The Indiana Surprise

The other old friend of Jeff’s who helped shape the memoir about my brother was Karen Grote, his girlfriend at Indiana University (IU). Like Ed Smith, the ex-GI, Karen had first contacted my son Jeff; unlike Ed, she knew from the outset he wasn’t the Jeff Sharlet she was seeking – too young, perhaps a namesake. Karen had searched further on the Internet and came upon the awful truth: Jeff was long gone, dead too young.

At first I thought Karen was an earlier IU girlfriend I’d met in the ‘60s, Karin Ford, whose whereabouts were unknown to me. Karen Grote told me how late that summer of ’03 she was holed up indoors during hot, rainy days – muggy weather like back in Indiana. The ironic lyrics of a ‘60s country tune crept into her head: “God didn’t make little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime ….” Jeff had lived and worked in Indy, short for the state capital, during the summer of his junior year, 1966, and Karen had visited him there. She wondered where he’d landed in life, what he was doing now.

After my son forwarded Karen’s inquiry, what did I learn about Brother Jeff? How they met, how he introduced her to Chinese food and taught her to use chopsticks (which, like many Vietnam GI’s, he had carried since they weren’t washed, just wiped after each use), and other anecdotes of everyday student life in Bloomington IN. Karen also told me about IU’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter (SDS) and its local anti-poverty project on which she and Jeff worked before Vietnam came to dominate the national organization’s focus.

Campus Entrance, Indiana University

The work involved a pocket of poverty south of town in rural Monroe County, a place of no running water, rat-infested shacks, and no services. Jeff and others, in helping those people improve their lives and obtain social services, were not above lending a hand with the dirty hard labor of cleaning the communal well, repairing roofs, sealing rat holes.

Karen also gave me invaluable insight into Jeff’s temperament as a young ex-Vietnam GI. After all, I’d known him best as child years younger than me. She said he was usually quite reserved, both in public and in private. He’d been affectionate, never effusive, and she could recall only one time he showed any anger toward her. But there were dark moods as well when he’d become uncommunicative.

One episode she remembered occurred across the border in Kentucky where Jeff and other activists were trying to advise a young man on his draft situation. The advice was divided between recommending the man resist and do prison time, or accept the draft call and agitate against the war from inside. In face of disagreement, Jeff simply went silent. Another time Karen recalled him sitting on the stoop, head in his hands. When asked what was wrong, he answered in a tone of quiet despair, “We gotta get out of this place,” which happened to be a line from a ’65 hit song that became the anthem of Vietnam GI’s. She was puzzled, Jeff said nothing further.

I’d always assumed Jeff had worked for the railroad right there in Bloomington during summer ’66. Having taken my PhD at IU, I knew the town well, remembering the tracks a block or so beyond Courthouse Square, but no, Karen set the record straight. Jeff had gotten a job in Indy that summer, 50 miles to the north, working in the freight yards as a locomotive fireman and boarding with a carpenter named Karlis Zobs in his big old ramshackle house. As the summer drew to a close, Karen remembered Jeff on the verge of telling her certain things, but he never seemed to get past the openings. He’d begin, then become uncharacteristically anxious, and stop abruptly. On the last occasion he started to tell her what he did in Vietnam, not just about Vietnam, but broke off, saying he couldn’t, that she wouldn’t understand and hate him if he told her. Karen never knew what it was.

From Source to Searcher

After Karen and I had talked at length, I realized she was something of a wannabe sleuth, obsessed with facts, and unusually computer literate; she quickly volunteered to help me locate people from the various times in Jeff’s short but fruitful life, not an easy task in the days before social networking made its appearance. I’d been researching a quasi-memoir of the Cold War, especially its domestic impact on American life, and had blocked out two central chapters on my brother – as a Vietnam GI, and later as an antiwar leader.

Karen Grote Ferb, several years later

In short order, with the flood of new information on Jeff facilitated by Karen, those chapters evolved into an outline for an entire book as I learned much more about my younger brother; his times; the underground paper he created, Vietnam GI (VGI); and its role in fostering the GI resistance movement which contributed to the war’s end.

I had taught the Vietnam War for years and became intrigued by the cohort Karen and Jeff – had he lived – represented, a cohort that came of age in the middle of the Cold War, in the fever zone of Vietnam, the turbulent ‘60s, and beyond. I was constantly on the lookout for references to Jeff in the historical literature, had read Dissent in the Heartland*, an excellent study of the ‘60s at IU, and here I was face-to-face with a participant, a member of SDS who had known the activists the author had written about: Bernella and David Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, Peter and Lucia Montague, Joe Fuhrmann, Professor James Dinsmoor, and others who were all old friends with whom she’d lost touch, but now found.

The Owl Coffeehouse just off campus; IU’s alternative paper, The Spectator, edited by Jeff’s friend Jim Retherford; Guy Loftman of SDS wins IU student presidency; the rallies in Dunn Meadow. And there were the campus antiwar protests against the likes of General Maxwell Taylor and General Lewis Hershey, the head of the draft. Karen and Jeff were at those demos together.

Hershey demo at IU, May, 1966

Karen had special memory of the arrests of IU protesters in Indy, July ’66, on occasion of President Johnson’s speech at the war monument in the city’s center; she’d been one of those arrested, but that’s a story for elsewhere. Although Karen didn’t know them personally, she was aware of the campus pro-war conservatives, most notably Tom Huston, a law student; Robert Turner; and Bob Tyrrell, all of whom later rose to prominence in the nation’s capital.

In effect, Karen became my witness to the history of Jeff’s SDS years, to the rich IU chapter of his story. And I should add she's been scarcely less productive in tracking down his military buddies from the Army Language School (ALS) and ASA, or the Army Security Agency, as well as the Chicago group around VGI and the GI coffeehouse people who manned those antiwar outposts around the country outside the major Army bases. Names I had known only from old letters, photos, and articles in Jeff’s files turned into individuals I was able to interview and got to know, thanks to Karen, the tireless searcher.

*By Mary Ann Wynkoop.

The Vietnam Coup Capers

In the beginning I was not the only searcher for my brother Jeff Sharlet – two of his oldest friends from the ‘60s also sought to reconnect with him. Instead, they found my son Jeff, a writer highly visible on the Internet and my brother’s namesake. At the time I was working on a memoir on my Cold War experiences that I envisioned would include a couple of chapters on Brother Jeff – on his time in Vietnam and as a leader of GI protest against the war, so young Jeff referred both old friends to me. The first voice from the past was Ed Smith, an ex-Vietnam GI, who wrote that he was Jeff’s best friend in Vietnam. That got my attention. Over the years since, Ed had taken a degree in Oriental languages, become a published poet, served 15 years in the ministry, and was then working as an insurance agent struggling to rediscover his poetic voice. A great admirer of Vietnamese culture, Ed sent me some lovely poems he had recently written about his Vietnam tour, including one about his passionate love affair with an older Vietnamese woman. His poetry suggested a man entering the age of nostalgia, recalling happier times. In that spirit, Ed came looking for his old friend Jeff decades later.

I had only a general idea of Jeff’s time in Nam during 1963-64; I was in Moscow that year writing a PhD dissertation. Jeff hadn’t talked much about his experience, and I hadn’t asked since I knew the work was classified. Half a dozen years after me, my kid brother had followed in my footsteps into the military. We’d both dropped out of college, and in those days there was a draft, so why not enlist and have some choice. Jeff and I each spent a year at the Army Language School (ALS) and served in a special communications intel outfit, the Army Security Agency (ASA), military arm of the NSA or National Security Agency. There was one big difference; I had studied the Czech language and got a very comfortable posting to Cold War Europe in the ‘50s while Jeff, upon arriving at Monterey on the California coast, had been bumped from Russian into Vietnamese. As fate would have it, that moment shaped the trajectory of his remaining short but interesting life.

Ed Smith, a Harvard dropout, had also joined ASA and preceded Jeff to the Language School where he too had been bumped – out of Chinese into Vietnamese. It was summer ’61 not long after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and JFK, smarting from defeat, zeroed in on Southeast Asia where he would meet the Soviet global challenge. Sure we needed Russian and Chinese linguists, but building up a cadre of Vietnamese speakers was the priority. Jeff arrived at ALS midway during Ed’s course and the two became close pals, pub crawling through the bars of Monterey and nearby Carmel-by-the-Sea, including Sade’s on Ocean Avenue where my ALS classmates and I had once spent many a pleasant afternoon.

In June ’62, Ed graduated at the top of his class and was sent to Fort Meade in Maryland for eight weeks of specialized training by NSA experts. In September he deployed to Southeast Asia, to the 9th ASA battalion at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippine Islands (PI). Four months later, his Viet course over, Jeff joined Ed at Clark. They worked side-by-side on the night shift, translating North Vietnamese (NVN) military intercepts. Off duty, they partied – in nearby Angeles City; at Baguio, the mountain resort high above the heat of the plains; and in Manila, a train ride to the southeast. Presumably NSA had given Jeff additional training in PI since he worked exclusively with Ed helping the cryptographers, or ‘crypts’, break low-level NVN codes.

Ed Smith (arrow) with Jeff, right

The Coup Missions

As Buddhist opposition to the repressive and incompetent Diem regime mounted during summer ’63, a group of South Vietnamese (SVN) generals discreetly sought US approval for a possible coup against the SVN president. Washington ‘green-lighted’ the plot, and in mid-summer Ed Smith was sent over to Vietnam to reinforce Davis Station, home to ASA’s 3rd Radio Research Unit (RRU), a secure facility at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon. Several weeks later Jeff and a team of lingy’s, linguists in ASA parlance, followed. NSA briefed the team on a top secret mission. No one in ASA without ‘Need to know’ was privy. The American Embassy had assigned Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, to liaise with the generals plotting the coup, but the White House wanted an additional channel of information on the plotters’ plans.

Realizing that I hadn’t been aware of what Jeff had been involved in, Ed abandoned caution and said, “What the hell, the war’s over; I’ll tell you what we were doing.” The ASA team set up in a remote corner of an Army signal battalion base near a ville called Phu Lam to the west of Saigon. The base handled all military communications for the region, American and Vietnamese. Hooking into the football-field size antennas, the team worked out of communication vans 24/7 surveilling SVN general staff communications. By mid-October ’63, their assignments completed, Ed and Jeff returned to Clark AFB. Two weeks later, the generals pulled off the coup, killing Diem in the process. Since Jeff later became a major opponent of the war, I asked Ed if he’d heard him express any antiwar sentiments. No, he replied, we’d both bought into the prevailing Cold War consensus that the Soviet global threat had to be met, although we’d felt uncomfortable snooping on our allies. Obviously the bigger picture of which they were part was above their pay grade.

President Diem of South Vietnam & General Minh, head of post-coup junta

Back in the Philippines, Ed and Jeff resumed their routine, secret work and the good life of college boys on extended vacation. Then one night late January ’64, they returned from clubbing in Manila to find orders taped to the barracks door – Report to the Clark flight line with gear noon the next day. Another coup was about to occur in Saigon, and a contingent of Viet lingy’s was rushed back to Vietnam. This time the coup went smoothly, power was quickly consolidated, and the ASA team stood down. But 400 miles north at Phu Bai near the ancient capital of Hue, lingy’s were needed to backup highly classified cross-border operations. Ed was ‘short’, his enlistment nearly up, but Jeff had time left, so the military sent them off in different directions – Ed back to Clark to begin his exit from the Army, Jeff up to the North Vietnamese border. But that’s another story.

Epilogue

Returning to the States, Ed briefly attended UC-Berkeley where Jeff, who mustered out several months later, paid him a visit, the last time the two guys saw each other. Nearly 40 years later when Ed found me, he’d had no idea Jeff had died back in ’69. We talked extensively, Ed was an immense help as I began thinking about setting aside my own memoir and focusing on Jeff. Later, I turned to Ed again with additional questions about Vietnam, but couldn’t find him. Emails unanswered, I called his company which said he was no longer there and, somewhat cryptically, provided no further information. Years passed, and then in 2010, a tribute to the late Edward W. Smith III, a well-remembered poet, surfaced on the Internet. Just three months after Ed and I had met, he’d fallen ill and died of a rare complication, the day after Christmas, 2003.

The Other Academy Boy

Brother Jeff Sharlet went to a small country-day school called The Albany Academy. A very old institution with some historically distinguished grads – Melville the novelist, Henry the scientist, Learned Hand the jurist – the Academy was a very conservative place, conservative in the older sense that favored tradition and regarded askance any but minimally incremental change. I preceded Jeff in the Class of ’53, he was the Class of ’60, both of us under the reign of the long serving headmaster, Harry E.P. Meislahn, a man of a certain age and considerable size, a crusty Princetonian with much gravitas who at weekly chapel read the Old Testament from a massive podium resembling the prow of a great whaling ship.

I’ve always marveled how Jeff found his way to a radical view of society from such infertile soil. The Academy after all was a military school. We wore uniforms, drilled daily, and marched as a battalion in the annual national day parades through downtown Albany, the capital of New York. Though we were seven years apart in age, neither Jeff nor I grew up in a home where the subject of politics was the order of the day. I was standard issue from the ‘50s, the Eisenhower era, serving in the Cold War amidst the prevailing consensus of the times – we were the good guys up against the wicked Soviets and their minions.

Jeff came out of the same environment, but just a few years after the long gray line of the Academy he found himself in Vietnam, a very different war from whence he developed a critical stance on the world around him. His name is recorded on a plaque at the Academy listing cadets who served, and in some cases, died in Vietnam. While Jeff finished his tour as an NCO, many though not all the boys on the wall with him, served as officers, having gone through college ROTC programs. A few of them made a career of it, a pilot here and an infantry officer there, but most returned intact, unmarked by war in mind or body, and took their places at the bar, in the medical ranks, in the professional world of their fathers.

Jeff of course eschewed that route and went on to become a leader of the GI antiwar movement. For a long time I thought of him as singular among the Academy ex-Vietnam GIs, the only one who broke ranks with the US mission in Southeast Asia and came back irreversibly changed. That was until I learned about a fellow cadet, Gordon Livingston of the Class of ’56. Neither Jeff nor I knew him personally, although Gordon may have known of me since I cut a figure on the football field. In his senior year when he served as second in command to the battalion major, Gordon was unlikely to have been aware of Jeff, just another III Former or 9th grader in public school parlance.

Gordon Livingston, AA ’56 and (see arrow) Cadet Captain Livingston on parade, spring ‘56

However, Gordon went on more than a decade later to make one of the most unique statements against the Vietnam War. At the Academy he’d been a model cadet, cum laude honors, Varsity soccer, captain of hockey, editor of the school paper, and of course Executive Captain. He would have been a logical candidate for the Ivies where Headmaster Meislahn sent many of his boys year after year, but Gordon’s father had other plans for him. His father, a WWII veteran and well-connected politically, arranged an appointment for his son to West Point when he was still a youngster. Although Gordon would have preferred a life of the mind, he followed the course set for him by his father and went to the Point. He took to the military life, deciding to make a career of it until the day in Vietnam when he took a dramatic stance against the war.

Gordon Livingston’s protest against the Vietnam War was rare, highly unusual, and, as an act of conscience, took uncommon moral courage. His was an extraordinary moment of protest, a selfless action little known in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement. As Gordon later recounted in an article in a national magazine, long since forgotten, he dramatically proclaimed his opposition to the war on Easter Sunday ‘69 at a remote US combat base in South Vietnam.

I say Gordon’s was a rare action because I know of no other instance of a senior officer serving in the combat zone taking such a step. I refer to his protest as highly unusual since it occurred in the presence of the commanding general of all US forces in Vietnam, to whom Major Livingston personally handed a copy of his incredibly irreverent antiwar statement. Finally, I add that Gordon Livingston’s act of conscience called for uncommon moral courage because he was well aware he faced the likelihood of a court-martial and the end of his military career.

Gordon Livingston was no ordinary soldier. He was a West Point officer, an airborne ranger who had commanded a company of the 82nd Airborne, a qualified pilot, and a Regimental Surgeon decorated for valor in battle who, before deploying in November ’68, had taken the trouble to study the Vietnamese language, culture, and history. Nor did he join just any line unit. He became Regimental Surgeon to the 11th Armored Cavalry Brigade, nicknamed the ‘Blackhorse’, a crack, aggressive 5,000-man outfit commanded by Colonel George Patton, Jr., scion of WWII Patton.

Shoulder patch, 11th Armored Cavalry (the 'Blackhorse')

Livingston went to Vietnam believing in the war and was a good soldier in every respect, but his doubts and disillusionment with the US mission gradually grew, fed by seemingly isolated incidents – Patton’s cynical remark at a briefing that 90% killing with 10% hearts & minds was about right; a hot-dogging chopper pilot showing no remorse after recklessly killing a Vietnamese girl who just wanted Doc Livingston to clear him to fly again; as well as the harsh treatment of Vietnamese civilians and wanton destruction of their property Major Livingston witnessed as he flew around the country visiting various bases.

Before writing his ‘Blackhorse Prayer’, a perfect parody with provocative lines like “Give us this day … napalm that will burn for a week. Help us to bring death and destruction wherever we go …,” Major Livingston was well aware of the case of Dr. Howard Levy, an Army doctor who, refusing to train Green Berets, was convicted by court-martial and served three years in federal prison. Undeterred, Major Livingston sprang his surprise at Colonel Patton’s change of command ceremony attended by General Creighton Abrams and a bevy of flag officers. The military’s reaction was predictable – the dissident Regimental Surgeon was arrested and bound over for court-martial.

Fortunately, the Army thought better about making a martyr of a West Pointer, a physician and an officer who had witnessed his unit’s atrocities, and permitted Livingston to resign. Returning to Johns Hopkins, his medical school, the erstwhile military doctor trained as a psychiatrist and, while the war still raged, appeared as an expert witness to war time atrocities at civilian antiwar events. However, in spite of his spectacular act of protest at the heart of the military machine, to this day Gordon Livingston, the other Academy boy alongside Jeff, remains a relatively unsung alumnus of the GI antiwar movement.

VGI's Divinity School Distributor

Getting Vietnam GI (VGI) into the hands of young men stateside destined for military service as well as to the thousands of others undergoing training for Vietnam, entailed a helping hand from countless civilian volunteers. Two of the major draft resistance groups assisted the cause. Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE) not only helped the VGI staff in mailing the paper, but also distributed it to area draftees, giving them a firsthand look at what they’d be getting into. BDRG (Boston Draft Resistance Group) printed an extra three-to-five thousand copies of VGI and reached not only inductees at the processing centers in New England, but they also passed out the paper to troops traveling to and from bases in the region.

A major point of distribution to the troops undergoing Basic Training (BT) or Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) were the GI coffee houses manned by civilian antiwar activists outside the gates or nearby the major Army and Air Force bases. The coffee houses went by catchy names like the UFO at Fort Jackson, SC; the Oleo Strut, Fort Hood, TX; and the Shelter Half near Fort Lewis, WA. Jeff Sharlet and his team would ship bundles of each issue of VGI to the GI coffee houses where GIs dropping by off duty could read the paper while having a cup of coffee or, ideally, take it back with them to the barracks. Military rules permitted possession of a single copy of such publications, but there was no restriction on a guy sharing his copy with buddies.

By summer of ’68, the media had picked up on the GI coffee houses and the antiwar papers. The New York Times ran a long story with a front page photo of GIs in civvies relaxing at a coffee house while reading VGI. The NBC Huntley-Brinkley Report broadcast a segment showing uniformed GIs reading the paper at the UFO in Columbia, SC. Esquire published a story with pictures, and a two-part series appeared in the Atlanta Constitution. Some of the GI coffee houses were short-lived, but as long as the coffee houses lasted, they were sanctuaries where soldiers, Marines and airman could read the underground antiwar press, including VGI, and get an unvarnished view of the war.


New York Times photo of off-duty GIs at the UFO GI coffee house, Columbia, SC, August ‘68

Far from the metropolitan centers or the huge semi-rural military training bases occasional lone individuals took up distribution of VGI. In the fall of ’68, Larry Christensen was in divinity school in Dubuque, IA, in the religious wing of the antiwar movement. He and fellow divinity students did “kneel-in” protests at local churches and were constantly in search of something that might bring the war to an end sooner. One day while at a college coffee shop, Larry came across a copy of VGI. He was much impressed with its reports “direct from the trenches” and wrote the Chicago office for multiple copies to distribute.

Rolled up in a brown paper cylinder, the papers arrived in the nick of time for the forthcoming scheduled induction of Dubuque’s new draftees. On the appointed day, Larry and friends handed out VGI to the inductees as they boarded the bus to the induction center. The military authorities were taken by surprise, not expecting antiwar activity in the middle of the conservative Midwest. The divinity students pulled it off again on the following induction date, but then the Army caught on and changed the bus pick-up to a place where unauthorized access could be blocked. Decades later, Larry remembered VGI as a “straight-from-the-ranks type of reporting,” very unusual in the heavily intellectualized peace movement of the day.

'Search for Jeff' continues every Wednesday.

VGI's Door Gunner Distributor

The primary objective of Jeff Sharlet and fellow editors of Vietnam GI (VGI) was to get the paper into the hands of GIs in Vietnam, the guys fighting the war. In addition to the friendly antiwar unit mail clerks who would surreptitiously ‘distribute’ VGI to sympathetic troops in the Headquarters Company under the nose of the commanding officer (CO), Jeff relied on some 200 individual GIs scattered up and down South Vietnam who had volunteered as covert distributors. VGI would hear from the volunteers when they sent in the blank for a free subscription and offered to pass around extra copies as well.

One such volunteer distributor was Terry DeMott of the Americal Division. Arriving at the main base near Chu Lai in March ’68, he spent the first half of his tour on the ground in the 5th battalion, 46th infantry regiment of the division’s 198th brigade, but for the last half of his 12-month tour Terry transferred to the aviation wing of the 198th – serving as a door gunner in an observation chopper. Wounded near the end of his tour, he left Vietnam on a stretcher in February ’69, just days before his 12 months were up.

Door gunner in flight, © Mark Jury

From Terry’s perspective on the war, he and his buddies were being used as ‘bait’ to draw out and pinpoint the enemy for destruction by US military technology. As he saw it as an infantry grunt, his patrols were designed to draw fire from the VC so planes and artillery could open up on them. Even when he transferred to choppers, Terry and his buddies were still being dangled as bait, flying in formations of three up to Danang where Marine artillery was on alert at Red Beach. The mission was to fly around just west of Danang in order to draw and mark ground fire to which Marine batteries would then respond.

He remembered first coming upon a copy of VGI on his return from patrol to base camp at Landing Zone (LZ) Gator. Terry vaguely recalled just finding the paper in his squad tent, reading it front to back, and almost immediately filling out the subscription blank which he mailed to Chicago with a note offering to distribute VGI if additional copies were sent. His letter was read by Bob Brown*, one of the sub-editors who promptly wrote back, enclosing five copies of the latest issue. Bob added that the number of GIs in Nam circulating the paper had increased from 75 in July ’68 to 200 by September.

Terry carried the copies in his backpack on combat patrol, and, as he put it, “One night on a laager (night defensive position) and everybody in my squad had read them.” On return to base camp, the copies would then be passed to other squads. Once VGI made the rounds in Terry’s platoon, the papers would be handed over to other units. He was circumspect in his distribution efforts, but not too worried since they had a cool top sergeant and anyway, “everyone humping out there was against the war.”

In response to the question, Ok, but what if you did get caught distributing Vietnam GI, Terry replied: “Paranoia was a way of life out there. You were constantly worrying about your life so [getting caught distributing] seemed small potatoes. The worst they could do was pull me out of the field, send me someplace and court-martial me. And [then] I’d be safe anyway.”

* http://jeffsharlet-and-vietnamgi.com.yolasite.com/

Distributing Vietnam GI

Gathering stories for Vietnam GI (VGI), printing the paper, fund raising to keep the enterprise afloat, and, not least, distributing an underground antiwar paper were all activities fraught with difficulties with which Jeff Sharlet and his editorial staff had to deal. VGI relied on GI first-person accounts from Vietnam for leads, so appropriate returning GIs had to be contacted and interviewed monthly. Most other stories in each issue also came from ‘Nam’, which meant Jeff, Jim Wallihan, and other editors had to make the rounds of stateside base camps scattered throughout the country gathering copy. Printing the paper then meant trying to find a friendly printer who had not been scared off by a visit from the FBI. Eventually, this required the VGI team driving well up the western shore of Lake Michigan to a small town Wisconsin print shop. Fund raising to support the paper was a constant struggle which routinely involved Jeff and either Jim Wallihan or Dave Komatsu working wealthy liberal circles on the East and West Coasts.

Vietnam GI, hot off the press

After surmounting these hurdles each month, Jeff and his team still had to semi-surreptitiously distribute VGI to the GI coffee houses and base camps in the US and Western Europe as well as into the hands of GIs in Vietnam. Since postal inspection in the Chicago area was in cahoots with the FBI field office as well as Army intelligence out of Fort Sheridan, Illinois, using relatively inexpensive 3rd class mail for printed matter was out of the question. Third class mail was subject to random postal inspection, and since the FBI had declared VGI seditious material during spring ’68, the individual copies or bundles could be confiscated by the US Post Office.

Circumventing the problem meant mailing VGI to stateside addresses via the more expensive 1st class mail rate which by law cannot be opened except by addressee. Even so, fictitious return addresses were regularly used to divert attention from curious eyes in the postal system. The actual posting of the bundles also required guile and the assistance of a number of helpers, often members of CADRE, the acronym for Chicago Area Draft Resisters. Dumping large numbers of bundles wrapped in brown paper at the post offices would have drawn attention, as would dropping them in one or two mailboxes in the city. Therefore, each VGI helper would drive around the Chicago metro area and even beyond to nearby cities to deposit smaller, less obtrusive bunches of packages in a variety of mailboxes.

Shipping copies of VGI to GIs at military bases in Western Europe via their APO (Army Post Office) addresses required air mail postage, the most expensive option at the time. However, getting the paper to the troops in Vietnam was the most challenging part of the distribution process. The first step was sending a large number of copies to Tom Barton, the VGI East Coast distributor in New York City. The assumption was that the NYC postal authorities had such enormous mail volume, they were less vigilant on the sedition front. Barton in turn had a list of APO South Vietnam addresses of friendly unit mail clerks who, upon receiving bundles of the latest issue of VGI, were willing to covertly circulate the copies to enlisted men. However, undercover distribution skirted lifer NCO’s who were usually heavily committed to the mission and intolerant of dissent. His modus operandi was to wrap the copies in plain brown paper and use made-to-order return addresses which no commanding officer would ever suspect carried seditious material. His favorite was ‘Protestant Pen Pals’.

Tom Barton was also responsible for distributing VGI to troops in the New York metropolitan area and at nearby bases, including Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base, both in northern New Jersey.Here the distribution technique of choice was for Barton to go with several helpers to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where thousands of troops passed through heading back from leave to the NJ bases and other East Coast military installations. If the group was hassled by the Port Authority police, they’d split up and go individually into the departure tunnels for the buses headed to the bases. To the northeast, Charlie Fisher and colleagues with the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG) assumed responsibility for circulating VGI in New England. Because their main objective was to encourage draft resistance, BDRG hit not only the bus terminals and military bases, but also the induction centers, handing inductees copies of VGI as they got off the bus to process for their physicals. They also distributed papers at the South Boston Army Center, the transfer point for all troops looking for military transportation back to base.

BDRG distributing VGI, South Boston Army Center

Finally, Jeff and his fellow editors relied on countless individuals, civilian as well as GI, to get the paper around. Every issue carried a subscription blank free for GIs. Many personnel scattered at bases around the world and in the fleet requested subs and often added, If you’ll send me extra copies, I’ll spread the word. One such ‘distributor’ was a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. He regularly passed around five copies of each issue. Civilians also lent a hand in the distribution process. Another GI paper, The Ally, based in San Francisco, facilitated circulation of VGI in the Bay Area. And occasionally, the editorial office in Chicago would hear from a lone civilian who had come across the paper and offered to get it to troops in his area. One such person was a divinity student in the Midwest who, until the Army blocked his access, managed to hand out copies of VGI to young men about to enter the local induction center.

At its peak in late ‘68, 35,000 copies of Vietnam GI were printed and circulated, and on the basis of feedback from the numerous letters-to-the-editors, Jeff heard that each copy was often read by three to five and even more GIs. Those who read VGI came to regard it as the ‘truth paper’, the antithesis of the official military organ, Stars & Stripes.

Tommy the Traveler

In the annals of bizarre homefront stories from the Vietnam War, the tale of Tommy the Traveler stands out. I came across him purely by serendipity. From the FBI down to the local cops, the authorities – trying to keep track of young New Left antiwar activists – most likely experienced no shortage of willing undercover informants, paid or otherwise. Tommy, however, was in a class by himself; beginning in 1967 on his own initiative, he undertook surveillance on a number of college campuses.*

A little background. Tommy, born in 1944, was half American and half Thai with an unusual family history. Through his father he was related to the royal house of Thailand, while his paternal grandmother was a Russian from the tsarist period. Apparently Tommy’s father had worked with the CIA and Army intelligence in Thailand, presumably during early Cold War days. As a boy, he had a typical American childhood, although his fascination with guns and playing cowboys and Indians was somewhat extreme. After high school, he went out west and for a time rode rodeo. Tommy had a very patriotic upbringing.

I was talking with one of my former students from Union College about Indiana University (IU) in the Vietnam War era. I was telling him about the undercover informant in IU’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter (see Blog post for 3/30/11), and he in turn said that a similar character passed through Union College while he was an undergrad there. News to me. It was a guy nicknamed Tommy the Traveler.

Tommy had been a traveling salesman, and his beat was upstate New York which took him through a number of college towns where he styled himself a free-lance agent provocateur. He reportedly visited State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, University of Rochester, Hobart, Cornell, Union, and SUNY-Albany, among other schools. He’d appear on campus and connect with the activists. SDS’s lack of national hierarchy, or often even local structure, made it easy for Tommy to get close to them.

A handsome young man with neat, close cropped hair, three-piece tweed suits, and a snazzy new Ford Mustang, SDS activists on several campuses suspected him as an undercover cop. However, Tommy skillfully dropped names from one relatively isolated campus to another and managed to ‘pass’ undetected. His modus operandi was to persuade activists to carry out violent actions on their campuses. Though he had little success, turmoil followed in his wake. By early ’69, Tommy had parlayed his networking into a major speaking role at a regional SDS meeting held at SUNY-Albany.

'Tommy the Traveler'

After he’d developed an extensive network of contacts, Tommy apparently sold his services to the Buffalo FBI field office, a hundred-strong outfit, because of long-time concern over Old Left activity in the industrial heartland. But because he was extreme in his proposed provocations and considered a little nutty (he had a lot of military gear including an M-1 rifle, grenades, and a pistol), the FBI cut him loose, recommending him to the Ontario County Sheriff for undercover drug work on the campuses. When later interviewed by CBS’s Walter Cronkite, the sheriff defended Tommy showing students how to build bombs as “perfectly proper behavior for a police agent attempting to infiltrate student radicals.”

In his narc role, Tommy finally succeeded in realizing his violent anti-antiwar agenda. At Hobart College in Geneva NY, he persuaded a couple of impressionable freshmen to toss a Molotov cocktail into the campus offices of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in the basement of a dorm with students sleeping above. The culprits received short jail sentences, while in the end Tommy the instigator got off nearly scot free. During that campus visit he’d also set up and fingered several other students for a NY State Police drug bust which had turned into a riot. The bust briefly brought Tommy local celebrity, and he even considered running for the office of county sheriff. He went on to study criminology, worked as a police officer in Pennsylvania, and later in life became a horse and cattle breeder. More recently, he was spotted as a Civil War re-enactor in Oklahoma. Tommy still gets around.

*Esquire, July 1971