War Music

[From time to time we’ve inserted relevant music clips into blog posts as illustrative of the time or topic, so it occurred to us that a couple of posts on  the music of the Vietnam War as a whole might be of interest. Karen Ferb, my close collaborator on the blog, has written this first of a two-part survey of ‘War Music’ to be followed later with a discussion of the protest music of the Vietnam War my brother, Jeff Sharlet, served in.]

Right up through Vietnam and beyond, war and music have been inseparable. In ancient times Greek soldiers sang to flutes and trumpets as they marched to war; more recently brave Scots followed their bagpipers into battle, while during the Korean War Chinese troops preceded human wave attacks with a chorus of war trumpets. And of course, at least since the Civil War, the military day has closed to the sound of Taps.

With the dawn of radio in the ‘20s, music became accessible to the multitudes. When America went to war in the ‘40s, radio music accompanied the troops. Armed Forces Radio Services (AFRS) and other shortwave broadcasts overseas brought a little bit of home to men fighting in the far corners of the world. In early ‘45, Time ran a piece on “GI Jill,” the armed forces’ response to Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, whose broadcasts from Tokyo and Berlin aimed to demoralize US troops and make them homesick. GI Jill’s combination of music and breezy chatter was intended to make them feel at home.

GI Jill was Martha Wilkerson, who recorded her show, ‘GI Jive’ for AFRS six days a week in Los Angeles.  The transcripts were flown out to far-flung posts and “tenderly passed from one mosquito network to the next.”  Time proudly boasted that “From Kodiak [AK] to Canberra… [Jill] is a top GI favorite.”

Martha Wilkerson aka GI Jill

One of the most popular WWII songs for both Allied and Axis troops was Lili Marlene, a 1915 war poem set to music in 1938. It was a sweetly nostalgic song, laden with innuendo, that produced a guilty pleasure in many of the Allied troops.  Marlene Dietrich, one of the many stars who entertained US troops, sang it throughout the European and African theaters in her smoky, louche contralto during the war. ^†

In 1944, the Andrews Sisters hit, The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, topped the charts.  Written in ‘41 at the outset of the peacetime draft to expand the military, this iconic tune has remained incredibly popular to the present day, so popular that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has ranked it #6 of 365 songs on its ‘Songs of the Century’. ^†

♫He was a famous trumpet man from old Chicago way

He had a boogie style that no one else could play

He was the top man at his craft

But then his number came up and he was gone with the draft

He's in the army now, a-blowin' reveille

He's the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B

 In the same year, Black American Louis Jordan notably scored a crossover hit, GI Jive, in spite of racial segregation which at the time extended even into the military. ^†

♫This is the G.I. Jive
Man alive
It starts with the bugler blowin' reveille over your bed when you arrive
Jack, that's the G.I. Jive

Both the Allies and the Axis used music extensively for propaganda purposes.  In the days before “politically correct,” some of the songs on either side now sound pretty harsh to the modern ear.  Der Fuehrer’s Face; Goodbye Mama, I’m off to Yokohama; Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer; and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition were among American tunes aimed at boosting morale among the troops while bashing the enemy.  The last was written in 1942, the year Jeff, Bob’s brother was born; Bob and his young friends enjoyed belting it out.

♫Down went the gunner, a bullet was his fate

Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look

And manned the gun himself … shouting

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and

we’ll all stay free!

 The Germans published lists of banned music and performers, not only Jewish artists’ works, but also works by anyone whose art was at odds with the Nazi party worldview.  However, for propaganda purposes the Nazi   propaganda minister formed a band, ‘Charlie and His Orchestra’, which played “degenerate” swing and jazz on shortwave radio on a regular schedule. These broadcasts were directed specifically at the home fronts in the US and Great Britain. Typically, the songs would begin as written, but a few lines later, the lyrics would change, describing, for example, how poorly the war was going for the Allies, emphasizing their losses, and predicting that they’d soon be defeated. ^†

On the other side, perhaps the Allies’ major musicological coup of the war was to co-opt the first four notes of ‘Ode to Victory’, from the great German composer Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Those four notes corresponded to “V” for Victory in Morse Code and were used over and over again in concerts, films, and other forms of Allied propaganda.

One of the musical oddities of WWII was Dogface Soldier, written in 1942 by non-musician soldiers as a protest against commercial war songs.  A general called it “the best battle song of the war.” Although forgotten by its authors, the song spread by word of mouth, was actually sung in battle, and became part of the soundtrack for the postwar movie about Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of the war...  It’s still being sung today by American soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. Dogface Soldier was even adopted by the 3^rd Infantry Division and is still sung at the division’s garrisons at Fort Stewart GA and elsewhere. ^†

In the Korean War, the main musical genre was country, and the lyrics spoke of faith, patriotism, fear, and longing.  A young officer expressed his fears and longing in Rotation Blues circa 1951:

♫I got the Rotation Blues

I'm a lonely soldier sittin' in Korea….

But rotation's comin', so I should have no fear

Following one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Heartbreak Ridge, an exhausted soldier wrote his mother of the horror of it in a song of that title:

♫On Heartbreak Ridge I stand tonight

 Nothing but wounded and dying in sight

Vietnam was the first American war to bring forth a barrage of protest music. In the Korean War, Elton Britt’s The Unknown Soldier presaged the protest songs of the Vietnam War soldier:

♫My grave is a promise you did not keep

 My wreath is a ribbon of pain

 and though I am dead, I shall never sleep

 If I know I have died in vain

The generally upbeat and patriotic songs of World War II, the good war, were replaced with darker, sadder themes during the Korean War, which can be viewed over the course of the Cold War as a transition to the music of the Vietnam War.  The Cold War 50’s, years often viewed through rose-colored glasses as “the good old days,” were actually a time of high anxiety, living as we did under the triple threat of The Bomb, Communist subversion, and crippling polio.  ‘Ban the Bomb’ demonstrations were frequent, and citizens fretted about fallout shelters while the schools drilled kids to ‘duck and cover’ when the sirens sounded.  There were attempts at levity in the face of direst threat.  The Kingston Trio popularized “Merry Minuet,” reminding us that

♫…we can be tranquil and thankful and proud, for man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day, someone will set the spark off... and we will all be blown away.

It was written in the caustic style of the satirist Tom Lehrer, who would continue in that vein throughout the Vietnam War with titles such as the “pre-nostalgic” So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III).

♫While we're attacking frontally,
Watch brinkally and huntally,
Describing contrapuntally
The cities we have lost.
No need for you to miss a minute
Of the agonizing holocaust.

Beginning in the final year of the Korean War, rock and roll swept the nation with the rise of the likes of  Ray Charles (Mess Around, ‘53), Bill Haley and the Comets (Rock Around the Clock, ‘54), Elvis Presley (That’s All Right, ‘54), Chuck Berry (Maybellene, ‘55), and Bo Diddley (Bo Diddley, ‘55).  

Like all young men turning 18 in the US at the time, Elvis Presley registered for the draft in 1953.  Soon a superstar, he was drafted in ‘58 and sent to Fort Hood TX, later serving with the 3^rd Armored Division in West Germany. In spite of the Cold War issues, it was a period of great exuberance and growth in the US.  The baby boomers entering their tween years embraced rock and roll wholeheartedly.  The Cold War was in full swing, but the Army didn’t faze young men since we weren’t in a hot war. 

Elvis in the army

Elvis was discharged in ‘60, and his fans’ anxious wait for new movies and appearances was over. It wasn’t long until the release that same year of the musical film, G.I. Blues, with its popular soundtrack, which included Didja Ever:

♫Ya get up in the morning and turn the shower on

 You're gettin' pneumonia, the hot, hot water is gone

 Freezin' sneezin'

 You wanna dry your back, a well

 Didja' ever get one of them days

 When there's no towel on the rack

For most GI’s during the Cold War, those were about the worst aspects of Army life.  But quietly, over in Southeast Asia, war was coming.  US military advisors had already been on the ground in South Vietnam for years, and in 1961, President Kennedy gave his blessing to the Green Berets, Special Forces out of Fort Bragg that would specialize in counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia. And in ‘62, the first protest songs, though written much earlier, hit the Billboard Top 100 chart.  They were Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone and If I Had a Hammer, both top hits for Peter, Paul and Mary.  This was also the year Jeff Sharlet, who had enlisted in the Army, found himself assigned to a Vietnamese language course.

Bob Dylan's debut album, March 1962

In the background that same year, Bob Dylan gave the first public performance of Blowin’ in the Wind in New York’s Greenwich Village. ^†  The song spoke of war, peace, and freedom.  The gates of anti-Vietnam War protest would soon open wide.

To be continued at a later date …

† Links to music videos:

Lili Marlene:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLU8ybLaI2k (English); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jrfluDC9AA&feature=related (German)

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfCFU3Mqww

GI Jive:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eokdlAZAmn8&feature=related

Charlie and His Orchestra:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78NeGAoElWg

Dogface Soldier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Exf1NDWeY

Blowin’ in the Wind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A006XhYG7co&feature=fvsr

GIs Have a Say on Monterey Bay

Monterey Bay, south of San Francisco, was long the site of two dramatically different military worlds. High on a hill overlooking the bay sat the Army Language School (ALS),* while across the water, along miles of prime California beachfront, Fort Ord spread over the landscape.  Separating the two bases was the long-defunct Cannery Row, which lent its name to a John Steinbeck novel, and the then-sleepy fishing port of Monterey.

ALS was designed much like a small college specializing in foreign languages. Most of the student-soldiers were either college grads or at least had a few years under the belt. Instead of dorms, there were barracks. What at a college would be described as a dining hall was called the Mess Hall at ALS. The food was not so different, maybe even a bit better. We even had lawns and flower beds.

I studied Czech at ALS in the ’50s; brother Jeff Sharlet was there in the ‘60s for Vietnamese; and, not long after, our cousin John Sharlet went through the 11-month Russian program. All three of us were in the Army Security Agency (ASA), a communications intelligence outfit, although other branches of the military also sent their people to ALS for intensive training in one of the nearly two dozen languages taught by native speakers.

Military duties were held to a minimum, and everyone was free at the end of the class day as well as on weekends when some of us headed across the peninsula to Carmel-by-the-Sea with its beaches and upscale pubs, while others took off up Highway 101 to the San Francisco Bay Area. As military life went, it was great duty.

♫ Well they're out there a'havin' fun

In that warm California sun**

If a guy landed across the bay however, he was in for a very different military experience. Fort Ord, a sprawling 28,000 acre site the size of a large city like Boston, was Sixth Army headquarters and home to the 6^th Infantry Division (later the 7^th). During the Vietnam War, Ord was the country’s major Army Basic Training Center where tens of thousands of young men inducted into the Army underwent an 8-week infantry course in the fort’s sprawling facilities.

Drills, obstacle courses, and rifle practice were the routine. Trainees were also familiarized with a mock-up of a Vietnamese village and the kinds of booby traps used by the Viet Cong.  Back at the barracks after long, hard training sessions, spit & polish was the order of the day. Upon graduation from the Basic course, those not shunted off to armor or artillery bases received Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) followed by a short leave, then invariably were shipped to Vietnam via Travis Air Force Base north of the Bay Area.

 Basic training graduation parade, Ft. Ord, '60’s; new trainees look on.  

Photo:  Jim Vestal

During my time up on the hill at ALS, most of the Ord troops were sent to US garrisons in either South Korea or West Germany – neither posting placing them in harm’s way during the Cold War ‘50s. However, when our cousin John arrived at the language school for intensive Russian, Ord was training large numbers of infantry for the escalating Vietnam War. The sign over the Close Combat Course said it all: If you fail here – you fail in combat. If you fail in combat, you die.

By the late ‘60s the tally of men killed in Vietnam had passed 25,000, the war had become increasingly unpopular with the public, and opposition to it had begun to spread among the GIs themselves. In January ’68 after Jeff launched Vietnam GI (VGI), the first GI-led underground antiwar paper addressed to active-duty troops, the extent of unrest among the those fighting the war soon became apparent in numerous letters-to-the-editor published monthly.

Meanwhile, a lot was happening on the homefront – In late March President Johnson dropped out of the ’68 presidential race, leaving the Democratic nomination contest to his pro-war vice president and two popular antiwar senators, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Opposition to the war was in the air, and dissent in the ranks wasn’t confined to troops in Vietnam. It was growing as well among those training to deploy. A report from a GI which Jeff ran in the April VGI, reflected the mood at Ford Ord.

It is hard to actually describe the antiwar feeling that exists here at Fort Ord, for much of the activity is confined to the minds of men.  A common reply to the statement 'I'm opposed to this war' is the simple but inclusive answer 'Who isn't?' There is little enthusiasm toward the policy of the war in Vietnam.  It shows in the disgruntled attitude of most of the men on their jobs. ... It's not as if the men were apathetic toward their country or its people, nor are they unwilling to sacrifice personal comfort, safety, and ambition, it is simply the fact they don't believe in what we're doing in Vietnam. ...
 

                        ♫ Ain’t gonna fight, fight war no more

                                 We’re giving it up, we’re gonna let it go

                                 We’re giving it up, we’re gonna let it go**

 There has been some open expressions of  antiwar sentiments, a few people have gone to jail, some have distributed leaflets, and many have openly discussed their feelings with other people.  The future is sure to bring an increase in open antiwar expression.  Many CO [Conscientious Objector] applications will be refused, and many of these people will go to jail.  More leaflets written by GIs are appearing, and antiwar graffiti is to be found everywhere around the fort. ... One thing is certain, the troops are getting restless and disillusioned with this war.  Some are vehemently opposed, while others are beginning to experience doubts, and this is sure to manifest itself in some way.  There are many here who realize what's going on in Vietnam, and they don't like it.

While Fort Ord was one of the largest bases in the country, it was just one of many turning out soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airment for Vietnam, and, as similar reports in other issues of Vietnam GI indicated, GI protest at Ord was not unique. 

*Renamed the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in the '70's.

**California Sun, by Henry Glover and Morris Levy, 1961

***(Ain't Gonna) Study War No More, by Willie Dixon and Alex Dixon, 1988, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhJHMbbh8ZQ

On the Trail With the NVA

As the Vietnam War intensified, a major US objective was to stop the infiltration of men and materiel by the People’s Army of Vietnam, otherwise known as the formidable North Vietnam Army (NVA) into the Republic of Vietnam or, more familiarly, South Vietnam (SVN). General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition against the black pajama-clad guerrilla forces fighting in the jungles and mountains of SVN known to GIs as the Viet Cong, or VC, was not working. Although US forces brought immense firepower to bear causing heavy casualties, it was to no avail.  Decimated VC battalions refitted and reappeared along with increasing numbers of North Vietnamese regulars.

NVA units and supplies were continuously coming down what was dubbed the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ (HCM trail), a complex, semi-concealed network of roads, trails, waterways, and mountain paths originating in North Vietnam, looping through the border areas of neutral Laos and Cambodia, and crossing into SVN at various points. These were well-trained, well-equipped, uniformed units that entered the fray alongside the VC. For the North Vietnamese troops, coming down the trail was a long, arduous journey, all the more so given steady US bombing the length of the route. Still they came, and, since the NVA and VC traveled light, only modest amounts of materiel had to make it through the gauntlet to supply them in the battle zone. 

Ho Chi Minh Trail infiltration routes

Vietnam GI (VGI), Jeff Sharlet’s underground antiwar paper for GIs, regularly ran interviews with enlisted men—combat veterans back from the Nam as they called in-country or, in military parlance, simply ‘grunts’— but occasionally a maverick officer turned up in its pages. In the September ’68 issue, an Army captain sat for an interview. He had five and a half years in and was headed for a career, but had grown disgusted with senior officers he worked with in Vietnam, had lost faith in the US mission, and resigned his commission. The captain had served at brigade headquarters of the 173^rd Airborne and had stories to tell, including an account of a typical NVA unit gleaned from interrogations of prisoners captured by the 173^rd.

For the next three months, the 174^th underwent unit training with special emphasis on squad, platoon, and company tactics. The training was very thorough and included mock-ups of American planes and tanks. They ‘war-gamed’ with some of the regiment’s units taking the role of US troops and using the same tactics as American commanders. The 174^th gradually learned how their adversaries operated and developed counter-tactics.

Finally ready for combat, the unit began infiltrating down the HCM trail in early ’67, crossing into Laos where it engaged the Royal Laotian Army in what a captured NVA lieutenant characterized as a kind of shakedown battle exercise. As the Laotians were no match, the encounter served to sharpen the 174^th’s combat tactics and techniques. Enroute along the trail, the 174^th came under American bombing raids. However, they had been trained to expect such attacks, minimum damage was sustained, and they continued their trek south.

By May of ’67, the 174^th had made it into SVN, arriving at the Central Highlands in the area of Dak To. They were soon in heavy combat with South Vietnamese forces formally referred to as the ARVN, as well as elements of the US 173^rd Airborne. The NVA decimated an elite ARVN unit, inflicting heavy casualties and overrunning their position. Not long after they made contact with two companies of the 173^rd and chewed up Alpha Company thanks to their earlier training in US combat tactics.

The NVA commander knew that upon first contact with the enemy, American infantry units pulled back about 200 yards, formed a temporary defensive line, and called in superior firepower on their adversary’s presumed position.  After heavy shelling and air strikes, the US unit would then attack. Predictably, the US commander was about to fall back, at which point the 174^th deployed the new counter-tactic it had practiced. As the maverick captain told VGI, Instead of holding their position and withstanding the inevitable shells and bombs, the NVA

began assaulting as soon as contact was made....They immediately made physical contact with us and stay[ed] as close as possible, even between our ranks....so that we couldn't use [our] artillery or air strikes.

NVA Assault Troops

The counter-tactic worked so well for the 174^th Regiment that word went out to all NVA commands in SVN to use it. As the war ground on, US commanders changed and adapted their tactics accordingly, but of course it was too late for the men of Company A of the 173^rd Airborne.

Tall Tales – The New Left According to J Edgar Hoover

Spring ’65. The US escalates the war in Vietnam. ‘Rolling Thunder’, the systematic bombing of North Vietnam, is launched, and the first American combat units go ashore in South Vietnam. Students rise in protest on many campuses stateside. Opposition to the war emerges at Indiana University (IU), growing exponentially over the next several years.^†  Although relatively moderate in scale compared with Berkeley or the University of Wisconsin, IU comes to the attention of the FBI.
As the antiwar movement grew across the country, President Johnson (LBJ) became obsessed with the idea that the Russians or Cubans were behind it – a familiar Washington scenario of Communist subversion at work. He tasked J Edgar Hoover to get the goods. The ‘Bureau’, as the FBI was called by insiders, created a program to monitor all anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and directed its 59 field offices and numerous satellite branches across the country to keep an eye on colleges and universities within their jurisdictions.

The Bureau had at its disposal well-tested tools for surveilling and disrupting the antiwar movement, techniques honed in its no-holds barred postwar campaign against the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and rival Marxist groups. By the mid-‘60s, the CPUSA had been thoroughly penetrated by FBI informants and was a shadow of its prewar self, although its smaller Trotskyist and Maoist rivals were going strong.

Responding to a rattled LBJ who in ’67 loudly declared to his cabinet, “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government,”* Hoover deployed the vast resources of his secret agency against the antiwar movement. Shocked during spring ‘68 by SDS’s temporary takeover of Columbia University, the Director escalated, intensifying his campaign under a code word he’d coined in 1956 for work against the Old Left, COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program, this time directed at the New Left. The Indianapolis (Indy) Field Office took note, stepping up its surveillance of colleges and universities in the State of Indiana experiencing student unrest, most notably IU at Bloomington.

How do we know this? Under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI recently began posting the archives of its long ago campaign against the New Left and related groups on a new web site. This included the Indy FBI’s files on IU for the years 1967-69, a skewed tale of the now well-known history of activism at IU in the ‘60s** viewed through the distorting lens of an organization long accustomed to chasing Communists. Indeed, one IU activist was known to be a ‘card-carrying’ member of the CPUSA, while several others considered themselves ‘communists’. Operating at the margins of campus protest, however, those individuals had negligible influence on events.

The Indy office stood among the vanguard against the New Left in the FBI network and was determined to confirm the President’s and J Edgar’s suspicions that the Soviets were calling the shots in the antiwar movement. However, the problem was they were using an investigative template in their IU operation that led them to pose the wrong questions about the New Left, which had broken with the Old Left modus organizational model nationally.   

Out the window went CPUSA shibboleths such as the need for a strong leader, ideological conformity, a hierarchical organization, strict rank and file discipline, ‘front’ organizations, and the creation of misleading propaganda. Yet, like generals fighting the last war, these were the markers the Indiana FBI was looking for. At the time, the Bureau only distinguished between left and rightwing targets of investigation. It was later that Hoover created an internal division of labor between continuing surveillance of Old Left organizations and the more active pursuit of New Left groups.

Predictably, the Special Agent in Charge-Indianapolis (SAC-Indy), had great difficulty finding evidence of ‘Soviet influence’ among the IU New Left, but this didn’t deter him from pulling out all the stops in pursuit of the Director’s objective. Indy’s modus operandi included aggressively interviewing student leaders to remind them the feds were watching and collecting covert ‘intelligence’ gathered by two student informants rated excellent, one of whom had access to the campus New Left leadership.^† Sent on to Washington, SAC-Indy’s myriad secret reports produced a caricature of a mini-Communist conspiracy on a conservative Midwestern campus in a small southern Indiana town.

Although the Indy FBI’s memoranda of 40+ years ago are redacted to conceal informants’ names and even the targets of surveillance in places, a latter day file clerk’s carelessness left the names of targets uncensored elsewhere in the reporting. Hence, the FBI dubbed Steve Cagan, a grad student, the mastermind of the IU conspiracy. As a founder of the campus chapter of the Dubois Clubs of America, successor to CPUSA’s former youth auxiliary, the Young Communist League, Cagan was a convenient leadership candidate, especially when he formed the ‘Indiana Central Office for Peace Action’ (ICOPA) in late June ’67 “to coordinate all the antiwar and anti-draft organizations in the State of Indiana.”*** However, the ‘catch’, as the same FBI report conceded, was that Cagan left IU six weeks later, leaving the ICOPA, which had accomplished little, defunct.

The FBI’s search for ideological coherence, not to mention consistency, at IU proved equally challenging since neither was a characteristic of the sprawling New Left. Neither of the two marginal campus groups that were often at sword’s point ideologically – the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), youth division of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization that broke away from the CPUSA; and its rival, the Dubois Club – could divine what the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest campus group, stood for other than opposing the Vietnam War.

The quest for a hierarchical structure at the heart of the IU conspiracy was especially elusive given the diversity of student organizations and the amorphous nature of SDS. Almost lamentably, SAC-Indy had to inform J Edgar that at IU “SDS … has no organizational structure. All of their activities depend on individual activists and are spontaneous.”*** In spite of its Soviet lineage, the Dubois Club seemed not much more promising in terms of observable structure, appearing primarily as a handful of individuals. The only hope the FBI found that met the criterion of at least “a degree” of organizational structure was YSA.

Even more troublesome for the traditional FBI template of a Soviet-influenced Communist conspiracy was the expectation of a disciplined rank and file. However, absent a ‘party line’(in Bureau nomenclature) and given the rather nebulous group structures, both the necessary command and enforcement mechanisms were missing from the equation. To add to the Indy FBI’s woes, nailing down the strength of these groups was a guessing game. As Mary Ann Wynkoop, the historian of IU dissent, noted, membership among the various IU activist outfits tended to overlap, making head counts less than reliable and an individual’s primary allegiance somewhat of a mystery.** Long accustomed to referring to CPUSA rank and filers as ‘card-carrying members’, SAC-Indy’s report to the director had to acknowledge that membership in SDS was largely “a state of mind,”*** while qualifiers such as ‘approximately’, ‘about’, or ‘estimated at’ had to be used to report the strength of other New Left groups.

Determined to get at least a piece of the conspiracy puzzle right, the FBI rapporteurs classified  the IU chapter of the ‘Committee to End the War in Vietnam’ (CEWV), a large and inclusive umbrella antiwar group founded at University of Wisconsin-Madison in ‘65, as a ‘front organization’, meaning a group manipulated from behind the scenes by a controlling organization. Since the alleged mastermind, Cagan, had been involved with CEWV before leaving IU, the FBI concluded it was a ‘front’ for the very small Dubois Club, presumably Cagan’s political home, a group on the US Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, a designation which created problems for the Club with IU’s Administration, but that’s another story.

Later the FBI surmised that control of the front had shifted to the rival YSA chapter, the distinction between a pro-Moscow group and an anti-Moscow Trotskyist group apparently having little meaning for the single-minded Bureau back in Washington.  The CEWV functioned much less conspiratorially at IU and elsewhere as a big tent for mobilizing antiwar demonstrations since not all New Left groups wished to march under the SDS flag – most notably YSA members who spoke contemptuously of SDS’s lack of right thinking as well as its loosey-goosey structure, discipline, and countercultural habits – the very qualities of openness which attracted thousands of students to SDS at campuses throughout the country.

Finally, as any rookie FBI man would know, a Communist conspiracy worth its salt puts out propaganda or slanted, misleading public information to tarnish its opponents. Other than the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the SDS bible, most campus organizations were generally not given to issuing manifestos, especially at a conservative institution like IU where such rhetoric would likely fall on deaf ears, even possibly engendering hostility and hindering recruitment of potential new members to the cause. Conveniently for the Indy FBI, in the wake of protest actions in ‘67, IU SDS and CEWV issued public statements charging excessive force or ‘police brutality’. Indy labeled these charges unfounded, made “for publicity value only” [Read: propaganda].****

In fact, at the first of these protests in Bloomington in June ‘67 led by Brother Jeff Sharlet, Jim Wallihan, and Joe Fuhrmann, a passer-by witnessed excessive force by a plainclothes detective who repeatedly beat a handcuffed student with his flashlight.^† In another protest jointly led by SDS and CEVW several months later, the FBI report again defended the police, emphasizing their injuries, and minimizing student injuries as just a cut on the mouth and an injured ear. On that occasion campus security along with the local police, county sheriffs, and the Indiana State Police, decked out in protective gear with riot sticks, used disproportionate force to subdue a handful of students who refused orders to cease their sit-in. Two of the students suffered head injuries, one serious, and had to be sent to the hospital.

A student casualty of the October ’67 protest^†

Although extensive feedback to Washington did not confirm the projected image of a Soviet-inspired antiwar movement at IU, SAC-Indy assured Hoover that the student “ringleaders” (names blacked out, but well known on campus)  – Russell Block, Steve Cagan, Joe Fuhrmann,  Bob Grove, Robin Hunter, Bob Johnson, Dan Kaplan, Jeff Sharlet, and Jim Wallihan, among others – were either on or recommended for the “Security Index,” a list of citizens considered a sufficient threat to national security that in event of a national emergency they could be subjected to actions ranging from heightened surveillance and tracking, to immediate detention.***** J Edgar responded with a well done.

*T Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (2012)

** M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (2002)
*** SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (6/25/68)
****SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (7/15/68)
***** SAC-Indianapolis to Director, FBI (6/3/68)

^†

 -Protest at IU:   http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/heartland-radicals.html

-Surveillance at IU:   http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/03/surveillance-at-indiana-university.html
-Police brutality:  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/unsung-hero-of-gi-resistance.html
-Dow protest: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/omeka/archives/studentlife/exhibits/show/studentdemonstrationsatiu/1967dowchemicalsitin

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