Vol. 75/No. 26      July 18, 2011

Below is an excerpt from Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States against the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead. It is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. From 1960 to 1975 Washington’s military intervention—aimed at thwarting the Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination—killed more than 2 million Indochinese and almost 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Reaching out to GIs was an important political component of building a mass movement against this war with the demand “Bring the Troops Home Now.” Among those fighting for this perspective were the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), who insisted that GIs had a right to express their opinions on the war in Vietnam and organize against it. Copyright © 1978 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FRED HALSTEAD  
[As] antiwar activity among GIs became widespread and a number of soldiers who had been active YSAers in civilian life were prominently involved, it was assumed by many within the movement that the YSA had deliberately sent people into the army. This was never the case. They were drafted. Nor did the YSAers quietly allow themselves to be drafted. As a general rule, YSAers called by the draft would notify the authorities in writing of their antiwar position and declare their intention to maintain these views and express them within the army… .

The YSA and SWP preferred to keep their members in civilian life if possible, where they could organize freely and spend far more time on antiwar activity—not to mention socialist political work—than was possible in the army. They had no illusion that their own small forces could make a critical difference—except by occasional example—in activities within the army, which were tenuous and difficult at best.

The proletarian military policy was a political approach, not an adventure, not a fad, and certainly not a gimmick. It advocated pointing the antiwar movement toward the great mass of ordinary working class Americans, including those in the military, and including the 99 percent who were not opposed on principle to all military service.

Nor did those of us in the YSA and SWP view GI antiwar activity as a substitute for building the antiwar movement in the civilian population. On the contrary, it was our view that the civilians were the key force. Without a mass antiwar movement in the civilian population the GI movement could never get beyond occasional isolated individual acts. There was, however, an important reciprocal factor. Any antiwar stand by GIs carried great weight with the civilian population and cut, like nothing else could, through the “support our boys” demagogy of the hawks. Conversely, the more massive the civilian movement, the easier it was for the GIs to express their own opposition to the war.

In addition, we in the SWP also had our hopes that a GI movement could develop which would have a direct effect on the war machine. We knew this was at least theoretically possible, because it had happened before. Not only in extreme situations of social collapse like Russia of 1917, but within the U.S. military itself in what was called the “going home movement” following World War II.

In late 1945 and early 1946 the huge U.S. overseas military machine had to be hastily demobilized, contrary to plan, because of a massive campaign by GIs which had broad support in the civilian population at home. This movement involved contact with trade union and other groups within the U.S., petitions to Congress, distribution of literature by the GIs themselves on military facilities, and even large demonstrations by men in uniform. These activities took place both in Europe and the Pacific.

Although this movement had been virtually ignored in history books, a dim memory of it remained and had been kept alive in particular in the SWP, which considered it an important historical development. As an eighteen-year-old sailor in the U.S. Seventh Fleet in China waters, I had seen a part of this movement personally, though I had nothing to do with organizing it.

At the time the part of the fleet I was with was actually involved in the Chinese civil war—another fact rarely mentioned in the history books—ferrying Chiang Kai-shek’s troops to Northern China to fight the Communists. The GIs I was acquainted with had by and large accepted the Second World War as some kind of necessity. But we knew nothing about the Chinese civil war until we found ourselves involved, and we wanted no part of it. It was not so much a political mood as a simple desire to go home, though I remember some of the GI orators using words like “imperialism” in their agitation. As I recall, the organizers were older than I was, usually noncommissioned officers with some sort of specialized skills and a background of trade union experience.

I remember that at the time it was considered no big thing for GIs to be painting banners or turning out leaflets on military mimeograph machines, or even requisitioning space on military airplanes to attend distant meetings. I observed one of these meetings at the Red Cross building in Shanghai, which was a gathering place for GIs in the area. The lobby had a big banner in it: “GIs Unite—We Want to Go Home!”

If the officers didn’t like these goings-on, there was not much they could do about it. The sentiment was too widespread and they were too dependent in day-to-day life on the noncommissioned officers who were participating. The movement was finally halted by decree, but this was possible only because the rapid demobilization had already begun and was irreversible, at least as far as that body of men was concerned.

In 1965 and 1966 we in the SWP thought a lot about that earlier experience and described it on every possible occasion to other antiwar activists. Could anything like that develop among American GIs in Vietnam? We weren’t sure, but we didn’t exclude it. And we did what we could to press the point that GIs had a right—if anyone did—to express their opinions on the war in Vietnam, and to organize and demonstrate against it.  
 
 
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