A different kind of voice
Most accounts of the protests of 1967 concentrate on students, clergy and pacifists. A smaller and less visible strand came from people who had served, or were still serving, in the armed forces. Their voices carried special weight, because they spoke from experience. In 1967 that strand was only beginning, and it is easy to exaggerate its size. It matters because it grew into one of the most recognisable parts of the movement after 1969.
The founding of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
The group that became Vietnam Veterans Against the War began in April 1967, in connection with the Spring Mobilization in New York. According to the usual account, a small number of recently returned veterans, about half a dozen, marched together in the parade on 15 April, carrying a banner or standing out as a contingent of men who had served in Vietnam. Afterwards, they agreed to form an organisation. It was a small group at first and remained so for some time.
Early members included Jan Barry, a former West Point cadet and Army veteran, and others who had served in Vietnam or the military. They were not a mass movement in 1967. The group had few members and little money, and it took time to build the structure and the reputation that would give it influence. Its large public moments, including the Winter Soldier hearings of early 1971 and the Dewey Canyon III protest in Washington in April 1971, came years later. The name was adopted early, though some details about the first meetings and who attended them differ between accounts.
Soldier dissent
Dissent inside the services in 1967 was scattered and mostly individual. A few cases became widely known.
- Captain Howard Levy, an Army doctor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, refused to train Special Forces medics for Vietnam, arguing that the training would be used in a way he considered unethical. He was court-martialled and convicted in 1967, and received a prison sentence of three years.
- In 1966, three soldiers from Fort Hood in Texas, sometimes known as the Fort Hood Three, had refused to go to Vietnam, and their case was still known in the movement.
- Some servicemen wrote letters to newspapers or members of Congress, and a few applied for discharge as conscientious objectors. Others left the military without permission, and a small number of deserters travelled abroad to places such as Canada and Sweden; in late 1967, a handful of sailors who had left their ship in Japan became the first group of this kind to attract wide notice.
Active-duty opposition would spread much more widely after 1968 through GI newspapers, coffeehouses near bases and organisations of soldiers. In 1967 the military authorities generally treated open dissent as a disciplinary matter, and punishments could be severe. The rise of GI resistance is a subject for later years.
How veterans were seen
Veterans occupied an unusual position. For the antiwar movement, they were valuable allies, since it was harder for critics to call them unpatriotic or cowardly. Student radicals who were not veterans often welcomed them with respect, and some tried to place them in the front of marches. Yet the relationship was not always easy. Some protesters spoke of soldiers in ways that veterans found offensive, and later accounts record complaints about hostility from sections of the movement. Veterans in turn sometimes had little patience for the style of student radicals.
Public opinion was also mixed. Many Americans admired those who had served, but veterans who spoke against the war could be accused of betraying their comrades. Groups such as the American Legion supported the war and often criticised protesters, and some veterans’ organisations regarded antiwar veterans with suspicion. The reception varied by region and by generation, with older veterans of the Second World War often reacting more strongly than younger men.
There was also a tension within the veterans themselves, between those who had come to oppose the war because of what they saw and those who felt that criticism dishonoured their service. Many of the men who came home in 1967 did not join any organisation at all, and may have felt that no group spoke for them.
Why it mattered later
In 1967, the veterans’ contribution was modest, and their numbers were small. But the principle was important. The idea that a soldier could oppose a war without being disloyal, and that experience gave a person authority to criticise policy, would become a prominent theme of the movement. Over the next few years, as more men returned from Vietnam and as the war’s costs rose, the organisation founded in April 1967 became far larger and more visible than its founders could have expected.