When the Fort Hood Three refused to go to Vietnam, they sparked a military revolution
The war was “illegal, immoral, and unjust”
In the summer of 1966, three Army privates stationed at Fort Hood in Texas received their orders: they had 30 days leave, then they would ship out to Vietnam. They were young — David Samas and James Johnson were just 20 years old, Dennis Mora was 25. Upon hearing the news, Samas travelled to Chicago and married his girlfriend. Then he met the other two in New York. They had made a decision. They weren’t going to Vietnam.
It was a turning point in the anti-war movement. The Fort Hood Three, as they came to be known, decided to mount an organized military resistance campaign. They had connections to leftist groups in New York, and soon they rallied activists and pacifist organizations around them. They gave a press conference in a church announcing their refusal.
Simultaneous to their press conference, their lawyers filed a permanent injunction against their being shipped out on the grounds the war was “illegal, immoral, and unjust.” If their case failed, they were prepared to face prison time.
The Fort Hood Three’s families were called by the police and told that if their sons didn’t retract their statements, there would be trouble. The men went ahead anyway, co-writing a pamphlet laying out their anti-war stance.
They had heard talk in their barracks and knew they were not alone — other soldiers were uneasy about their orders. If they stood up, maybe others would too. If enough military joined them, it would add “badly needed muscle” to the peace movement. Pacifists, obviously, had been against the war all along. But they were often seen as not just anti-war, but anti-soldier. The men lamented, “In the past, the peace movement has been surprisingly slow to carry its message to the soldiers.” Samas argued that G.I.s were being told that pacifists were against them. But it didn’t need to be this way. Soldiers, after all had the most to lose — their lives. “Tell them you want them to live, not die,” Samas wrote.
They were taking cues from the black power movement — indeed many in the military were themselves already involved. The Fort Hood Three were a cross-section of Americans of color: Johnson was black from East Harlem, Mora was Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, and Samas was Lithuanian and Italian from Chicago. Coming from working class backgrounds, they understood that people of color and non-elites were seen as expendable and would be the first to be thrown in the line of fire — quite literally — and the last to see any benefits that American society offered. If this worked, military groups, black power activists, and pacifists would unite to create a powerful lobby to end the war from the inside out.
The Fort Hood Three planned a second press conference for the following week. They would stand alongside Stokely Carmichael, the famous civil rights activist, members of the Peace Parade Committee, other groups, and their families.
None of the men made it to the second press conference.
Johnson and Mora were arrested at a peace rally immediately preceding the press conference. According to Samas’ later testimony, he was walking in the Bronx with his wife when he was approached by two men in suits with badges. He had noticed men in suits following him before. Now they told him his leave had been canceled and they were talking him to Fort Dix. He didn’t have any bags packed, but the men insisted on taking him that moment, right there in the street. He was only allowed a moment to hand his wife some money. Johnson and Mora were immediately shuttled to the base as well. The tactic was obvious: get the men out of public eye before dissent could spread.
The press conference went on anyway. Samas’ young wife had taken an unedited draft of his statement when he was arrested. She read it in his absence, surrounded by activists, media, and other family members. “In a great way, I too am responsible for the boys who already are in Vietnam,” she quoted her husband as saying. It was a rallying cry: dissent was a civic duty.
But it wasn’t just Americans the Fort Hood Three were worried about. Samas would later say of the Vietnamese, “We aren’t giving them a free choice in what kind of government, what kind of life they should live, or what kind of system they should live under.”
It was an abandonment of the military principle of blind obedience, and that obedience required a bedrock of trust that one’s superiors had the country’s best interests at heart. The Fort Hood Three’s revolt was an early indication of what happens when the military’s trust in their leaders dissolves.
For better and for worse, they were ahead of their time. The war was just over a year old, and though there had been opposition from the very beginning, public opinion hadn’t yet crested to a consensus. As Todd Gitlin explained in his history tome, The Sixties, draft resistance didn’t begin in earnest until the following year. Being the first to oppose the U.S. military behemoth came with all its attendant anxieties. They could take no comfort in the idea that their revolt would be memorialized as an act of moral resistance.
In September of 1966, the three men were court martialed. During their separate trials, they argued the war was illegal. Samas cited Nuremberg code as precedent and said, “The way I was brought up was to judge things with my conscience, and that is what I did.” The men were presented as counterpoints to Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi who defended his orchestration of the “Final Solution” to kill millions of Jews by saying that he was just following orders. They were not unthinking cogs in an inhuman killing machine, but citizens of conscience and intellect.
The military court ruled against them, charging them with insubordination. They were all dishonorably discharged. Mora was sentenced to three years in jail, Samas and Johnson to five. When Johnson received his sentence, an audible gasp was heard from the gallery.
Not long after, a sparsely attended tribute was held for the men in New York. Mora’s sister warned about apathy about the war and the the fates of the Fort Hood Three. In the coming years, the military would try to clamp down on similar conscientious objectors with brutal and excessive punishments. But insubordination proved contagious. There would be dozens of demonstrations on bases and over 250 anti-war newspapers run by the enlisted. The Fort Hood Three were the first sprouts of resistance in what would become the full-on movement that ultimately toppled the Vietnam War. Not long after the Fort Hood Three, another soldier refused his orders, saying “I follow the Fort Hood Three. Who will follow me?”
