To reverse these judgments, Lewes argues that those behind underground military newspapers were the vanguard of the "plurality of GIs [who] not only opposed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia" but were involved in an active, organized resistance movement.
The evidence Lewes offers for his thesis is thin and at times even contradictory. He relies on some especially turgid critical communications-theory scholarship, the self-serving reminiscences of various protest figures and "Gonzo" journalists, and the manifestos contained in 130 or so various underground GI newspapers archived in four university collections.
Although Lewes maintains that significant numbers of U.S. military personnel resisted the war, he has only his own wishful thinking to confirm this view. Indeed, at one point he flatly states, "It is impossible to accurately assess just how many GIs took part in anti-war activities." In recounting the saga of Roger Priest, an apprentice seaman assigned to the Pentagon in 1969, Lewes notes that Priest was the publisher, editor, and often sole contributor to his own "liberation newsletter"--hardly indicative of a mass movement.
Lewes perhaps anticipates such criticism, devoting a chapter to the military's "response and repression" that emphasizes the necessarily anonymous status of most uniformed dissidents. Unfortunately, this lands him in the predicament of propounding a nonfalsifiable theory. If the evidence for mass resistance does not exist, then it was either suppressed by "the brass" or the members of this supposedly seething underground were all cleverly hidden.
Undeterred by having failed to demonstrate his thesis, Lewes casually declares the GI papers "helped end U.S. intervention in South Vietnam." This hopelessly simplistic statement, unsupported by anything preceding it, is almost certainly wrong. If anything, the causation is exactly opposite: "vietnamization," the war's winding down, and the elimination of the draft all contributed to the undoing of the antiwar movement.
Stylistically, this mercifully brief book reeks of dissertation padding. The book's entire first third consists of rehearsing theoretical frameworks, fatuous definitions, and methodological throat clearing. Throughout, the decidedly nonfelicitous prose is jargon-laden and heavy with repeated academic sign-posting; for example, "In this chapter, I first focus...."; "I examine...."; "I test...." Lewes also has the distressing habit of adopting his protagonists' viewpoint and, somewhat anachronistically, even their vocabulary. Thus, he treats readers to approving quotations of infantile, frequently scatological, rants against "the pigs" and repeatedly refers to officers and noncommissioned officers as "lifers" and "the brass."
While the subject and tone of this book will be off-putting to many readers, there is nothing wrong in exploring the less edifying, dimly lit comers of military social history. Barracks lawyers, insubordination, desertions, drug use, "combat refusals," "fraggings," and mutinies are as old as Homer's The Iliad (Penguin Books, New York, 2003) and as up-to-date as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Soldiers of a certain age recall all too well these late-Vietnam and immediate-postwar pathologies.
The samizdat Lewes discusses perhaps has its analogue today in some of the websites and blogs disgruntled service members and ex-members run. Lewes's romantic renderings in Protest and Survive, however, do not advance understanding of any of this. That would require intelligent interrogation of the underground GI literature, as well as relevant secondary sources, oral histories, and the official record. Fascinating and valid questions remain. As Bob Dylan's song says, "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind."
COL Alan Cate, USA, Retired, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
