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

In Dangerous Grounds, David L. Parsons adds a valuable perspective to the evolving scholarship on the antiwar GI-movement during the Vietnam War. Following scholars such as Christian Appy and Penny Lewis, whose work has challenged popular stereotypes about the class and racial composition of the larger antiwar movement, Parsons focuses on a network of GI coffeehouses that proliferated in military towns between 1968 and 1974. Like the GI movement itself, the coffeehouse network reflected a decentralized, but not disconnected set of local initiatives contributing to the antiwar effort. Part of what makes the movement so significant is how coffeehouses became spaces for GIs to organize resistance in a climate of countercultural comfort. At the same time, Parsons makes clear that the coffeehouses became sites of both racial and class conflict, as well as targets of government surveillance and policing.

Parsons begins his story with Fred Gardner, who believed stopping the war in Vietnam meant building "an antiwar movement within the army" (16, italicized in original). Taking inspiration from radical coffeehouses in San Francisco, where he lived, Gardner decided to open "The UFO" outside Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina in 1967. He believed a "hip antiwar coffeehouse, designed for GIs, might be an effective way of starting conversations between antiwar soldiers and civilians" (17). The UFO soon caught the attention of national organizations, which began supporting more coffeehouses. The chapter introduces the UFO, the Oleo Strut outside Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, and the Shelter Half outside Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, which are the main sites explored in the book.

In chapter two, Parsons describes the role of these coffeehouses during significant episodes of the GI movement, such as the Fort Jackson Eight, when GI resisters fought the army for First Amendment rights to oppose the war. He also relates the Fort Hood 43 case, when a large group of black soldiers refused mobilization for riot control duty outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. This chapter also details other ways the coffeehouses supported acts of resistance, including peace marches, local boycotts, and counterculture demonstrations.

While chapter two begins documenting attacks on the coffeehouse movement, the third chapter pulls local and national acts of repression into focus. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) questioned them prior to the Chicago Eight trial in 1968, and the Committee on Internal Security followed in 1971. Police intimidation and harassment was routine. Legal charges mounted and created expenses that undermined business, particularly for the UFO. J. Edgar Hoover directed FBI field offices to use drug charges to target coffeehouse proprietors, and sent in undercover agents.

In his fourth chapter, Parsons traces the changing character of the GI and coffee-house movement after Nixon's election in 1968. He explains how the coffeehouses nourished the GI underground press, but also reveals the increasing visibility of racial and class tensions inside them. He notes that just when "black GIs were becoming the driving force of GI activism, the stereotypical image of coffeehouses as hangouts for middle-class peace activists presented a distinct challenge for GI organizers" (99). Drugs, youth culture, and finances all challenged coffeehouse staff. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Nixon's Vietnamization strategy, which withdrew 400,000 American soldiers by 1971, led to fewer patrons. In some sense, the movement became a victim of its own success.

Dangerous Grounds pairs well with Beth Bailey's history of the transition to the all-volunteer army, but the book's audience goes beyond historians of the GI movement and the Vietnam War. Although he doesn't explicitly engage with the question of masculinity, Parsons' history complements Anne Enke's work on the creation of alternative public spaces during the rise of second-wave feminism. Twentieth century scholars of American studies interested in radical labor, black power, social movements, and even racialized policing will find it relevant. Further, it points toward projects investigating the...