Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era by David L. Parsons (review)

The Vietnam War protest movement has received extensive attention in historical scholarship in recent decades. Many studies, however, have largely focused on civilian activists and their successes and failures in influencing the American public's opinions about the war. Here lies the significance of David L. Parsons's fine book. Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era explores the efforts of some civilian activists to collaborate with and to provide a base of support for antiwar soldiers within the military, what some scholars have called the "GI movement" (p. 4).

This brief volume focuses on the founding, operations, and travails of twenty-one antiwar coffeehouses located near U.S. military bases. Parsons spends the bulk of this book on three of the most successful coffeehouses: the UFO near Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, the Oleo Strut outside Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, and the Shelter Half near Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington. The coffeehouses provided soldiers a safe place off base to gather and discuss the war with like-minded military men and civilians, to find counterculture literature and entertainment, to organize antiwar events, and to get access to legal and personal counseling. The author contends that these coffeehouses were "often a determining factor in the growth and long-term survival of local GI antiwar organizations" (p. 11). This may be overstating his case a bit, but Parsons does demonstrate the many ways that the coffeehouse network enhanced the GI movement. It is notable that two of the three major coffeehouses he focuses on were in the South. Parsons chronicles how the coffeehouses had to negotiate the unique culture created by the relationship between military base and military town, which was especially difficult with the very conservative social and racial politics of the late 1960s South.

Parsons's story is at its best when he delves into activist memoirs and his interviews with coffeehouse organizers and volunteers. Sometimes, however, these individual stories are subsumed in the tangle of the countless organizations that spun out of the GI movement, plainly demonstrating just how splintered and conflicted the New Left could be in pursuit of varied goals during this era. Nonetheless, he does a nice job of tying the coffeehouses to the larger context of Vietnam-era political activism and culture. The one unifying force in this story is the United States Servicemen's Fund (USSF), which was created in 1968 and supported different GI coffeehouse projects. The USSF raised funds to provide for daily operations, antiwar literature, printing services for underground GI newspapers, public marches, and the many legal battles that embroiled the staff members and activist GIs who frequented the coffeehouses.

Though it could have been difficult to show significant change over the course of the few years when the GI coffeehouses operated, Parsons astutely demonstrates how the coffeehouses struggled to navigate a rapidly changing society, war, and military in the 1970s. He also finds clear precedents for twenty-first-century leftist GI support organizations, including modern-day antiwar coffeehouses. While Parsons has written concisely about an important and underappreciated element of the antiwar movement, there are instances when he relies too heavily on activist accounts without dealing with official incident reports or relevant news accounts. Though military, local police, and FBI records would likely have a clear bias against leftist activists, it cannot be denied that activists also had an agenda in their retellings. Balancing their accounts with opposing viewpoints more often could have strengthened the author's argument. This minor shortcoming aside, Parsons has authored an engaging and relevant study for Vietnam War scholars and lay readers alike. Dangerous Grounds should inspire further research on the relationship between civilian antiwar activism and the military.