Irwin Silber's `About The GI Movement" Article Revisited: Part 2

In the booklet that's included with Paredon Records' 1970 vinyl album, FTA!: Songs of the GI Resistance Sung by Barbara Dane with active-duty GIs, former Sing Out! magazine and U.S. Guardian radical newsweekly editor Irwin Silber wrote--in his "About The GI Movement" article--the following:

"...Almost three years ago, as anti-war GIs began to realize that almost no one except lifers and the brass were in favor of the war, the dissent began to take on an organized form. GIs at various bases began publishing their own underground newspapers. Salty, outspoken, increasingly political, there are more than 50 such papers regularly published today. Some of them have a circulation as high as 15,000 copies per issue. The papers appear everywhere--including some which are epublished in Vietnam, Germany and Japan. Stockade rebellions, protesting the Army's racist system and the inhuman treatment accorded military prisoners, broke out in dozens of camps--including posts in Vietnam, German and Japan.

"Desertions from the U.S. Army reached an all-time high, while AWOLs sky-rocketed to the point where the military conceded there were more than 150,000 such cases in 1969 alone. GIs began organized letter campaigns and petition movements in opposition to the war, in support of the struggles of blacks, Mexican-Americans, students, working people and others in the civilian populatlion, and in protest at the brutalizing conditions within the armed forces. Mess hall boycotts, sick-clal strikes, and various other `on the job' actions spread throughout the ranks--particularly in conjunction with coordinated mass civilian anti-war actions.

"The movement is more than one of spontaneous dissent, however. The basis for a widespread movement exists in the reality of the opprression of the ordinary GI, and particularly his victimization as the one who is asked to give up the most--his life--for the least. But it also took the conscious and concerted efforts of politically motivated activists to help this movement find its voice and its organizational forms."

Irwin Silber's `About The GI Movement' Article Revisited: Part 1

In the booklet that's included with Paredon Records' 1970 vinyl album, FTA!: Songs of the GI Resistance Sung by Barbara Dane with active-duty GIs, former Sing Out! magazine and U.S. Guardian radical newsweekly editor Irwin Silber wrote--in his "About The GI Movement" article--the following:

"Soldiers in the U.S. Army, stationed at Ford Gordon, Georgia, organize a `War Crimes Commission' to investigate the American military machine.

"More than 100 GIs, held prisoner in the stockade in Fort Lewis, Wash., sign a petition supporting the Vietnam Moratorium Day and stage a mess hall boycott for one day.

"Hundreds of U.S. Marines march in an anti-war parade through the streets of Oceanside, Calif., home of Camp Pendleton, largest Marine training camp on the West Coast.

"GIs at Fort Hood, Texas, mimeograph copies of the political program of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (formerly the National Liberation Front) and distribute them to onlookers and participants in a peaceful demonstration in Houston.

"The Commanding Officer at one of the largest military bases in the U.S.A., Fort Dix, New Jersey, confines his own troops to barracks during an anti-war demonstration for fear they will join the demonstrators. He polices the action with MPs flown in from another base, figuring his own Military Police might be too sympathetic to the protestors.

"19 stockade prisoners at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, sit down in the center of their enclosure and sing `We Shall Overcome' as a protest against inhuman treatment of GIs.

"More than 40 military bases throughout the country cancel traditional Armed Forces Day celebrations (May 16), concerned that anti-war demonstrators will `invade' their bases and propagandize the GIs.

"Incidents such as these, only occasionally publicized in the U.S. press, are occurring daily at the camps, bases and installations of the self-proclaimed most powerful military machine on the face of the earth. Widespread disaffection right within the ranks of the U.S. military has become one of the major political and logistical problems for the Pentagon, whose policy planners have become the High Command of international counter-revolution.

"It is a problem they did not anticipate. Just as the orthodox military mentality has no way of coping with the realities of `people's war' in Vietnam, so the elite officer corps of the U.S. brass, contemptuous of their own enlisted men in the first place, cannot comprehend the depths of alienation and outright political opposition which have infected every branch of the armed forces..."