Four years before I was brought to
Originally named the Fort Dix Thirty-Eight, soldiers who were charged with rioting faced courts-martial, resulting in the sentencing of some men to three years in military prison. About the same time official representatives of the
All of the detainees who exited the bus I traveled on were placed in several two-story white clapboard World War II-era barracks. The stockade was located just beyond these barracks, now a cinder-block building surrounded with barbed wire, replacing the clapboard buildings where prisoners had been housed when the 1969 riot took place.
When I arrived at Dix, I knew about the conditions at the stockade and the riots and courts-martial that had taken place. I was frightened by the prospect of being placed in this stockade. The conditions that led to the riot and the resulting trials had been publicized in antiwar literature. Similar to the present, however, trying to determine the truth about military issues was difficult to find in the mainstream press. Much information had either been self-censored by writers who dealt with the war, censored by editors, or reported through the filter of what the government wanted known. There was no such thing as “imbedded journalists” during
I was lucky. I was able to afford a lawyer who argued before the company commander to keep me out of the brig. I had appealed orders to report for active duty and was savvy about not speaking to military brass without my lawyer present. Many, however, who were not so fortunate were immediately sent to the prison.
In 1977 I applied to the Carter amnesty program, and my discharge was retroactively upgraded to 1973. I had balked at using the Ford clemency program of 1974, its guidelines punitive toward military resisters, clearly favoring draft resisters. Military resisters, under the Ford program, were given “bad” discharges that could later be upgraded to clemency discharges, discharges that offered no benefits. While the Carter program was seen as more “liberal” in its treatment of military resisters, only about 16,000 benefited from this amnesty out of about 430,000. Few veterans received a discharge “under honorable conditions,” and nearly all who received upgraded discharges were barred from receiving any benefits. The latter was seen as vindictive and reflected the nation’s and government’s disdain for those who had opposed the war from within the military. Technically, a soldier who received a so-called “bad” discharge, and did not oppose the war, could receive veterans’ benefits, but those who opposed the war from within the ranks of the military were barred by law from receiving any benefits. Many soldiers who resisted the Vietnam War were in dire need of benefits.
When cases of torture were reported at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, opened in 2002 to house over 700 prisoners from the war in
In 2004, when reports of torture and abuse by the military at Abu Ghraib prison in
The
Howard Lisnoff is an educator and freelance writer. He can be reached through his Web site at www.notesofamilitaryresister.net.
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