Justice Military Style

Dachau, Germany, is best known as the locale where thousands of Jews were tortured, killed and burned by their Nazi captors. Some of these Nazis futilely pleaded at the post-War Nuremberg trials that they had done their evil not from wicked hearts but because they had been ordered to do so.

The United States military forces now maintain a prison near the former extermination camp, and it was there in August 1968 that Sergeant Wesley A. Williams, acting on orders from his superiors, severely beat five Gl prisoners with a rubber hose wrapped in green tape. The stockade commander, Major William B. Moore, later told a court-martial that the victims were "known troublemakers" transferred from another prison, and he justified the beatings with the argument that they were good preventive discipline. "Give them a welcoming party--but don't leave any marks," Sergeant Williams says he was told, and he did just that, bludgeoning the five men and then kicking them as they lay on the floor, trying to protect themselves. Although the sergeant admitted all this, his explanation that he was "only following orders" satisfied the military tribunal, which acquitted him of any wrongdoing.

That is the kind of Cotton Mather trick--the victor proving his perfection by repeating with impunity the mischief of the vanquished--that the military mind would enjoy. Yet, of course, it raises other thoughts that the responsible civilian, desiring to be proud of his Government, will want to reject. The historical parallels--of officially sanctioned brutality and of military justice rigged to protect a corrupt system--are too unpleasantly obvious to accept without further evidence.

There is no shortage of places to seek the evidence. The Pentagon supervises in this country and overseas 138 Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine brigs and stockades with an overflow population of 15,000 prisoners. To what extent do these prisons harbor the incipient Dachauism of the 1940s? It is a fairly important question, seeing as how there are 26,820,000 veterans in this country and another 3,800,000 Servicemen; if they, by their experiences, develop a tolerance for unconstitutional trial procedures and for unconstitutional punishment, it means that the minds of one seventh of our population will already have been to some extent polluted by militarism.

The Army is quite frank about its mission to condition not only the bodies but the minds of those under its control. In the pamphlet "The Fort Knox Experiment," for example, the Army touts its methods for "developing the 'whole' man...in contrast to just exposing them to information," and says: "The Army today is the only organization in America equipped to conduct this kind of efficient training of our citizenry. The Armed Services have an extraordinary opportunity, since they control the time and attention of the trainees 24 hours a day, seven days in the week." To gather clues to what is going on in the almost 90,000 courts-martial that take place each year, and to what is happening in the military prisons where many of these defendants wind up, I interviewed GIs, officers, honorably discharged vets and deserters from coast to coast. The file of random reports runs over: of the homosexual at the Navy brig on Treasure Island, San Francisco, who was forced to suck on a flashlight for the amusement of his Marine guards; of the Army brass at Fort Riley, Kansas, who panicked when they discovered one of their soldiers was only 12 years old and "hid" him for three months in solitary confinement; of the inmate at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center brig whom guards punished by wrapping his throat in a wet towel, clamping a bucket over his head and making him smoke cigarettes thereunder until he passed out; of the several Servicemen at Fort Dix, New Jersey, who were sprayed with water and then pushed outside, naked, for varying lengths of time in the winter (one of them for three hours); of Fort Dix soldiers seeking conscientious-objector discharges who were imprisoned "for their protection" in a special cell with known homosexuals; of the several sailors and Marines who, according to the reports from different bases, were made to do such strenuous exercise right after eating that they vomited, after which the guards pushed their faces in it or they were made to roll in it or (in two instances reported) they were made to eat it; of the inmate at the Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, stockade who was covered with gray paint and required to stand at attention until the paint dried on his skin.

But before a random compilation, perhaps it would be fairer to back up and take a long look at an "average" prison. The Presidio stockade has been much in the news lately, because that was where 27 prisoners sat down in a circle and refused to get up until they had read a list of their complaints about wretched living conditions and the threat of death from guards. They were tried as mutineers and some are now in Fort Leaven-worth, Kansas. Senator Charles Goodell, of New York, who demanded an investigation of stockade conditions, was told by Pentagon officials that "some stockades are better than the Presidio, some are worse," which must mean that it is average.

At the time of the Presidio sit-down, there were 125 prisoners in space meant to hold 88. There was one toilet for about every 35 prisoners, because not all of the toilets had lids and some were stopped up and unusable (and half the time, there was no toilet paper). On the day of the sit-down, the stockade--always short of supplies--had food for 110 prisoners, 15 short of the prison population. Prisoners had to buy their own soap; and if a prisoner ran out of soap in the middle of the week, he couldn't have another bar until the next week; if he lost his toothbrush at the first of the month, he couldn't get another until the following month. Prisoners in segregation cells were sometimes not permitted to bathe or brush their teeth for a week. The barracks were so crowded that prisoners lying on the top bunks could touch the ceiling. Recreation was one movie a week, chosen by the chaplain. The prison library, which closed at four P.M., before the men came back from work, was in the basement and accessible only by climbing over garbage cans; the books were ancient ones, mostly on mysticism and military history. Families could visit prisoners, but it was against the rules for a father to hold his baby. But the worst feature was the lack of cleanliness and the smell of human waste. The toilets were constantly clogged, backing up into the shower rooms, the floors of which commonly were two or three inches under water; human feces floated in the water, so it was best sometimes to take a shower while wearing boots. And, as a result of these conditions, there were rats.

An official Presidio press release claims that "prisoners live a more comfortable life than the regular soldier who performs his duties properly." Yet there were 52 suicide attempts in the stockade last year. Colonel Harry J. Lee, provost marshal for the Sixth Army, says, "There have been no suicides nor has there been a bona fide suicide attempt at the stockade in the memory of personnel now serving at the facility since at least June 1966." The Army does not call them suicide attempts; it calls them "gestures." Private Roy Pulley, one of the protesters, tells of how a gesture struck him: "I was lying on my side on the bunk, reading, one night, and this guy across the room was sitting on his bunk. He tied something around his arm to make the veins swell up so he could cut them better. And when he cut them, the blood flew about 20 feet--hit me right in the back of the neck." A total of six gestures were made by Ricky Lee Dodd, who cut his wrists when he was imprisoned in solitary and was taken to the hospital, where the wrists were sewn up and bandaged. He was returned to the stockade; this time, he removed the gauze from his wrists and hanged himself. When he arrived back at the hospital, he was pronounced dead but was revived. After an earlier attempt at suicide, a guard had handed him a razor blade with the encouragement, "If you want to try again, here we go." (After one of his suicide attempts, a guard had squirted him with urine from a water pistol.) Other gestures made by the sit-down defendants were: 12 cuttings of wrists, arms and chest; two cuttings of throat; eight dosings of lye, detergent, oven cleaner, shampoo, metal polish and something identified only as poison. Altogether, there were 33 suicide attempts among 21 of the mutiny defendants. The men who ran the Presidio paid little attention to these gestures, because, as Lieutenant Colonel John Ford, Presidio provost general, put it, they felt the men were "just trying to get medical discharges."

Since the sit-down protest, the Army has spent more than $80,000 fixing up the stockade building--which was constructed two generations ago as a bank and still uses some of the original wiring for the burglar alarm. Many of the plumbing and heating and other physical ailments have been corrected. It is still no show place; Presidio officials refused to allow me to inspect the building and also refused to permit a representative from Senator Goodell's office to drop in unexpectedly. Presidio officials did organize a special one-day tour for the press, but the prisoners were not permitted to be interviewed and were, in fact, removed from the stockade and lodged elsewhere before the press got there. Officials admitted they "spruced up" the place for the press. The validity of the prisoners' protests of shabby facilities can be seen in the fact that since the sit-down, the stockade has been supplied with an intercom system, a new recreation area outside, perimeter lighting, a new boiler, a new medical-treatment room, new locks (the old ones could be opened with a comb, according to guards), ten more chairs in the mess hall, two new stoves in the kitchen, a new soap dispenser in the kitchen and a fire sprinkler system. The guard strength has been increased threefold, the cooks and kitchen help have been increased twofold, and the prison population has been cut one third.

Actually, however, the physical-environmental problems were never responsible for the prisoners' hellish existence. Their troubles came from the men who ran the prison: Captain Robert Lamont, 25 years old, was in charge. He had never had any training in confinement work and was easily swayed by bad suggestions both from noncoms serving under him and from his immediate superiors. Apparently holding a great deal of sway over Lamont was his top sergeant, Thomas Woodring, who had previously worked as a guard in civilian jails and for ten years as a Los Angeles policeman and a sheriff's deputy. Prisoners have given sworn testimony that Woodring and Lamont tried to talk the Negro inmates into beating up whites. Other affidavits tell of Woodring's delight in the bottle. The closest he came to denying this was to say, "To my knowledge, no complaints have been made about me drinking on duty." Woodring's aide, Sergeant Miguel Angel Morales, did the best he could for his boss, testifying, "I have heard of him working intoxicated, but I have never seen it. I never heard that he gets mean when he gets drunk." If Woodring sometimes (continued on page 214)Justice, Military Style(continued from page 122) came to work high, he apparently wasn't the only one. The prisoners say the guards were frequent users of LSD, pot or liquor. They say Sergeant Morales had his own special technique for instilling fear in new prisoners; he would tell the newcomers, "I'm so tough I shot a Vietnamese woman in the belly, just like that, pow!" (In court, he said that this killing "was just a lot of b.s.") The armed guards who went out on work details with the prisoners--all of whom were minimum-security prisoners and, according to regulations, should not have been guarded with guns--were untrained in the use of shotguns, but they loved to play with them and point them at the prisoners and threaten to "blow your fucking heads off." Not long before the sit-down, one of the guards had accidentally discharged a shotgun and had blown a hole in the roof of a wooden building next to the stockade just as the prisoners were falling in for work. Army regulations require that stockade guards be specially trained for confinement work, but only one guard at the Presidio had had instruction. One guard had reportedly been transferred to the Presidio from another base when his commanding officer became uneasy after the lad, a Jew, began dreaming that he was a Nazi.

Every stockade has its isolation cells (although some of the stockades are so crowded these days that two or three men will share "isolation"). Even at the main Army prison in Leavenworth, which military men present as the model prison, the isolation cell is called a hole--for good reason. It is a room 5 feet wide by 10 feet long by 15 feet high, illumined by one low-watt light bulb. The sanitary facility is a hole in the floor. The Presidio has five such cells, two painted black until just before the press was given a tour of the stockade in 1969 (at which time they were painted gray and Presidio officials pretended they had never ben black) and three painted white. Estimates of the dimensions of these boxes--as they are called--vary somewhat, the prisoners claiming that they are 4 1/2 feet wide, 8 feet high and 5 1/2 feet (black boxes) or 6 feet (white boxes) long. The Army claims that the boxes are 5 feet wide, 8 feet high and 6 feet long. But even if the Army's measurements are accurate, they fall below the minimum dimensions required by the Army's own regulations (6 feet wide, 8 feet high and 8 feet long).

The isolation cells have no toilets; to relieve oneself, one must persuade a guard to give escort, and frequently the guards prefer to ignore these requests. The white cells have no furniture but a bunk; the black cells have no furniture at all. The tops of the five cells are covered with a wire screen. One light above this screen throws a feeble communal glow over the five cells, inadequate for reading the Bible, which is the only reading material permitted.

The isolation cells are frequently used to store psychotic prisoners; prisoners who attempt suicide are always sent to the box. One of the crazy inmates best remembered by former guards was a young man nicknamed Penis because he sat around in his isolation cell all day, moaning, "I want my penis; I want my penis." He played with himself, urinated on the floor and rolled in it, defecated on the floor and then smeared the excrement in his hair and over his face. He also used feces for writing and finger painting on the walls and floor. Some of the guards would tease him by climbing onto the mesh roof over his cell while he was sleeping and jumping up and down and screaming to awaken him. He spent two weeks in solitary this way before they carried him off to the psycho ward at the hospital. The self-applied business with feces and urine is quite common among mentally unbalanced prisoners who are forced to spend any length of time in solitary; prisoners tell of several others who did the same thing, including one boy who tried to hang himself, was cut down and sent briefly to the hospital and then returned to the box, where he doused himself in excrement for a week before the doctor thought it was time to send him to the psycho ward.

Stephen Rowland, one of the protesters, perhaps one of the best educated of the lot, since he had done some premed work at the University of Missouri before getting into the Army, added this information to the history of the stockade:

A man went into an epileptic fit and the guards kicked him. On at least three occasions, men cut their wrists and were put in the box overnight without treatment. I was inducing vomiting in a suicidal prisoner who had ingested poison one night when the sergeant, apparently drunk, came up and forcibly interfered with my work. On two other occasions, I found guards trying their best to help a poison-ingestion case but doing the wrong things--they don't know what to do, even when they intend no harm. In one of these instances, the turnkey delayed calling the ambulance for at least ten minutes after being informed that the prisoner had ingested chrome polish. The prisoner was in a semicomatose state and in obvious need of immediate medical attention. A suicidal prisoner, after attempting to take his life, is usually taken to the hospital, revived, stitched or bandaged and immediately returned to the stockade and put in the box--definitely not the place for a mentally disturbed person.

On February 26, 1968, a soldier named Herman L. Jones was taken to solitary confinement. He was (witnesses say) hysterical, screaming that he was supposed to go to the hospital. Jones had kidney and prostate trouble. In his words, "My testes hurt and I dripped." But the guards had grown tired of releasing him from the barracks prison room to go to the toilet; so they put him in solitary and gave him a can and a roll of toilet paper. In his hysteria and anger, Jones threw the can and toilet paper outside, tore his clothes and urinated on the floor several times. Guards hosed out the cell, hosed Jones down also, opened the windows (February can be very chilly on the San Francisco waterfront) and he was left without clothes and without bedding.

On February 27, the stockade doctor came and, without asking Jones how he was, wrote OK on Jones's clipboard and left. A soldier confined in the solitary box next to Jones picks up the account:

Later on that day, the guards came in and took all of us except Jones out of segregation to the TV room. On the way out, Sergeant Porter came in [to Jones's box] with three husky men. We were permitted to smoke, talk and watch TV. In general, the guards were surprisingly and unusually nice to us. We could hear Jones yelling and screaming. When we were put back in our boxes, Jones was sitting in a strait jacket in a different box. His lip was puffed up and his forehead and eyes were bruised. Jones later told me that the guards had rubbed his face in his own excrement. We were then made to clean up Jones's mess.

What happened after the other segregated prisoners were taken from their boxes to watch television is told by Jones:

Several of the guards spit in my face. Other guards grabbed me by the leg, tripped me. A guard got a rag off the floor, dipped it in urine and feces and rubbed it in my face and hair. I was so mad I was crying. I told Sergeant Porter he should have killed me, and he said he could arrange that, too. Then I was taken out of the box and put back on the other side. Sergeant Porter said something was going to happen to me and nobody would know. I was scared and wanted to commit suicide, so I ate paint off the wall. A guard saw me eating the paint. Then I was put in a strait jacket and taken to Letterman General Hospital. I saw a wóman doctor there. While in the hospital, I was in irons. At the hospital, while my stomach was being pumped, a big guard was twisting my leg irons and laughing.

After the "mutiny," prisoners (especially those involved in the sit-down) were treated even more harshly. Attorneys for the defendants sent five affidavits to Sixth Army Commanding Lieutenant General Stanley R. Larson, relating the new harassments, including beatings and slappings, but they got no response. Apparently, the treatment given some of the defendants lodged at the Marine-run prison on Treasure Island was worse. Private Lawrence Zaino, 20, of Toledo, Ohio, cracked under it. At the end of one trial day, when he saw the MPs approaching to return him to Treasure Island, he began shaking and mumbling, "It's true what I said about the brig, but they don't believe me. I'm sorry for what I did, but they don't believe me, but it's true," And just as the guards got to him, he tried to lift a chair to hit them, but he was shaking so hard he couldn't. It was so obvious he had flipped that the military judge ordered him immediately to the psychiatric ward at Letterman; and that's the last anybody heard of him for three months, after which he emerged just long enough for a trial at which his lawyer, to protect him from further mental strain, offered no defense, so that the trial could be ended immediately.

The worst postprotest beating at the Presidio was sworn to by Roy Pulley, who said that Sergeant Woodring (weight about 210) ordered him (weight about 145) into a back room. Pulley's affidavit reads:

He followed me in an closed the door. Then Sergeant Brown stood outside, blocking the door and peeking in, while Sergeant Woodring proceeded to push me around the room. I grabbed him by the tie and shoulder and tried to hold him off. Sergeant Woodring was pushing and swearing at me all the time, attempting to provoke me into fighting back. Eventually, he knocked me down and sat on my stomach, pinning my right arm with his knee. He grabbed my fingers and slowly and methodically, he twisted my fingers until one of them was broken. He twisted for at least a full minute while raving at me. In the meantime, I was crying and screaming for help and asking him to stop.... This afternoon, after my return from the hospital, I was shoved in the black box. While there, Captain Lamont, the C. O., told me that if I thought they had used force today, I had not seen anything yet.

Later, Pulley was transferred to solitary confinement on Treasure Island. Doubtless these prisoners sometimes exaggerate, but there's no denying that Pulley's hand still shows the mangling of some fight.

Again, this kind of treatment is not limited to the Presidio. Daryl Amthor, 21, of Rockport, Missouri (who, when I interviewed him, was hiding out in the Peace House in Pasadena, California), had been A. W. O. L. 31 times, had been put in five stockades--at Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Riley, Fort Sill, Fort Ord and the Presidio--and had escaped a total of seven times from three of these places; he came away with these memories of his two months in the Fort Ord prison (where more than 500 prisoners are kept in quarters intended to hold 200):

I was thrown in the box for having contraband--a cigarette lighter. The first day I was there, five guards came into my cell and started beating me and trying to get me to swing back, but if I would have swung back, I would have been killed. So I hung onto my belt and just let them do their thing. The next day, one of the guards brought me a pair of boots, size seven, and ordered me to wear them and break them in for him. I couldn't even get them on. I wear a size-nine boot. When I told him this, he came in the cell with two other guards and proceeded to beat me up again, so I let them. I was in the box for 14 days and was beat up five days straight, three times a day. After five days, another prisoner was brought in. He had refused to do physical training, because of his heart. He had a profile [a medical record showing heart trouble], but this didn't really seem to matter to the guards. After doing some exercises, he wouldn't do any more and he told the guards to beat on him if they wanted to, and they did the same thing to him a few days they had done to me, until he finally wound up in the hospital. One time, this other fellow was beat up by a civilian that used to be a guard at the stockade but got discharged and just happened to be on hand because he was there to visit and take another look at the stockade. I really do believe these guards are insane. They actually try to find a reason to beat people up and, of course, they only pick on the ones they know won't strike back--prisoners that are the nonviolent type, such as me. I once saw a prisoner sitting down, reading a Bible, when in walks a guard, takes the Bible out of the prisoner's hand and throws it down and then asks, "Do you believe in this shit?" The prisoner says yes, he does, and the guard beat him up. These things go on all the time. The prisoners go to the C. O. and the C. O. laughs. One prisoner who was beaten wrote to his Congressman and his Congressman wrote back, saying he was going to do something about it. The prisoner took this letter to his court-martial and he was discharged right then, I guess because the Army didn't want any publicity about it.

In the spring of 1969, about 300 prisoners at the Fort Ord, California, stockade went on a sit-down protest against the brutalities of the guards, the bad living conditions and short rations--and they made the protest despite the fact that they knew they could be charged with mutiny; in fact, they made their protest while the mutiny trials of 14 men from the Presidio were being held at Fort Ord.

A minor rebellion occurred at the Fort Dix stockade in June 1969, during which the prisoners burned mattresses and broke up furniture to call attention to conditions. Word came out through the soldier grapevine that the explosion was touched off when the inmates were made to stand in formation three hours through the sweltering part of the day, after which they stood in line three hours for dinner, only to find that there weren't enough water bowls for half of the men. (One of the many reasons inmates call the Fort Dix prison the Pound is that they drink from bowls.) The grapevine later reported that, as a result of the violence, 19 prisoners had been kept in solitary confinement for three weeks; one man was reportedly held without food for three days.

There have also been riotous protests against conditions at the Marine brig at Da Nang, South Vietnam, and at the Army stockade in Long Binh, 12 miles north of Saigon. At Da Nang, prisoners burned down a cell block; but at Long Binh, they went further--burning down buildings covering an area the size of a city block. The infamous Long Binh Jail (dubbed L. B. J. by Vietnam veterans) seems to have had a riot at just about every turn of the moon, the most famous uprising occurring in 1968, when several hundred black GIs took over a section of the stockade area; a month later, a handful of them reportedly were still holding out against MPs in one part of the prison.

Like most stockades, L. B. J. is usually packed 75 percent above its regulation maximum capacity. I discussed conditions with several men who had spent time in L. B. J., and most of their stories jibe with that of a black private, first class (who cannot be identified, since he is still in the Army), who told me:

We got one meal a day, usually, and that was canned rations. They would punch a hole in the cans about a week before they gave us the food, so it would be dried up. That was part of the punishment. I got beat about twice a day for a month. Everyone knew why I was there [he refused to fight anymore after taking part in a sortie in which, he says, about 3000 of the enemy were killed]. I was in minimum security for two weeks, and then they stuck me in maximum security for three months, because they heard me telling the other fellows why I wouldn't pick up a rifle and why they shouldn't. They have about 30 maximum-security holes. You sleep on dirt floors. You can't see out, but they have a hole where they can see in on you. It's total dark, day and night. If you were lucky enough to have a guard who had a heart, he'd take you out for a crap. Otherwise, you crapped in the hole. The room was about five by eight. One black GI, who raised a fist salute, was accused of trying to incite a riot and about ten guys jumped on him, stomped him, kicked him. About 60 percent of the prisoners are black. Racial tension couldn't have been higher. Fights every day. The blacks had one barracks and the whites couldn't go in there. If they did, we'd beat them. The Vietnamese people would give us marijuana and all kind of stuff. If you had a stockade arm band on, they'd do anything for you. We'd go to the fence and they would throw us over bundles of grass. It was really great. The guards used the drugs, too. I'd smoke with some of the guards, but they'd turn right around and beat me the next day, anyway.

One experiences the peculiar flavor of life at the Long Binh stockade from the moment he steps through its gates. One young ex-sergeant, Robert Lucas, better known in recent months as the GI coordinator of the Vietnam Moratorium, recalls having to escort a black soldier to L. B. J.; the prisoner had not been convicted of any crime; he had only been charged with having been A. W. O. L. This, says Lucas, was the way they processed his prisoner:

When we got there, they put the black fellow inside a large cage just inside the gate. They took his belt, cap and shoelaces. He was then taken from the cage to the incoming building. I explained that he was a pretrial prisoner, that he wasn't hostile. But they treated him just as though he had committed first-degree murder. They stripped him, made him bend over, so they could inspect his butt to see if he was hiding anything; they checked his groin, looked in his mouth for contraband. This was just done to humiliate him; they knew any serious smuggling around a prison is done by the Vietnamese workers. There were three clerks watching. One of the clerks grins at him and says, "Sit down and I'll give you my first haircut." So he shaved him bald. Then they led the prisoner to a military shipping box--a steel box about six feet high, about seven feet deep, about five feet across--it's usually used for shipping heavy things like typewriters or ammunition. That's where he stayed his first night in L. B. J. He had a bucket to piss in and some water to drink. He was in that steel crate from four o'clock that afternoon to seven the next morning. That's standard procedure.

Garret Gianninoto, of New York City, an ex-GI who spent three months in the Da Nang brig, gives this report on its solitary-confinement cells (in which he spent eight days):

The cells were six by eight feet. The only furniture was a square box covering one half of a 25-gallon drum--this was your toilet. The drum was taken out once a day and the stuff was burned. Some fellows who have been in other prisons' solitary-confinement cells complain because they didn't have any place to go to the toilet, but I would rather not have had. Those toilets got pretty awful when the temperature inside the cells got up to 130 degrees. And you had to sit on the toilet all day. That was an order. You couldn't sit or lie on the floor. One bulb hung over the wire mesh that was the ceiling, and this was what you had to read by, but the only things you were permitted to read were the Bible and the brig rules. We didn't have a Bible, so I read the brig rules several dozen times. The food was lettuce and rice and, in the morning, two boxes of Kellogg's corn flakes and water. Stuff like that, and in the food it was commonplace to find slugs and flies and weevils.

Gianninoto said he had seen no physical brutality.

Most of the men in the Da Nang and Long Binh prisons, as is true of most military jails, are guilty of being A. W. O. L. only. But many GIs in Vietnam look upon A. W. O. L. not as a crime but as a way of life. Some GIs claim that there are 10,000 to 12,000 A. W. O. L. Servicemen in the Saigon area on any given day or night. Since the military insists on treating them as criminals, it is the A. W. O. L.s who crowd the stockades to explosive capacity.

The military's disciplinary style is evident everywhere from Da Nang to Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and although details are often suppressed for a while, eventually they get out. More than three months after a riot took place at Fort Bragg, when 238 inmates seized the stockade in the summer of 1968 and held it for three days, Andy Stapp, head of the American Servicemen's Union, was able to learn details of the incident that provoked the riot and printed them in the A. S. U.'s newspaper, The Bond. Stapp tells it like this:

A certain Private Johnson, a black prisoner, was beginning his 78th day in solitary confinement on that morning of July 23. Johnson faced almost 20 years' imprisonment, because he had dared to fight back when the commandant of the prison, a major, had spit in his face and taunted him. For this he was charged with assault on a superior officer and put in solitary for close to three months. And three months is a hell of a long time to sit in a room 7 feet by 11 feet.

Well, it seems that on this particular day, Johnson had just about had it with that little room; and after he had been taken to use the latrine, he asked permission to stay out in the hallway for a while to get some exercise. When the guards tried to hustle him back into the rathole, he physically resisted, knocking the MPs down and climbing to the top of the prison bars. The major, a real sadist, ordered him blasted off by a fire hose. The impact from these hoses will rip the bark off a tree at 100 yards; and when they turned it on the desperate prisoner, he was immediately knocked to the ground, the force of the water breaking his fingers.

The guards then rushed in and spread-eagled Johnson on the floor. After they had got him securely pinned down (which wasn't hard for them to do, considering his dazed condition), a lifer E-6 [a career enlisted man], his first wrapped in a pistol belt, began to methodically beat in Johnson's teeth.

And that's where their little game ended. Because about six other prisoners who had been watching this horror from behind a fence on the other side of the compound went right over that fence and rushed the bastards who were mauling Johnson. And behind them came several dozen other prisoners, for by now the fence had been completely torn down.

After that, one thing led to another.

James Niles, who worked six months as a processing clerk at the Fort Hood, Texas, stockade, says that right after riots at Hood in 1968, "they segregated the black prisoners in the old mental ward, which is now a jail annex, and piped it for CS ['pepper'] gas, and a guard told me they turned it on a couple of times just for the heck of it."

The Army is quite genteel in these matters, however, compared with the Marine Corps, which supplied more horror tales than any other Service. An ex-Marine, who is now studying to enter the Episcopal ministry, said he had witnessed Marines forced to strip to the waist and roll in fresh feces. In fact, the threat of Marine Corps treatment is sometimes used to keep Army dissidents in line; sometimes, Marine guards from Treasure Island go over to the Presidio to show the Army guards how to do it. Marine guards have special techniques. One day, a Presidio prisoner called an Army guard Uncle Tom; a few hours later, three Marine guards showed up and took over for the occasion. As another prisoner related in a sworn statement: "You could hear screams from the man all over the stockade. Later he said he had been held by two Marines while the other grabbed and twisted his testicles and then hit him several times in the stomach." He told also of the occasion when six guards went into the box to get Private Richard Gentile, a veteran of 12 months in Vietnam, who was in the stockade because he had marched in a peace parade: "A guard held up leg irons and said, 'If you don't come out, I'll beat your head in with these.' The door to solitary was open and five guards jumped Gentile and after he was handcuffed and put into leg irons, he was beaten until he was bloody and almost unconscious. Then four of the guards carried him to a truck and sent him to Treasure Island. After this happened, a sergeant said, 'I'm not a violent person, but if your name comes up to go to Treasure Island and you resist and it takes ten of us to one of you, we'll beat the shit out of you and then send you to Treasure Island, where the Marines can really take care of you.' " (It was treatment of this sort that prompted Gentile to make two "gestures": He drank a can of chrome polish and he slit his arm from the wrist to the elbow, which required 44 stitches to close.) One U. S. Senator received information from a sailor who had spent time at Treasure Island that he had witnessed guards pick up another prisoner in battering-ram style and run him headfirst into a heavy wooden door.

Father Alban Rosen, a Catholic priest at Mission San Luis Rey near Oceanside, California, who has done volunteer chaplain work on Marine bases, said that Camp Pendleton nearly had a Presidiotype mutiny in April 1969, when a group of about 40 prisoners in the brig came out of the building and saw a prisoner hanging from the Cyclone fence, spread-eagled. His feet were off the ground. A guard had made him stand on a stool while he was handcuffed to the fence; then the stool was kicked away. He was screaming. The men sat down and said they would stay there until something was done for the man. A cooler-headed officer than was at the Presidio during its "mutiny" persuaded them to move along. The guard was found to have a long history of psychological troubles; but, as Father Alban said, "Nobody wants to work at the brig, so they get that kind of guard."

The Pendleton brig is a converted World War Two prisoner-of-war camp, with a capacity of 400 men; there are reportedly 900 in the brig now.

Father Alban said that the official brig chaplain told him of seeing men forced to run in a circle until they fell from exhaustion, at which point "the guard would just go over and kick them until they got up and started trotting again. This stuff goes on all day. The guards get pleasure from it." The brig physician told Father Alban of sick men whom the guards would not allow to sleep. "The guard will come along and throw cold water in on the guy if he catches him sleeping."

One of the episodes related by the priest was about a kid in maximum security, who apparently had psychotic problems, "and the kid was screaming all the time and driving the guards crazy, so they taped up his whole face except for his nose. They left a hole for his nose. The only problem was, the kid had sinus and bronchial trouble. That night, he had a real bad attack; but since he was taped up, he couldn't say anything. All he could do was keep banging his head against the door. They had to hospitalize the kid."

The handcuffed crucifixion of the prisoner was verified by Dr. Larry McNamee, who was the brig physician for a year at Pendleton until he left the Service in July 1969. He said he had heard of several prisoners' being manacled to the fence, feet off the ground, but he could vouch personally for only the one prisoner, whose wrists he had treated. It was from Dr. McNamee that Father Alban learned of the boy with the taped face. In fact, Dr. McNamee had an encyclopedia of horrors to tell: about the time a guard had kicked and smashed the cast on a prisoner's broken arm; about a dozen or so prisoners who had come to him from time to time for treatment of broken noses, black-and-blue scrota (having been kicked in the groin by guards) and back pains from being kicked or stomped by guards. Dr. McNamee related:

One day I saw two or three guys who said they were clubbed--the guards had some kind of wooden thing with tape around it and the men were banged with this club. They had bruises all over their chests and backs. I brought this up tot he C. O., who had an investigation, like always. The guards denied everything, of course, but we found their club, exactly the way these prisoners described it. One of the guys who was responsible for this was seen by a psychiatrist and deemed to be sadistic and should not be working in a correctional facility. But he continued to work there until he was discharged from the Service. None of the guards are screened.

Dr. McNamee told about the "icebox," a special punishment facility of six cages set on a concrete slab in the open. The cages were outfitted with canvas flaps that were closed during the sunny days to parboil the prisoners and raised at night so they would freeze. He said that 53 percent of the prisoners who needed treatment in special clinics or surgery at the base hospital were never taken, because there were no guards to escort them, "although there always seemed to be enough guards to escort prisoners to cut the commandant's lawn." Of the drugs he prescribed for prisoners, only 15 percent ever reached them. Sometimes, prisoners would be held for up to eight hours in the "bull pen," which had neither toilets nor water fountains. Many times, prisoners with 102-degree and 103-degree temperatures whom he had ordered to bed rest would be kept at work, instead.

A former guard at Camp Pendleton told of how some of his colleagues, who felt that one prisoner wasn't clean enough, scrubbed the inmate's back with a street-cleaning brush until he was bleeding so much he had to be taken to the hospital.

When these conditions were revealed by Dr. McNamee, the Marine Corps hurriedly decided that the icebox and the bull pen were no longer in use; at least that's what they told inquiring reporters. But the inmates still felt that something was oppressive, apparently, because within hours after Pendleton officials announced that they had put an end to the more brutal aspects of their penal care, about 200 enraged prisoners drove their guards into a hut and pelted it with stones. One thing the officials do not pretend has been closed is the maximum-security building. It still thrives--all 48 dungeons. The interior of this building is in virtual darkness, so few are the bulbs. Prisoners are required to sit on the cement floor up to 20 hours each day. Exercise is limited to ten minutes. There are two toilets and two washbasins for the 48 men.

Recalcitrant prisoners--and these are average prisoners, not those in maximum security--are sometimes taken to a room of mirrors and made to stand naked, looking at themselves, while different-colored lights are spun through the room (the longest period heard of for this was a 21-day stretch). This is supposed to make the prisoner crack. If he refuses to stand up and look at himself, he is spread-eagled on the floor, naked, and guards drop bullet casing onto the floor next to his ears--ping, ping, ping, ping--all day.

Jack Eugene Lunsford, 20, who was a guard in a correctional-custody platoon at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego until he couldn't take it any longer and deserted, described one of the techniques: "They have this hook on the wall, seven feet or so off the floor. The hook sticks out about four inches and is as big around as your thumb. If a prisoner doesn't cooperate, they'll put him in a strait jacket that has a ring in the back and they'll hang this ring on the hook in the wall. It's painful and a lot of the cats pass out." Another trick, he said, was to "put a cat in a strait jacket and alternately throw hot and cold water in his face. Puts you in a state of shock." Terry Chambers, 19, a former Marine, who is now a deserter and was interviewed in a Whittier, California, church sanctuary, said that when he was a prisoner in the Marine correctional-custody platoon, "They hung me between two bunk beds, hung me by my thumbs and toes to the top posts of the beds. I still don't have feeling in my thumbs."

• • •

It would be a mistake, however, to concentrate on the stockades and brigs and assume that they are an accident or an aberration of military justice. They are, in fact, a very logical extension of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the legal process that constitutes trial in the Armed Forces. One must understand the purpose of military justice. It is not related to protecting the innocent. The comforting old saw "Better a hundred guilty escape than one innocent man be punished unjustly" has no place in the military, not even as a myth. The most accurate and honest description of its single purpose was given by Major General Reginald C. Harmon, for 12 years Judge Advocate General of the Air Force, until his retirement in 1960, who told the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights that "the principal asset of the military justice system" is "the swift and certain punishment of the guilty man."

Depending on the measure of guilt, military courts are for debasing a man or for destroying part of his life and reputation. As Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Constitutional Rights subcommittee, put it, "The primary purpose of the administration of justice in the military Services is to enforce discipline, plus getting rid of people who think they are not capable of contributing to the defense of the country as they should." Unlike civilian courts--to which one can go to seek protection of property or protection of civil rights and civil liberties--military courts have no constructive or positive purpose. One may enter them only as a defendant, never as a plaintiff. One can emerge from them only in a poorer position; even to win is to lose, for the procedure goes on one's record and, to the military mind, to have been charged at all makes one forever suspect.

The more heavy-handed and arbitrary the action of the military court, the more convinced is the Army that it will instill fear in the minds of its personnel and thereby lay the foundation for a stronger discipline. Illogical and cruel punishment may be offensive constitutionally, but the Army considers it extremely valuable in spooking the troops into line. As long as a soldier can assure himself, "I have the right to act within constitutional limits," he is a potential troublemaker. The less assurance a soldier has of any practical rights, the more likely will he be to shrink from action beyond that authorized by command.

Although the trials arising from the Presidio demonstration were disastrous from a public-relations viewpoint, many in the Army looked upon them as highly successful (though it is impossible to measure unborn troubles) in promoting servility; all the ingredients for illogical and inhumane punishment were there.

Three of the Presidio defendants have I. Q.s in the 60s, which is just above the level of a moron. Nearly half the defendants have less than a normal I. Q. Though in the Army two years, two hadn't the talent to finish basic training. One of the defendants is insane and was known to be insane before he joined the Army. Fifteen of the 27 were appraised as unfit for service by the Army's own psychiatrists.

The civilian backgrounds of the defendants tell a great deal about whom the Army considers best to make disciplinary examples of. Alan Rupert, for example. Before he was 16 years old, his mother had been married and divorced 12 times and had had many men friends during her career as an alcoholic barmaid. In an exchange during the court-martial, the Army illustrated how it tries to dehumanize defendants. Although the psychiatrist on the witness stand tried repeatedly to avoid saying it in front of Alan, he was finally forced by the prosecuting attorney to spell out what was quite apparent from the evidence and need not have been said--that the boy's mother was a whore. The men passed through the house so rapidly that Alan never knew who his father was. Always looked upon as excess baggage, at the age of 13, Alan was--without a word of explanation from his mother or from his temporary stepfather--dropped off at a ranch to work for a year. He joined the Army to escape and immediately found that the Army was not the best refuge. Within two weeks, he had been accused of having been A. W. O. L. (a matter of mistaken identity) and manhandled by a sergeant for leaving his trousers on the floor (again, mistaken identity). That was fall of the Army he wanted. Before he got into the Presidio mess, he had been A. W. O. L. four times and had escaped from stockades twice; and just a month before the "mutiny," an Army psychiatrist had said he was unfit for service and should be discharged. Only because the Army failed to act on this recommendation did Alan wind up charged with mutiny.

Even more outlandish is the treatment of Larry Lee Sales. He was burglarizing homes before he was out of the first grade; he dropped out in the ninth grade on the advice of the school psychologist, who told him he was hopeless. He shot up a home with a 12-gauge shotgun when he was 16, by which age he was thoroughly familiar with every available narcotic and with every use of his body, including posing for homosexual photographers. Sharp instruments had also played a part in his development, as when he attempted to stab his father with a knife, tried to stab a friend with a pair of scissors and tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. All of this before he joined the Army. He didn't join out of patriotism. He joined because he had just got out of the Modesto State Hospital; he went into the Army as an alternative to being committed to an insane asylum, talking the doctor into the idea that if he couldn't make it in the Army, the Army could care for him better than the state asylum.

Of course, he couldn't make it. After one day of basic training--"My nerves were about to blow," he says--he went A. W. O. L. and awakened a couple of weeks later in a hospital after such an overdose of codeine that the nurse couldn't find his pulse. Civilian officials tried to have him put back in Modesto State Hospital, but Larry Lee's father talked them into letting him contact the Army again, because "the Army could take better care of him." So he phoned Fort Lewis, Fort Lewis phoned the Presidio and the Presidio sent an ambulance to fetch Larry Lee. The Presidio psychiatrist looked him over and said, "My God, you're insane--what are you doing in the Army?"

The Army personnel in San Francisco told him they were going to send him back to Fort Lewis for his discharge, because the Presidio just wasn't giving discharges. So they packed him off to the Presidio's Special Processing Department, which is a sort of loose holding company, to wait for his convoy the next day to Fort Lewis. When he got to S. P. D., it was late in the afternoon and the specialist there, who didn't want to be bothered making out the papers, told Larry Lee. "I'm going to stick you in the stockade overnight and you'll get picked up in the morning. Then I won't have to make out the papers. They can do it up there."

Well, it was October one when Larry Lee entered the Presidio stockade. He waited around. He kept telling everyone he was getting out the next day. The other prisoners told him, "Don't count on it; some of us have been here there or four months, waiting to get out."

Two weeks later, because the commanding officer was so incompetent that he couldn't get an insane man out of the stockade, Larry Lee was facing mutiny charges. Unfair, of course, nut it showed the ranks that the Army wouldn't excuse back talk from anybody, not even a madman.

Almost as useful, but in a different way, was the participation of Nesrey Sood, who was a good soldier when he was sober, but wasn't sober often enough, being addicted to cheap wine, When he was drunk, he had the habit of telling noncoms and officers, "I ought to push your face in." and sometimes trying it. After sentencing him to a couple of long terms in an Alaskan stockade, the Army decided that it and sood were incompatible. He was given traveling orders to pick up his discharge at Fort Lewis.

Part of sood's troubles, however, were domestic. His wife was too gregarious and he was worried about his children. So instead of pausing at Fort Lewis to pick up his discharge, which was waiting, he went straight on to Oakland, to see if his children were being A. W. O. L. and put into the Presidio stockade and though practically speaking no longer a soldier, wound up sentenced to 15 years for mutiny, which was later reduced to two years. And, just to rub it in, a letter from the Oakland juvenile department, telling Sood of a hearing on the custody of his children, was withheld from him by stockade officials for eight days--two days past the date of the hearing.

Why would the Army go out of its way to destroy these pathetic waifs? The victory seems so slight and the overkill so enormous. The answer is a fairly human one, not a bureaucratic one. The Soods and Sales of the Army are not the direct victims of an inflexible list of regulations handed down by Big Army--the hairy, aging human beings who run things in the field and whose insecurities in a civilian-dominated world are hidden beneath the uniforms of colonels and generals.

The chaos and the often ridiculous inconsistencies of military justice are largely the fault of a tradition by which a commandant is allowed to run his own outfit with all the autonomy of a medieval fiefdom. Face and pride, so precious to the military, would otherwise be damaged. Pentagon officials said that they will go to almost any lengths to avoid interfering with the generals their who run the bases and will reverse their injustices only when adverse public opinion mounts to dangerous levels. As result, one finds a general's trivial jealousies, grudges and personal political biases often dictating the conduct of courts under his command, as well as dictating, of course, who appears before them as defendants.

Captain Howard Levy is a New Yorker who, long before he refused to teach medicine to Vietnam-bound Green Berets, offended the military-tuned citizenry near his South Carolina base by helping Negroes in voter-registration drives and who offended his fellow officers on the base by refusing to join the officers' club. Given an indiscreet tongue, which he had, it was almost inevitable that he wound up defending himself against serious charges. It was just as inevitable that Lance Corporal William Harvey and Private George Daniels were packed off to military prison fo serve terms of six and ten years, respectively, for no crime greater than asking to talk with their commanding officer about the justice of black men being sent to Vietnam; they had made the mistake of irritating the Marine brass at a time when their base, Pendleton, was described by a pentagon official as an "extraordinarily dangerous" place, because of the unrest of the troops. The commandant was irritated by Black Muslims, and Harvey and Daniels happened to be of that religion.

And one need not be surprised that Private, First Class Bruce Petersen was sentenced to eight years in prison for possessing marijuana (enough, the cops said, to mildly taint the lint in his pocket), when the ordinary sentence for possession is six months. Petersen was editor of the underground newspaper at Fort Hood, Texas, that had embarrassed and enraged the commandant for months, printing news of disturbances on the base that the brass wanted to keep quiet and that the local civilian newspaper did, indeed, suppress. Petersen had to go

The same injustice descended on the presidio through a confluence of persons and activities that irritated the hell out of the local brass--the most irritating influences being: the peacenik and hippie community of San Francisco, which, the Army believed, was ruining many of its soldiers; the San Francisco press; and Terence Kayo Hallinan, attorney.

The Presidio brass hated the peaceniks and the hippies so much, in fact, that there were secret discussions of moving the confinement facilities away from San Francisco. The suggestion was put to the Sixty Army commanding general by Colonel Robert McMahon, infantry commander, in a memo last year in which he wrote:

The primary reason for this request is to prevent further unfavorable criticism of the Army caused by indifferent, irresponsible, ineffective soldiers awaiting disposition at presidio of San Francisco. This problem is acute because the Presidio is located in the San Francisco area, where the press is particularly inclined to give headline attention to sensational stories involving the Army. ... They easy access from the city of San Francisco...not only permits but encourages the two-way contact of troublemaker elements in the Service with the press and other organizations that thrive on sensationalism. ... The Haight-Ashbury District acts as a magnet for fugitives and contributes to the general problem. ... A contributing cause to the recent adverse publicity has been the group of attorneys to whom many S. P. D. personnel have turned for representation. These lawyers have employed techniques bordering on the unethical in order to achieve discharges for their clients. Soldiers have been advised to go A. W. O. L or remain out of military control until they are dropped from the rolls of their organizations, and then surrender at the Presidio, so they will be processed here in the atmosphere hostile to the Army.

From Colonel McMahon's tone, it is plain that the Presidio commanding cadre felt at war with these outside influences. And of the attorneys who specialized in helping Gls, none was so hated as Terence Hallinan, one of five sons of the attorney Vincent Hallinan, who was the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1952 and who is equally well known for his court fights on behalf of Harry Bridges, the West Coast longshoremen's czar. To say that the Hallinans are left-wingers is putting it mildly. One of the Hallinan boys is working for the Communist Party in New York. Terence has recruited and organize for such group as the DuBois Clubs. And to say that they are tough is also an understatement. Each of the five brothers was an intramural boxing champ at the University of California; Terence was the best, making national runner-up as a fighting. By the time he received his law degree, he had beaten up so many people out of the ring that the state bar association didn't want to license him and only after losing a two year court battle did it do so. No sooner had Terence become a lawyer than he was fighting the Army, and he won one case by actually climbing aboard an Army bus that was taking his client to a Vietnam-bound plane, pulling him off the bus and shoving some MPs around en route to freedom. Some Army brass claim that Terence Hallinan once sneaked into the stockade disguised as a priest, in order to give advice to some of the prisoners. I asked Hallinan if he had done this and he sort of side-stepped the question. In any event, Terence Hallinan was hated by the Presidio hierarchy.

Thus, when the 27 Presidio prisoners sat down on the grass to vent their unhappiness, the generals and colonels did not view this as an action potentially destructive to the Army; they viewed it as a convenient problem they could respond to in such a way as to get back at peacenik civilians, the press and Hallinan. Two days before the sit-down, there had been a GIs and veterans' march for peace in San Francisco; and although everybody at the Presidio was restricted on that day, so that they could not participate, nevertheless, many GIs were in the march and Outpost Army was furious. In the 48 hours before the sitdown, it was rumored around the base that the prisoners were about to pull something "to attract the press," which also infuriated the officers; and when, at the sit-down itself, the prisoners began screaming, "We want Hallinan! We want Hallinan! We want the press! We want the press!" the sit-downers became secondary antagonists. The colonels and generals were out to get those other forces that, by beguilling their GIs, had fouled the disciplinary nest.

Is this just speculation? I don't think so. Sergeant Steven Craig Black, who took video films of the demonstration, just as he had taken video films of the GIs and veterans' march two days earlier, revealed that when he showed both films to a group of eight top officers from the base, "someone at the meeting said that the reason for the demonstration was to support the GIs and vets' march and someone else said that it was to protest the killing of a prisoner. I didn't hear anyone say that one reason for the demonstration was to avoid doing something they were going to be ordered to do."

So much for the notion that the Army honestly looked upon it as a mutiny. It was a minor part of a much bigger grudge.

For months, the morale of the Presidio stockade had been in a tail spin. As Private Patrick Wright recalls those early autumn days of 1968, "It was a crazy house--people cutting on themselves--everybody yelling--being jumped on all the time--guards telling me, 'I'm going to break your arm'--human excrement all over the latrine floor--guards shorting us on food."

Among the prisoners was Private Richard Bunch, 19, a little fellow (five feet, four inches, 120 pounds) who was enough to give any barracks the heebie jeebies. He talked to himself all day, and every night was riddled with his screams and moans and his mindless jabber about being a warlock and being able to walk through walls and kill people with a glance. Sometimes, he tried his powers by walking into a wall. He shouldn't have been in the prison, of course; he had gone A. W. O. L. and, after blowing his mind for months on LSD, had returned to this home in Ohio. His mother saw at once that Richard had flipped, but the Army told her in writing that it would give him treatment. Instead, he was sent to the stockade.

On October 11, 1968, Bunch committed suicide by teasing the shotgun guard, standing about five paces away, into shooting him. "What would you do if I ran?" Bunch had asked.

"You'll have to run to find out," the guard had replied.

"Well, be sure to shoot me in the head," Bunch begged, as he went walking, then skipping, then trotting down the Presidio road. The guard fired. Bunch was hit with what one California Congressman described as "not number-seven shot, which we use for pheasant, or number-six shot, which we use for duck, but number-four shot, which can down a 30-pound goose, a Canadian honker, with one pellet"; and although Army regulations require that a guard fire only as a last resort and then aim for the legs, this blast hit Bunch in the heart, lungs, spleen and kidney and left a hole in his back the size of a grapefruit. The Army later explained that something was wrong with the gun and that it discharged higher than aimed. After shooting Bunch, the guard whirled around and pointed the gun at another prisoner and yelled, "Hit the ground, hit the ground, or I'll shoot you, too."

Another guard nearby was reported to have told the killer guard, "I wish I'd done it, so I could have got a transfer closer to home." (Army practice is to transfer a killer guard immediately.)

The guard was not court-martialed and the slaying was ruled justified.

Bunch's death threw the stockade into bedlam, with people weeping, shaking things, refusing to eat and periodically exploding with shouts. Windows were broken. There was talk of murdering a guard in retaliation, or burning down the stockade.

The day after Bunch's slaying, the stockade commandant, Captain Lamont, summoned the prisoners and read to them the mutiny article from the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It wasn't really his idea; he did not have that much knowledge of the U. C. M. J. Lieutenant Colonel Ford, his commanding officer, knowing Lamont had begun to lose control of his stockade, had asked, "Have you ever considered reading the mutiny article?" And to Lamont, a suggestion from a superior was equivalent to an order.

Having read the article, he did nothing else to quiet the men. The Bunch memorial service didn't impress the prisoners, one of whom later recalled, "The officers just sat around, laughing." Two prisoners who showed up with black arm bands (homemade with shoe polish) were ordered to remove them.

On Sunday night (October 13), a few of the prisoners--nobody can now remember how many were at the planning session--decided that the next morning, at the 7:30 formation, they would pull a sit-down demonstration and, when Lamont showed up, read their list of grievances. Heading the list were demands that there would be no more shotgun guards and that all guards would have to take psychiatric examinations.

Lamont knew what was up. At 5:30 A.M., a guard had phoned to tell him the men had planned a demonstration for two hours hence. And then what did he do to cool tempers? "I went back to sleep," he testified. "I considered that standard procedure."

At the 7:30 sick call, the prisoners broke ranks and sat down: 28 of them, then 27, as one wandered away. There had been talk of 90 or 100 joining, but in the showdown, most stayed in ranks.

When Captain Lamont approached the sit-downers, however, the grievance plan began to fall apart. He would not listen to their list of demands but, instead, began reading from the U. C. M. J. manual. Frustrated, they began singing and shrieking to drown him out, so Lamont retired to a loud-speaker in an M. P. sedan outside the stockade yard and again began to read the mutiny article. Now he also ordered them to get up and return to their barracks.

Later, under oath, he admitted that when he first approached the group, he had not ordered them to return to their barracks. Up to that point, then, they had not disobeyed an order, much less mutinied. Mutiny, the Army says, is conspiracy with "the intent to override authority." Unless orders are given, authority cannot be overridden. And if they could not hear the order when it was finally given, could it be said that they intended to override authority? Captain Lamont also admitted under oath that the loud-speaker he was using was troubled by feedback. Other witnesses testified to both static and feedback. And Dr. Vincent Salmon, a senior research scientist at the Stanford University Research Institute, who is one of the nation's foremost experts on sound, as well as a noted inventor of loud-speaker systems, testified that if the men were singing with just average volume, they could not have understood the order, even if they had heard the captain. Were they singing that loud? Lamont testified that the pitch of their voices was "screaming. They got very, very loud."

And now we come to perhaps the most Dostoievskyan justice of the day. One of the men in the protesting circle was Private Edward Yost, holder of the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman's badge for service in Vietnam, where he had performed with exemplary courage on 19 forays into the Mekong Delta before being put out of the war by a booby-trap explosion that cost him much of the hearing in one ear and cost him much of the hearing in one ear and some of the hearing in the other. If the 26 other soldiers were unable to make out the words of Captain Lamont's order, Yost was having trouble even making out the words of the songs and shouts of the men right by his side. he couldn't have been sure Captain Lamont was making a sound, even if he had been facing him--and he was sitting with his back to the captain.

What was Yost doing in the circle? Not protesting the war, as the prosecution later implied. In fact, few of the men were protesting the war. Especially not Yost. He was happy to have served in Vietnam and said he would serve there again. He was in the stockade not because he had gone A. W. O. L. from disagreement with the Army as an organization but because when he had returned from Vietnam with his injuries, his pay records had not followed; and his former wife was threatening him for lack of support--no trivial matter in California. So, just because he felt it wasn't helping to lie around the hospital, he had gone A. W. O. L. and got a job to make some money while waiting for the Army to clear up his pay records. He disliked peaceniks. He disliked people who tried to undercut the Army. He had joined the group simply because a buddy he had known from civilian days broke ranks, said to him, "Come on, let's go," and in his almost-deaf and puzzled way, he had gone.

All this came out in his trial, of course. And after he had been sentenced to nine months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge, his military attorney asked several members of the jury if they had not believed what the acoustical experts had said about the noise and about Yost's hearing. Oh, sure, they said, they believed them--but Yost was guilty, that's all.

• • •

Viewed from the Army's side, its system of justice works beautifully. More than 95 percent of all courts-martial result in convictions, and convictions are rather final. There were 89,649 courts-martial of all kinds in 1968 and only 121 cases were accepted by the Court of Military Appeals--which means that 13 percent of the men convicted got a full review.

The military has worked out the routine in such a way that some of the constitutional safeguards seem to be in force and yet actually aren't. The Army gives the defendant an attorney and then won't let him work. In some cases, the defendant may have both a military attorney and a civilian attorney. But civilian attorneys who do their work too vigorously may find themselves threatened. David Lowe, a civilian attorney in the Presidio cases, was warned that if he didn't stay in line, the military authorities were prepared to have him reprimanded by his state bar. ("I encouraged them to go right ahead," Lowe recalls. "I said swell, because then we'd have some hearings they'd really be interested in.") To use another case, that of Captain Levy, the Brooklyn dermatologist who went to prison for refusing to teach medicine to Green Berets: His attorney, Charles Morgan, Jr., of the A. C. L. U., one of the best lawyers in the South, was ridiculed by the military judge, who in open court suggested that Morgan might be too incompetent to complete the case. Hallinan, the most flamboyant and aggressive of the civilian attorneys in the Presidio affair, was told that the Army was gathering evidence in an effort to have him charged with fomenting the mutiny.

Military defense attorneys who do their jobs with gusto have even more trouble. One of them, Captain Emmit Yeary, was twice threatened with court-martial, once for "speaking to the press" and once for spending too much time on the case. Captain Brandon Sullivan, another of the outstanding defense attorneys, ended his courtroom fights with an immediate assignment to Vietnam, which was rescinded as a "mistake" only when press denunciations of the assignment apparently caused too much embarrassment for the Army.

As for the rules by which military trials are conducted, they would be very entertaining if they did not result in nearly 90,000 cases of dubious justice every year. There is no bail, no indictment by grand jury, no trial by peers, no impartial judge; in short, no due process--all supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. The defense attorneys have no subpoena power, little freedom of cross-examination, no power to call military witnesses. In the trail of Captain Levy, the colonel who pressed charges against him admitted under oath that he had no intention of doing so originally but had changed his mind and had decided to try to send Levy to prison "after reading what they had on him in a G-2 investigation." The investigation by the Army's intelligence unit was the heart of the entire case--but the Army refused to allow Levy's lawyers to read it.

Defense attorneys must their requests for witnesses through the prosecution, and if the prosecution doesn't think the witness should be Private Yost wanted to call two noted psychologists at his own expense, but the prosecutions turned him down. The Army also refused to take verbatim transcripts of the preliminary hearings, saying it could not afford to hire secretaries and that the base had no available tape recorders. The press gets even shorter shrift. The Pentagon refused to make any of its trial records available to me, but I was able to obtain them elsewhere.

In a civilian court, a juror will be knocked off the jury if the defense attorney can show that he is biased against his client. Not so in a military court. The military judge has nothing to say about it; the question of a prospective juror's bias is left up to a vote of the other members of the jury.

A stunning example of what this can mean emerged at the trial of the first of the Presidio defendants. The military defense counsel, Captain Sullivan, was subjecting one of the prospective jurors, an Army colonel, to what Sullivan considered to be some routine questions:

Sullivan: Colonel, do you believe in the right to demonstrate?

Colonel: No.

Sullivan: Maybe you didn't understand my question. Let's forget about the Army for a moment. Do you believe that civilians have the right to express their views in peaceful demonstrations in support of or in opposition to an official policy?

Colonel: No.

Military Judge (interrupting): Colonel, you know the Constitution provides that right.

Colonel: I don't care.

Sullivan: OK, we'll challenge him for bias.

The jury of colonels voted down Sullivan's challenge and accepted their brother colonel as unbiased and fit to serve.

There was really nothing unusual in this experience. The Army makes no pretense of supplying objective jurors. In another of the Presidio trials, these were the notable responses from three representative members of the jury as they were being selected:

Lieutenant Colonel Frank C. Marshall said that parades and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam "annoyed" him, but he wouldn't let that prevent him from giving a fair decision to somebody charged with anti-war demonstrating. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Brennan said he felt the reports in the press that called it a mutiny were accurate--but he hadn't formed any opinion about the case. Colonel Harold E. Curry, who is in the R. O. T. C. Division of the Sixth Army, complained that there are "incidents that occur on campuses throughout this Army area almost on a daily basis" with "an adverse effect" on his R. O. T. C., but he didn't feel it prejudiced him against sit-downers and protesters. And he said he didn't have anything against the A. C. L. U., although he had found in his experience with them that A. C. L. U. attorneys are "misinformed, in a frequency of the cases I got involved in."

Lieutenant Colonel Everett F. Whitney gave the most incredible response. Although the mutiny arrests brought about the most explosive publicity in the Presidio's history, he said he had read only the headlines mentioning the mutiny and that these had not interested him enough to make him read further. And--so he claimed--nobody who worked in his office at the base was much interested, either.

Q.: You say you heard it [discussed] perhaps in office talk. Can you recall what you heard in the office talk, if you recall?

Whitney: Yes, "Have you seen the morning paper?" "Yes, I seen [sic] the morning paper." And some person would mention, "Well, I seen [sic] they had trouble up in the stockade"--but not anything in detail.

Whitney also had a low opinion of demonstrations, although he stopped short of calling them criminal.

Q.: How do you feel about demonstration and protest?

Whitney: I'm wondering who's paying these people who can afford this time to go out and do it....

Q.: Do you feel that a protest is ever a legal means of expressing a grievance?

Whitney: I can only presume it is. I would have to say that I feel that a protest is not necessarily an illegal [italics mine] means of expressing a grievance. That would be the best answer I could give you on that one.

Much of the defense's argument would, of course, rest on the fact that the stockade was run in an oppressive, sloppy, perverse way and that, therefore, the group of protesters had valid complaints to make, even if they chose the wrong way to make them. But the defense could hope for little attention from Whitney, who had been an inspector general from 1964 to 1966, visiting prisoners in stockades and listening to thousands of similar complaints.

Q.: During this two-year period, did you have the opportunity to check on the complaints or grievances of people who were residing in the stockades as prisoners?

Whitney: Yes.

Q.:Did you find that any of those complaints were justified?

Whitney: Yes, I'm sure there must have been some. In fact, I know--I recall one.

Why didn't defense attorney Paul Halvonik challenge these colonels and try to have them tossed off the jury? "I didn't make any challenges for cause," he explains, "because it's insane to do it. I never challenge for cause in a military trial. All it does is set the other jurors against you. They take it as an insult to a fellow officer."

In any court-martial where the pride of the brass is at stake, or where the brass feels the need to make an example of the defendant, the defense attorney is always dead. There were grotesque examples of this in the trial of Captain Howard Levy, perhaps the most headlined victim of military injustice, who went to prison after being convicted of saying things that fomented "disloyalty and disaffection" and for refusing to train Special Forces troops who were going to Vietnam, he was convinced, to commit war crimes.

Several quite revealing rulings were made by Colonel Earl V. Brown, the trial judge in that case, who was also, at that time, the chief legal officer of the Army (he has since found what may be better use of his talents, as a professor of engineering). In the first place, he ruled that the truth of Captain Levy's statements about the war was irrelevant. Secondly, he refused to let Captain Levy's counsel ask witnesses to define disloyalty and disaffection. "All right," Morgan said to the judge, "would you please define disloyalty for us?" "Later," said the judge. Morgan pressed on: "Could I have a meaning from the court what disaffection is?" Again, the judge said he would provide a definition later. When the later time arrived, the judge did give definitions, but he added, "I am not satisfied with them myself."

Now, it may seen odd that Levy was convicted of saying things that may have been true but whose truth was irrelevant and of saying things that fomented reactions that the judge himself could not define; but the character of that trial took on even weirder shapes than these. For Levy was also accused and convicted of "conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman," under Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; and one will better understand military justice if he analyzes the judge's explanation to the jury of what constitutes a violation: "Any officer who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman violates this article."

In the face of the verbatim transcript of the trial itself, the Army would be hard put to dispute attorney Morgan's historical summation of the case: "The problem with Levy was, he was tried and convicted of crimes that don't exist. Like witchcraft and heresy. That's exactly what he was tried for. We went through a lot of years in this country with everybody thinking witchcraft and heresy were not things to be tried for, but that's what he was tried for, that's what he's serving a sentence for."

Corruption cannot be removed from military jurisprudence until sycophancy is removed from the military system--which means that corruption is permanent. The commanding officer handpicks the jury from members of his command who are subject to his promotion and control and who, naturally, want to please him. Usually, they are career officers or career enlisted men (who make the toughest jurors), who know that the general wouldn't have called the court-martial in the first place unless he thought the defendant was guilty; this was especially true in the Presidio case, where the investigating officer had ruled that the mutiny charge, "an offense which has its roots in the harsh admiralty laws of previous centuries, is an overreaction by the Army," but was overruled by the commanding general. The general's lawyer (the staff judge advocate) appoints both the prosecuting attorney and the military defense; the general's attorney draws up the charges and he reviews the verdict; and, finally, the general decides whether or not to approve what the court-martial has done.

Not even the American Legion, usually looked upon as an apologist for the military, can stomach the inequities that are pressed down upon military justice at the whim of the generals and colonels and admirals. A special Legion committee that studied the Uniform Code of Military Justice concluded bleakly that "many of the evils and irregularities which have arisen in the American system--both past and present--probably have their origin in the system itself, and no amount of patching and mending of the present system can entirely eliminate command control and influence." Meaning that the Legion sees no way to keep the generals from rigging their own courts. And why, asks the Legion, should every court be convened ad hoc, for every individual case? Why not a permanent military court--unlinked to any particular command--as was found "even in Germany before the coming of Hitler"?

Some, agreeing with the Legion on the probable futility of trying to correct the military-court procedure from inside, would take away most of the military's jurisdiction. Those who have come to this conclusion range from responsible public advocates such as Charles Morgan to U. S. Senators such as George McGovern.

Says Morgan:

There's just no point of having any sort of trials conducted within the military. The military is incapable of understanding the Constitution. Several things are going to have to happen if we're going to have a decent Army in the future. First of all, there's absolutely no need to have Army physicians. You can get physicians for the Army who don't have to run around in Khaki green, saluting. Let the Army hire civilian doctors. Secondly, you don't need chaplains in the Army. Let the various churches pay for them and send them to accompany the Army, if they want to. And the third thing is, the Army should be made to give up its lawyers and its courts. The handling of folks who've got good sense is a great problem, and the Army doesn't know how. People with good sense expect to be covered by the Bill of Rights, and Army justice doesn't permit this. There's absolutely no argument against giving Army personnel the protection of civilian juries.

Senator McGovern agrees, with only a slight qualification:

I think it would be a good idea to put the serious legal and criminal questions in the hands of the civilians. It seems to me that the civilian supremacy over the military would be protected by having serious charges handled in civilian courts. The processes of justice are more dependable when handled on the civilian side. The right to freedom of speech is poorly protected by the military. Much as it galls me that they have the wrong ideas, I do not believe generals should be muzzled. But I also believe privates who want to meet in groups on the base and denounce the Vietnam war should be able to speak their minds under the same protection. Either on or off the base, they should have the right to march in peace parades. They should not find themselves confronting courts-martial for these activities. The Bill of Rights should extend to the military.

Perhaps the very best argument for taking the process of justice away from the military is that the officers are often so obtuse that they really don't know what their critics are getting at when they talk about constitutional right. For instance, when they prepared to fly Captain Levy from Fort Jackson to begin his three-year term at Leavenworth, it was one of those early, chilly, odd Army hours provoke strange conversations. Levy was standing by the plane as it warmed up, and some of his friends were there to see him off and a colonel who had escorted him to the plane was there; suddenly, the colonel interrupted the others' goodbyes to say quite earnestly, "Captain, I want you to know I'm in the Army really to defend the rights of all, and while I disagree with what you said, I'll defend to my death your right to speak." It was hopeless, and Levy, knowing this better than anyone, responded amiably, "Well, goddamn."