Jeff Sharlet (Vietnam antiwar activist)

Vietnam veteran

Vietnam veteran is a phrase used to describe someone who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War.The term has been used to describe veterans who were in the armed forces of South Vietnam, the United States armed forces, and countries allied to them, whether or...

, was a leader of the GI resistance movement during the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

and the founding editor of Vietnam GI. David Cortright

David Cortright

David Cortright is an American scholar and peace activist. He is Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and Chair of the Board of the Fourth Freedom Forum....

, a major chronicler of the Vietnam GI protest movement wrote, “Vietnam GI, the most influential early paper, surfaced at the end of 1967, distributed to tens of thousands of GIs, many in Vietnam, closed down after the death of founder Jeff Sharlet in June, 1969.”¹

Early life

Sharlet was born and raised in Glens Falls, New York

Glens Falls, New York

Glens Falls is a city in Warren County, New York, United States. Glens Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 14,700 at the 2010 census...

, a small town in the foothills of the Adirondacks, and later in the state capital of Albany. In 1960 he graduated from The Albany Academy

The Albany Academy

The Albany Academy is an independent college preparatory day school for boys in Albany, New York, USA, enrolling students from Preschool to Grade 12. It was established in 1813 by a charter signed by Mayor Philip Schuyler Van Rensselaer and the city council of Albany...

, a private military academy.

Military training and assignment: Philippines

Restless during his first year of college, Sharlet withdrew and decided to fulfill his military obligation. In return for a three-year enlistment in the United States Army Security Agency

United States Army Security Agency

The United States Army Security Agency was the United States Army's signal intelligence branch. Its motto was "Vigilant Always." The Agency existed between 1945 and 1976 and was the successor to Army signal intelligence operations dating back to World War I...

(ASA), a communications intelligence outfit, he was promised a year’s training in a Slavic language followed by a European posting.

But at the Army Language School

Defense Language Institute

The Defense Language Institute is a United States Department of Defense educational and research institution, which provides linguistic and cultural instruction to the Department of Defense, other Federal Agencies and numerous and varied other customers...

he was bumped into the Vietnamese language

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

course. He and fellow students spent six hours a day in class over 11½ months. In early 1963 Sharlet was sent to Clark Air Base

Clark Air Base

Clark Air Base is a former United States Air Force base on Luzon Island in the Philippines, located 3 miles west of Angeles City, about 40 miles northwest of Metro Manila. Clark Air Base was an American military facility from 1903 to 1991...

in the Philippines

Philippines

The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

where he was assigned to the 9th ASA² at Stotsenberg Field Station as a Vietnamese translator/interpreter. With a Top Secret/Cryptographic security clearance

Security clearance

A security clearance is a status granted to individuals allowing them access to classified information, i.e., state secrets, or to restricted areas after completion of a thorough background check. The term "security clearance" is also sometimes used in private organizations that have a formal...

he and fellow linguists monitored Vietnam People's Army

Vietnam People's Army

The Vietnam People's Army is the armed forces of Vietnam. The VPA includes: the Vietnamese People's Ground Forces , the Vietnam People's Navy , the Vietnam People's Air Force, and the Vietnam Marine Police.During the French Indochina War , the VPA was often referred to as the Việt...

radio communications.

Vietnam duty

In late August 1963 Sharlet and a small team of linguists were flown to Saigon on short notice and transferred to the Army Security Agency’s 3rd Radio Research Unit, Davis Station, named after the first American GI killed in combat during the Vietnam War,³ at Tan Son Nhut Air Base

Tan Son Nhut Air Base

Tan Son Nhut Air Base was a Republic of Vietnam Air Force facility. It is located near the city of Saigon in southern Vietnam. The United States used it as a major base during the Vietnam War , stationing Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine units there...

outside the capital. The transfer occurred at the time of the secret US-backed coup planning

1963 South Vietnamese coup

In November 1963, President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam was deposed by a group of Army of the Republic of Vietnam officers who disagreed with his handling of the Buddhist crisis and, in general, his increasing oppression of national groups in the name of fighting the communist Vietcong.The...

by South Vietnamese generals against the Ngo Dinh Diem

Ngo Dinh Diem

Ngô Đình Diệm was the first president of South Vietnam . In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords, Diệm led the effort to create the Republic of Vietnam. Accruing considerable U.S. support due to his staunch anti-Communism, he achieved victory in a...

regime.⁴

From Davis Station, Sharlet and seven others were dispatched to Phu Lam

Phú Lâm

Phú Lâm is a commune and village of the Phú Tân District of An Giang Province, Vietnam....

, a US Signals base, where they worked on a remote corner of the base apart from Army signals personnel. Each day’s product was sent by heavily armed jeep down to Tan Son Nhut from where it was airlifted to Washington, DC for analysis at the National Security Agency

National Security Agency

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...

.

Very shortly before the November 1st coup which overthrew Diem, Sharlet and the special team were pulled out and ordered back to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. By then, as he later related to family, he was beginning to experience doubts about the U.S. mission in Vietnam.

A few months later, Sharlet was shipped back to Vietnam, this time on the eve of the 1964 South Vietnamese coup

1964 South Vietnamese coup

Before dawn on January 30, 1964, General Nguyen Khanh ousted the military junta led by General Duong Van Minh from the leadership of South Vietnam without firing a shot. It came less than three months after Minh's junta had themselves come to power in a bloody coup against then President Ngo Dinh...

by General Nguyen Khanh

Nguyen Khanh

Nguyễn Khánh is a former general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who variously served as Head of State and Prime minister of South Vietnam while at the head of a military junta from January 1964 until February 1965. He was involved in or against many coup attempts, failed and successful,...

against the junta on January 30. Following the quick success of the coup, Sharlet was re-assigned north to Phu Bai,⁵ an Army Security Agency base just below the 1954 boundary between North and South Vietnam, the DMZ.

There he was attached to Detachment J, a branch of the 3rd Radio Research Unit providing communications support for commando operations in North Vietnam

North Vietnam

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam , was a communist state that ruled the northern half of Vietnam from 1954 until 1976 following the Geneva Conference and laid claim to all of Vietnam from 1945 to 1954 during the First Indochina War, during which they controlled pockets of territory throughout...

.⁶ Sharlet was also seconded to a nearby Marine intelligence unit⁷ for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol

Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol

Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, or LRRPs , were special small four to six-man teams in the Vietnam War on highly dangerous special reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory....

s. By the time he finished his Vietnam tour late May 1964, Sharlet had seen enough political corruption

Political corruption

Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...

and military incompetence of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam

Army of the Republic of Vietnam

The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam , sometimes parsimoniously referred to as the South Vietnamese Army , was the land-based military forces of the Republic of Vietnam , which existed from October 26, 1955 until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975...

⁸ (ARVN), often compounded by exaggerated, upbeat reports by U.S. military advisors, to become thoroughly disillusioned with U.S. involvement in what he considered a Vietnamese civil war.

SDS days at Indiana University

Sharlet returned to college fall of 1964, re-entering Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

(IU) in Bloomington where he majored in Political Science. In early 1965, the Vietnam War escalated with the launching of U.S. bombing raids against the North and the landing of Marine combat units in the South.⁹ By April, student protest against the war had begun to spread on U.S. campuses. At IU, early organizers of a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society

Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)

Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

(SDS)in 1965 included Bob and John Grove, Robin Hunter, Peter Montague, Karl North, Rick Ross, Bernella and David Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, and Sharlet.¹⁰

In the fall of 1965 Sharlet joined SDS, and during his following two years at IU participated in, helped organize, or co-led SDS demonstrations against campus visits by several prominent pro-Vietnam War speakers, including former Vice President Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...

, General Maxwell Taylor, General Lewis Blaine Hershey, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson when he spoke in nearby Indianapolis.¹¹

On campus, he supported the protest against the arrest of two members of the leftist youth W.E.B. DuBois Club,¹² Bruce Klein and Allen Gurevitz. During his tenure as SDS co-chairman Spring term 1967, with the help of Bob Tennyson, Sharlet took public issue¹³ with IU President Elvis Jacob Stahr, Jr., a former Secretary of the Army, over his criticism of the New Left

New Left

The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

and later played a significant role in getting SDS activist Guy Loftman elected IU student body president.¹⁴

Sharlet won a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship¹⁵ which he chose to use at University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

in its Political Science PhD program beginning fall 1967.

Chicago and 'Vietnam GI'

During his IU years Sharlet had pondered the question of how to give voice to opposition to the war which he knew existed among many Vietnam GIs. In the summer of 1967 he went to New York City where he met fellow ex-Vietnam GI Jan Barry Crumb¹⁶ and joined his fledgling organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Vietnam Veterans Against the War is a tax-exempt non-profit organization and corporation, originally created to oppose the Vietnam War. VVAW describes itself as a national veterans' organization that campaigns for peace, justice, and the rights of all United States military veterans...

(VVAW). Returning to Chicago Sharlet began graduate work, but by the end of the Fall term decided to withdraw to resume his anti-war work full time.
Using his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds, Sharlet launched the first GI-run anti-war paper addressed to GIs, calling it Vietnam GI (VGI). The first issue was dated January, 1968. His associate editor was David Komatsu, and the editorial board of ex-Vietnam GIs included Jan Barry, [Joseph Carey], William Harris, Peter Martinsen, Dink McCarter, James Pidgeon, Gary Rader

Gary Rader

Gary Eugene Rader was an American Army Reservist known for burning his draft card in protest of the Vietnam War, while wearing his U.S. Army Special Forces uniform. Afterward, he engaged in anti-war activism.-Background:...

, Francis Rocks, David Tuck, and James Zaleski. A civilian conscientious objector

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

, Thomas Barton,¹⁷ served as VGI’s East Coast distributor and was responsible for unobtrusively shipping bundles of the paper to Vietnam.

Vietnam GI quickly became a success among GIs stateside and in Vietnam¹⁸ where soldiers like Terry DeMott, a helicopter door gunner in the Americal Division stationed near Chu Lai, and a number of sympathetic unit mail clerks helped circulate the paper surreptitiously. It was free to GIs, and requests for individual subscriptions as well as multiple copies for distribution in stateside barracks and Vietnam combat units soared, with the print run reaching 30,000 copies by fall 1968.²⁰ Letters-to-the editor indicated that single copies passed through many hands. In August a separate “Stateside” edition of VGI was launched.

Between issues, Sharlet worked wealthy liberal circles on both coasts for contributions to support production costs. Barbara Garson

Barbara Garson

Barbara Garson is an American playwright, author and social activist.Garson is best known for the play MacBird, a notorious 1966 counterculture drama/political parody of Macbeth that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions world wide...

, author of MacBird, a widely performed anti-war play of the late 1960s, was an especially helpful West Coast contact. While traveling, Sharlet kept in touch with civilian activists running GI coffee houses outside major bases,²¹ including Judy Olasov at Ft. Leonard Wood, MO; Larry Langowski at Fort Sill, OK; and Donna Mickleson,²² national coordinator of the coffee house movement based in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as draft resistance groups which distributed Vietnam GI at induction centers, including CADRE (Chicago Area Draft Resisters) and the Boston Draft Resistance Group in New England, which not only helped by having the paper printed in Boston but also by shipping copies into Vietnam and distributing it throughout New England.²³

In late 1968 Sharlet visited the Oleo Strut, the highly activist GI coffee house, and nearby Fort Hood in Killeen, TX. Run by Josh Gould and Janet “Jay” Lockard, it was associated with the strike of the “Fort Hood 43,”²⁴ Black troops who refused riot duty at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention

1968 Democratic National Convention

The 1968 Democratic National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968. Because Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek a second term, the purpose of the convention was to...

in Chicago. Sharlet also represented the burgeoning GI anti-war movement at conferences in Japan²⁵ and in Sweden²⁶ where he worked with the theologians Harvey Cox

Harvey Cox

Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr. is one of the preeminent theologians in the United States and served as Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009...

, Michael Novak

Michael Novak

Michael Novak is an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. The author of more than twenty-five books on the philosophy and theology of culture, Novak is most widely known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism...

, and the late Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus was a prominent Christian cleric and writer. Born in Canada, Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a naturalized United States citizen...

Illness and death

The success of Vietnam GI and the growing GI protest against the war led to national media coverage for Sharlet and the paper in Esquire,²⁷ New York Times,²⁸ and on NBC Nightly Television News as well as the AP and NEA newswire services.²⁹ In early 1969 a problem first experienced in Vietnam resurfaced, and he underwent surgery for kidney cancer. As David Komatsu wrote in Vietnam GI, “From there it was steadily downhill all the way. At the end, he said he had many new ideas for our fight, but was just too exhausted to talk about them.”³⁰ Sharlet died on June 16, 1969, age 27.³¹

Posthumous recognition

Sharlet’s work as a founder of the GI protest movement was eulogized in the underground press throughout the country, including The Movement,³² Veterans Stars & Stripes for Peace,³³ Guardian,³⁴ and The Old Mole of Cambridge, MA³⁵. David Dellinger

David Dellinger

David T. Dellinger , was an influential American radical, a pacifist and activist for nonviolent social change.-Chicago Seven:...

with Barbara Webster published a long remembrance of Sharlet for the magazine Liberation³⁶. A new GI underground paper, Next Step, published in Heidelberg, then West Germany, was dedicated to him, while Fred Gardner

Fred Gardner

Fred Gardner is an American political organizer and author best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War and his writings about the medical mariijuana movement in the United States.Gardner received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1963...

, in the definitive account of the 1968 Presidio Mutiny 27, The Unlawful Concert (1970), dedicated his book to “Jeff Sharlet, founder of Vietnam GI, dead at 27.”³⁷

During past decades a number of scholars of the Vietnam anti-war movement have written about Sharlet and Vietnam GI in books and journals, including in recent years Andrew E. Hunt

Andrew Hunt (historian)

Andrew Emerson Hunt is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is also the Director of the Tri-University Graduate Program in History.-Life:...

, The Turning: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1999)³⁸; David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (reissued 2005)³⁹; Bob Ostertag, People’s Movements/People’s Press (2006)⁴⁰; and a new middle school text, The American Journey: Modern Times (2009)⁴¹.

The most dramatic tribute has been the award-winning documentary, Sir! No Sir! (2005), on the Vietnam GI anti-war movement screened in theaters across the country and recently shown on Sundance Channel, co-dedicated to Sharlet, as the director David Zeiger⁴² put it, “for starting it all.”

External links and sources

http://www.sirnosir.com [Vietnam GI resistance online archives]
http://www.historyplace.com/United States/Vietnam/index.html [Vietnam War history and timeline]
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/ [Vietnam War online archives]
http://www.vwip.org/vwiphome.html [Vietnam War Internet Project]
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/bibliography.html [Vietnam War bibliography]
http://www.nasaa-home.org/ [ASA history]
http://www.oldspooksandspies.org/ [ASA Davis Station, Saigon]
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/ [Sixties Project]
http://www.sds/revolt.org/documents.htm [SDS documents]
http://jeffsharlet-and-vietnamgi.com.yolasite.com/ [Jeff Sharlet and Vietnam GI Web site]
http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html [Blog "Searching for Jeff Sharlet"]
http://earthairwater.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-gi-challenged-war-makers.html [Jan Barry blog post about Jeff Sharlet]

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