Servants of War: GI Opposition to the Vietnam War in the Pacific Northwest, 1970-1973

In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden declared ‘we are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit’. In the early 1960s, this sentiment perfectly encapsulated the youthful endeavour of students at elite universities to argue for a more democratic form of mainstream politics, directly confront racism in America, and fight for nuclear disarmament and the end of the Cold War. However, by 1968, the situation had transformed, and it was no longer just students who were advocating the vision of a better America expounded by Hayden. One of the most important, yet overlooked, vanguards of this movement and the movement to end the war in Vietnam came, not from students, but from those bred in a larger degree of discomfort, housed in military barracks across the United States, and looking uncomfortably to a world in which they potentially have no part.

Political rhetoric, popular culture, and even histories have stereotyped the participants of the anti-war movement as the privileged, white, middle-class students to whom Hayden referred. However, this talk will focus on the anti-war critiques of those being forced to participate in the Vietnam War; those Americans whose lives the war affected the most. Specifically, this paper will analyse the voices of those GIs engaged in creating, writing, and distributing the underground anti-war newspaper, the Lewis-McChord Free Press. Located on Fort Lewis, McChord Air Force Base, and Bremerton Naval Yard, in the early 1970s, these GIs used this newspaper to express their discontent with the war they were being forced to fight and the institution of the military itself. Utilising both the newspaper and oral testimony, this paper will demonstrate that GI protests went beyond pragmatic concerns and encompassed broader criticisms of US politics and society. GIs linked the Vietnam War to domestic concerns regarding racism, oppression of migrant workers, subjugation of the working-classes, and sexism and misogyny through criticisms of capitalism and a perceived US imperialism. In this way, GIs used their voices to espouse a structural view in which the causes of foreign policy problems and domestic issues were one and the same.