Active-duty GIs had been protesting the war as early as 1965, and by 1969, that protest had evolved into a full-on movement. The GI movement — as it was called — was an effort by active-duty soldiers and veterans, working closely with civilian allies, to organize troops to oppose the war, resist the military brass, fight racism, and protect GI civil liberties. While often local, sporadic, and decentralized, the resistance that made up the GI movement was loosely tied together by common symbols, narratives, organizing vehicles, and outside support.
Thousands of soldiers plugged into and participated in the GI movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They signed petitions, joined antiwar marches, and donned peace symbol necklaces. They formed their own soldier antiwar groups with names like GIs for Peace, the American Servicemen’s Union, and Movement for a Democratic Military. They flocked to off-base antiwar coffeehouses and circulated hundreds of subversive newspapers deep into the military’s ranks.
And all this was just the more organized expression of a much larger reservoir of disobedience and rebellion throughout the ranks of the armed forces — leading, for example, journalist John Pilger to film a 1970 documentary on US soldiers in Vietnam titled The Quiet Mutiny, and a famed Marine colonel to declare the “collapse of the armed forces” in the pages of the Armed Forces Journal in June 1971. (For more background on the GI movement, see the new book, Waging Peace in Vietnam: US Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War, as well as David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt, David Parsons’ recent book on GI coffeehouses, and the documentary Sir! No Sir!).
A crucial factor in building the GI movement was the solidarity between dissident soldiers and the antiwar civilians who helped them organize. This is important, because the history of the GI movement dispels the notion that the antiwar movement hated soldiers. Rather, many peace activists sympathized with the plight of US troops and helped organize them to end the war.
They fundraised for the GI movement, offered legal help, and aided in the staffing of coffeehouses and the production of GI papers. Some tensions may have existed between antiwar civilians and GIs, but their relationship was far from what scholar Jerry Lembcke has called the “spitting image,” the myth that peace activists spit on US soldiers, would have us believe. Rather, the spitting image was a trope that was mobilized after the war for conservative political gain and to serve a revived American militarism.
By the time the October 15, 1969 Moratorium rolled around, then, GIs were not only increasingly seen as a crucial constituency within the wider antiwar movement, but they had already succeeded in organizing themselves into their own loose antiwar movement that stretched across the globe.