Joe got through his 12-month tour and came back to the States in April ‘68. He hooked up again with Jeff Sharlet in Chicago where Joe’s wife Suzan was teaching. The two ex-Vietnam GIs had previously met at Indiana University before Joe was drafted. Jeff had done his war earlier and was finishing up his degree work before moving on to grad school at University of Chicago. A year later, he decided grad school could wait, there was a senseless war raging that had to be opposed.
By the end of ’67, Jeff was ready to launch the first GI-led antiwar paper for GIs, at least the many he was aware of who had growing doubts about the wisdom of the US mission in Vietnam. The first issue of Vietnam GI (VGI) bore the date January 1968. It would soon find an enthusiastic readership among GIs in Nam and those in stateside camps, men who survived their tours there or were waiting to deploy.
Jeff realized he needed photos of the war, not just to break up the text, but to put a face on the conflict. Fortuitously, Joe Carey came along and got back in touch. Co-opted into the editorial collective, Joe provided VGI with many of his ‘unsuitable’ photos from the field, including one of a so-called Viet Cong (VC) suspect – more likely just a poor peasant caught in the middle between the American steamroller and the guerrillas formally known as the People’s Liberation Army. The man was pinned to the ground, an officer questioning him with a knife in hand:
Photo credit: Joseph Carey
Joe also passed on to Jeff one of the most shocking photos
of the war, an atrocity photographed by a combat GI who bore witness and
wordlessly handed his roll of film to Joe when he arrived
on the scene. Jeff realized the photo was a dynamite visual against the war,
young American soldiers posing like great white hunters on safari with their
grisly trophies. He offered it to the national media, but none of them would
touch it since editors knew how vindictive the Johnson White House Press could
be to journalists who seriously embarrassed the administration. A European news
service eventually put it out on the wire, and the photo also reportedly
appeared in a major Soviet newspaper.
Meanwhile, with no takers stateside, Jeff ran the photo in
the May issue of VGI along with his own caption. About that time, the Army’s
Military Intelligence unit out of Fort Sheridan IL had gotten wind the photo was
going to appear, and agents came to Chicago looking for the negative; but Jeff
had taken the precaution of hiding it off-premises before he ran the photo.
Eventually the picture was reprinted in the civilian underground press,
including the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Express Times, and the
Army could no longer ignore the extremely adverse publicity it was generating.
They went in search of the offending GIs in the shot; they
were located and court-martialed at Fort Sill OK, one of the more out of the
way US military bases, the idea being to keep the proceedings low profile.
Although it was not his photo, Joe Carey’s connection was detected, and he was
summoned to testify at the trial (Nb. Although a GI finished his tour and
returned to civilian life, there remained a period of inactive reserve during
which he was subject to being called back – so Joe was still on the books).
In the end, the outcome of the court-martial was no more
than a slap on the wrist, very characteristic of military justice in the middle
of a war. The ringleader, a staff sergeant, was reduced in rank one grade while
the younger privates were deemed to be following a superior’s orders and let
off. For such comic opera justice, Joe had driven all the way from San
Francisco to dusty Lawton OK.
From Vietnam GI, May '68
Enter Dave Dellinger at this point in the tale. A long time
pacifist, by ’68 he was the titular head of the ‘Mobe’, short for the broad
movement against the war, and editor-in-chief of Liberation, a small but
powerful magazine committed to the antiwar cause. Dellinger was well connected;
he knew all the major activists in the States and in Europe. SDS, Students for
a Democratic Society, had migrated to Europe with a few chapters in cities with
concentrations of American civilians. There were also myriad indigenous
European anti-Vietnam War groups, especially in France, The Netherlands, West
Germany, and Sweden. In addition, there were sizeable communities of US
military deserters being harbored in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Paris. In
brief, the war was a very big issue abroad as well as on the homefront.
One particular European group is of interest here – Paris
American Committee to Stop War (PACS), made up of expatriate Americans including
Alexander Calder, the sculptor; Susan George, a political activist who had
opposed France’s war in Algeria; Ian Morris, a novelist; and Mary Jo van Ingen,
later to become a professor of English, among others. PACS had been organized
in ’66 and had ties with other groups on the Continent opposed to the war.
Maria Jolas, long the grande dame of the American expat community in Paris and
a person of consequence in the literary world at large, served as executive secretary
of PACS. Except for World War II, Madame Jolas, a tall, striking woman then in
her mid-‘70s, had made her life in Paris since the ‘20s when she and her
husband Eugene, who had died in 1952, became an important part of the modernist movement in literature and the
arts in general.
In the late ‘20s, Maria, an heiress from a very old American
family, and Eugene created the journal transition as a vehicle for literary
modernism. They published most of the distinguished or soon to be distinguished
writers of the day including T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, the
young Hemingway, and not least, James Joyce, who was then in self-imposed exile
in Paris. The influential journal continued until just before the outbreak of
the war when it completed publication of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake,
published serially over the years in its pages. The Jolas’s had become the
author’s close personal friends and devoted literary supporters up to his death
in early ’41. They then looked after his family and his literary estate. By the
late ‘60s, Maria Jolas was one of the last survivors of Joyce’s Paris circle.
Maria Jolas was a networker par excellence. Earlier in life she
and Eugene successfully networked among the literati of Europe and America for the
cause of modernism; in the Vietnam War era she was in touch with like-minded antiwar
leaders throughout Europe and in the States. She threw her formidable
organizing ability into protest against the war. Meanwhile, the American war in
Vietnam had taken a turn for the worse in early ’68, and those opposed to it
took heart.
Maria Jolas, Paris, late '60s
Photo credit: Gisele Freund
The Tet Offensive, which opened suddenly with a stunning
attack on the US Embassy compound in Saigon, was winding down after several
months of intense fighting along the length of the country. By late spring ’68,
the offensive had turned into a military defeat for the insurgents although it
simultaneously became a political-psychological victory of considerable consequence
for them. The enemy had dramatically shown that heretofore secure major cities
were vulnerable to large-scale attack. In the wake of Tet, General Westmoreland
was out, and President Johnson soon withdrew
from the ’68 presidential race.
Any notion that there
was a light at the end of the tunnel was extinguished; instead, the more
realistic prospect of a long, grinding unwinnable war slogging on was featured
on television screens and in major print media; and, for GIs in the war and in
the pipeline, it was the big story in the relatively new GI antiwar press led
by Jeff Sharlet’s Vietnam GI, Andy Stapp’s The Bond, and The Ally, ably edited by
Clark Smith. Opposition to the war in the ranks was rising.
Earlier in late ’66, for Maria Jolas the war had suddenly
become much more than a distant conflict.
An Army truck driver, the first GI deserter to seek help from supporters of
North Vietnam in France, was told of her work and, figuratively speaking,
landed rather abruptly on her doorstep seeking assistance. Maria was initially
taken aback. For one thing, PACS existed at the tolerance of the French
government, which had as leverage the granting of residence permits to
foreigners for only short, renewable periods. Generally, it was the policy of
the government to turn over wayward GIs who fell into French hands to the US
military authorities in West Germany.
On the other hand, nothing in Maria’s background or life
experience had prepared her for Gregory Graham, a private first class (Pfc)
from Waco TX, fleeing from his unit in Germany to avoid deployment to Vietnam. He
was a redneck youth raised in an orphanage who had enlisted to get out of
Texas; his explanation for deserting was something of a shock. Graham told
Maria, “Ah doann mind barbecued bonzes, but ah hate fried drivers, that ain’t
my scene. I split.”
Translated from Texas vernacular, he said he didn’t object
to Buddhist monks in Vietnam dousing themselves with petrol and burning
themselves alive as an antiwar protest, but he disliked the prospect of being
personally fried – when a gasoline tanker, such as he would drive in Nam, went
over a mine – and living in agony for three days before dying.*
An Austrian living in Paris, Max Watts, came to the rescue
and helped Maria deal with her unexpected guest. Graham was hidden from the
French and American authorities in a French psychiatric hospital on the Loire
River where he was alternatively classified as a patient or a gardener
depending on who was asking. Word got out among antiwar groups near US bases in
West Germany as well as in Amsterdam and Antwerp where GIs deserting their
units often first headed, that help was available in Paris.
In ’67 several more GIs found their way to Maria, who, with
the assistance of Max and his comrade, Mary Jo (aka June) van Ingen, placed
them beyond the reach of the French cops. This experience gave rise to RITA,
Resistance Inside the Army, a formidable network for helping US deserters as an
action against the war.**
By ’68 Maria Jolas was a seasoned anti-Vietnam War activist,
a familiar figure at Left Bank antiwar rallies. That spring a French group, the
English name of which was the National Committee of Vietnam (NCV), allied with
PACS, planned an antiwar event in Paris, a rally in an appropriate venue with
speakers. Aware that the GI antiwar movement writ large was growing, Maria
contacted her American comrade Dave Dellinger seeking an ex-Vietnam GI to speak
at the event. Dellinger turned to
brother Jeff, who by spring ’68 was editing VGI, already widely read
below the radar by troops in Nam and stateside camps.
Jeff, however, was up to his neck in work on the paper –
touring base camps for interviews with returned combat veterans, visiting GI
coffee houses, and, not least, raising funds among East and West Coast liberals
to pay the printing and mailing bills to keep VGI afloat. Instead, he
recommended Joe Carey for the Paris mission, especially since Joe had most
recently seen the war up close through the lens of his camera. Furthermore, Joe
had brought home pictorial evidence of what was really going on over there. Jolas
liked the idea. So did her French colleagues.
Jeff supplied funds to have a selection of Joe’s combat
photo outtakes enlarged and mounted, Dellinger provided the plane ticket, and
Joe Carey was off to Paris. He was
met at the airport by Dr M. F. Kahn of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, a
member of the sponsoring French antiwar group, who took him to his apartment
where Tom Hayden of the SDS leadership waited to brief him.
David Dellinger Joseph Carey
By pre-arrangement, Joe was put up with a French journalist,
and his Parisian hosts included Maria Jolas and Laurent Schwartz. During his
stay in Paris, Maria entertained him several times at her apartment in Montparnasse, which had been the artistic center of Paris at the time Maria and Eugene launched transition, in the 6th
arrondissement not far from Saint- Germain-des-Prés, which became the center of the existentialist movement following WWII. It was a comfortable place with many framed photos of Maria’s
family and friends***, and, of course, much evidence in bookcases of her long
involvement in the literature of the first half of the century.
Joe had been aware of Maria’s relationship to Joyce. An
English lit major, he had read about her in the definitive Joyce biography, but
had no idea she was an activist as well. A gracious hostess, he remembered
Maria showing him her signed first editions of Joyce. On his last Sunday in
Paris, she also invited the American writer Mary McCarthy over, they drank iced
tea, and Maria told stories of her time with the Joyce family.
Laurent Schwartz served as
Joe’s guide in Paris. Schwartz, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th
c, had won a Fields Medal, the equivalent of the
Nobel Prize; he was also a well-known French political activist who had opposed
France’s wars in Vietnam, and Algeria and was now bringing his activist skills
to bear against the American war in Vietnam. The previous year he had sat as a
member of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal at its sessions in Stockholm
and Copenhagen. Schwartz, along with
Jean-Paul Sartre, had founded NCV, which was sponsoring a follow-up war crimes tribunal
at which Joe Carey would make his presentation the evening of his arrival.
Laurent Schwartz
Joe had raced to Paris to be there in time for the event on
an early July evening and was quite tired from the journey. He was able to grab
a few hours of sleep at Dr Kahn’s before being whisked off to the venue for the
Paris tribunal, a small art theater. His 30-odd Vietnam photos, including the
headless atrocity shot, in 8x10’s and 11x14’s, were set up on the stage. The
proceedings were in French, so Maria Jolas sat alongside him and translated his
presentation. At the end of the evening, the French organizers asked if he
would extend his stay since other antiwar events were coming up, and they hoped
he’d be willing to participate. Additional funds were found to cover expenses,
and Joe was of course delighted to spend several weeks in Paris.
As an ex-Vietnam GI who seen action and had had a special
angle of vision on the war, Joe was in much demand in Paris left circles. On
another occasion he was scheduled to appear at the Quaker Center with the
playwright Arthur Miller and Wilfred Burchett, a well-known Australian
journalist of the left. Joe also gave newspaper interviews, was feted at
parties, and wined and dined by high ranking representatives of North Vietnam
and the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the insurgency in South
Vietnam. Paris was still in turmoil from the May student uprising on the Left
Bank, and, with the Bastille Day celebration approaching, another round of
student unrest was in the offing.
On that day, July 14th, Joe, as an experienced
photographer, went out onto the streets of the Latin Quarter to shoot some film
of the students battling the cops. However, he
soon realized that from the police point of view, the line between observer and
participant was non-existent; his film was exposed, his Nikon smashed, and he narrowly escaped arrest. He later heard that French
students who’d been nabbed had been made to run a gauntlet of cops swinging
rubber truncheons. In spite of the high drama of his Paris days, looking back
on his sojourn decades later, Joe’s fondest memories remained those afternoons
and dinners chez Madame Jolas.
After his successful mission to Paris, Joe Carey returned to
the States, eventually becoming a chef, nationally known as Chef Joseph; a restaurateur;
an author; and founder of the Memphis Culinary Academy.**** As for the notorious
atrocity photo he had passed on to Jeff for
Vietnam GI – since the end of the
Vietnam War many years ago it has hung in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi
Minh City, formerly Saigon.
In the War Remnants Museum
*Max Watts, “American RITA GIs in
the Paris of May of 1968,” Le blog de Mai
(May 1, 2008)
**http://againstthearmy.blogspot.com/,
June van Ingen’s writings on RITA and its times
***Thanks to George Carrano, an
American antiwar activist who visited the Jolas apartment in early ’68 and
remembered the many interesting photos on walls
and surfaces.
****http://www.theroguechef.net/trc/
