Jeff Sharlet (Vietnam antiwar activist)

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Jeff Sharlet, linguist, U.S. Army Security Agency, 1963-1964
Jeff Sharlet, linguist, U.S. Army Security Agency, 1963-1964

Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969), an ex-Vietnam GI, was a leader of the GI resistance movement during the Vietnam War and the founding editor of Vietnam GI,[1] a monthly underground paper written by and for enlisted men who were committed to ending the war.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Sharlet was born and raised in Glens Falls, New York, a small town in the foothills of the Adirondacks, and later in the state capital of Albany. In 1960 he graduated from The Albany Academy, a private military academy.

[edit] Military training and assignment: Philippines

Restless during his first year of college, Sharlet withdrew and decided to fulfill his military obligation. In return for a three-year enlistment in the United States Army Security Agency (ASA), a communications intelligence outfit, he was promised a year’s training in a Slavic language followed by a European posting.

But at the Army Language School (ALS, now the Defense Language Institute) he was bumped into the Vietnamese course. He and fellow Vietnamese students spent six hours a day in class over 11½ months. In early 1963 Sharlet was sent to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines where he was assigned to the 9th ASA at Stotsenberg Field Station as a Vietnamese translator/interpreter. With a Top Secret/Cryptographic security clearance he and fellow linguists monitored North Vietnamese military radio communications.

[edit] Vietnam duty

In late August 1963 Sharlet and a small team of linguists were flown to Saigon on short notice and transferred to the Army Security Agency’s 3rd Radio Research Unit, Davis Station, named after the first American GI killed in combat during the Vietnam War,[2] at Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside the capital. The transfer occurred at the time of the secret coup planning by South Vietnamese generals against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.[3]

From Davis Station, Sharlet and seven others were dispatched to an area in the jungle near Phu Lam where they worked on a remote corner of the base apart from Army signals personnel. Each day’s product was sent by heavily armed jeep down to Tan Son Nhut from where it was airlifted to Washington, DC for analysis at the National Security Agency.

Very shortly before the November 1st coup which overthrew Diem, Sharlet and the special team were pulled out and ordered back to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. By then, as he later related to family, he was beginning to experience doubts about the U.S. mission in Vietnam.

A few months later, Sharlet was shipped back to Vietnam, this time on the eve of the 1964 South Vietnamese coup by General Nguyen Khanh against the junta on January 30th. Following the quick success of the coup, Sharlet was re-assigned north to Phu Bai,[4] an Army Security Agency base just below the 1954 boundary between North and South Vietnam, the DMZ.

There he was attached to Detachment J, a branch of the 3rd Radio Research Unit providing communications support for commando operations in North Vietnam.[5] Sharlet was also seconded to a nearby Marine intelligence unit[6] for long range reconnaissance patrols. By the time he finished his Vietnam tour late May 1964, Sharlet had seen enough political corruption and military incompetence of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam[7] (ARVN), often compounded by exaggerated, upbeat reports by U.S. military advisors, to become thoroughly disillusioned with U.S. involvement in what he believed was a Vietnamese civil war.

[edit] SDS days at Indiana University

Sharlet returned to college fall of 1964, re-entering Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington where he majored in Political Science. In early 1965, the Vietnam conflict escalated with the launching of U.S. bombing raids against the North and the landing of Marine combat units in the South.[8] By April, student protest against the war had begun to spread on U.S. campuses. At IU, a small group of students including Bob and John Grove, Robin Hunter, Peter Montague, Karl North, Rick Ross, Bernella and David Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, and Sharlet founded a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).[9]

During the following two academic years at IU, Sharlet participated in, helped organize, or co-led SDS demonstrations against campus visits by several prominent pro-Vietnam War speakers, including former Vice President Richard Nixon, General Maxwell D. Taylor, General Lewis Blaine Hershey and President Lyndon Baines Johnson when he spoke in nearby Indianapolis.[10]

On campus, he supported the protest against the arrest of two members of the leftist youth W.E.B. DuBois Club[11], Bruce Klein and Allen Gurevitz. During his tenure as SDS president Spring term 1967, with the help of his vice president Bob Tennyson, Sharlet wrote a public response[12] to IU President Elvis Jacob Stahr, Jr., a former Secretary of the Army, over his criticism of the New Left. Sharlet later played a significant role in getting an SDS activist elected IU student body president.[13]

Sharlet won a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship. which he chose to use at University of Chicago in its Political Science PhD program beginning fall 1967.

[edit] Chicago and Vietnam GI

During his IU years Sharlet had pondered the question of how to give voice to opposition to the war which he knew existed among many Vietnam GIs. In the summer of 1967 he went to New York City where he met fellow ex-Vietnam GI Jan Barry Crumb[14] and joined his fledgling organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Returning to Chicago Sharlet began graduate work, but by the end of the Fall term decided to withdraw to resume his anti-war work full time. Using his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds, Sharlet launched the first GI-run anti-war paper addressed to GIs, calling it Vietnam GI (VGI). The first issue was dated January, 1968. His associate editor was David Komatsu, and the editorial board of ex-Vietnam GIs included Jan Barry, Joseph Carey, William Harris, Peter Martinsen, Dink McCarter, James Pidgeon, Gary Rader, Francis Rocks, David Tuck, and James Zaleski. A civilian conscientious objector, Thomas Barton,[15]served as VGI’s East Coast distributor and was responsible for unobtrusively shipping bundles of the paper to Vietnam.

Vietnam GI quickly became a success among GIs stateside and in Vietnam[16] where soldiers like Maury Knutson,[17]stationed near Qui Nhon on the South China Sea, along with a number of sympathetic unit mail clerks helped circulate the paper surreptitiously. It was free to GIs, and requests for individual subscriptions as well as multiple copies for distribution in stateside barracks and Vietnam combat units soared, with the print run reaching 30,000 copies by fall 1968.[18] Letters-to-the editor indicated that single copies passed through many hands. In August a separate “Stateside” edition of VGI was launched.

Between issues, Sharlet worked wealthy liberal circles on both coasts for contributions. Barbara Garson, author of MacBird, a widely performed anti-war play of the late 1960s, was an especially helpful West Coast contact. While traveling, Sharlet kept in touch with civilian activists running GI coffee houses outside major bases,[19] including Larry Langowski at Fort Sill, OK and Donna Mickleson,[20] national coordinator of the coffee house movement based in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as draft resistance groups which distributed Vietnam GI at induction centers in Chicago and Boston.[21]

In late 1968 Sharlet visited the Oleo Strut, the highly activist GI coffee house, and nearby Fort Hood in Killeen, TX. Run by Josh Gould and Janet “Jay” Lockard, it was associated with the strike of the “Fort Hood 43,”[22] Black troops who refused riot duty at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sharlet also represented the burgeoning GI anti-war movement at conferences in Japan[23] and in Sweden[24] where he worked with the theologians Harvey Cox, Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, and Michael Novak.

The success of Vietnam GI and the growing GI protest against the war led to national media coverage for Sharlet and the paper in Esquire,[25] New York Times,[26] and on the AP and NEA news wire services.[27]In early 1969 a problem first experienced in Vietnam resurfaced, and he underwent surgery for kidney cancer. As David Komatsu wrote in Vietnam GI, “From there it was steadily downhill all the way. At the end, he said he had many new ideas for our fight, but was just too exhausted to talk them.”[28] Sharlet died on June 16, 1969, age 27.[29]

[edit] Posthumous recognition

Sharlet’s work as a founder of the GI protest movement was eulogized in the underground press throughout the country, including The Movement,[30] Veterans Stars & Stripes for Peace,[31] Guardian,[32] and The Old Mole of Cambridge, MA.[33] David Dellinger with Barbara Webster published a long remembrance of Sharlet for the magazine Liberation.[34] A new GI coffee house in Frankfurt am/Main in then-West Germany was dedicated to him, while Fred Gardner, in the definitive account of the 1968 Presidio Mutiny 27, The Unlawful Concert (1970) published by Viking Press, dedicated his book to “Jeff Sharlet, founder of Vietnam GI, dead at 27.”[35]

During past decades a number of scholars of the Vietnam anti-war movement have written about Sharlet and Vietnam GI in books and journals, including in recent years Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1999), published by New York University Press, [36].; David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (reissued 2005 by Haymarket Books)[37]; and Bob Ostertag, People’s Movements/People’s Press (2006) published by Beacon Press.[38]

The most dramatic recognition has been the award-winning documentary, Sir! No Sir! (2005), on the Vietnam GI anti-war movement screened in theaters across the country and internationally and recently shown on Sundance Channel, co-dedicated to Sharlet, as the director David Zeiger[39] put it, “for starting it all.”

[edit] References and Footnotes

  1. ^ David Cortright, a major chronicler of the Vietnam GI protest movement wrote, “Vietnam GI, the most influential early paper, surfaced at the end of 1967, distributed to tens of thousands of GIs, many in Vietnam, closed down after the death of founder Jeff Sharlet in June, 1969.” Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (1975), p. 324. For the front pages of the Vietnam GI issues, see http://www.sirnosir.com/archives_and_resources/galleries/cover_pages/vietnam_gi.html.
  2. ^ ASA Specialist 4th class James T. Davis was killed in a Viet Cong ambush outside Saigon on December 22, 1961. See http://www.comcenterspec.homestead.com/DavisStation.html.
  3. ^ On the South Vietnamese military’s coup planning and the Kennedy Administration’s involvement resulting in the overthrow and death of President Diem on November 1, 1963, see Grant, Facing the Phoenix, pp. 198-215, based on extensive interviews with Lucien Conein, the CIA operative who served as liaison between the White House and the coup plotters; Prados, The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President: A Book and CD Set, especially the audio on JFK’s meetings with his secret committee on the coup planning on disks 2 & 3; and Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans, pp. 520-59, based on declassified State Department cables and CIA reports between Saigon and Washington, DC on the progress and final execution of the coup plans.
  4. ^ The Phu Bai military base was 9 miles SE of Hue, capital of one of South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces. See the map at http://www.cswayne.com/huemap.html which shows the village of Phu Bai just south of the ASA base.
  5. ^ The Pentagon Papers: As Published by the New York Times, p. 238.
  6. ^ On the Marine 1st Composite Radio Company, see USMC, 1st Radio Battalion, Vietnam Veterans. On the composition and mission of the Marine unit, see Radio Battalion.
  7. ^ See Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army, especially ch. 5. On the disastrous battle of Ap Bac (January, 1963) which became emblematic of the South Vietnamese Army’s failures, see Halberstam’s firsthand account in The Making of a Quagmire, pp. 146-62; and Sheehan’s detailed discussion in A Bright Shining Lie, pp. 212-65.
  8. ^ On the launching of the bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, on March 2, 1965, and the landing of the first Marine combat battalions at Danang on March 8, 1965, see respectively Lewy, America in Vietnam, pp. 375-78 and 42-49.
  9. ^ On the formation of the IU chapter of SDS in 1965, see Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University, pp. 36, 43-44, 46, and 51.
  10. ^ On LBJ’s appearance in Indianapolis on July 23, 1966 and the preemptive arrests of many of the IU SDS protestors, see Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland, pp. 44-45.
  11. ^ The first DuBois Clubs, Marxist discussion groups named after a prominent African American civil rights leader, were organized in the San Francisco Bay Area during 1963. The following year the national organization, W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America, was formed. See Freeman, At Berkeley in the Sixties, p. 27. By 1966 the national organization was under investigation by U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. In September, Klein and Gurevitz were arrested on the IU campus for defying the university’s ban on the DuBois Club participating in the fall activities fair at the student union.
  12. ^ Jeff Sharlet, “The Role of the New Left on the Campus: State of the Students, State of the University,” The Spectator, March 13, 1967, pp. 3-6,
  13. ^ Sharlet, at the time SDS president, was a draftsman of the winning candidate’s campaign platform. The SDS activist was declared victor in the election. See Indiana Daily Student, April 14, 1967, p. 1.
  14. ^ Jan Barry Crumb, who later shortened his name to Jan Barry, was founder and first president of VVAW. See Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, pp. 15-17.
  15. ^ See Barton’s interview, “Jeff Sharlet and Vietnam GI,” an “extra” feature on the DVD Sir! No Sir! The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam]], Displaced Films, New Video Group, 2006. Barton today sees himself carrying on Sharlet's work in his current role as editor of the daily online Iraq GI antiwar newsletter, GI Special, archived at http://www.militaryproject.org/, which he conceived of as a continuation of Vietnam GI in the present context. He also assisted ex-Iraq GIs in organizing Iraq Veterans Against the War.
  16. ^ In The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era, p. 104, Moser wrote that Vietnam GI “became one of the most successful soldier newspapers of the period.” While the press run for the first issue was relatively modest, Cortright in Soldiers in Revolt, p. 55 reported it was soon “exceeding fifteen thousand.” Reviewing the paper’s history, Ostertag in People’s Movements/People’s Press, p. 126, concluded that “Vietnam GI set a standard of excellence unmatched in the underground GI press.”
  17. ^ On Knutson, see Jim Pidgeon, “My Son the Newspaper,” Vietnam GI, April 1968, p. 7.
  18. ^ 20See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, p. 106.
  19. ^ On the organization of GI coffee houses, see Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, pp. 53-54. For the military’s reaction, see Ben A. Franklin, “Antiwar G.I.’s and Army Head for Clash Over Vietnam,” New York Times, April 28, 1969, p. 22.
  20. ^ Mickleson was co-founder with Fred Gardner of the GI coffee house movement. See Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, p. 98.
  21. ^ Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, pp. 321 & 420, n.62.
  22. ^ “Fort Hood Strike,” Vietnam GI, Stateside edition, September 1968, p. 1.
  23. ^ The conference took place in Kyoto in August, 1968. On Sharlet’s participation, see Halstead, Out Now!: A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War, pp. 427-28
  24. ^ The meeting took place in Stockholm in October, 1968 as reported in the Swedish press, “Sexton Faktasokare Fran USA (Sixteen Factfinders from the USA),” Dagens Nyheter, October 28, 1968, p. 1.
  25. ^ Robert Christgau, “Military Personnel Will Not Participate in Any Activity Having to Do with Creating a Union,” Esquire, August 1968, pp. 112 & 116.
  26. ^ Donald Janson, “Antiwar Coffee Houses Delight G.I.’s but Not Army,” New York Times, August 12, 1968, pp. 1 and 41.
  27. ^ The NEA’s national feature by Tom Tiede, “GI’s Aim Resentment at Brass,” ran in the Schenectady (NY) Union-Star, September 24, 1968, p. 19., while the AP’s national feature by Fred Hoffman, “GI Protest Newspapers Add Fury to Army’s Ire,” ran in the Albany (NY) Times-Union, May 25, 1969, p. A-7.
  28. ^ “Jeff Sharlet Dies,” (obituary), Vietnam GI, August 1969, p. 3.
  29. ^ “Mr. Sharlet, Founder of GI Magazine,” Miami (FL) Herald, June 18, 1969, p. 3-B.
  30. ^ Lincoln Bergman, “Jeff Sharlet, Editor of Vietnam GI,” The Movement, August 1969, p. 17.
  31. ^ “Jeff Sharlet Dies,” Veterans Stars & Stripes for Peace, Summer 1969, p. 1.
  32. ^ Jim Retherford, “Jeff Sharlet Dies of Cancer,” Guardian, July 5, 1969, p. 3.
  33. ^ “We regret to announce the death of Jeff Sharlet, Founder and Editor of Vietnam GI,” The Old Mole, June 20-July 3, 1969, p. 2.
  34. ^ David Dellinger & Barbara Webster, “The first edition of Vietnam GI came out in January, 1968. … Today Jeff died of cancer,” Liberation, July 1969, p. 2.
  35. ^ see page v.
  36. ^ see pp. 23, 26, 30-32, and 34
  37. ^ see pp. 55 and 324.
  38. ^ see pp. 125-32.
  39. ^ 41In the late 1960s Zeiger had been a civilian volunteer at the Oleo Strut, the GI coffee house near Fort Hood, TX. For his filmography as a writer/director, see David Zeiger.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Gardner, Fred. The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case. Viking, 1970.[ISBN 670-74108-6].
  • Geier, Joel. “Vietnam: The Soldier’s Revolt,” International Socialist Review, no. 9, August-September, 2000 at http://www.isreview.org/issues09/soldiers_revolt.html.
  • Glessing, Robert J. The Underground Press in America. Indiana University Press, 1970. [ISBN 0253190088].
  • Grant, Zalen. Facing the Phoenix. Norton, 1991. [ISBN 0393029255].
  • Halberstam, David. The Making of a Quagmire. Random House, 1965. [ISBN 0-345357-77-9].
  • Halstead, Fred. Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War. Monad Press, 1978. [ISBN 0-913460-47-8].
  • Hunt, Andrew E. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York University Press, 1999. [ISBN 0-8147-3581-9].
  • Lewes, James. Protest and Survive: Underground GI Newspapers During the Vietnam War. Praeger, 2003. [ISBN 0-275-97861-3].
  • Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. Oxford University Press, 1978. [ISBN 0-19-502391-9].
  • Moser, Robert R. The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era. Rutgers University Press, 1996. [ISBN 0-8135-2241-2].
  • Nicosia, Gerald. Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement. Crown, 2001.[ISBN 0-8129-9103-6].
  • Ostertag, Bob. People’s Movements/People’s Press. Beacon Press, 2006. [ISBN 0-8070-6164-6].
  • Pentagon Papers: As Published by the New York Times. Bantam Books, 1971. [ISBN 0552649171].
  • Prados, John. The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President – A Book and CD Set. New Press/Norton, 2003. [ISBN 1565848527].
  • Rinaldi, Matthew. “The Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organizing During the Vietnam War,” Radical America, vol. 8, no. 3, 1974, pp. 17-52 at http://geocities.com/cardobakaf/gis.html.
  • Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Random House, 1988. [ISBN 0-394-48447-9].
  • Wynkoop, Mary Ann. Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University. Indiana University Press, 2002. [ISBN 0-253-34118-3].
  • Zeiger, David, writer/director. Sir! No Sir! The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam. DVD, 84 mins. + extras. Displaced Films, New Video Group, 2006.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links and sources