrival.

Each time the paddy wagon filled up, the group was transported to a sheriff’s bus out of sight of the crowd, the press, and especially the president’s podium. LBJ finished speaking and left for a businessmen’s luncheon where he ironically declared, “We will abide civil protest” as the would-be protesters were carted off to jail. 

Chief Jones thought the roundup of the protesters with their “lousy signs” was a good idea, but the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) immediately protested: 

It is incredible that responsible public officials would utilize the power of their position in such a flagrant suppression of the efforts of the citizens to exercise their fundamental right of freedom of expression. 

By dark we’d all been released. A small crowd of supporters awaited us outside the jail. Jeff was there, quietly outraged.  He intuitively understood how frightened I’d been and how anxious I was about the pending court case. 

That Sunday’s New York Times gave the story brief coverage in the back pages, saying the president had vigorously defended his Vietnam War policy before a crowd of several thousand at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis.

As for the thwarted protesters, the report included a statement by a sheriff’s deputy that we might be kept overnight and charged with breaking up a public meeting.  Only one arrestee was named, IU Professor James Dinsmoor, charged with interfering with the police.

When I came to trial, the initial charge of Disorderly Conduct had morphed into Resisting Arrest. The arresting officer falsely testified I had struck him with my sign. I was nonplussed and felt little satisfaction with my eventual verdict of not guilty. 

Dan Kaplan, to create a better world

Dan Kaplan, SDS chair (carrying books), leading a demo, Indiana University, 1967

A teenage stalwart, Dan has done it all – civil rights activism, SDS leader, Trotskyist journeyman, antiwar organizer, college professor, and longtime union activist.

At a New Left reunion in 2013, Dan, conceding that their side hadn’t been winning the battle for fundamental social change, said he still remained committed to engaging in the struggle ‘to create a better world’.

Dan knew Jeff at their alma mater, Indiana University (IU), succeeding him as president of the campus SDS chapter. Dan remembered him well.

They first met at an SDS meeting. Both were following the discussion with interest when someone remarked that since Jeff was an ex-Vietnam GI, he should be asked his opinion on the matter.

Dan, a freshman, recalled being amazed that the activist next to him had been in the war. Turning to Jeff, he asked, ‘Are you really a Vietnam veteran?’‘Yes, I am’, Jeff said, ‘but this is where I really belong.’

Later that year, Jeff as SDS leader gave a speech at a rally Dan has always remembered, a demo outside the residence of the university president. Jeff opened, saying ‘This is the second time in my life that I’ve belonged to an organization run by Elvis Stahr’.

He explained that he had served in Vietnam under Stahr as Secretary of the Army, and was now again under his aegis as President of IU. Rhetorically, Jeff asked why a man of the ‘war machine’ was qualified to be president of an institution of higher learning, then answered that in various ways the American university system served the military-industrial complex, hence senior personnel of the two organizations had become interchangeable.

Jeff went on to grad school at University of Chicago with a prestigious national fellowship. Dan’s memory of their last encounter had an elegiac tone.

Jeff told Dan he had decided to drop out of Chicago, instead using his fellowship funds to launch a much needed GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI.  Dan expressed surprise that Jeff was throwing away a coveted fellowship at a distinguished university. Jeff replied– and presciently, given his short but interesting life:

He told me that this was what he wanted to do at this time in his
life.  And that he thought this would be the most important thing he had ever done. 

Anti-hero of GI protest

Grave marker, Pvt James Richard 'Rusty' Bunch, 1949-1968

High above San Francisco Bay sat a nondescript white stone building, the Army stockade at the Presidio of San Francisco. The majority of the prisoners there were maladjusted soldiers serving short-term sentences, mostly for AWOL  (absent without leave).

In the fall of ’68, conditions at the stockade were seriously wanting – it was badly over-crowded with insufficient sanitation facilities and sometimes short rations. Many of the GI prisoners were a disorderly bunch–some had gone AWOL during their first days and weeks in the Army, others multiple times.

A number of them came from unstable homes, were poorly educated, and generally unable to adapt to military life. Mental illness was not uncommon among the prisoners, some of whom repeatedly attempted suicide.

Among this odd lot, one young prisoner stood out as truly bizarre. From his arrival at the stockade barracks, it was apparent to all that Private James Richard ‘Rusty’ Bunch was a very strange bird. He often conducted two-way conversations with himself; fantasized about space ships; believed he had been reincarnated; and claimed he could walk through walls.

He was clearly suicidal, asking a bunk mate the best way to do it–slashing wrists, drinking a toxic fluid, or trying to escape while under guard. The guards had standing orders to shoot fleeing prisoners. Rusty chose to run, and died of a shotgun blast.

The next day 27 prisoners protested his death and prison conditions generally with a sit-down. Refusing an order to disperse, they were arrested. The 27 were charged not with ‘Willful disobedience to orders’ entailing a light sentence, but the extreme charge of ‘Mutiny’ calling for death or life imprisonment.

None of the offenders had expressed any interest in the war–Vietnam was not their issue, stockade conditions were – but the Army prosecutor construed their actions as antiwar and anti-military. The alleged ringleaders were court-martialed first and got 14 and 15 year sentences.

The heavy sentences for a peaceful protest immediately ignited press and public reaction in the San Francisco Bay area. Jeff’s Vietnam GI got on the story as outrage spread quickly throughout the broad antiwar community.

The Presidio case soon took on national dimensions, reaching the halls of Congress. The Pentagon hastily reduced the sentences, but it was too late; and GI protest, heretofore buried in the back pages, became national news.

No matter that not one of the Presidio 27 was protesting the war; in the public mind the late Pvt Rusty Bunch went from a tragic figure to an unintended martyr to the GI cause, or, as a GI antiwar activist later put it.

The Presidio 27 was the best thing that ever happened to the GI movement – it put us on the front page.

Dave Komatsu, keeper of memories

Header for Dave Komatsu's obituary for Jeff, Vietnam GI, 1969

Perhaps no one knew Jeff in his last years as well as Dave Komatsu of Chicago. Jeff harbored a big vision of how to stop the war; Dave helped him realize it. The two first met through a mutual friend in New York, summer, ’67. The rest is antiwar history.

Dave, an exceptionally bright and insightful individual, skeptical of all certainties, had long been a left activist. He led a breakaway faction of the American Socialist Party that became the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL).

Dave and Kit, his wife, set up a newspaper for YPSL, American Socialist, a briskly written, well-edited tabloid Jeff happened to read and admire.

Returning from the Vietnam War, Jeff planned to organize GIs to oppose the war from within the military, a formidable undertaking. Dave suggested an interim step, a newsletter or bulletin reflecting GI opinion.

Thus was born Jeff’s antiwar underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI), which soon became a platform for raising GI political consciousness and encouraging self-organizing against the war. An instant success from the initial issue, VGI ultimately inspired dozens of antiwar papers created by serving GIs.

Jeff’s aim was to mobilize GIs to bring the war to a halt, but unfortunately his time was cut short. An illness he first experienced in the Vietnam bush resurfaced and took his life.
 Dave had known my brother much better than I. For me Jeff was a much younger sibling, while Dave remembered him as a man he greatly admired. He compared Jeff’s tightly wound power and self-containment to Steve McQueen's racing car driver in the film Le Mans.

 Many obits on Jeff appeared in the underground press, but Dave’s, in a posthumous edition of Vietnam GI, was the most eloquent, the most poetic, as reflected in the opening and closing lines:

 Many good men never came back from Nam. Some came back disabled in mind. Jeff Sharlet came back a pretty together cat – and he came back angry. Jeff started VGI and, for almost two years poured his life into it, in an endless succession of 18-hour days, trying to organize men to fight for their rights.

                                          …

[At the end] he said he had many new ideas
for our fight, but was just too exhausted to talk about them.

Tran Van Don, coup-maker

Major General Tran Van Don, South Vietnam, 1963

The Vietnam War was not going well in ’63; the Viet Cong controlled much of the rural countryside. South Vietnam’s President Diem was a generally benign but inept leader. There was much dissatisfaction among the populace as well as the elites.

Minority Catholics, Diem and his brother Nhu, the secret police chief, ordered a violent assault on the Buddhist clergy. For the army generals, mostly Buddhists, who long felt that both the war and the country itself were being badly mismanaged, that was the last straw.

General Don was delegated to find out what the US would think of a coup. He contacted an old friend, a CIA officer at the embassy. The US was secretly supportive – Washington was fed up with Diem’s ineffective leadership.

Born in France of Vietnamese parents, educated in Paris before WWII, Tran Van Don had been a senior officer in the South Vietnamese Army since the establishment of the republic in the mid-‘50s. He held the trust of both the general staff and the presidential palace.

Late summer/early fall ‘63, Don and Lucien Conein (US liaison to the plotters) maintained surreptitious contact. Although Jeff never met Conein, he and fellow Vietnamese linguists were part of his operation. From a secret location outside the capital, they clandestinely monitored the generals’ communications as backup to Conein’s meetings with General Don.

The day before the planned coup, Don tried again to persuade Diem to change his policies asking, ‘Can you make some changes to your domestic policy by reopening the pagodas, freeing the monks and nuns, and bringing about a more flexible government?’

       His plea was to no avail, the president replied, ‘No, there is nothing to do … the situation is fine.’ The next day the generals carried out the coup. Diem and Nhu were executed. General Don was distressed; they were supposed to have been sent into exile.

Oleo Strut – Front Line of GI Protest

Fall 2011, the ‘Austin Lounge Lizards’ and ‘The Possum Posse’ played a benefit concert in the Texas state capital for a contemporary GI coffee house 70 miles down the road in an obscure small town not far from Fort Hood, home to the largest number of GIs in the US. There was much history in the moment. ‘Under the Hood Café and Outreach Center’ sits in a modest building on a side street of Killeen, direct successor to the Oleo Strut GI coffee house of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. The wars are different, Vietnam then, Afghanistan today, but the operators of the café and the coffee house share/shared a common opposition to raging wars
which have taken their toll on Ft Hood troops.

As the Vietnam War intensified in ’67, Fred Gardner and a few friends decided it was time to focus on GIs in the antiwar protest equation, up to that time mostly visible as a civilian movement. He approached the SDS leadership with the idea of opening several GI coffee houses outside major military camps. His idea was that the coffee houses would become venues for developing GI organizers for the creation of a GI antiwar movement as well as hip places where off-duty military personnel could relax and read antiwar papers if interested. SDS blew Fred off in what we might be called a failure of analysis – not being able to imagine GIs who were equally opposed to the war and had far more at stake. He was surprised by their unwillingness to act on the idea, then figured it was up to him. Later, seeing Fred’s early success in South Carolina, SDS came around and supported the initiative.

Fred opened the first coffee house near Fort Jackson SC by rounding up private funding with the assistance of Donna Mickleson of Berkeley. He called it the ‘UFO’ in a kind of play on USO or the United Service Organization, the mainstream off-base organization catering to GIs and military personnel. The UFO was a big hit with a lot of young Basic trainees who were not enthusiastic about the Army or the war, so plans were laid to open coffee houses elsewhere. The second one, called Mad Anthony’s Headquarters in the little town outside Fort Leonard Wood MO, was run by Judy Olasov , a University of South Carolina student volunteer from the UFO.

The next location scheduled was near Fort Polk LA, but the local authorities were so hostile that they hustled the organizers out of town almost immediately. Instead, during summer ’68, ‘Oleo Strut’ became the third coffee house outside Fort Hood TX. Named for a helicopter shock absorber, the ‘Strut’ was co-managed by Josh Gould, a civil rights activist, and Janet ‘Jay’ Lockard, a Radcliffe dropout. Among the early staff volunteers were Tom Cleaver, an ex-Vietnam sailor; the late Dave Cline, a thrice-wounded Vietnam combat veteran who had mustered out at Fort Hood; and David Zeiger, decades later the director of Sir! No Sir!, the award-winning documentary on Vietnam GI antiwar protest dedicated to Jeff Sharlet and ex-Vietnam Marine John Kniffen.

Home for the ‘Strut’ was a storefront on the main drag of the small grungy army town of Killeen a couple of miles from Fort Hood, stateside base for the 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions. The base was a small city in itself with 39,000 troops either bound for or just returning from Vietnam, and 65,000 military dependents in the environs. Some 2/3rds of the troops had served their 12 months in Nam and were ‘short-timers’, army slang for guys waiting out the remaining months on their service obligation.

♫So kiss me and smile for me, tell me that you’ll wait for me

Hold me like you’ll never let me go.

‘Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again

Oh, babe, I hate to go*

Killeen itself was grimsville USA, or as a Washington Post story described it, “a forlorn, single-story town that looks like a set from Bonnie and Clyde.”** The Strut was on Avenue D, a street lined with loan sharks, pawn shops, pin ball joints, a pool room, greasy spoons, and rip-off flashy jewelry and clothing stores, in a word, a typical garrison town. The Strut staff operated as a social collective, earning very modest wages for serving coffee, cider, and soda as well as doughnuts, pie, and ice cream and rapping with GIs who came through the door. The place had light yellow walls with about 20 tables covered with orange cloths. GIs were welcome to play the stereo in the corner with its collection of rock and pop records.

GI protest and movement literature, including Jeff Sharlet’s Vietnam GI (VGI), was available for reading or carrying back to the post. House copies of Rolling Stone and Village Voice were on hand as well. On the walls were giant foto blow-ups of Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Malcolm X, and Mohammad Ali among others. When possible on weekends, the Strut booked music groups from Austin, the capital, for a nominal door charge of 50 cents a head. Occasionally nationally known musicians would perform, one time the folkie Pete Seeger, on another occasion Barbara Dane the folk, blues, and jazz singer. There was an unwritten rule on drugs, ‘no holding, no scoring’.

The Oleo Strut was a venue for performers such as Barbara Dane, right

Getting the Strut up and running in a gung ho army town and keeping it going was not easy. Harassment was a regular occurrence – by the cops and civil authorities, by local rednecks nicknamed ‘goat ropers’, and by the military. Most common was being flagged down for alleged traffic infractions, being singled out for parking tickets where no other violators were ticketed, and being stopped for ID checks while walking in town. The Killeen Fire Department dropped by frequently for quickie inspections and gigs. David Zeiger remembered being arrested several times – for hitchhiking, for swearing in front of a cop, and once for having a dirty license plate. Civil and military surveillance occurred when the Strut staff organized outdoor events. Local police, Military Police (MPs), Army criminal investigators, and even the FBI would show up, snapping fotos of the activists.

The teenage cowboys, the goat ropers, sons of the town fathers whom the cops tended to view benignly, would attempt to break up off-premise Strut events, or cruise by the storefront trying to pick fights with the GIs. They generally threatened to destroy the establishment; the smashed front window may have been their work. By far though, the most dangerous harassment came from the local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). One time a carload of Klansmen with an M-16 drew up to the lead car of a caravan carrying Strut people to a Houston demo and tried to shoot out its tires. Other times the KKK would circle the house where the staff collective lived, leaving behind stickers saying “The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are watching you.”

The Oleo Strut drew full houses its first summer of ’68 in spite of the hassles and became the hub of GI antiwar organizing to the deep chagrin of the Hood brass: In-house, around town, and even on base through sympathetic GIs picnics were held; teach-ins staged; GI papers, especially VGI, the Ally, and the Bond, were surreptitiously distributed at Hood; and later, marches were organized and GIs driven up to Austin for political events. The Strut also assisted antiwar GIs with launching their new underground paper, Fatigue Press, an alternative to the official Fort Hood paper, the Armored Sentinel. However, by far the most momentous event for which the coffee house served as a kind of communications and coordination center was the Fort Hood Strike of August ’68.

Since most of the Vietnam veterans at Hood were ‘short’ in terms of army time and had no formal duties to speak of, they were trained for riot-control duty. Black uprisings in the northern urban ghettos had begun in ’65 and spread to major cities across the country. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, spring ’68, Fort Hood riot control troops had been airlifted to Chicago to help cope with the ensuing Black riots. As the Democratic National Convention scheduled for Chicago late August ‘68 approached and the New Left had announced its intention to disrupt the event, plans were afoot at Hood to again dispatch troops to assist the Chicago police.

Just before liftoff, 43 Black soldiers refused to board the planes and deploy against their own people in the ghetto. To avert any suggestion that they were cowards, only Nam vets who had won the Bronze Star for valor and had been wounded in battle participated in the refusal. Fort Hood command reacted predictably – first trying to cajole wayward troops, then sending in the MPs to beat them, and finally bringing severe charges against the 43 soldiers.

The incident and the Strut’s role in the affair brought renewed joint civil-military pressure on the coffee house. Just hours before heading to the airport to fly to Chicago for the great protest against the Democrats, co-manager Josh Gould was stopped by the police for allegedly making an illegal right turn and then charged with possession of marijuana after the cops claimed they found a few grains on the car floor. Bail was set at $50,000. Two weeks later, after finally identifying him as the underground editor of Fatigue Press, Private Bruce ‘Gypsy’ Petersen was arrested on another setup drug charge while “standing in front of the Oleo Strut.”*** Subsequently convicted, sentenced to 8 years in prison, and dishonorably discharged, he was eventually exonerated, although it took 18 months to get him out of Leavenworth.

Coffee counter at the Oleo Strut

Photo courtesy of the Roz Payne Archives

Many years later in a memoir by a former Counter Intelligence (CI) officer at Fort Hood, the full extent of command’s disquiet over Oleo Strut in their midst as a threat to the ‘good order and discipline’ of the Army was revealed. Posted to CI in the spring of ’68, the young officer found that the only files the section maintained were mainly dossiers tracking the activities of the civilian and GI activists at the Strut. His first assignment was to operate as a plain clothes undercover agent visiting the Strut regularly for the purpose of coming up with something which would justify placing it ‘off limits’ to military personnel. A budding antiwar GI, the lieutenant chose to quietly cast himself as a ‘double agent’, nominally representing the military, but privately protecting the Strut. As he put it, “I planned to see as little as possible and above all, to keep completely to myself whatever I did observe that might potentially incriminate someone.”****

GIs rapping at the Strut under the gaze of Muhammad Ali on the wall, ‘68

Photo courtesy of the Roz Payne Archives

Throughout his tenure as VGI editor Jeff Sharlet travelled the country frequently, visiting GI coffee houses and nearby bases, interviewing returning Nam vets, counseling GIs considering starting underground papers, and raising money to support the printing and distribution of VGI. In late November ’68, Jeff spent a week at the Oleo Strut, talking with staff, rapping with GIs, and enjoying the music. It was there he and Tom Cleaver were reunited; as young ex-Vietnam veterans, the two had met and hung out in Chicago, summer ’67. Tom was the Strut’s music coordinator, bringing music groups down from Austin. Jeff also met Dave Cline in late '68; he had just gotten out of the hospital, having recovered from wounds received in Vietnam, and would return to work at the Strut after his discharge from the army.  That was to be Jeff’s last trip since the illness which took his life seven months later had begun taking its toll.

From its inception in July ’68, the Oleo Strut, a front line strong point in the GI resistance movement, continued on until ’72, although along the way it was often staggered by financial problems, riven by internal political differences, and shorthanded on staff as dedicated volunteers came and went during that transient time of their young lives. Nevertheless, the Strut in particular and the coffee houses in general were, as an expert has written, “central to the rise of a broader, global” GI antiwar movement.*****  The contemporary Under the Hood Cafe carries on the work today.  It was created in '09 on the initiative of Tom Cleaver with the assistance of fellow '60's activists Alice Embree, Jim Retherford, and Jeff Segal, among others.

 *Leavin’ on a Jet Plane by John Denver, 1966
**Washington Post, 14 July 1968
***Vietnam GI, Stateside edition, August 1968
****Michael Uhl, Vietnam Awakening (2007)
*****Derek Seidman, The Unquiet Americans: GI Dissent during the Vietnam War (2010)