'Provocative People': The Lewis-McChord Free Press, GI Social and Political Consciousness During the Vietnam War

Rix, Joseph (2025) 'Provocative People': The Lewis-McChord Free Press, GI Social and Political Consciousness During the Vietnam War. PhD thesis, University of Worcester.

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Abstract

This thesis analyses the contents of one anti-war newspaper, the Lewis-McChord Free Press, published by active-duty servicemen in the Pacific Northwest during the Vietnam War. It also employs new oral testimony of the men and women who published the paper. This publication was the main conduit for discontented GIs – a term which referred to members of all branches of the military, not just the Army – to voice their upset and outrage at the US’ presence and conduct in Vietnam. This they characterised as oppressive and aggressive, and flouted military regulations to publish the Free Press, organise events, and attend anti-war demonstrations in order to espouse this opinion. Primarily, these GIs conceptualised the war in Vietnam as an imperialist endeavour, one which was pursued for capital gain rather than a benevolent intervention to aid the sovereignty of the Republic of Vietnam, as successive administrations had claimed. With an eye on the wider GI Movement, this thesis contends that this particular publication was widely illustrative of the arguments which young men on military bases across the US made about the Vietnam War. This work also highlights the everyday issues which young men, antithetical to the purposes of the military, encountered on Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base, such as their conflict with military law.

This thesis contends that whilst the anti-war critiques of servicemen are of paramount importance, these historical actors’ positions were much broader than this. Instead, as young people in the “Sixties”, they engaged in many of the progressive endeavours which are usually associated with the civilian “movement” of the period. As active proponents of social justice, opponents of racism, and supporters of women, publishers of the Free Press undermine stereotypes that soldiers are inherently conservative and highlight the need to include servicemen in progressive narratives of this period. Hugely important to these endeavours was the increasing radicalisation of the publishers of the Free Press, catalysed by their understanding of the Vietnam War as an imperialistic conflict, which pushed them increasingly to the Left. Oral testimony has revealed that some of the GIs of the Free Press were also members of a revolutionary Maoist organisation during this period, and this has necessarily impacted understandings of the paper itself. An increasing commentary on class, especially the working-class, and an attempt to reach out to other oppressed groups can therefore be viewed as an effort to pull the US Leftward, sometimes culminating in the desire for a Marxist-Leninist revolution.

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