GIs Demonstrated Against the war in Saigon

GI resistance to the war in Vietnam took many forms. Richard Boyle was a free lance reporter in Vietnam, working for the Overseas Weekly. The following account is taken from his book Flower of the Dragon. Nguyen Hong Long was a leader of the "Long Hoa," an underground organization of Vietnamese students, teachers, and deserters.

GIs Demonstrate in Saigon

http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/sw/sw31/pgs_25-34/gis_demo.html

excerpt -

The biggest problem was getting the word to the GIs. One offered to get some leaflets printed up on Army presses. Another, a disc jockey on AFVN, said he would try to get the word of the demonstration on the air. Long went off to recruit among the students at Saigon University and I went off to contact an American civilian anti-war group made up mostly of employees from the religious social service organizations.

By Christmas Eve, Reuters had broken the story about our proposed demonstration and many papers in Saigon carried the announcement in the headlines. About an hour before the demo was due to start, Long and I drove down to JFK Square to check out the police preparations. We were staggered by what we saw. Three blocks from the square was a squadron of tanks and a battalion of combat police with automatic weapons. Lined up in a row of trucks were about 300 paid "counter-demonstrators", prepared to come in and bust heads when the demo started. What was worse, the police had put up a 6-foot barrier of barbed wire all around the square, leaving only a 5-foot gap for people to get in and out. It would be a massacre if we went ahead!

Long went off to the university to warn the students. A few of them said they were willing to demonstrate anyway, and filed into the square. Meanwhile, I went to warn the GIs who had gathered at the Overseas Weekly office. There, I heard some more bad news: the Brass had declared JFK Square off-limits to GIs and confined many of the men to their barracks. Only GIs who lived in apartments could get out to demonstrate. I told them about the danger at the square. Half-dozen decided to go anyway.

Even if we were marching to our own funerals, we were determined to do it right...........

more.......

I know a man who was trained as a Corpsman in the US Army. He never made it to Vietnam. He was arrested for wearing a North Vietnamese uniform during an anti-war protest in El Paso, Texas and spent the last year of the war in the brig before being dishonorably discharged.