Torture in Vietnam

It’s no secret that torture was used in the Vietnam War – by both sides. However, I’m interested here in the American side of the equation, to wit, when US personnel were involved or bore witness. It’s commonly assumed torture on ‘our’ side of the conflict could be laid at the door of our South Vietnamese allies, both the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the national police. Indeed, there were many accounts of ARVN soldiers or police kicking or punching Vietcong (VC) prisoners who were tightly bound as well as civilian VC suspects. There were also reports of waterboarding, a harsh technique for extracting information, now widely known since 9/11.

It was a model soldier, Master Sgt Donald Duncan, who first blew the lid publically on the widespread use of torture in Vietnam. A highly decorated Green Beret sent to Vietnam in ’65, Sgt Duncan turned down a field commission a year later and left the Army over his profound opposition to the mission and how it was being carried out. Part of it was his revulsion as a soldier to the torture he witnessed and the complicity of US forces in handing over civilians suspected of VC sympathy to the ARVN. Duncan published a major firsthand exposé in a radical magazine and testified in ‘67 at the Copenhagen session of the International War Crimes Tribunal organized by Lord Bertrand Russell as to what he saw and heard in Vietnam. The torture issue was out in the open.

US troops were not only accomplices in the use of torture, but active participants as well. A former medical officer told me how he witnessed wounded VC being tortured over his objections. A combat unit back from the field brought a couple of seriously wounded enemy soldiers to his aid tent. He and his staff patched them up so they could be quickly medevaced to a field hospital for urgent medical care if they were to survive for standard post-action interrogation. The combat personnel, however, would not wait and began immediate interrogation through an interpreter before the trail went cold. The objections of the military doc, the regimental surgeon himself, were overruled on the basis the military situation took precedence. The method of ‘persuasion’ was poking the prisoners’ wounds, causing great pain if answers weren’t forthcoming on their unit’s strength, deployment, and equipment. Other times, patrols in the field conducted ad hoc interrogations under threat of torture, trying to learn whereabouts of the elusive enemy.

Field interrogation by knife*

By far though, the most common form of torture employed by US forces was euphemistically called the “Bell telephone hour,” a reference to the instrument used as well as to a familiar stateside music program sponsored by the Bell Telephone Company. This technique involved using a standard military field telephone to deliver a painful shock to the person under interrogation when cooperation was withheld. Military Intelligence (MI), a branch of the Army, was principally responsible for interrogating captured enemy soldiers as well as civilians suspected of being VC. The use of the field phone to extract information was routine for MI’s trained interrogators.

Although Jeff served in Vietnam with the Army Security Agency (ASA), a communications intelligence outfit, he would have been aware of MI and their procedures. Apropos, he located Peter Martinsen, a former MI interrogator in Vietnam, and interviewed him for Vietnam GI (VGI) so that GI readers would know what was going on in those MI tents. A little background on Peter Martinsen: he had also testified before the Russell Tribunal on war crimes, an unofficial body of distinguished international public intellectuals and members of the arts, at the Copenhagen session in ‘67. A member of the tribunal wrote that they were “overwhelmed” by Martinsen’s testimony. A young man, son of a psychology professor, he was demoralized by what he had been required to do, including beating Vietnamese civilians under interrogation; witnessing torture daily; and having caused the death of a teenage girl by forcing her out of hiding with a smoke bomb. Needless to say, Martinsen had turned against the war, deeply upset by what he’d been involved in.

Brother Jeff caught up with Peter in the States. He had been with the 541st Military Intelligence, the MI detachment with the 11th Armored Cav Regiment, which operated in Long Khanh Province about 50 miles east of Saigon. Like Jeff, he was a Vietnamese linguist, but an interrogator as well. Jeff asked him how he tried to get information out of the people rounded up, including women and children. Martinsen replied:

Force was used a lot, and like … you could beat them with your open hand and not leave a mark on them. Electrical torture with a field phone … it really gives a nasty shock. You know how bad it is, and you can imagine being shocked for three or four hours by one of those things. That was pretty common.

Standard torture device of military interrogators

To convert the above EA312 military phone to an electrotorture device, the interrogator merely had to attach a ground wire and a hot wire to the terminal block at the top of the instrument at one end, and to sensitive parts of the prisoner’s body at the other end. Then each turn of the crank on the side (which would normally cause a phone to ring elsewhere), delivered a short but powerful shock to the individual being asked questions.

Peter Martinsen concluded saying, “This is a dirty war, and there’s no reason on earth for us to be there.” At the time of his interview with VGI in early ’68, Martinsen was 23. A few years later he committed suicide.

*Photo credit Joseph Carey

Army Pushback

As Jeff Sharlet’s Vietnam GI (VGI) circulated widely among troops stateside and in Vietnam, the Army began to push back, a clear signal the paper was hitting its mark. The first indication that VGI and its impact on the troops was worrying the military authorities (generally called ‘the brass’) appeared in VGI’s ‘Mail Bag’ for the June issue of 1968. Jeff printed the following letter from an Army legal officer in Vietnam under the heading “VGI RATTLES BRASS”:

Department of the Army
HQ 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)
Office of the Division Staff Judge Advocate
APO San Francisco 96490*
*[The route for all mail to and from US personnel in Vietnam]

Dear Mr. Sharlet:

Some idiot who is editor of Vietnam GI … is using your name and is mailing his ‘writing’ to members of the Public Information Office (PIO) section of this Division. The personnel there have enough good publications to occupy their time and have no desire to read the filth and untruths published in Vietnam GI.

James A. Mundt
Major, Judge Advocate General [JAG] Corps
Division Staff Judge Advocate

At the end of Major Mundt’s letter, VGI’s editors commented: “Screw you. Let’s hear from the EMs (enlisted men) in the PIO section themselves.”

A month later, the JAG office of the 1st Air Cav, then based at An Khe in Binh Dinh Province, upped the ante. VGI was usually mailed with various real and fictitious return addresses from Chicago and New York to avoid unwanted attention from postal inspectors on the lookout for ‘seditious literature’, as well as company commanders (CO) in Vietnam trying to prevent ‘subversive’ material from reaching their troops.

In this case, a JAG Lt Colonel wrote to VGI’s East Coast distributor that the paper “does serious violence to the truth”, its “political philosophy is of no consequence”, and, with no hint of irony, that “people here are dying to preserve freedom of the ‘press’.” To stress that he considered VGI a danger to the 1st Air Cav, the colonel added a notation to the bottom left corner of his letter – “Copy furnished: FBI, 201 E 69th St, New York, NY 10021.”

The brass’s discomfort with troops reading VGI of course didn’t deter Jeff and the editors. On the contrary, more copies were printed and shipped to Nam (in plain brown wrappers under the radar), so the Army tried a new tactic – a training film.

During fall of ’68, a “Nam veteran” was handing out copies of Vietnam GI to new recruits at Fort Dix NJ and surprised to learn they already knew about the paper. Their CO had lectured the recruits, warning that VGI and other underground papers were trying to confuse them about the war, and then he required them to sit through a short training film on the subject. As one recruit described the film:

GIs go to a party – in their Class A’s [day uniforms],  dig? – and they meet some nice broads. Well these chicks ask the guys how they like the Army and they say, ‘Oh, it’s Okay’. Then one of the chicks shows them a paper called Vietnam GI and tells the guys that this paper is on the soldier’s side and against the officers.

                               

Young woman handing out VGI at Boston Army Center ‘68

Another recruit picks up the story – the lights go up and the CO comes back on, telling them VGI is written by communists and intended to get them “pissed off about the war and the draft.”

In a kind of barracks epitaph for the Army’s pushback efforts, the GI added: “Personally, most of us guys figure [the CO] and the other lifers are running scared.”

"Dear Jeff", Vietnam GI’s Mail Bag

At the end of fall semester ‘67, my brother, Jeff Sharlet, withdrew from the University of Chicago grad school to go fulltime on his passion, GI antiwar protest. He and fellow ex-Vietnam GIs launched his underground paper Vietnam GI (VGI) at the start of ‘68. The January and February issues had been sent out – to Army bases in the States and to quite a number of individual soldiers in Vietnam. The initial issue contained a box offering VGI free to any military personnel whose address was received. The response was almost immediate and enormous.

Offer to receive VGI free

Handwritten letters-to-the-editor, “Dear Jeff”, began arriving along with ‘subscription’ requests at VGI’s Chicago office from troops in Vietnam as well as stateside units. Members of the paper’s floating staff (civilian supporters who turned up to stuff envelopes and other clerical chores as needed) would type up each letter; the letter writer then received the next issue of VGI along with a reply from one of the editors. By the March ‘68 issue, the first batch of letters ran on page two under ‘Mail Bag’ in large, bold letters, identified just by the writer’s rank and unit to protect him from military retaliation for his act of protest.

The first seven letters to appear reflected the scope of VGI’s reach, from Vietnam in – the Central Highlands, to up near the North Vietnamese border, and on a war ship in the South China Sea; and to West Germany as well as stateside Army and Air Force bases (AFB). The lead letter dated 8 March 68 from Pleiku was typical of many that followed. A trooper in the 4th Infantry Division, having read the first two issues, requested a subscription not just for himself, but for a number of his buddies. Another writer from the China Beach area, most likely a Marine, asking for the next issue, said simply “I like most what I seen in your paper and what you stand for.”

A private writing from Fort Campbell KY went a step further, as many other letter writers later would. Saying that most of his fellow trainees expected to be sent to Vietnam, he offered to serve as a ‘distributor’ for VGI;

I could distribute about as many copies of the paper as you send
me …. I’m putting copies in the day rooms of the training companies,
but could easily hand them out to hundreds of individual trainees
and men back in my unit.

From the sailor aboard a ship off the coast of South Vietnam came news that the first issues of VGI had been “widely read by enlisted and junior officers alike,” and if multiple copies could be sent “the whole ship (340 men) could be covered.”

But in that first wave of feedback, a letter from Bolling AFB outside of Washington, DC went to the very heart of Jeff’s purpose in creating Vietnam GI – to give voice to the voiceless guys fighting the war: “God knows that those of us who have been there – and who are yet silent, trapped by fear or bitterness or impotence – need a surrogate speaking for us.”

During spring ’68 Jeff began sending me each issue of VGI as it came off the press. I was well aware of his antiwar views as an ex-GI, but found each new batch of letters surprising. At that point in the Vietnam War – except for an occasional media-visible protest such as the Army doctor who refused an order and was court-martialed in ’65, the Fort Hood Three who said No to Vietnam and received long prison sentences, and four sailors who deserted the aircraft carrier Intrepid in Japan in ’67 – there was little or no public awareness of a protest mood among many military personnel.

VGI Mail Bag continually surprised me with its blunt letters critical of the war from a wide range of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and, not least, members of the ‘Green Machine’ (the Marines) – reflecting significant military dissent below the radar of the national media. On one occasion I asked Jeff if the letters were for real, had he made them up. No, he replied they were the real McCoy, but added he could have written them.

♫ It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son, Son.

It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one.*

By the April ’68 issue, Jeff and company had even received a letter from a retired general, a critic of the war, approving of their work. In that same mail bag was a letter from a GI in Germany at a base facing regular levies of troops being reassigned to Nam. Predictably, he reported the only support for the war came from the ‘lifers’ or sergeants, career soldiers.

A spring letter from Fort Gordon GA indicated that VGI was having an impact by raising GI consciousness about the war, and breaking through the wall of silence surrounding military life:

Dear Jeff:
Thanks for the letter and especially the copies of Vietnam GI ….
We’ve been attempting to organize against the war … [and papers
like VGI] are very helpful in making guys feel they are not alone….
Let’s face it. With the possibility of being sent to Vietnam … being
almost a certainty for the vast majority of us … what have we got
to lose by fighting against it.

More and more letters poured in from all branches of the military and a wide variety of units, including the 1st Marine Division, 1st Air Cavalry, Danang Air Base, 198th Infantry Brigade, 155th Assault Helicopter Company, 196th Light Infantry, a sailor aboard the SS Valley Forge, 1st Marine Air Wing, and even from wounded Vietnam GIs in Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital as well as Watson Army Hospital, Fort Dix NJ. Almost every writer mentioned multiple readers of a single issue as a Spec-4 (Specialist 4th Class) wrote: “Within 5 minutes every man in the billet was peering over my shoulder reading your publication. Raquel Welch would not have received a hardier reception.”

                                   1st Air Cavalry Patch                        USS Valley Forge

The immense popularity of VGI was evident wherever US military personnel were stationed. As an avid reader with the 198th Light Infantry put it: “It’s an even money bet which is more popular in our unit, Playboy or Vietnam GI.” The reason was clear – as a ‘sky soldier’ near An Khe with the 173rd Airborne wrote, VGI was “the Truth” paper.

* “Fortunate Son”, written by John Fogerty .



Subversion by Newspaper

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

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

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

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

North Vietnamese SAM-2 battery

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

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

           

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

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

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

            that a copy of the paper mysteriously appeared on the commanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Ted was likely in his brother’s orbit.

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

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

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

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

            ocean. ..."

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

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

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

Maverick Mentor

Late summer ’64. My younger brother, Jeff Sharlet, finished his Vietnam tour and returned to Indiana University (IU) to resume his education. Unsettled and restless as a freshman, he had withdrawn to fulfill his military draft obligation. He’d hoped for training in a Slavic language followed by a European posting, but as luck would have it, he ended up in Vietnam speaking Vietnamese. Back at IU, Jeff, older and more mature, felt a sense of disquiet about the war in Vietnam, but getting into the swing of things academically and keeping his head above water financially took precedence.

Meanwhile, President Johnson (LBJ) beat Senator Goldwater decisively, taking a dovish position on Vietnam in the campaign. Yet within months, LBJ decided to send in the Marines and begin bombing North Vietnam – in the spring of ’65 the fighting went abruptly from a low intensity conflict to a deadly serious war. Students on dozens of campuses reacted, IU was no exception. Jeff felt himself no longer alone in his unease about US involvement in that faraway country. He banded together with a very small group of fellow students who shared his concerns and had begun to stage peaceful protests on campus. Thus was the genesis of what became the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at IU that fall.

♫ War, it ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreak…induction then destruction, who wants to die?*

Like most professors, Indiana’s faculty was largely liberal – many personally sympathized with the student activists, but usually at arm’s length. There were a few notable exceptions – the historian C. Leonard Lundin helped with financial support as needed; Professor Jim Dinsmoor, a psychologist, marched with the protestors and even ran for public office on an antiwar platform; and Bernard ‘Bernie’ Morris of the Government Department became unofficial adviser to the campus New Left, as well as academic mentor to a number of SDS members.

Bernie had long been a maverick. A New Englander, in the early ‘40s he had enrolled at Yale for a graduate degree. Although a very good student, one of his professors thought him too leftist, so he was bumped from the doctoral program with a terminal MA in Political Science. Bernie went to Washington seeking a job and initially found a position in the Justice Department where his office colleague was one Judith Coplon**, ’Judy’ as he knew her, who was later to be exposed as a Soviet spy codenamed Sima. Having known and worked with Judy Coplon would later create problems for Bernie when he went to the State Department.

At State during WWII, Bernie worked in the Intelligence & Research section under the leadership of Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer, anti-Nazi German refugee intellectuals who became distinguished scholars in American academe after the war. When they left for the universities, Bernie stayed on, rising in the hierarchy at State. The three men remained friends – Bernie was best man at Marcuse’ second marriage and later helped Kirchheimer write his famous book, Political Justice. But in the late ‘40s as the Cold War heated up, the first trials of Soviet spies got underway, and then Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his demagogic anti-communist crusade; Bernie began to encounter problems in the newly heightened security environment.

Although a loyal American, Bernie’s ‘association’ with Coplon, arrested and tried for espionage and conspiracy in 1949-50, was one problem, while his experience at Yale was another. In those times, very little was required for someone, especially in government, to fall under suspicion, and Bernie was a critical thinker on the great issues of the day. Although there were rocky moments, he survived the McCarthy period, but then in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s Bernie fell under criticism at State on a very different issue. The alliance between Communist China and the Soviet Union had begun showing subtle strains – Mao held Khrushchev in contempt as a fellow Marxist.

Bernie was presciently among the first intelligence analysts to detect signs of a schism between the two Communist giants, a parting of ways later dubbed the Sino-Soviet Split. However, the prevailing consensus in official Washington was that the Soviet-Chinese alliance was rock solid, and any indications to the contrary were considered deliberate feints to mislead the West. Regarded as a maverick, Bernie was told to stop pushing against the official line. That attitude and the growing US involvement in Vietnam under President Kennedy in the early ‘60s were the final straws – Bernie no longer wanted to work in government and left for academe.

Bernard Morris joined the IU faculty in ’63, straight from Washington where he had worked in the State Department for a number of years. From the outset he was unusual among the Political Science profs in that he didn’t have a PhD, just an MA from Yale. Bernie’s specialty was International Relations (IR), especially Soviet foreign policy, and IU wisely felt that his extensive experience was his credential. In addition to the obvious IR courses, early on he also introduced the first course on Marxism at IU. Styling himself neither a Marxist nor a member of any left party, Bernie taught the subject professionally as a political theory course. An excellent teacher with classroom charisma, his courses, especially Marxism, drew well among Jeff and his cohort as well as other students interested in a critical take on US policy and the Cold War.

Relocating from the cosmopolitan capital to Bloomington IN, a provincial college town, must have entailed culture shock for Bernie and his wife Betty. They kept their ties to East, vacationing on Cape Cod, later on Martha’s Vineyard, during summer breaks. Otherwise the Morrises settled in to their new existence, acquired a beautiful house at the edge of town, and Bernie soon acquired a student following. As antiwar sentiment heated up on campus during spring and fall of 1965, Bernie was in the midst of it, attending the Friday afternoon rallies on civil rights in the South and the growing Vietnam War on a great expanse of lawn called Dunn Meadow. Brother Jeff; Paulann Hosler Groninger of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA); Robin Hunter, a Marxist grad student from England; and Dan Kaplan, an SDS leader, were among the prize students Bernie taught; hence, he was mentor as well as maverick.

Bernie and Betty at the Cape

In May ‘65, the State Department and Pentagon dispatched a team of officials to the Midwest to ‘explain’ the necessity of the war in Vietnam on several Big Ten campuses. Someone tagged them with the ironic name, the ‘truth squad’, and they arrived at IU after apparently uproarious receptions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison*** and the University of Iowa. The largest venue at IU, the auditorium, was filled for their appearance. It was a mixed audience – pro-war people, a large number who came out of curiosity to hear the arguments, and a sizeable group of both activists and other critically minded students already opposed to or with profound doubts about the war. Jeff and Soviet Studies grad students Erik Hoffmann and Fred Fleron sat with Bernie in the audience. After the leader of the group, a Foreign Service Officer, laid out the Administration’s rationale in a somewhat cavalier manner, a very agitated Bernie Morris made an impassioned statement from the floor: “I never thought I’d see the day when my government would lie to me.”

Two years later in ’67 during Jeff’s senior year, Bernie nominated him for a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship (WWF), a prestigious award carrying a generous stipend designed to enable promising candidates to earn PhD’s and become college teachers-scholars. Jeff however was of mixed mind about his immediate future – he was drawn to the idea of an academic career, but at the same time, in his heart, the unfinished business of opposing the Vietnam War very much preoccupied him. He decided he could do both, but Bernie, in his very strong letter of support for Jeff lauding his considerable intellectual qualities, noted his ambivalence about his near future. Nonetheless, the WWF conferred the coveted fellowship on Jeff who chose to take it the University of Chicago. How the foundation ended up financing Vietnam GI, an underground antiwar newspaper, instead of a doctorate is another story for elsewhere.

After Jeff’s early death in ’69, Bernie wrote me that he hadn’t been surprised Jeff dropped out of the PhD program in favor of the great mission of his short but interesting life – confronting the war machine by giving voice to the voiceless GIs with serious doubts about the war.

Although the de-escalation got underway in June ’69, it took another four years to wind down the American war, including the invasion of Cambodia in spring 1970 which re-ignited a firestorm of opposition throughout the country. At IU, 8,000 students at that fundamentally apolitical, even conservative, Midwestern school turned out in Dunn Meadow to protest. The biggest ovation went to Professor Bernie Morris who said

I join you in condemnation of Nixon’s strategy of terminating the war by widening it. It is strategically unsound, politically self-defeating, and morally indefensible.

Jeff would’ve been proud of his maverick mentor.

          Dunn Meadow in peace and war

* “War”, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, 1969.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOLH8WfCaY

**Judith Coplon Socolov, 1921-2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/us/02coplon.html?_r=2

***See http://www.surroundedbyreality.com/Misc/Veitnam/BloodOnTheThirdCoast.pdf beginning on page 17 for the full story on the appearance of the ‘truth squad’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Vietnam GI's Mission

When my brother Jeff Sharlet created the first GI-led underground paper for active-duty GIs, Marines, sailors and airmen, he set out on an antiwar ‘mission’. He laid out his objective in an editorial in the first issue of Vietnam GI in January ’68. In his opening sentences, Jeff fired off the first shot: “We are veterans of the Vietnam War. From our experience we know the Administration has lied to us and other Americans.” He goes on to express the core of his mission statement, to wit, “[I]t seems like everyone has been heard from on the war except the main group which has been and still is fighting it – the enlisted men.” In effect, Jeff gave voice to the voiceless GIs.

Front page, first issue of Vietnam GI, January ’68:

Jeff’s antiwar mission statement:

Preemptive Arrest, Karen's Day in Court

During summer ‘66, my brother Jeff Sharlet lived and worked in Indianapolis (Indy), capital of Indiana. He was then studying for his BA degree at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington and needed income from a summer job. He found one as a locomotive fireman in the Indy freight yards. I asked my research assistant, Karen Grote Ferb if she remembered any stories of Jeff from that summer; here’s one of them she told me in her own words:

I set out one summer day to join a peaceful protest against the President of the United States’ Vietnam War policy, but never made it – I was preemptively arrested. This is what happened.

On July 21, 1966, the New York Times carried a front page story mapping a Midwest campaign swing President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) would be making for the off-year congressional elections. It would begin in Indianapolis, the very heart of that patriotic part of the country. The next day the IU chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV) circulated a flyer on campus calling for an antiwar demonstration planned for LBJ’s speech in Indy, 50 miles to the north.

The flyer read, “Since Lyndon B. Johnson has chosen to honor the citizens of Indiana with his presence, we feel that IU students who oppose his policy in Vietnam should show Him (sic) that we exist.” A copy of the flyer and related material found its way to the office of IU’s president, Elvis Stahr. It had been sent to him by the university bookstore with a note: “We found [these documents] … on one of our cash register[s] … and are sending them to you” [in case copies haven’t already reached your office]. The note went on: “We would like to add that we are strongly against the policies and opinions expressed in these communications and hope the University can curtail these as much as possible.”

I had planned to join the protest that weekend. I had already been in Indianapolis many times since Jeff started working on the railroad that summer. I knew he’d want to participate and went up that Friday after classes to stay with him at the house where he boarded. However, Jeff was scheduled to work that sultry Saturday so he dropped me off quite early at Monument Circle in the center of the city where LBJ would speak. About 100 activists began arriving from IU about 10:30 AM. By then the preemptive arrests had already begun. State troopers had relayed the license plate numbers of the cars from Bloomington to the Indy cops who were working with the Secret Service. Although the IU group had a permit and were assured they could peacefully demonstrate, the Indy police began arresting them as they arrived.

Soldiers and Sailors War Memorial, Monument Circle, Indianapolis

The few of us there early had staked out a spot a block from the circle—the pro-war John Birch Society was setting up opposite us. We were chatting while awaiting the arrival of the IU group and others when policemen told us we’d have to move back a block out of sight of the President, the press, and the crowd. Someone produced our permit and we remained in place. The cops went away so we figured we were OK. Talk about being lulled into a false sense of security! The police returned led by Chief Jones, a good-sized older man wearing a standard tan gabardine trench coat, a brown Fedora, and an annoyed expression. We asserted our right to be there when the walkie-talkies came out and three more men in trench coats and hats appeared. They were Secret Service.

LBJ addressing the crowd at Monument Circle*

A few moments later, police flooded into the area, and a paddy wagon pulled up. I stood quietly watching the scene, holding a sign upside down, resting it on the street, when a youngish, mild-mannered officer walked up, put me under arrest, and led me to the paddy wagon. I burst into tears, stunned and frightened, the first one arrested. Not long after that any of my group who refused to leave and move out of sight of the circle, were also arrested. As the paddy wagon filled up, each load was taken to a sheriff’s bus on a nearby side street, out of view of the President’s podium, where we were held until LBJ’s departure for a luncheon talk in which he delivered the ironic line “We will abide civil protest.” At that venue, a girl was arrested for littering after obeying an order to put down her sign. Six others were taken into custody for entering Monument Circle after LBJ and entourage (which included Indiana’s senior US senator who opposed the war) had left. Ironically, some of the arrestees were carrying one-word signs with merely the senator’s name, Hartke.

As time wore on, it became insufferably hot in the bus. Adding to the misery was a guy throwing up. He’d been arrested by mistake; he was carrying a pro-war sign. At the city lockup we were put into holding tanks, one for men, the other for the eight women, and given a slice of bread and some watery bean soup. When someone needed to use ‘the facilities’ (the only seat in the place, so we mostly stood, finding the floor a dicey option), we made a human shield for privacy. “We Shall Overcome” seemed like the right thing to sing, so we did.

♫ Oh, deep in our hearts we did believe that we would overcome some day.

The Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) immediately protested the arrests, stating, “We will carry this all the way to the President.” In a letter to Indy Police Chief Jones, copied to the mayor and the governor, the ICLU president wrote:

It is incredible that responsible public officials would utilize the power

of their position in such a flagrant suppression of the efforts of the citizens to exercise their fundamental right of freedom of expression. Let us hope that this kind of harassment arrests will never happen again in Indianapolis.

The chief, on the other hand, said he kind of thought the roundup was a good idea, “Those people had some pretty lousy signs.” By mid-evening we were all finally released . A small crowd of supporters awaited us outside the jail. Jeff was outside waiting for me, quietly outraged. He seemed to intuitively understand how frightened I’d been and how anxious I was about the pending court case. What if I received a jail term? Would my acceptance to graduate school be in jeopardy? Jeff had to work the next day, Sunday, so I just hung out at the house awaiting Monday’s court appearance.

That Sunday’s New York Times gave our story brief coverage in the back pages preceded by how the President had vigorously defended his Vietnam War policy before a crowd of several thousand at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, continuing:

Between 25 and 30 peace demonstrators were placed in a sheriff’s bus today and taken to the city building after President Johnson had spoken at Monument Circle. A sheriff’s deputy said the demonstrators might be kept overnight on a ‘charge of breaking up a public meeting’. The group had been kept a half-block from Mr. Johnson during his speech. One of the pro-testors….was Professor James Dinsmoor, Indiana University psychologist who was an unsuccessful candidate for a Democratic nomination for Congress this spring. Police Capt. Charles Sherman said Mr. Dinsmoor had been charged with interfering with the police.

At the time of my arrest, the officer charged me with disorderly conduct, but later at the trial when he testified, I learned I had also been charged with resisting arrest; he blatantly told the court that I had hit him with my sign. I was nonplussed and felt little satisfaction in my eventual verdict of not guilty. At the continuance on August 26th (the ICLU had filed a motion, overruled by the court, to quash the police affidavits), two of the 13 co-defendants were found guilty with judgment withheld; the rest of the cases were scheduled to be heard before a jury in early September ‘66.

The day after the arrests, one of the Indianapolis papers carried a larger story including the names of those arrested and a photograph of me front and center. I thought I’d better notify my parents in Michigan rather than have them hear about it second-hand from our Indiana relatives. My father, not known for taking time away from his high-powered position but for the direst emergency, immediately flew to Bloomington, demanding to know what I was up to and what all the fuss about Vietnam was. He listened intently, had nothing to say, but clearly was displeased with me. It took some time, but he finally came to understand.

Karen at the Indianapolis courthouse, July 25, 1966

Back at the university, Jeff asked me to relate my experience to an audience of our activist friends at the local coffeehouse. Sitting on a tall stool under a spotlight, I couldn’t see the audience beyond in the dark. I spoke maybe five minutes.

Karen concluded her story, “I had thought there’d be questions, but there was only stunned silence.”

*LBJ Library photo