By Johnnie Lewis
January 24, 2025

A recent article in the British Guardian newspaper recounted the experiences of veterans of the U.S. military and their thoughts and feelings in opposition to the U.S.-aided and -abetted genocide on Palestianian Gaza perpetrated by Zionist Israel. This opposition is to be applauded.

The U.S. military is now “all-volunteer.” So, this opposition will allow youth contemplating joining the military a different, sobering perspective. No doubt many young people already have this perspective because all branches of the military are failing to meet their recruiting quotas.

My experience in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1969 was quite different from that of these veterans.

There was a bloody genocidal war being waged directly by the United States where hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people had been and were still being killed by carpet bombing, chemical warfare (Agent Orange) and massacres of whole villages of people by U.S. soldiers. This happened in My Lai on March 16, 1968, when U.S. troops killed as many as 500 Vietnamese civilians.

While the genocide was ongoing, the resistance forces organized and fought back, killing and wounding tens of thousands of U.S. servicemembers. Every night on the 6 p.m. news, the U.S. population heard reports on the number of their youths slaughtered. They often viewed them in black body bags strapped on top of tanks and loaded on half-tracks racing down dusty roads, or in flag-draped aluminum caskets, row upon row upon row, coming home — although dead.

Many, including myself, believed the Vietnamese resistance to be a righteous war of national liberation.

From draft resister to GI organizer

At first, I was a draft resister. I had decided I was not, under any circumstance, going to participate in this war as a soldier of imperialism. I was fortunate: I knew from the start I was not going.

I was a draft resister from the winter of 1965 until the spring of 1968 when I was waiting for trial for draft “evasion.” I had been arrested by the FBI and was expecting to meet up with my friend and fellow draft resister, Don Pratt, at Allentown federal prison where he was doing three to five years.

However, something else happened. On a nice spring day in March 1968, I had the good fortune to drop into a workshop at a national anti-war conference on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I lived nearby. Amazingly, the workshop was led by U.S. Army soldiers in uniform. They talked about how they were organizing an active-duty soldiers’ union — the American Servicemen’s Union — to go on strike against the U.S. war in Vietnam.

I thought, “Wow! What a lovely idea! This is what I will do!” And, I did.

Within a few weeks I was in Army uniform, in Basic Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, working with one of those uniformed GIs organizing for the ASU against the war among my fellow soldiers. I openly stated I was not going to the war. My first week in Basic Training I spent in the stockade (a concentration camp-type military prison) for saying to an officer: “I am not going to Vietnam. I don’t need to train harder, faster.”

During my stint in the Army, I got orders to go to Vietnam three times and refused each time. In all, I had three military courts-martial, spending about 10 months in stockades at various Army bases.

Outside of jail I handed out The Bond, the ASU newspaper, which for seven years always carried news of struggles against the war, against racism and the total unfairness and lack of basic rights for enlisted service members.

Organizing in the stockades

Inside jail, or behind the wire of the concentration camp-like stockades, organizing did not stop. It actually seemed to pick up: we were already in jail, what could they do to us for protesting? There were few pro-war prisoners, if any. In fact nearly everybody inside was a protester in their own way.

Most of the prisoners at Fort Dix were Black and Latine, and like my friend and fellow ASU organizer, Henry Mills, a member of the Nation of Islam, had refused to even complete Basic Training, often more than once.

I had visitors from the ASU National Office in NYC, as well as Workers World Party members, who brought copies of The Bond newspaper inside. So, just as on the outside, we read the latest news on the many organizing fronts, organized strikes, protests, disrupted war propaganda sessions.

The ASU had 10,000 members, including in Vietnam. We had members all over the world, very probably on every military base and on every ship. The ASU was wherever there was anti-war, anti-racism sentiment, mostly because we helped create it, expand it, spread it around like peanut butter on warm toast.

So, while the struggles of present-day service members may take a different route and may comprise people not drafted, the powers that be — the U.S. military complex — will always, always fear what the ASU did to their military during the era of the U.S. war on Vietnam! The organizing we did, the actions we carried out, the disruptions to their military machine, ensured the end of the military draft — at least till now — which is on the face of it, quite a victory.

For more information on the history of the American Servicemen’s Union, including the organizing of author Johnnie Lewis, read “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” by John Catalinotto.