Now Hear This - A Unique Literary Prize for Military Writers

[In lieu of our regularly planned posting, we are running this timely announcement of a new literary prize in honor of my brother Jeff Sharlet after whom this blog is named. This prize has been established by my son and daughter and their spouses as a memorial to Jeff. This literary competition will be conducted annually by the University of Iowa, the premier program for writers in the United States, and its distinguished literary journal. If you are a military veteran or on active duty as well as a writer, a submission from you of either fiction, non-fiction or poetry would be most welcome. If you do not qualify, but know of a writer who has served or is serving in the military, please pass on this notice.The following announcement has been written by my son and co-author on the memoir project in progress.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 'Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans' is a $1,000 prize, with publication, for writing in any genre on any subject by U.S. military veterans and active duty personnel, hosted by The Iowa Review and judged by Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The deadline is June 15. Read more about it at the website of The Iowa Review. If you're a vet or on active duty and a writer, please consider submitting your work. If you have friends, family, co-workers, or students who are veterans, I hope you'll let them know about this contest, which we believe is the first of its kind.

About The Prize

The prize is in honor of my uncle, Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969), the founder of Vietnam GI, the first anti-war paper by and for enlisted men and women. Each issue of Vietnam GI featured interviews with ordinary soldiers and other military personnel. They were angry, funny, sad and scaldingly honest like no other account of the war at the time, and soon after the first issue the paper was inundated with letters from other GIs who wanted to let Jeff know that reading Vietnam GI -- itself a dangerous act -- was the first time they recognized themselves in the media.

The paper helped launch an underground press of hundreds of anti-war papers by and for GIs, the information network of a movement that contributed mightily to the end of the war. Jeff, who'd been exposed to U.S. chemical weapons in Vietnam, died in 1969 at age 27.

The Iowa Review has been published at the University of Iowa in Iowa City for 42 years. Past contributors include John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Louise Gluck, Seamus Heaney, James Alan McPherson, Joyce Carol Oates, Ishmael Reed, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Simic, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, and many others.

The prize is in honor of an anti-war activist, but what truly made Jeff's work uncommon was his focus on the voices of his fellow enlisted men and women.Vietnam GI was fiercely anti-war, but it was first and foremost about those voices. In that spirit, the contest is open to current and past U.S. military personnel, writing on any subject.

Jeff Sharlet, Vietnam, 1964

Radical Chicago

Spring ’67. Jeff Sharlet, an ex-Vietnam GI graduating with honors at Indiana University (IU) had just won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for graduate study, fondly known to recipients as a ‘Woody Woo’. He had applied to PhD programs at Yale, Michigan, and University of Chicago, which, I assumed, he chose on the merits of its noted Political Science Department anchored by David Easton, a luminary of the discipline’s new behavioral persuasion, as well as Leo Strauss of the older tradition of political philosophy.

What I didn’t know was that Jeff was ambivalent about his immediate future. As one of his IU mentors told me after Jeff’s early death in ’69, my brother was torn between two divergent paths – pursuing an academic career in the long run, while in the near term continuing his struggle against the Vietnam War. He was well qualified for both paths. He’d served in Vietnam 1963-64 and been a major antiwar leader at IU, while earning respect for his quality of mind, even from those faculty who disagreed with his politics. In effect, it was a question of whether to go with the head or the heart.

 In retrospect, I think Jeff chose Chicago, the “City of the Big Shoulders”*, which of course happened to have a great university. Ann Arbor, college town of the University of Michigan, and Yale’s New Haven were no match for a young man emerging from the classroom, eager to grasp the world and acquire higher learning. As Sandburg sang, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”*

 In late summer ’67, Jeff headed to Chicago, a cynosure of the antiwar movement as well as powerful currents of grass-roots street activism.  The city was the site not only of the headquarters of SDS, which rapidly grew into the nation’s largest youth movement, but also a number of street-level groups, most initially below the radar of the national media and for a time even the underground press.

CADRE, the pacifist Chicago Area Draft Resisters was the first to organize against the Vietnam War draft. The grass-roots ‘Jobs or Income Now’ (JOIN), an offshoot of SDS in its early anti-poverty phase, sprang up in poor and working class neighborhoods.  JOIN then spun off the Young Patriots, white migrants from Appalachia led by Jack ‘Junebug’ Boykin. The Young Lords, Puerto Rican youth headed by Jose ‘Cha Cha’ Jimenez, joined with the Patriots and Fred Hampton’s Chicago Black Panthers to form the ‘Rainbow Alliance’—the first multi-racial, multi-ethnic alliance—to improve the quality of life for communities that had traditionally been adversarial.

Mike James, a leader of Chicago’s white working-class radicals

 Photo:  Michael James Archives

They helped people get social services they were entitled to; led rent strikes against slumlords; and mounted protests against police brutality, a familiar feature of life in powerless neighborhoods of Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Eventually Mike James, a prime mover of JOIN, co-founded ‘Rising Up Angry’ (RUA), an offshoot of the Young Patriots with the same mission.

♫Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy,
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy**

Radical Chicago supported two underground papers.  The Seed, was especially noted for its artwork, initially under co-founder Don Lewis, then Lester Dore. The Bridge, created by Bernie Farber, the late Bill O’Brien, his sister Anne, and others, was short-lived.  The city also sported two coffee houses as gathering places for activists and others, one on the University of Chicago campus, and ‘Alice’s Revisited’ in a neighborhood where the young camped out, eventually succeeded in the ‘70s by ‘Heartland Café’, co-founded and still run today by Mike James, in the Rogers Park section.

The notorious Mayor Richard J Daley and his political machine had scarce tolerance for these grass-roots organizations -- or the Vietnam antiwar movement. The Chicago Police Department’s ‘Red Squad’ surveilled dissent wherever it raised its head. In opposing the Rainbow Coalition, the mayor could call on J Edgar Hoover, who regarded the Black Panthers as “The greatest single threat to the internal security of the country,”*** as well as the US Attorney for the Northern District.  To monitor antiwar activity, he could also count on the Department of the Army’s Military Intelligence unit (MI) at Fort Sheridan IL.

The Daley machine could field a formidable array of forces against those who challenged the municipal status quo or, according to Daley’s super patriotic standard, subversively used Chicago as a base for spreading sedition nationally and beyond. This was the Chicago to which Jeff moved in August of ’67, his attention split between continuing his antiwar mission and preparing for grad school.  

The idea of organizing soldiers with doubts about the war in Vietnam was very much on his mind since he’d been in New York earlier that summer where he had joined the new Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) and met its co-founder Jan Barry^†. He also looked up Tom Barton^†, an IU alum whom he had run into the past spring. Tom put Jeff in touch with another young man, Dave Komatsu of Chicago, also a seasoned Old Left activist who additionally had experience running a shoestring underground newspaper.

In Chicago, Jeff found his way to antiwar circles where he met Tom Cleaver^†, an ex-Vietnam sailor, at a CADRE meeting on draft resistance presided over by the flamboyant Gary Rader^†, a Northwestern grad and Special Forces reservist. Classes began, the semester wore on, but Jeff’s heart was not in the academic game. He hung out at the campus coffee house, hooked up with local activists at Alice’s Revisited, and did more brainstorming antiwar options with Komatsu than coursework.  Jeff also spent time with the editorial group for the alternative paper The Bridge soaking up ideas on how a small paper was put together.

His initial idea of organizing ex-Vietnam GIs gave way to the more modest effort of starting an underground paper directed to active-duty GIs, thus giving voice to the voiceless in the antiwar movement. Jeff now realized that the task of planning an antiwar paper was not conducive to PhD work. Heart won out over head; Jeff withdrew from the University of Chicago, moved in with the Komatsu family, and began working full-time to launch a GI paper. Key to the operation was money for a typesetting machine, printing costs, and distribution expenses – a problem Jeff solved by putting the rest of his Woody Woo, a goodly sum in those days of a few grand, into the project.

Launched in January of ’68 in the midst of the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, Vietnam GI (VGI) took off quickly, catching the attention of Vietnam GIs as well as stateside troops training to deploy.  The months ahead proved eventful. President Johnson abruptly pulled out of the presidential race in late March; and Martin Luther King (MLK) was assassinated in Memphis in April, igniting riots in ghettos across the country. Federal troops were deployed in Chicago.  In May, VGI ran a sensational photo of GIs posing over an atrocity that brought MI to town looking for the negative so embarrassing to the Army. The assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy followed in June.

University of Chicago campus

Getting the monthly issue to press and mailing it under the vigilant gaze of postal inspectors on the lookout for seditious material took a lot of hands. As a deadline approached, Dave Komatsu would call upon his CADRE friends as well as political comrades to lend a hand with typing, transcribing and other chores; there were big monthly ‘mailing parties’. Money always in short supply, Jeff was frequently on the road raising funds for VGI’s coffers.

An appeal for financial help to SDS had fallen on deaf ears – Rennie Davis was disposed, Tom Hayden opposed – it hadn’t yet dawned on the organization that soldiers also opposed the war. Jeff’s road trips included stops at GI coffee houses outside base camps where he’d rap with returning combat veterans, gathering their stories for the paper. At the coffee house outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, Jeff met Fred Gardner^†, founder of the GI coffee house network.

The ’68 Democratic Convention was set for Chicago, and the Mobe, the national umbrella organization of the New Left, planned to bring in large numbers of protestors to demonstrate against the war. The prospect was anathema to Mayor Daley who secured commitments from the Illinois National Guard and from Washington for riot troops.  Foreseeing a major confrontation, Jeff and Jim Wallihan, his close friend from IU who’d come up to Chicago in the spring to help edit VGI, decamped with the materials for the forthcoming August issues, taking no chances that the Red Squad might use the public fracas as cover to crack down on local radicals.  

While street battles raged in Chicago, Jeff and Jim crashed in the Bay Area with Joe Carey^†, an ex-Vietnam GI combat photographer who had supplied the paper with some revealing photos. They readied the press run for the regular August issue of VGI as well as for a brand new ‘Stateside’ edition with GI protest news attuned to US base camps. The headline of the initial Stateside issue concerned a large group of Black Vietnam combat veterans who refused to deploy for riot duty at the Chicago convention.

Fall ’68. Jeff shared an apartment with Jim Wallihan and Bill O’Brien. Bill, well connected in Chicago labor circles, got Jeff and Jim into the Paper Handlers Union; that meant hard work maneuvering enormous rolls of newsprint in the city’s press rooms. By then, a medical problem Jeff first experienced in Vietnam was beginning to take its toll, and the job proved too demanding. In October, he made one last trip abroad on behalf of The Mobe – to Stockholm^† to meet with GI deserters. He had already gone to Japan^† on the same issue in August. Jeff made his final coffee house visit in late November ‘68 when he spent a week at the Oleo Strut outside Fort Hood, TX where he again crossed paths with Tom Cleaver and met ex-Vietnam GI Dave Cline^†, both of whom were on staff at the Strut.

The late Bill O’Brien of Chicago

Photo by Mary O’Kiersey

That was effectively the end of the line for Jeff as an activist; his final half year would be spent in Miami area hospitals dealing with a serious illness which would prove terminal. Even so, from hishospital bed he maintained telephone contact and a lively correspondence with many of the activists in his national network. Komatsu and colleagues had gotten out the January ’69 Asian and Stateside editions of VGI.  

 Back in Chicago on the first anniversary of MLK’s assassination, the Rainbow Coalition of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots held their first ever joint press conference to commemorate the occasion and renew their commitment to helping the poor. Finally, in June ‘69 just a week after Jeff’s death, SDS held what would be its last national conference at which the organization dramatically split. Weatherman, the winning faction, espousing violence, went underground six months later.

Epilogue

A year later in 1970, VGI was still alive. Dave Komatsu, who had moved on to another project, handed off to Craig Walden^†, an ex-Vietnam Marine; John Alden, ex-Vietnam-era Navy; and for a short time Lenora ‘Nori’ Davis, an early feminist and anti-racist activist. David Patterson, aka Joe Harris, succeeded Nori as the third member of the troika. Natives of Chicago, Craig and his wife Judy were active with the Young Patriots, while Nori worked with RUA and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.

As America’s involvement in Vietnam wound down and an end could be discerned, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) finally succeeded in revoking the tax-exempt status of the East Coast outfit funding the GI coffee houses and underground papers.  With operational funds dried up, Vietnam GI expired with the August ’70 issue after a two and a half year run, relatively good longevity by standards of the GI underground press. By then Jeff’s legacy was secure – Vietnam GI had inspired by example well over a hundred underground papers at Army posts, Air Force bases, Marine camps, and on board ships of the line, which collectively broadened and deepened military protest against the Vietnam War, eventually contributing mightily to the end of the ill-fated US mission in Southeast Asia.

Rainbow Alliance press conference ’69, Panther co-chair presiding, Junebug Boykin sitting to his right and behind him in beret & sunglasses, Craig Walden, VGI co-editor in ’69-’70.  Photo: Michael James Archives

*Carl Sandburg, Chicago (1916).

**Street Fighting Man, Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, 1968
***Quoted in A. Sonnie & J. Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists (2011)

^† Jan Barry:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/07/subversion-by-newspaper.html

  Tom Barton:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/unsung-hero-of-gi-resistance.html
  Tom Cleaver: http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/oleo-strut-front-line-of-gi-protest.html
  Gary Rader:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/green-beret-antiwarrior.html
  Fred Gardner:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/oleo-strut-front-line-of-gi-protest.html
  Joe Carey:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/07/torture-in-vietnam.html
  Stockholm:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/09/meeting-in-stockholm.html
  Japan:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/02/jeff-in-japan.html
  Dave Cline:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/oleo-strut-front-line-of-gi-protest.html
  Craig Walden:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/01/if-its-tuesday-this-must-be-laos.html and http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/bad-intelligence-sorry-bout-that.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

Black Marine from War to Exile

Terry Whitmore’s journey began in the rundown Black ghetto of Memphis, a Tennessee river town on the Mississippi. Poor but contented, he didn’t fully appreciate the extent of racial hostility awaiting him beyond the old neighborhood. Coming of age and seeking a job in the white world was an early awakening. A series of random encounters with racist whites had a sobering effect. Several years later aboard a plane about to land in Sweden, a land of predominantly blue-eyed blonde people, he lamented, “Ain’t there nowhere I can go and be at peace?”*

Graduating high school in ’66 with no plans for college (“Student deferment? I wasn’t even sure what it meant”), Terry, like any footloose young man of that time, faced the draft. A macho guy, he chose a three-year commitment to the Marines instead of two years in the Army. Boot training at Parris Island was the expected nightmare, far worse than the relatively sanitized version later seen in the film Full Metal Jacket. Trained as a Marine infantryman specializing in the M-79 grenade launcher, Private Whitmore was predictably deployed to Nam.

Off duty at base camp in a forward area, he hung out with Black Marines, but in combat neither he nor white Marines made any distinctions since survival was the name of the game. Terry was a good Marine to whom orders were orders, the American mission in-country unquestioned. Along with many other combat Marines, he shared an intense dislike for ‘hippies’ demonstrating against the war back home.

However, in the course of his deployment he began to experience an ethical, if not political, consciousness. Serving in I Corps in the northernmost part of South Vietnam in a battalion which had taken heavy casualties, Terry was on a company-strength operation led by a commanding officer (CO) reportedly seeking revenge for a brother lost in the war. Coming upon a hamlet with a dozen sub-hamlets, the CO ordered that if a single shot was fired from that direction, the entire community was to be leveled. A shot was heard, and the Marines went at it with gusto, tossing grenades in the hooches, burning them to the ground, and shooting all the civilians, a merciless massacre that preceded My Lai unnoted.

One hut remained standing. The CO ordered squad leader Whitmore and his fire team to take it out, so Whitmore fired a rifle grenade, but there wasn’t sufficient distance for the round to detonate on impact.  An old peasant woman and a small boy came out. Whit, as his buddies called him, wasn’t into killing women and children, so he signaled for them to get out of sight. Turning away, he heard a loud explosion. The curious child had picked up the unexploded grenade, killing the two instantly. Whit felt remorse, a rare feeling in the combat zone.

The adults were dead, the children rounded up. Marines were usually fond of little kids, so asked the CO to where to take them. To the surprise of Whit and others, the CO brusquely ordered the children wasted. Orders were orders, and after a few M-16 bursts on full automatic, there were no survivors in the nameless hamlet. Whit was shocked, but remained silent. However, another Marine, sickened by what he had witnessed, went to the chaplain. The battalion commander was informed and the captain relieved of command.

Several months later in ’67, Whit’s platoon headed out to set up an ambush just a thousand yards below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the boundary separating the two warring Vietnams.  His unit was led by a green lieutenant (LT) not long out of officer’s school. Unbeknownst to the concealed Marines, a full North Vietnamese Army (NVA) company three times their strength moved into a covered position no more than 15 yards in front of them. Suddenly three enemy soldiers were spotted, fire was exchanged, at which point the gung ho LT jumped up and ordered the men forward, assuming there was just a handful of NVA to take out. Instead the well-entrenched NVA opened up with heavy machine guns and AK-47’s, inflicting heavy casualties on the exposed Marines and pinning the platoon down on open ground.

Whit and his men managed to beat a retreat back to cover, but the LT was among the first hit. As he lay out in the open, he kept calling for Whit to help him. Abandoning caution, Whit ran out into a field of fire and dragged his seriously wounded CO back. Then one of the radiomen got hit, and once again Whit put himself in harm’s way to bring him to safety. Marine Air flew to the rescue. To mark the enemy’s position, the surviving Marines threw red smoke grenades. Knowing what that signaled, the NVA jumped up and pulled back, exposing themselves to Whit and his team, who quickly cut down two dozen of them.

Finally, a Marine tank came up to evacuate the wounded, and the NVA opened up with mortars trying to take it out. Whit was hunkered in a B-52 crater when a mortar round landed nearby, peppering him with over a hundred pieces of hot shrapnel. His legs a bloody mess, he was paralyzed. A white Marine, wounded himself, threw his body over Whit to spare him more damage, and then dragged him to rear, keeping up a constant chatter, jiving Whit to keep him from going into shock. Much later Whit commented that even if the guy was a racist, he’d vote for him for president.

Whit wended his way through a series of military hospitals, finally landing at the superbly equipped hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, where he had his ’15 minutes’ of fleeting fame when President Johnson (LBJ) made a surprise visit to award medals. Coming to Whit’s bedside, seeing him swathed in dressings, LBJ paused, looked genuinely saddened, and asked Whit gently if he could pin the medals to his pillow. The photo snapped by trailing newsmen was seen across America.

LBJ awarding medals to Terry Whitmore, ‘67

Not long after, one of the doctors came by and told Whit he had some bad news. “You got polka-dotted pretty bad” – they would have to send him to Japan for treatment. Whit was elated, he was getting out of Nam. After a couple of months in Yokohama, he began to recover, became ambulatory, and was allowed to leave the hospital for a little nightlife. He met a Japanese girl, a university student, and began an affair.  They loved to dance.  Life was looking up.   

♫Got what I got the hard way
And I make it better, each and every day
So honey, don't you fret

'Cause you ain't seen nothing yet

I'm a soul man, I'm a soul man**

A doctor told him it would just be a matter of time before they’d send him home, his war over. But later, in fact on his birthday in March ’68, another doctor came by to announce that he was fully recovered and would receive orders in the morning to head back to Nam and his unit. Whit was stunned, felt betrayed, but his Marine training kicked in, and he reconciled himself to return to combat.

That night he told his girl the news. She was distraught and raised the race issue for the first time. “Why you Black people fight? … What does America do for you?” He knew she was right, but his sense of duty trumped, and off he went in the morning to the airport. He ran into a sailor enroute, a Black Muslim, who told him that’s not for you brother, that’s not for us. Whit’s transport to Nam was delayed two days in a row; each time he’d go back to his girlfriend’s pad with growing doubts.

In a kind of soliloquy, Whit thought about his obligation to ‘Sam’, slang for Uncle Sam:  Sam has put me through a lot of shit - and I can't even say why. 

Not only can't I come up with some good excuses for Sam to be wiping out the Vietnamese people, but I can't even think of one good reason for me to help Sam in his dirty work.

On the third morning Whit lingered, passing the reporting hour, saying to himself, “It’s all over between me and Sam,” choosing desertion, and radically changing the trajectory of his life. He spent the next week on the run, dodging the ever present Shore Patrol (SP), the Navy police. Fortuitously, he was put in touch with Beheiren, the leftwing Japanese peace group that helped US deserters get out of the country.

After much cloak and dagger in Tokyo, changing cars and taxis frequently, and moving from place to place to throw off possible police tails, Terry Whitmore was shifted from one safe house to another until Beheiren organized an escape plan: he was escorted to a departure point where he met four other deserters also kept under cover by the Japanese left. The deserters, disguised as tourists and carrying luggage, were to board a plane for Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. The exception was Terry Whitmore; Beheiren had earlier given him a cover identity as a student from East Africa.

On Hokkaido, the group was spirited to the house of a Japanese fishing boat captain. The next day they donned fisherman’s outfits and boarded his boat. A sixth deserter was later put aboard, all kept out of sight below decks until the craft rendezvoused with a larger Soviet Coast Guard vessel in Soviet waters. The boats came alongside, and Soviet officers boarded them under the pretext of inspecting the Japanese captain’s papers. Meanwhile, the deserters were assembled at the stern for transfer. The two vessels were pitching in rough seas as each of the Americans made a parlous leap onto a mattress on the cutter’s deck below. Soviet sailors then hustled the Americans below deck, and the two ships parted.

After several days, the Americans were put ashore on Sakhalin Island, Soviet territory, and flown to Vladivostok, the USSR’s main Pacific port. After a welcoming reception, an overnight stay, and a brief car tour of the city, the group flew on to Moscow where an official reception awaited. As guests of the Soviet peace organization, Terry and his five companions were treated to an extended tour of the Soviet Union – Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi in the southern republic of Georgia, a Black Sea resort on the USSR’s Florida-like coast, and Gorky on the Volga, a city otherwise off limits to foreigners. At every stop, the propaganda value of American deserters from the war against a fraternal ally of the Soviet Union was maximized.

Terry grew weary of Soviet hospitality – they were always closely watched by three keepers – and was quite happy when told they were to move on. Terry’s final destination of his long journey was to be Sweden, a neutral country offering humanitarian asylum to US deserters. On May 25, 1968 the commercial jet landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda International Airport, and Marine Lance Corporal Terence Marvel Whitmore of Memphis stepped down onto Swedish territory, beginning the first day of his exile, which would last nearly the rest of his life.***

Terry Whitmore and fellow deserters arriving in Stockholm, ’68

©AP Images The Associated Press

*Quotes in this post are drawn from Terry Whitmore’s memoir, Memphis, Nam, Sweden: The Story of a Black Deserter (’71, reprinted ’97)

**Soul Man, by Isaac Hayes and David Porter, 1967

***Terry Whitmore eventually returned to US for good in the year 2001. A few years before his death in 2007, he made an appearance in the documentary Sir! No Sir! (’05), the first film on GI resistance to the Vietnam War, bearing the dedication to “Dedicated to Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969), founder of Vietnam GI, the first GI underground paper.”

Jeff and Max

Jeff and Max didn’t know each other, but they should have. Max was Tomi Schwaetzer, aka Max Watts; Jeff was my younger brother, Jeff Sharlet. Max and Jeff would’ve liked and respected each other. They were both working simultaneously on the Vietnam antiwar front of the ‘60s, although half a world apart – Jeff in the US and Vietnam, Max in West Europe.What makes an antiwarrior? Max, nearly a generation older, and Jeff came from disparate backgrounds. Max was an Austrian, Jeff an American. Max came from a professional family – his father a physician, his mother a psychoanalyst. Jeff was born into a business family, both parents ‘in retail’ as the saying goes. Neither family was particularly political. However, living in Vienna in the early ‘30s the Schwaetzer family could hardly have been unaware of the politics roiling the Continent. The Sharlets, from a provincial American city in the ‘40s and ‘50s, were certainly aware of the Cold War writ large (who wasn’t), but otherwise family table talk was business and social life.

What politicized Jeff and Max? As the Nazi movement swept across Austria, Max’s parents fled to neutral Switzerland, staying one step ahead of the coming Holocaust. At the time, Great Britain allowed two members of a refugee family on temporary visas. It was decided that Tomi and his father would go so that Dr Schwaetzer could try to establish the right to practice medicine in England.  Failing to do so, the doctor, a patriotic Austrian who'd though it would all blow over, committed suicide.  

   

Max’s parents, ‘30s

Meanwhile, Max’s mother and sister had made the arduous journey through Paris over the Pyrenees, across Spain to Lisbon, and aboard a ship to America. Under the circumstances, there was no one left in Europe to whom Max, a minor, could be sent, so the British government permitted him to remain at a boarding school. Max finally made it to the US working as a deckhand on a freighter, rejoining his family in New York where he began a life of left activism that eventually took him to revolutionary Cuba, the new State of Israel, France, Germany, and Australia, and continued until his last days many decades later.

             Max at Sodom Crossing, Israel, ‘50s

Jeff also came from a comfortable background. He spent years in prep school, but in his senior year his father suffered a financial reversal that severely curtailed Jeff’s plans for college. He went off to a low-tuition public university, but, very unhappy there, did not stay long. In those years, young men either attended college with a deferment, or the two-year draft beckoned. Jeff gave the military a 3rd year for the privilege of studying a foreign language for 12 months. He’d been promised a Slavic language and a European posting, but by the luck of the draw ended up in the Vietnamese course, inevitably becoming a Vietnam GI very early in the American war.

  Jeff as a cadet at the Albany Academy ‘60

Working as a spook in a semi-secret intelligence organization, Jeff found himself in some hot spots and unusual situations. Under cover he worked at the periphery of the coup against Diem; was involved in infiltrating commandos into the North; and engaged in other mysterious actions, the secrets of which he took to the grave. Jeff went to Vietnam in ’63 curious about the international politics of that part of the world, but came home thoroughly disillusioned with the US mission in Vietnam. He devoted the remainder of his short life to opposing the war.

Their modus operandi was different, but Max and Jeff were working along parallel lines. Max dealt largely with US deserters, but also disgruntled troops in France and West Germany; Jeff’s constituency was mainly active duty GIs in Vietnam as well as stateside troops training for the war. Max operated on a case by case basis with individual deserters who came to him for help as well as dissident troops in the ranks.The spontaneous movement for which Max was spokesman was called RITA, Resistance inside the Army. Jeff reached military personnel of all services en masse through his underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI), the first of its kind edited by an ex-GI exclusively addressed to men at arms in the war.

Both men became antiwarriors of stealth by necessity. If the French authorities caught US deserters, they’d return them to their bases in Germany where, inevitably, sanctions awaited, so Max and his RITA colleague June van Ingen had to keep them well hidden. Max, an alien on French soil, became the object of French police surveillance himself and was eventually deported for his RITA activity. He continued the work in Germany where he came under clandestine scrutiny by US Military Intelligence (MI).

In the States, J Edgar Hoover ordered surveillance on Jeff and his VGI staff. The FBI successfully discouraged Chicago area printers from taking on the press run of the paper, forcing Jeff and colleagues to drive long distances to a willing printer. Agents would knock on Jeff’s apartment door, always in standard trench coat and fedora, just to remind him they were watching. MI, operating out of a stateside base, also got in the act since VGI was considered a threat to the ‘good order and discipline’ of the Army. And unless the paper was mailed by the expensive method of First Class, the postal authorities were on the lookout for ‘seditious’ material being sent through the mails.

Max and Jeff’s respective undertakings required different approaches to publicity. For Max, who made his living as a journalist, publicity was the key, the more and the higher the visibility, the better. Thus, he would set up interviews in Paris with the US press in Europe eager to talk with deserters as undercover operations with the GI’s identity screened from the journo by a sheet stretched across the room. Later in Germany, a GI leaked to Max that his phone was being tapped by the Germans on behalf of MI, an embarrassing story for the Army that Max played beautifully to the European and American press, including good billing in the New York Times (NYT).

Conversely for Jeff, the direct glare of publicity on his enterprise was to be avoided in the interest of maximum efficacy. Anything that would give an investigative edge to the FBI, MI of Northern Illinois, the postal inspectors, or the Chicago Police Department’s ‘Red Squad’ was unwelcome. Hence, assembling issues of VGI would often entail moving from one friendly apartment to another to keep the opposition guessing. And when Jeff went on the road, either to do interviews with returning Vietnam combat veterans or for fundraising to pay the bills, he would occasionally call me to say hello, but always from a telephone booth in one city or another which he would routinely say best not to identify.

Nonetheless as VGI’s success with troops at home and abroad became apparent; both Jeff and the paper unavoidably came in for favorable visibility in spite of his low profile – including in the NYT, the magazine Esquire and, via the wire services, in the regional press.

Max, a skilled helmsman, once blocked a US nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser from entering Sydney Harbor, ‘80s. He continued his activism to the end.

In effect, both Jeff and Max in their different theaters of operation, succeeded in stoking opposing GI resistance to the Vietnam War by seeding doubt among the very people being asked to put themselves in harm’s way in prosecuting the Vietnam War. In turn, each man received well-earned recognition in subsequent literature on the conflict – Max in books by the ex-deserter Richard Perrin (’01); the former defense lawyer for GIs in Germany, Howard De Nike (’02); as well as his fellow RITA activist June van Ingen (‘11).* Jeff has been memorialized in David Cortright’s classic of GI resistance (’75), Andrew E. Hunt’s history of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) (’99), and Bob Ostertag’s study of the underground press (’06).

Jeff Sharlet will get a memoir of his short but interesting life (d.’69) for which this blog is a percursor, while the long and dramatic life of his comrade in peace, Max Watts (d. ’10), awaits its biographer.

*See her novella Max’s Anti-Vietnam Network posted on her blog Against the Army at http://againstthearmy.blogspot.com/.

War Poets

The good war, WWII, produced relatively little soldier poetry, although individual poems live on in contemporary memory. In sharp contrast, Vietnam, the war most would like to forget, yielded numerous soldier-poets and many volumes of verse, some highly acclaimed. In both wars, poets sang of violence, death, and survival. In addition, Vietnam War poetry has another dimension.
After WWII, men who had served for the duration returned home triumphantly with their units, were feted, and honored for their victory over dark forces. Their sons who marched off to Vietnam did so for only 12 months (13 for Marines). They’d arrive at a so-called repo depot—a soldier replacement system—as individuals and, if they survived their tour intact, would be released a year later, put on a plane, and returned to civilian life. Re-entry was as a lone individual, unheralded and even scorned, and for many of the Vietnam soldier-poets these sad, lonely, and often bitter experiences also became subjects of their verse.

America’s two great armies, no more than a few decades apart, fought very different wars as reflected in the poetry. Karl Shapiro, a WWII combat infantryman, described his unit moving along the Australian coast in Troop Train. Slowing, the train passed through a town heading for the ships and combat in the South Pacific. Townsfolk stopped to look:

And women standing at their dumbstruck door
More slowly wave and seem to warn us back,
As if a tear blinding the course of war
Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish. 

Louis Simpson of the 101st Airborne spoke of battle and surviving in Europe:

Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat
Marched through a forest. …
Most clearly of that battle I remember
The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin
Around a cigarette, and the bright ember
Would pulse with all the life there was within.

And for another soldier-poet, Anthony Hecht, the death of A Friend Killed in the War combined dark and vivid images of nature and fantasy: 

           Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants

                                               ...

           In the clean brightness of magnesium
           Flares, there were seven angels by a tree. ...
           And his flesh opened like a peony,
           Red at the heart, white petals furling out.

And finally, there was Randall Jarrell’s poem of air combat memorializing death in the maw of war, perhaps the most memorable lines of WWII:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dreams of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters,

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The early poetry of the Vietnam War brought forth equally graphic, but more literal images of a very different kind of war, one fought among civilians indistinguishable from the enemy, one fought not for terrain but for attrition. In WWII men died for ground gained, giving the whole endeavor a sense of linear progress, while Americans in Vietnam exchanged their lives for the enemy’s, only to withdraw, post the body count, and return to fight and die over the same ground another day.

The most notorious instance was the 1969 Battle of Hamburger Hill in which the 101st Airborne assaulted a hill held by North Vietnamese forces (NVA) numerous times during a 10-day engagement, finally taking the summit at the cost of dozens killed and hundreds wounded only to withdraw a few weeks later. In effect, individual survival in Vietnam meant eluding the circle of death.

Apropos, one of the most distinguished soldier-poets of the war, W.D. Ehrhart, a former Marine rifleman, wrote that most of them “were not really poets at all,” just soldiers so angry about the war that silence was no longer an option. He added that most of their poems were driven by “emotion rather than craft.”* Jan Barry, co-founder of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW), a former associate editor of brother Jeff Sharlet’s Vietnam GI (VGI), and a poet himself, is credited as the most important force behind the emergence of Vietnam GI poetry.*

Cpl Ehrhart filling sandbags, Quang Tri, ‘67

Credit: W.D. Ehrhart

Given the nature of the war as a counter-insurgency against an elusive enemy, GI poetry rarely describes pitched battles – there were few – and instead focuses on shadowy encounters with small groups of enemy troops and sometimes, tragically, South Vietnamese civilians mistaken for Viet Cong (VC). Other topics were fears and survival strategies, coming home, and haunting memories.

A Vietnam soldier-poet writes “all our fear/and hate/Poured from our rifles/Into/the man in black/As he lost his face/In the smoke/Of an exploding hand frag,” while elsewhere, describing a buddy randomly killing a farmer planting rice, he writes, “With a burst of sixteen. … I saw rice shoots/ Still clutched in one hand” (Frank Cross). On the death of his comrades, another poet sadly describes:

All the dead young men, some willing,
boys mostly, riding the knife of their youth and sex
to woo and conquer death, blown
away, splintered, wrapped in ponchos, and the lucky ones
saved by medics to serve as a memento (Steve Hassett)

Fear was ever-present. “When the M-16 rifle had a stoppage/ One could feel enemy eyes/Climbing/His/Bones/Like/Ivy” (MacAvoy Layne). A medic-poet writes “I sleep strapped to a ‘45/bleached into my fear” (D.F. Brown). And always survival was uppermost, but not for country or flag as another GI put it, “I fought Not for This Country Tis’/ of Thee/But for the next day I wanted to see” (C. Quick).

As for the unfortunate South Vietnamese peasantry caught between the VC and the Americans, wartime life was difficult and frequently fatal. Perhaps no soldier-poet spoke to the perils of farming in a war zone better than Michael Casey in the signature poem of his collection of Vietnam War verse, Obscenities, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for 1972.

Cultivating rice paddies, Vietnam

Credit W.D. Ehrhart

The scene is a column of armored personnel carriers, tracked vehicles, going single file through a farmer’s rice paddies, the irate farmer hitting the lead track with a rake. The track commander tries to reason with him and the farmer nearly hits him with the rake . So the column redeploys and continues through the fields “side by side,” leading Casey to suggest:

If you have a farm in Vietnam
And a house in hell
Sell the farm
And go home

Another of the war poets was Jeff’s Vietnam buddy, Ed Smith, a fellow Vietnamese linguist. Just months before his death in ’03, Ed penned a long poem, published posthumously, invoking memories of a beautiful older Vietnamese woman with whom he’d been in love in Saigon in 1963; her name was Pham Thi Mui. Describing how she had been a young singer in an entertainment unit of the Viet Minh that performed for the troops closing in on the French at Dien Bien Phu in ’54, he writes,

with that catch
in your voice
you were all
the girls they’d left behind
in Nghe-An, up the river Da

A North Vietnamese soldier-poet has also written of a lost friend, a young woman soldier assigned to the Ho Chi Minh Trail who, at the cost of her life, had saved a convoy from a bombing attack. The poet, Lam Thi My Da, recalls, “We passed by the spot where you died/tried to picture the young girl you once had been.”*** The war memories of most of the American poets are not as gentle. “Willy” knew too much, writes a bard, “Staring/his eyes reflected/Exploding bombs and mangled bodies” (R. Lomell). For another, “Seven winters have slipped away/the war still follows me” (Gerald McCarthy). And then there’s the rice farmer the soldier wantonly shot who

Sometimes

On dark nights

In Kansas

… comes to

Mitch’s bed;

And plants rice shoots

all around.

(Frank Cross)

W.D. Ehrhart himself probably best expresses the feelings of his fellow poets and, for that matter, most returning Vietnam GIs who had been in harm’s way, in his poem Coming Home: “San Francisco airport -- … No brass bands/No flags/No girls/No cameramen/Only a small boy who asked me/What the ribbons on my jacket meant.”

There were also civilian poets who wrote on the long Vietnam War. One in particular was Lincoln Bergman, a radical antiwar activist who memorialized Jeff in a long verse published in The Movement, a national underground paper published in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s fitting to close with a few stanzas:

Seeds of Revolution

for Jeff Sharlet, editor of  Vietnam GI

who died in 1969 at the age of 27.

…

He knew and loved the men

Who write the letters home

And when he came home

He gave them something to believe in.

…
Not long ago he said:

“We felt a newspaper

Was the best way to begin…

To talk to the enlisted men

The guys on the bottom

Help bridge the gap between

The movement and the people.”

He was a quiet, vital guy

Who thought before he spoke,

…

Courage from his courage

Example of his deeds,

For Jeff is dead…

*W.D. Ehrhart, “Soldier-Poets of the Vietnam War, Virginia Quarterly Rev., Spring, 1987
**Jan Barry, co-editor of the first two anthologies of Vietnam War poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (1972) and Demilitarized Zones (1976).
***Transl. by Ngo Vinh Hai and Kevin Bowen.

Jeff in Japan

Summer ’68. Jeff Sharlet gets a call from Dave Dellinger, titular head of the antiwar movement, editor of Liberation, and later one of the Chicago 7, the premier political trial of those times. Since the US escalation of the war in Vietnam in ‘65, Dellinger had begun organizing meetings in Europe between the American peace movement, largely a civilian group, and the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, also known colloquially by the GIs as the Viet Cong (VC). In ’67, the sides met in Bratislava in Communist Czechoslovakia (CSSR). The ’68 meeting was to be in Prague, the delegation to be led by Bernardine Dohrn of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), subsequently the leader of the Weather Underground.

Dave Dellinger, ‘69

The NLF had specifically asked that Jeff be part of the delegation; presumably the success of his antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, had come to their attention. Would Jeff join the group as an ex-Vietnam GI representative of the rising GI resistance movement? Jeff was of mixed feelings about the invitation. Yes, he wanted to support the undertaking, but at the same time he was worried. In Vietnam he had served with the Army Security Agency (ASA), the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA), a very secret organization. Upon completing his tour of duty, Jeff had received the standard de-briefing. Nothing was to be disclosed about his military duties on pain of imprisonment and heavy fine, and no travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years. In 1968, Jeff had been out of ASA for only four years, and was very reluctant to incur the wrath of official Washington, his antiwar position notwithstanding.

A solution presented itself in short order. The Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam of Japan, known as Beheiren, also contacted Dellinger and asked him to send a GI antiwar activist to help them sort out problems with US deserters they were harboring. Dellinger approached Jeff’s associate editor, David Komatsu, a Japanese-American who spoke the language, about making the trip. Komatsu preferred to join the Prague gathering where he felt the political action would be and came up with an arrangement satisfactory to all. Since both events were in August ’68, he proposed that he and Jeff switch venues. Off the hook, Jeff agreed and headed for Kyoto, while Komatsu made the journey to East Europe. As it turned out, the Prague conference had to be moved to Budapest because of the Soviet invasion of CSSR, but that’s another story.

In Japan, Beheiren had hidden nearly 20 US military deserters from Japanese and US authorities while waiting to move them safely out of the country, but they were having difficulties with their guests. Kept under wraps with peace activist families, many of the Americans were street kids who understood neither the language nor customs of the country and couldn’t stand being holed up. Some of them took to crime, stealing money for drugs and assaulting women. The largely middle-class Japanese activists couldn’t cope and sought counsel from someone from the States experienced in GI protest.

♫ There must be some kind of way outta here

said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion...

I can't get no relief*

To provide cover for the sudden appearance of an American GI activist in their midst, Beheiren arranged for the consultation to occur in the context of an international peace conference held in Kyoto, the former imperial capital.

Kyoto international conference hall

Jeff had visited Tokyo on military leave in ’63, liked the country, and was happy to return. Beheiren incorporated him into the conference agenda as one of nearly two dozen US participants from various organizations, so Jeff’s involvement would not be conspicuous. Jeff spoke the second day on the issue of on how to assist US deserters. Although he felt that disaffected Vietnam GIs ideally could more effectively oppose the war by remaining in the ranks and influencing their buddies and conveyed this view privately to the Beheiren leadership, he took a diplomatic position on the agenda item in his public remarks as recorded by the Japanese police and a State Department observer:

Jeffrey Sharlet, Secretary General of the Vietnam GI Committee,
expounded various difficulties confronting US soldiers before and
after their desertion. … He stressed the need for Beheiren to
consider the future fate of deserters when assisting them in running away.

In effect, Jeff strongly urged Beheiren in private conversations not to encourage US deserters because of the harsh legal consequences they would face in the military justice system and because they could help the cause more by spreading antiwar sentiments within the military. At the same time he attended to his real mission in Kyoto by conferring with and calming hidden deserters in the evenings. They were a mixed group of white and black GIs, mostly poorly educated, and all bored and restless in their underground situation. Jeff tried to persuade them to be patient with their Japanese friends while Beheiren worked on undercover arrangements to move them to another country beyond the reach of the US military police. Beheiren eventually succeeded in moving the group abroad, but that too is another story.

On the third day at the conclusion of the conference, Jeff’s Japanese guide informed him there would be a march on Kyoto City Hall. Some hundreds of Japanese activists gathered at a nearby rally site. Having seen televised accounts of such marches and clashes with the Japanese police, Jeff begged off, saying he had business elsewhere. Since he was the sole ex-Vietnam GI among the conferees, his guide wouldn’t hear of it and they proceeded to the assembly point. Jeff could see the waiting police, massed in military formation with helmet visors down and shields and long batons at the ready, and he instinctively headed for the rear of the column of militant left students. But the guide politely told him no, no, as a guest of honor you must be at the front.

With great apprehension, Jeff found himself in the middle of the front rank, six across with arms locked, as the column of 500 snaked down the main street, skirmishing with police along the route. In the end, 14 policemen and two students were injured, but Jeff survived unscathed and wisely took cover. What he did not know was that putting a non-Asian foreigner in the front rank was standard practice in the Japanese peace movement since the police would not strike a foreigner, least of all an American, to avoid an international incident.

And so ended another day for Jeff on the antiwar front of the Vietnam War.

*All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan, 1968