Welcome to the “War & Peace” section of my personal webpage.
Someday I hope it can better represent the pivotal role such issues have played in my life: the youthful patriotic decision to join the military, experience as a Boston University ROTC cadet, service as a US Army officer in Cold War West Germany, my Conscientious Objection claim (1988-90), working at CCCO (Central Committee for Conscientious Objection, in San Francisco) during the first Gulf War, subsequent activism with the peace movement, including supporting my friend George Mizo’s Vietnam Friendship Village project and helping mount the 2006 World Peace Forum here in Vancouver, and even teaching “War and Society” classes during the recent troubled times of “terrorism” and Trump. Some of that is manifested in the publications listed on the c.v. page (for example, an article published in The Bridge/Die Brücke, a German-American GI Movement periodical that represents my first steps with the peace movement and a Peace & Change book review that brings together some related thoughts and experiences.)
Here/Now, however, the page is devoted to web-publishing another of my projects: “We Say No To Your War! The Story of the Covered Wagon GI Coffeehouse” (1994). It also served as a “bridge” – this time between my days as a professional peace activist and my becoming an academic. After getting out of the army and living in San Francisco for a little more than a year, I wanted to re-engage with “middle America”, but not return “home” to the Midwest, so I took up a kind offer from an activist (and wonderful woman) I had met in Boise, Idaho, during one of my CCCO fieldwork tours speaking in schools and churches. Once settled there, I enrolled in the graduate History program at Boise State University. As my MA thesis, I researched a GI Movement “coffeehouse” that had been established in nearby Mountain Home during the Vietnam War. It was a rewarding project where I got to meet/interview a slew of veterans who had spoken out against war while on active duty twenty years before – a great opportunity to ground/orient myself by their examples as I figured out what to do next with my own life.
Unfortunately, the completed project was stillborn. Caught up in BSU departmental politics, my defense of the MA thesis was well-received but one member of the committee wanted me to eliminate the block quotes where I was trying, in good “postmodern” style, to “give voice” to the “marginal” actors in my “microhistory”. It was expected that I would take the degree with a few superficial revisions but that never happened once I was enrolled at Georgetown and caught up with my mother’s first serious illness. Moreover, for quite a while there, it seemed the project was to be published by Vietnam Generation, a journal out of Yale University, but they closed shop before it made it into print. The only public exposure it has had was in the Boise Weekly newspaper and in ripples afterward like encyclopedia pieces on “Military Morale” and “VVAW”. However, there were very few academic histories of the GI Movement at the time so I was able to share it with others who were working on similar projects, including David Zeiger, who made Sir No Sir!(2005), a documentary that introduced many to this forgotten piece of American History.
Here are the chapters as originally submitted to Boise State in 1994. As you will see, in those pre-internet days, I was already imagining some kind of “multi-media” presentation, and hopefully, someday I can go back and revamp the chapter introductions with the songs and video clips suggested herein “vintage” photocopier-format.
Meanwhile, I hope you appreciate this “microhistory” of Vietnam-era GI Resistance, my first project as an “activist” historian, following the template of Howard Zinn and Phoebe Lundy.
Jeff Schutts (14 November 2020)
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