Unsung Hero of GI Resistance

It was pure serendipity when Jeff and Tom met in June of ‘67. Jeff was about to graduate from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington in the middle of the American heartland, while Tom lived uptown in Manhattan in New York. Jeff Sharlet was New Left, president of IU SDS; Tom Barton was Old Left, a longtime activist. Rarely the twain met, but Tom, a so-called faculty brat in town to visit his parents, happened to be walking by just as events leading to Jeff’s arrest were unfolding —more about that further on.

Tom Barton had been something of a local legend during his student days at IU. At that time in the ‘50s, ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, was compulsory for male students on many campuses. In 1960, Tom led student opposition to the ROTC requirement, a protest that was inevitably received unfavorably by the Board of Trustees. Conscription was the order of the day in Cold War America, and the trustee chairman also happened to chair the local draft board. Although an enrolled grad student in good standing, Tom suddenly received a draft call, its retaliatory intent transparent.

He applied for Conscientious Objector (CO) status, entailing two years alternate service, but was rejected. There were procedural irregularities in the board’s decision, and Tom refused induction. The FBI was called in, he was arrested, and his case turned over to the US Attorney for southern Indiana for prosecution for draft evasion. Undaunted, Tom appealed to Selective Service headquarters in Washington. Given the punitive nature of his draft call and the IU trustee’s egregious conflict of interest in the matter, the government dropped charges against Tom and granted him CO status.

He performed his alternate service with the Peace Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, an organization active in the anti-nuclear protests sweeping the country. There he organized local chapters of the Student Peace Union (SPU), a 200-strong group drawn from area colleges and universities and served as Regional Director for the Philadelphia area. In effect, Tom Barton fulfilled his obligation and emerged a seasoned peace activist, experience he would carry into anti-Vietnam War protest later in the ‘60s

When Jeff and Tom first crossed paths, Jeff and fellow SDS leader Jim Wallihan were leading a demo near campus against local merchants, especially a pizza joint that had refused service to high school hippies. The protest, held in front of the doughnut shop across the street from the joint, was peaceful and orderly, perhaps with a few chants in the air. One of the shop owners called the cops, several uniforms and plainclothesmen arrived in four cars. As they pushed the group back off the sidewalk, an IU student began to address the group of demonstrators. A detective grabbed the kid, cuffed him roughly, and shoved him into one of the patrol cars where he began beating him with a flashlight.

Witnessing the arrest, Tom Barton called out, “Get his name.” At that moment another cop collared him saying “That’s all for you buddy” and he too was put in the back of the cruiser, as it happened in the custody of a young cop who turned out to be Tom’s high school classmate. Jeff and others protested the cops’ behavior, and were also arrested. Tom got bailed out and the next day wrote up a broadside describing the entire incident, especially the heavy-handed tactics of the abusive detective. The broadside circulated both in town and on campus and would eventually help Jeff in court, but, more important in the long run, Jeff and Tom would find themselves shoulder to shoulder on the antiwar barricades.

That summer Jeff went to New York, first stopping to meet Jan Barry and join his newly organized Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Afterward, he dropped by to see his new friend Tom Barton. Tom in turn introduced Jeff to his friend, Dave Komatsu, visiting from Chicago. Earlier Tom and Dave had been fellow members of a breakaway group from the American Socialist Party and on the board of the group’s paper. Jeff had mentioned to Tom he hoped to find a way to give active duty GIs opposed to the war a voice in the rising national chorus of protest.

Dave Komatsu was the perfect guy to hook up with. A long-time left activist, Dave knew his way around Chicago where Jeff was headed that fall for grad school at University of Chicago. Jeff was thinking of an underground paper for GIs, and Dave and his wife Kit had had earlier experience writing and producing an off-beat, low budget political paper, American Socialist. During fall term ’67, Jeff and Dave brainstormed the idea. Jeff the ex-GI had the contacts, while Dave had the know-how in putting out a paper, a match made in heaven. Start-up money was the only remaining piece of the project. Jeff solved that by withdrawing from grad school and using his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds to launch Vietnam GI (VGI) in early ’68 as the first GI-edited antiwar underground paper for active duty GIs.

VGI front page, June ‘69

Jeff and Dave needed help getting VGI to the troops in Vietnam. They had acquired a mailing list of left-leaning GIs, but Chicago, a hotbed of activism, was a magnet for federal, military, and local surveillance against the New Left and antiwar activists in general. The FBI worked hand in glove with suspicious US postal authorities on the lookout for cheap 3rd class printed matter, especially to Army APO addresses through which all mail to troops abroad passed. Undercover Army Counter-Intelligence agents operating out of Fort Sheridan in northern Illinois monitored all expressions of opposition to the war, while Mayor Daly’s police ‘Red Squad’ specialized in low-level harassment.

Re-enter Tom Barton who volunteered to help distribute VGI internationally, especially to Vietnam. Not that the Feds and the military were quiescent in New York, but the metro area was so huge and diverse that it was harder to keep an eye on. Hence, Jeff unobtrusively shipped big boxes of VGI to Tom, who would pick them up at the 14th Street Post Office near where he lived. He in turn, using various innocent-sounding, fictitious return addresses as well as diverse mail drops to avoid attention, transshipped the copies to GI subscribers in Vietnam. Multiple copies went to a cadre of mail clerks and combat troopers throughout South Vietnam who had written, offering to surreptitiously ‘distribute’ the ‘seditious’ paper in their units.

Tom became VGI’s East Coast Distributor for the New York metro area. This also included organizing fellow activists to hand out VGI at the Port Authority bus terminal through which soldiers and airmen returning to bases in the region passed, and even handing out copies to GIs on duty at an antiwar rally in Washington. However, to avoid unwanted notice from the authorities, his name didn’t appear on the masthead. Nevertheless, Tom Barton was a key member of the team which made VGI a great success early on as a global phenomenon wherever US troops were based.

Time moved on: Jeff died in ’69, a week later SDS imploded, and Nixon began the long de-escalation. Three ex-GIs – John Alden, David Patterson aka Joe Harris, and Craig Walden – took over VGI, carrying it forward til summer ’70 when the funding, always in short supply, dried up.

As VGI was winding down, Tom became a member of the editorial board for Wildcat, a new publication directed at industrial workers. By then VGI had inspired some 300 GI antiwar papers flying under the radar at US bases all over the world. GI protest grew powerful and contributed to war’s end, but in time it was lost to historical memory as America put an unpopular conflict behind it and the Cold War rolled on.

During the ensuing years, Tom Barton, a New York hospital worker and union shop steward, tried from time to time to keep memory of Jeff alive, once writing to Hanoi to suggest that the Vietnamese recognize the role of Jeff and GI protest in bringing the war to an end; another time giving an interview with Jim Wallihan about Jeff to IU’s hometown paper. Finally, during the Iraq War of ’03, Tom saw his opportunity to reprise Vietnam GI. He launched GI Special, a hard hitting, online anti-Iraq War daily. At the time I was seeking people who knew Jeff for a memoir on his short but interesting life. I didn’t know Tom Barton or his part in the GI resistance movement until Karen, the “Indiana Surprise” of the May 25, 2011 post, came up with an early Internet issue of Tom’s newsletter that re-ran Dave Komatsu’s long obit on Jeff from VGI of  summer '69.

 

Typical ‘bring the troops home’ leader

When I contacted Tom, one of the first things he said was that he saw himself following in Jeff’s footsteps with GI Special as successor to VGI. As formal hostilities ended in Iraq, but conflict between Iraqi resistance groups and US troops raged on for years, Tom’s lone antiwar voice gained readership among troops in the field as well as civilians in the States and abroad in over 90 countries. Tom became a co-founder of the Military Project and its periodical Traveling Soldier and helped ex-GIs organize the Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW) in the spirit of VVAW. For years since, the Military Project has made complete xerox sets of VGI issues available on request at nominal cost to Tom’s newsletter readers.

Tom Barton addressing the Military Project, ‘08

In recent years GI Special morphed into the current Military Resistance, now with much greater coverage of the intensified fighting in Afghanistan. Every day after work, Tom Barton puts out the day’s news on the war from both off-beat and mainstream media (“101st Airborne lost 131, the most killed in a single deployment since Vietnam”); as well as stories from the contemporary GI coffee houses that have sprung up near stateside bases; and, always relentlessly, the latest obits from local papers throughout the country lest the losses become aggregate abstractions, many from small towns rarely heard of—Ashford AL, Centennial CO, Checotah OK, Immokalee FL—with sad headers like:

Attack in Kabul Kills Austin Soldier

Marine Lance Cpl Jason Barfield Killed in Combat 10/24/11 in Helmland, Afghanistan

Sgt Alessandro Plutino, a US Army Ranger, Was Killed Monday

Killed by a Taliban Bomb, the Devoted Teenage Mother Who Joined the Military to Fund the Dream of Becoming a Nurse

Sgt Jeremy King: A soldier’s death isn’t anything like the movies. There was no patriotic music, there was no feeling of purpose. It’s just … death

Marine Lt James Cathey coming home from Iraq, Reno NV

Photo credit Todd Heisler, Rocky Mountain News

In ’04 when film maker David Zeiger approached Tom Barton for advice on a documentary about the Vietnam GI resistance movement, Tom told him the first thing to do was read the entire run of Vietnam GI, which he gave him. A year later when Sir! No Sir!, the first film on Vietnam GI protest, was premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, it was dedicated to ‘Jeff Sharlet, Founding Editor of Vietnam GI ’.

Let’s hear it for Tom Barton, heretofore unsung hero of GI resistance, past and present.

Subversion by Newspaper

1968, the third year of the American war in Vietnam. Concurrently, the broader, global Cold War was approaching its quarter-century mark. It’s sometimes forgotten that the Vietnam War was but one of a number of proxy wars between the two great Cold War adversaries of the last half of the 20^th century, the US and the USSR. An understandable lapse. The war in Vietnam was live-fire, blood and guts, while the Cold War dragged on for decades of feints, threats, bluffs, and secret operations that rarely came to light.

Brother Jeff Sharlet fought the Vietnam War as a GI, and then fought against it as a leader of GI antiwar protest. I preceded him as a Cold War soldier in Europe in the ‘50s, later becoming a scholar of the Cold War. Jeff’s ‘weapon’ against his war was Vietnam GI (VGI), the underground paper he created in early ’68 to give voice to GI dissent. At the same time, two law profs and I were completing a study for the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (USACDA) preparing for SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. SALT-1 eventually yielded the first arms control treaty between United States and the Soviet Union.

We analyzed all aspects of Soviet law for its potential to obstruct on-site arms verification on Soviet territory in the event the two sides agreed on a treaty to slow the nuclear arms race. We found many opportunities for legal obfuscation and concealment, finally leading US treaty negotiators to insist on “national technical means of verification.”

Since ’56, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Air Force (USAF) had been conducting manned U-2 flights over Soviet territory well above the range of their anti-aircraft defenses.  That came to an abrupt end on May Day, 1960 when the Soviets brought down pilot Francis Gary Powers with a recently developed ground-to-air missile, the SAM-2 – later used with deadly effect against American planes attacking North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

North Vietnamese SAM-2 battery

As a result of the ‘U-2 incident’, the CIA accelerated the ongoing development of a series of unmanned spy satellites capable of photographing objects as small as one to two feet on the ground below. A recon satellite would be launched in an orbit taking it over Soviet missile sites. The vehicle would then fly on over the Pacific where on remote command it would release a capsule with the film canister at a pre-determined location northwest of Hawaii.  At a top secret facility on an air base in the Islands, the USAF maintained planes specially equipped to recover the capsule by snatching it in mid-air as it descended by parachute, a tricky maneuver. The base also included helicopters with specially trained crews for rescuing pilots who crashed in the ocean.

The younger brother of Jan Barry, the ex-Vietnam GI co-founder of VVAW, Vietnam Veterans against the War, was an airman at that base while Jan was working on VGI with Jeff, my brother. Recently, Jan posted on his blog* the unusual story of his brother and VGI:

           

“Sometime in the spring of 1968, my brother Ted visited me in New

            York City and drolly told a story about how a copy of Vietnam GI had

            set off a big commotion in an Air Force special operations unit. It seems

            that a copy of the paper mysteriously appeared on the commanding

            officer’s desk in a highly secure area of a base in Hawaii. …

            Spying my name among the culprits on the masthead of this antiwar

            rag, Air Force investigators called in the FBI and targeted Ted, a

            paramedic in the air-rescue detachment. ‘Whose side are you on?’

            the commander demanded. The agitated colonel, who had lost a

            brother in the war, proposed that my brother join him in a raid on

            North Vietnam. The FBI agents flipped out a document that they

            said was a psychological profile of Ted’s radical brother, who

            resigned from West Point after serving in Vietnam. They implied that

            Ted was likely in his brother’s orbit.

            Ted, who professed ignorance of the newspaper’s appearance in their

            midst, was saved by a lieutenant who noted that the airman was a

            highly regarded member of his crew who had jumped out of heli-

            copters with rescue gear to save pilots who crash-landed in the

            ocean. ..."

The Air Force and the FBI knew that whoever did it, antiwar dissent now reached deep into even highly trained, highly motivated special operations units.

A single copy of VGI had penetrated a Cold War inner sanctum and rattled its occupants – subversion by newspaper.

*http://earthairwater.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-gi-challenged-war-makers.html

Searches – Spectacular Shortfalls: The Case of Zeke

A tale to nowhere. As editor of Vietnam GI (VGI), Jeff Sharlet formed a Vietnam Veterans Advisory Committee. They were listed on the masthead by name, rank, and branch of service – GIs, a Marine, and an airman. Several served as associate or contributing editors for one issue or another. A couple of them were already well known public figures in GI protests then emerging against the war. One later became a notorious outlaw, former Marine Lance Cpl. William Harris, better known as a co-founder of the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

I had hoped to talk with all, but found only a few. By the time I arrived on the scene as Jeff’s memoirist, two of the GIs had long before committed suicide, and one had died just before we learned his whereabouts. The two we did locate have been of great importance to the project, while two others, still ‘missing in action’, sat with Jeff for long interviews on their combat experiences.

Jan Barry Crumb (later just Jan Barry), a founder of Vietnam Veterans against the War in ’67, lent his name to the Advisory Committee and also served as sub-editor for early issues. Joseph Carey, Jeff’s fellow Indiana University (IU) graduate, had been a combat photographer with the 25th Infantry at Cu Chi and brought home a trove of photos Jeff used in VGI, shots much too edgy for the divisional monthly, but that’s a separate story.

Pfc. Jan Barry Crumb, Vietnam, ‘63 and Sp4 Joseph Carey, Cu Chi, RVN, ‘66

Karen turned up another committee member, let’s call him Zeke to protect his privacy, and I followed up. A local Chicago boy, Zeke returned home after Nam, co-founded a coffee house where he and Jeff crossed paths while Jeff was at University of Chicago grad school during Fall term ’67. When Jeff dropped out and used his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to launch VGI as the first GI-led paper addressed to GIs, Zeke agreed to join the committee and even served briefly as an associate editor. 

Zeke was not easy for Karen to find, he had migrated to the West Coast and there were many men with his surname out there. A friend of his, Jim Wallihan, a very close comrade in arms of Jeff’s at IU and in Chicago, had mentioned the name of Zeke’s wife. Though Zeke couldn’t be found, his wife turned up on the Internet, she’d listed their phone number.

Normally, I tried to approach people by email, introducing myself as Jeff’s older brother and describing what I’m up to – a softer approach since I’m a complete stranger to them seeking memories from the distant ‘60s. We had no email for Zeke, so no choice, called him cold turkey. Up to that point my inquiries had been received in a friendly way, but not this time. Through the phone I felt Zeke’s fury, how did I get this unlisted number? Told him of his wife’s posting which just increased his anger.

Apologized for disturbing him, quickly delivered my pitch, “What can you tell me about Jeff and VGI?” Zeke calmed a bit, said, “Very little,” he’d merely lent his name, wasn’t actually involved. Asked how I could be reached should anything occur to him, I said thanks and was about to sign off when Zeke tossed out, “Look for Suzy Creamcheese, Jeff’s girlfriend.” My three minutes of his time up, Zeke rang off abruptly.

I sat for a moment, bewildered by the violence of his reaction. Knew he was holding out – I’d been told he and Jeff hung out, he’d even helped get an issue to press. Because his father owned a bar popular with the cops, someone even suggested Zeke may have been an informer for the Chicago Red Squad inside the VGI. Was that it, what the hell was going on? Later, someone told me Zeke had become a cop, apparently got caught burgling and did time. He’d left Chicago and his past behind, clearly didn’t want it revisited in a book. Understood, I wouldn’t either if I were him. Hence my phone call to nowhere – well, not quite, as the reader shall see next in the final spectacular shortfall.