The United States Servicemen's Fund (USSF) was a support organization for soldier and sailor resistance to the Vietnam War and the U.S. military that was founded in late 1968 and continued through 1973. It was an "umbrella agency" that funded GI underground newspapers and GI Coffeehouses, as well as providing logistical support for the GI antiwar movement ranging from antiwar films and speakers to legal assistance and staff. USSF described itself as supporting a GI defined movement "to work for an end to the Vietnam war" and "to eradicate the indoctrination and oppression that they see so clearly every day."
Founding
USSF was started by several prominent anti-Vietnam War activists, including Army Captain and medical Doctor Howard Levy, initially working clandestinely from Leavenworth military prison where he had been sentenced for refusing to train Green Beret medics on their way to Vietnam; Fred Gardner, ex-Army reservist and founder of the first GI antiwar coffeehouse; Dr. Benjamin Spock and Professors Noam Chomsky; and Robert Zevin. In 1967, Gardner moved to Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson, the U.S. Army's largest training base and site of Dr. Levy's resistance and court-martial. He was determined to prove that GIs would, as he put it, "rather be making love to the music of Jimi Hendrix than war to the lies of Lyndon Johnson." With Donna Mickelson he opened the UFO counterculture coffeehouse, which was almost instantly popular among local young people and soldiers from the Fort. By early 1968, with encouragement from the UFO, 35 soldiers from the Fort organized an antiwar pray-in in front of the base chapel.
As the word of GIs resisting the war began to spread in the broader peace movement, previously skeptical antiwar leaders began to support and help raise funds for additional GI support work. This led in mid-1968 to the formation of the Summer of Support (SOS) headed by soon to be Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis, which channeled money and people power towards more GI coffeehouses. Its purpose was "to bring to public attention the extent of rank and file opposition to the war and military." By the fall of 1968 four coffeehouse had been established and the GI movement was gaining national recognition. Gardner and Dr. Levy joined forces and helped to lead these efforts into the formation of USSF, with the West Coast branches calling themselves Support Our Soldiers, a tip of the hat to the SOS legacy from the Summer of Support. According to the historian Derek Seidman, "Continuity between the UFO, SOS and USSF was key to the latter’s success." Gardner and Dr. Levy helped raise money and promote the organization, with Levy often being the "source of original ideas about what the organization should undertake", while Mickelson and Judy Olasov did much of the day-to-day work helping individual coffeehouses start up. Robert Zevin became the organization's treasurer and office manager while Josh Gould, one of the founders of the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, worked in the Cambridge and New York City offices starting in 1970. Gardner and Dr. Levy emphasized the importance of GIs "organizing themselves, with the civilian antiwar movement offering material and ideological support."
Activity and growth
The next two to three years were the height of the GI antiwar movement and USSF played a key role by supporting it financially and helping to tie it together through bulletins, newspapers, staff training and traveling activists who facilitated communication between projects. In the summer of 1971 they organized a training course for potential project staffers which was attended by almost 50 people. The manual for this course so worried the House Committee on Internal Security that they entered it into the Congressional Record. With support from USSF, the GI antiwar and coffeehouse movement grew from a few projects into an international GI dissent network. A list of USSF sponsors and contributors shows that it was supported by many of the most prominent people in the antiwar movement, including (in addition to those mentioned above) Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, William Sloane Coffin, Ossie Davis, David Dellinger, James Forman, Betty Friedan, I.F. Stone, and Jane Fonda. Its publications also received support from several labor unions. In 1971, USSF published a pamphlet called The New Army (see cover image above) which listed a total of 76 "organizing projects, coffeehouses, and newspapers" they were supporting, as well as six USSF offices. USSF was probably the main way most antiwar civilians could interact with and support the growing GI movement.
As the GI movement grew, USSF was able to use its connections among GIs and with mainstream reporters to help spread stories the U.S. military was attempting to keep hidden. Paul Lauter, who led USSF from mid-1971 to mid-1972, described this in his memoir observing that among GIs, "nothing the military started up remained secret for very long." He recalled passing GI stories on to the news media about secret B-52 bombing runs from Guam which, once revealed, generated increased antiwar sentiment. The Nixon administration, Lauter said, viewed this "process as a form of espionage", but "it was simply GI democracy at work."
The FTA Show
Perhaps USSF's most well known project was the FTA Show, an anti-Vietnam War road show for GIs designed as a response to Bob Hope's patriotic and pro-war USO tour. It was the brainchild of Dr. Levy, who met with Jane Fonda on the set of Klute, convincing her to participate and help pull it together. Fonda went on to recruit a number of actors, entertainers, musicians and others, including actors Donald Sutherland, Peter Boyle, Garry Goodrow, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, and singers Country Joe McDonald, Nina Simone, Len Chandler, Swamp Dogg, Holly Near and Rita Martinson. USSF became the official sponsor of the show during its U.S. phase, with Gardner as the Tour's "stage manager and liaison to the coffeehouse staffs."
In the spring of 1971, the show, referred to as "political vaudeville" by Fonda and The New York Times, began to visit military towns throughout the U.S. and then Asia. At a press conference in New York City, Fonda and Dr. Levy announced their plans to kick off the Tour in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near the Fort Bragg Army base. The initial plans were for "an ambitious twenty-stop tour" of U.S. military bases, and the final results were even more expansive. According to Fonda in her autobiography, they performed "for some fifteen thousand GIs near major U.S. military bases" before heading overseas where they "did twenty-one performances". All told, "between March and December of 1971, the show toured to over 64,000 troops, playing near, but never on, bases in North Carolina, California, Washington, Texas, Idaho, New Jersey, Okinawa, Japan, the Philippines, and Hawaii." And this, even when GIs "might risk official or unofficial discipline for attending an antiwar show". The historian Sarah King, quoting a The Washington Post reporter, described the show's popularity as "notable, considering the fact that 'it wasn't easy' for active-duty military personnel to attend FTA. Military authorities routinely 'put out misinformation about the time and place,' and GIs had to travel at their own expense (though the show itself was free). They also risked being photographed and harassed; Fonda recalls that the CID, 'the military equivalent of the CIA, was always around taking snapshots.'"
GI coffeehouses
One of USSF's founding and ongoing objectives was to support GI coffeehouses near U.S. military bases. Although several of these were established before USSF's creation, the organization saw itself as responsible for supporting and strengthening this aspect of the overall GI movement. Their 1971 pamphlet The New Army listed almost thirty coffeehouses, movement centers, and local projects that had been created and were receiving USSF financial support. Over time, the coffeehouse model gave way to a broader conception which included a wider variety of other forms like bookstores, gathering centers, counseling offices, peace houses, and more, including coffeehouses. The February 1972 issue of the USSF newsletter About Face discussed the importance of these off-base gathering centers: "there is usually no place on base where more than four or five people can gather at one time without running the risk of being harassed by the military authorities." Moreover, there was no place on military bases and ships where GIs could see films, read books and newspapers, or hear speakers and entertainers that had not been pre-approved by the military. This same article described the growth of USSF's support from six projects in 1969 to over thirty in early 1972. USSF established a "loose blueprint for the overall direction and purpose" of these projects. This included "educating GIs about the war" and "bringing together GIs who are opposed or become opposed to the war and the brass and helping them form more cohesive political organizations". It also "stressed the importance of maintaining a youth-oriented, alternative culture", a counterculture atmosphere. However, as the network of projects expanded, the USSF's "role in day-to-day operations was minimal"; it mainly provided financial and material support. Material support included entertainers, movies, projectors, typewriters, mimeograph machines, as well as radical books, magazines, and newspapers. The historian David Parsons argues that "USSF's support was vital" to the coffeehouse network, especially in its early years.
GI underground newspapers
Another activity USSF considered vitally important and worthy of support was the creation of underground newspapers by and for GIs. Given the restrictions inherent in military life, the creation of an underground press was seen as essential for GIs to speak their minds and spread the word. The first issue of About Face, published in May 1971, observed that when USSF was first founded there were less than ten GI newspapers; this number had multiplied more than ten times to "well over a hundred." And USSF was proud to say they were giving financial support to about "half of these papers." These newspapers, along with the GI coffeehouses and other projects supported by USSF, "helped sustain a broad community of troop dissent and a civilian-GI antiwar alliance" during the peak years of the GI movement. The newspapers spread the word among GIs, "facilitated communication between individual projects", and gave activists and troops the sense that they were part of a broader GI movement". By the time the Vietnam War had ended there had been over 400 GI underground newspapers and newsletters produced by and for GIs at U.S. militaries bases throughout the world. While USSF did not finance or support most of these, there is no doubt it had a significant influence on their initiation and creation, especially in the earlier days of the GI movement.
Organizing GI wives & WACs