FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (LNS) Fayetteville witnessed its first anti-war GI-civilian demonstration on Oct. 11 as 50 GIs from Ft. Bragg led a march of 1,000 people down the town’s main street.
The crowd marched through the streets shouting slogans like: “Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight,” “Um, Umgowa, People Got the Power,” and “Nixon’s Indicted by GIs United.” They encountered little harassment from either the cops or town residents.
While the GI organizers, GIs United, were reluctant to come out in support of the NLF, rally speakers Donald Duncan and Dr. Howard Levy did talk about the war in terms of U.S. imperialism. Duncan, a former Green Beret sergeant, said that a new generation stands in opposition to U.S. imperialist interests.
Levy, the army physician who was sentenced to 2 years at Levenworth for refusal to train Green Berets as medics, said that GIs he had talked to at Ft. Dix were conscious of U.S. capitalist and imperialist motives for the war.
Clearly, the Ft. Dix GIs are much further along in political development than most GIs across the country (thanks in great part to the presence of the Ft. Dix Coffeehouse, and the radical anti-war paper Shakedown), but the Army war machine makes a great school of anti-imperialism all by itself and if the GIs of Fort Bragg can march against the war now, they’ll soon be marching to support third world struggles too.
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See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.