Veterans Call to Conscience Speakers Bureau Carl Dix Short Bio

My name is Carl Dix. I was a Vietnam war resister inside the U.S. military who refused to go to Vietnam (as part of the Fort Lewis 6--6 GI's who refused to go as a group) in 1970. I spent 19 months in Leavenworth Military Penitentiary for refusing orders. Since I was released, I've been a revolutionary activist and am currently National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I oppose the U.S. war on Iraq because it comes down to the U.S., the sole remaining imperialist superpower, planning to rain death and destruction on the Iraqi people to further its control over the whole world. I signed the Veterans Call to Conscience because it uses the experience of those of us who have been in the U.S. military to speak to society as a whole, and especially the youth, about what fighting in an imperialist war means. What it does to the people we are sent to invade, and what it represents for the whole world. Here is an interview that I did with the Revolutionary Worker concerning my history: RW: Let's talk a little about how you ended up in the military. CD: It was in 1968 and the draft was kicking then. I got a notice to report on April 6, 1968. It was a couple of days after the assassination of Martin Luther King and, with all that was going on, I didn't feel like reporting to the army that weekend. So, I wrote them a letter and said, "I got some other things going on right now and I'm not coming." They sent me back a letter that said, "We understand why you might not want to report during this tumultuous time and we will send you another notice in the near future." A month later two MP's came to my house, delivering the notice to report in June. They gave the notice to my mother and told her that I'd be in big trouble if I didn't show up. So I decided to show this time. So I'm in the army and the big thing that I'm thinking about and up against is am I going to end up in Vietnam. At that point I didn't know nothing about the Vietnam War so it wasn't like I had a principled opposition to it. But I knew that people were getting shot and killed in Vietnam. So this was not somewhere I wanted to end up. I came out of the basic training and the advanced training and I got orders to Germany. I didn't realize that we were sent to Germany for some on-the-job training and then we got orders to Vietnam in November of 1969, around the time of this big anti-war march on Washington. When I got to the overseas replacement station at Fort Lewis, Washington, I decided that I didn't want to go but I didn't know how to work this out. I didn't want to end up in jail so I was trying to figure out how was this gonna go. I figured that I needed to at least delay this. I looked at how they were putting the list together to send people to Vietnam and figured since this was the army there was probably not a centrally generated list of all the people who had orders to go to Vietnam. There was probably a private sitting down with a pencil and a note pad putting together the list. I found this guy taking your name down as you got your sheets and blankets. I didn't see anybody else collecting a list. So instead of going in the front door and signing up for my sheets and blankets, I went around to the back door and caught one of the GI's turning in his sheets as he went to get on the truck to get on the plane to go to Vietnam. I said, hey man give me your sheets. He said, "Oh no, they told us we had to turn our sheets in." I asked him what they were gonna do if he didn't turn his sheets in--ship him to Vietnam? He laughed and gave me his sheets. So I got bedding and my name wasn't on that pad. Two nights later they called the whole barracks out and one by one they called off the names of the people to get on the plane to go to Vietnam. Every name got called except mine. My name was the only one that wasn't on the list. These officers who were calling off the list were there looking at me like they know I did something wrong. They don't know what it is but they know that somehow I did something that got myself off that list. The next day I'm walking along the base kicking a stone when I felt a stone hit the back of my feet. I turned around and looked and there were these other two GI's walking along kicking stones. I said, hey what's up man and they said they had orders to Vietnam and they didn't want to go. I told them that was exactly how I felt and they asked me did I know how to get to downtown Tacoma cuz they had heard there were people there who could help us. In downtown Tacoma we looked for people who could help GI's with orders to Vietnam but who didn't want to go. We finally ran up on some people and we talked with them. We weren't sure we should tell them we were GI's until we knew if they were against the war too. When we found out they were, we told them we were GI's against the war and we needed some help. They turned us on to some people who told us that we could file for conscientious objector status. We filed our applications and that got us off the orders to go to Vietnam. Then they had to give us jobs on the base. They found out I can type so they made me a company clerk. I'm sitting in the main office where all the people come through. I didn't have to go to Vietnam but all these people were coming through this office on the way to Vietnam and probably a lot of them don't want to go. I decided that when people came through I would stop them all and interview them. I checked out the regulations on the basis for people to get off orders to go to Vietnam. I took people through an interview and when I found people who fit those categories then I asked them things like, were they the sole support of their family, were they the sole surviving son of a veteran who had been killed, did they have a relative already in the war zone. In addition to filing for conscientious objector status, these kinds of things were the basis to get off of orders to Vietnam. Then I began to discuss that aspect with them and if I found they were reluctant to go to Vietnam I would say, well, I have to inform you that there is a possibility for you to file an application to get off the orders. You know, it's my duty to inform you of this. I'm not trying to make you do this but you can if you want. We got about 75 to 100 people off the orders to go to Vietnam in the three weeks that I was the company clerk. They noticed this explosion in people filing to get off the orders and they did two things. First they bounced me out of the company clerk's job. And they changed army regulations so that anyone who filed an application to get off orders to go to Vietnam would still be sent to Vietnam for the months it took for the application to get processed. In other words, while you're waiting to see if you don't have to go to Vietnam, you're sitting in Vietnam. They figured that would take the steam out of people filing these applications. Then they turned down all the conscientious objector applications, every single one of them. We felt this was payback for what we had done so we figured we got to go back at them. We got on TV in the area. We went to anti-war demonstrations and spoke on it. We did this over the weekend and by Monday they came back and said, "It wasn't right for us to turn down all these applications at once. We should have given you all an individual process. So we're gonna allow everybody to refile their applications, and do additional documentation and so on." They were offering us a truce. They wouldn't send us to Vietnam--they would process us endlessly while we got out of the army one by one and then we wouldn't mess with their operation. We figured ok, we won't go to Vietnam. Then we had a discussion in the barracks. They put all the conscientious objectors in the same barracks so we wouldn't infect the rest of the military since this place was sending hundreds of people to Vietnam every day. There were about 30 of us at that point. There was a lot of discussion and debate about whether we should just accept this truce or did we have a responsibility to resist the war in Vietnam. And if any of us did resist the war in Vietnam would they then revoke everybody's thing and try to send all of us to Vietnam. We had a lot of discussion over that and finally decided the people who wanted to take this on should go ahead and take it on and those who didn't want to would stand back from it. But people understood why some of us felt like we could not accept that truce. While all this was going on Kent State and Jackson State happened--the National Guard and law enforcement shot down protesting students. That took it over the edge. We felt like we had to step out and become a part of this movement no matter what the consequences were. We hooked up with a local anti- war coalition that was trying to figure out how to reach the GI's. The base was pretty locked down. You had to have military ID or a reason to get on. That meant people were limited to trying to find GI's off the base and handing them some leaflets and trying to get them to take the leaflets back to the base. Most GI's were reluctant to do that because there was a case of a guy who had one flyer and showed it to another GI and he got six months in the stockade. We took 10,000 flyers. We knew how things got done on the base. If the base got littered the GI's had to go out and pick it up. We decided to litter the base with the anti-war flyers. We got a car, drove through the base and 10,000 flyers went out the windows. Calls went into the base commandant the next morning saying the base is a mess and he's got to get it cleaned up. They got all the GI's out, lined them up and made them go through the fields picking up the anti-war leaflets. People picked up the flyers, saw what they were and then everybody was talking about how the anti-war protesters flyered the base. Word got back to some officers that they got people picking up these anti-war flyers and they said, "Get those flyers away from the GI's." It became a battle -- the GI's wanted to keep the flyers but the officers had given orders to take them back. The protest and the fact that the base got flyered were the topics of conversation on the base for the next couple of days. They had to lock the base down to try to keep GI's from going to that protest. And even with that, a number of GI's broke through the lockdown to get to the protest. RW: What kind of impact did the anti-war movement have on the GI's? CD: That had a major impact. That was where a lot of people learned a lot of what they got around Vietnam. The message was coming in about what was really going on in Vietnam and how this war was really about trying to suppress a people's liberation struggle. RW: So you distributed the flyer and then what? CD: The anti-war flyer was the first thing we did but we figured we got to go beyond that. There was this brother, Willie Williams, who was facing mutiny charges. He was a GI who had left because his family was in a bad situation and he needed more money than he got as a Private in the army to support them. He went AWOL and got a job to support his family. While he was doing this he hooked up with the Black Panther Party. They finally caught him and brought him back. He formally resigned from the military and they refused to accept it. They were going to put him on trial for desertion. While he was awaiting the trial for desertion he circulated a petition in the barracks demanding freedom for Black people. There were 40 GI's in his barracks and he got 35 signatures. His charges got upped from desertion to mutiny and he was facing 99 years in prison. We formed the Willie Williams Defense Committee and we went out and spoke at anti-war rallies, we tried to publicize his case. The army was essentially forced to back off of the mutiny charges and just make it desertion and then that was busted down to "Absent Without Leave." Then Willie got a year at Leavenworth. In the course of doing this we decided that we were going to go for what we thought was the most out there, public thing we could do on Fort Lewis. Every Sunday the local TV station interviewed the base commandant's wife on her way to church. She would say that she was going in there to pray for the boys in Vietnam. Everybody on the base hated this cuz they thought that the commandant had no concern for the boys in Vietnam or the boys at Fort Lewis and his wife probably didn't either. We figured we'd hit this. We got together with a few civilians -- there were four GI's and four civilians. We positioned ourselves right where she came to do this interview and as the camera came up to get her sound bite about praying for the boys in Vietnam we broke into it. We started talking about the Willie Williams case, about the opposition to the war in Vietnam in society and in the military. And then we harangued her with something about how people like her are preying on the boys who are being sent to Vietnam. We went to our car and tried to get off the base. We delayed too long and got caught. At first they were going to take us to the edge of the base and scatter us out and drop us off. This was the procedure when they caught civilians on the base. But when they found out that four of us were GI's they dropped the civilians off at the edge of the base and they brought us back and put us into custody. This was on Sunday, and Monday they denied the conscientious objector applications of the four of us who did the action. By Tuesday they denied most of the other conscientious objector applications too, although they did accept the application of one guy so it wouldn't be a blanket thing. The rest of us now had orders to go to Vietnam. We had a lot of discussion about what we were going to do. The majority sentiment was to try going to Canada and that's what most people did. Six of us decided that this was not the step we wanted to take. We had been standing up and opposing this war and we felt that we should stay here and refuse to go to Vietnam. I wasn't a revolutionary at this point but I did feel that my fight was not in Vietnam, it was here. A lot of that was bound up with the Black Liberation movement that was developing. I had seen the kids in the Southeastern U.S. have the dogs let loose on them, seen them get hit with hoses, as they went against Jim Crow segregation. I had seen the beginnings of the rebellions in cities across the country. I had not been a part of any of that but it all impacted me and I knew that somehow I had a fight here. I didn't know exactly what it was or exactly how to fight it but I did know that my fight was here so I wasn't leaving for Canada. Six of us decided that we were going to refuse. The morning that the orders were set for I told them I was not going to Vietnam and the first sergeant ordered this guy to get a pistol and rounds out of the weapons room and to shoot me if I make a move. I started to think that this might be a little more difficult than I thought. We had until that night to report but my commanding officer decided he wasn't going to let it go on that long. He pulled a truck up and gave me a direct order to get in the truck. I said I ain't gonna go and I got arrested and taken to the stockade. I ended up in the stockade that morning and one by one the other guys showed up. RW: You were tried for refusing the orders to Vietnam. What was the outcome of that? CD: The judge made a point of ignoring anything our attorney raised. He said at one point, "I have to allow you to say this for the appeal but it will have no impact here and if I fall asleep will someone wake me when he's finished." He just wanted to make it real clear that we were going to jail and he wasn't listening to any argument we had. We all got convicted but we didn't all get the same sentence. One guy got three years, two of us got two years; two others got one year and one guy got 58 days. The guy who got 58 days went back to the company and it turned out that the company commander liked him and thought that his only problem was that he had fallen under our sway. He did 58 days, went back to the company and was allowed to stay there. The orders to Vietnam were forgotten. The guy who got three years had his sentence busted down to two. When you got that much time you usually got sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary in a couple of months. In a few days we were all in Leavenworth except for the guy who got 58 days. They broke records in processing us out cuz they said we were a "cancer on the place." I was pretty scared of Leavenworth. The stockade was like boot camp again, not much worse than that except that you were locked in at night. But then again, at boot camp you didn't dare go out at night either, most of the time. I didn't know what I was going to face at Leavenworth. I decided to check out who was there, and the first person I fell in with there was Willie Williams. He got sent there from the stockade at Ft. Lewis before we got arrested. Through him I met some other people and then we met some of the newer people coming in. We began to talk about what's going on, what are some of the issues and what are things we can do. We found out that there had been a long struggle for a Black History class at Leavenworth and we decided to take it up. We could move on it and a lot of people in the prison wanted it, so it would give us a network of support. But also, we figured if we got it, it would give us some freedom to do some things. We could go into the class, and since the guards wouldn't be running the class you'd be able to do some stuff. So we contacted the Black Student Union at the University of Kansas because we knew they were tight with the Black Panther Party. But we also knew they were a legitimate student organization and we were going to try to get hooked up through them. We decided we needed to find somewhere to have these discussions that were less under the noses of the guards. We scouted and found that there was one area where we could legitimately be inside the prison but where the surveillance system wasn't working. The cameras had somehow gotten disabled and never got repaired. We held our meetings there. Sometimes only the core was there but other times there were also people who just wanted to kick it. There were about 50 people at some of the meetings and then only a half a dozen or eight people at some of the other meetings. We also broke through on something else that was important. When we came into the prison it was strictly segregated. And that was by the prisoners, not by the guards. You went into the lunch room, you went to watch TV, you went to the game room, the Blacks would be in one place, whites in another and Latinos in another. And there was very little mixing. We were actually able to break through that, and part of the reason we were able to break through it was that of the five Fort Lewis 6 people who came to Leavenworth there were three whites, one Chicano and one Black and we hung together. We also hung out with other people but we hung together. People would ask us why. Blacks would ask me why I was hanging out with those white guys, and they would get approached that way too. We said we're friends and we're together in the struggle. We were together in what got us here and we're not gonna split up just because that's the way things go here. In place of the strict racial segregation, we got political breakdowns. There would be a core of radicals who would hang together irrespective of nationality. There would be the Black nationalist camp, which on some issues would work with the radical camp and then on some others wouldn't. There was still a Chicano camp but on a number of issues they would unite with the radicals and with the Black nationalists. We were actually able to build a multinational grouping to fight for this Black Studies program. This was a very important advance because as long as it was just something the Black prisoners wanted then the commandant had an easy way to deal with it. He would say he couldn't do something that was just for the Black prisoners and that would be something the other prisoners wouldn't get. So we pushed forward on this. We didn't get the hook-ups with the students from Kansas and we sent out some other letters. We got a response from the Black Studies Department of the University of Missouri. We went to the commandant with it and he said that he couldn't do this because it was something for the Black prisoners. Now, we had actually done it this way on purpose. The Black prisoners raised it and we had the whites and Chicanos in reserve. We wanted the commandant to give a reason for turning it down and we expected that reason. So we said, oh you didn't know that all the prisoners wanted this? Then white prisoners and Chicano prisoners and Native People all came forward and said that they wanted this Black Studies program. They said that they felt that we were shortchanged in the American educational system and we all wanted to learn the history of Black people. Everybody was ready to make these arguments about why they wanted it and the commandant's reason for not going forward was flanked by this development. But he still refused to do it. A little later they came through and arrested 50 people in the prison. They swept through the prison, cracked open your cell, grabbed you, took you out and took you to the hole. They had to open up a new hole. There was a part of the prison that hadn't been used for a couple of years, and they set it up as an emergency solitary situation. But it wasn't really solitary because they had 50 of us down there. They were aware that we were going past their surveillance to have our meetings. They didn't know what we were discussing, but they thought it was something that would be detrimental to them. They knew who went past their surveillance on a regular basis and that's where they got their 50 people from. They held us for a while and then they took people in and subjected them to interrogation to try to find out what it was we were planning. When we got taken down to solitary we thought that the worst could happen. That wing of the prison hadn't been used for a couple of years because the last time it was used a prisoner had been murdered there. The official story was he had hung himself, but when his body was taken out it had bruises all over it. So it was clear that a beating had been administered. RW: We talked about the relationship between you GIs and the anti-war movement at the time. Well, one of the things that always seems to come up big in the anti-war movement--especially in the last Gulf War--is the issue of supporting the troops. And it will probably be a big question now. Already some people are raising that as a given--"of course we have to support our troops"--and as a restraint on the movement. How did that play itself out in your situation and how do you view it today? CD:Well, I valued the role that people opposing the war in Vietnam played. If it weren't for them, I would not have been able to do what I did. To me that was the best move I ever made. Going to Vietnam and being part of the United States' attempt to drown the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people in blood would have been the worst mistake I ever made. I needed the exposure that I got from occasionally reading the Black Panther Party newspaper, seeing the anti-war protests on TV, searching out the protesters and talking to them, finding out why they were against the war--I needed that kind of information and exposure to get to the point where I could make a decision on whether I should go over there and fight or was my fight right here. But I also needed that example of resistance to be able to develop the strength to do what I did. So when I speak to people I thank the anti-war movement for helping me to come to the right decision and refuse to go to Vietnam. At one point a lot of sentiment in opposition to the war in Vietnam developed inside the U.S. military. In fact, it got to the point in Vietnam where they could no longer field U.S. troops as a reliable fighting force. When I was going into the military they were talking about the different ranks and what our tasks would be. But they also talked about life expectancy--how long do people in a particular position usually last before they become casualties. The position that became casualties the quickest were second lieutenants. We always thought it would have been the grunts, the infantrymen, but it was second lieutenants. The army told us it was because second lieutenants often had forward observer duty, and the enemy was targeting them because of the bars on their shoulders and so on. We found out later, though, that part of the reason second lieutenants had such a high casualty rate is that they were the ones in the field commanding the troops and a lot of the time the troops were pretty determined to avoid combat and the second lieutenants were determined to lead them into combat. There would often be disagreement between the two positions and the army is not a democratic organization-- people didn't get to vote so they developed other ways of overriding the attempts of the second lieutenants to take them into combat. A lot of those second lieutenants got hit by what the military calls friendly fire-- though it wasn't so friendly. They got fragged; some of them got shot in the back trying to lead their troops into battle. Some of them got shot face up when they were trying to force their troops to go into battle. So there was a point where the military was no longer a reliable fighting force in Vietnam. Part of how that developed was that the sentiment against the war and the revolutionary sentiment that was developing throughout the U.S. permeated the military because it was drawn from average, ordinary people in society--and especially drawn from the oppressed. And the development of things like the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party--the Puerto Rican revolutionary party--and revolutionary groupings among the Chicanos had an impact among the GI's. To me it was the resistance movement throughout society that was helping GI's to see what the war was about. There was also the direct experience of the GI's as part of this. When you are over there, you realize that you are fighting a whole country and that all of the people there seem to want to oppose what you're doing there. This got some people to thinking about what motivated the Vietnamese people. What made men, women and children fight against the U.S. military machine, at that point the mightiest military machine in the world? What made these people without sophisticated weapons put their lives on the line to force the U.S. army out? It made some GI's think, and some of them learned some stuff off of that. There were a lot of brothers from Nam who told me about things they did that they weren't proud of. When I hooked up with Vietnam Veterans Against the War there was a lot of testifying about this. The other important thing I found out from talking with GI's who were in Vietnam was the way in which the Vietnamese people's resistance would try to raise these questions with the GI's, especially with the Black GI's. I talked with a lot of Black GI's who told me that their first Black History lesson was in Nam and they got it from the VC. They would run into Vietnamese who had essentially overpowered them and had their lives in their hands and instead of killing them, the Vietnamese asked these soldiers why they were there fighting against the Vietnamese people when Black people were being suppressed in the U.S. They wanted to know why the Black GI's weren't back in the U.S. fighting with their people instead of fighting to suppress the Vietnamese people. This had a huge impact on some people. Here was "the enemy" raising to you where your fight really was and you feeling like they were right. RW: : In terms of today, what would you say are the most important things that you can take from your experience as a GI resister during the Vietnam War and say to GI's today? CD:The most important thing is this: what is the nature of the war that you are being called on to fight. That's the most important thing and it is the most important decision that people have to make. They have to make it not by listening to the government, not by listening to the mainstream media, but they have to dig for what is this actually about. You can't accept George Bush saying that we have to go to Iraq because Saddam Hussein might have weapons of mass destruction. Hey, George Bush has many more weapons of mass destruction than Saddam Hussein. This is not about weapons of mass destruction. You have to get down to what this is about. And when you get down to this, you will find that this is an unjust war. It's not exactly the same as Vietnam because we're not talking about Iraq as a revolutionary country. It's not the U.S. trying to suppress popular revolution. But it is the United States trying to exert its domination over a very crucial section of the world and planning to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people to exercise that domination. That's an unjust war and my take is that you should not want to be a part of it. That's what I decided in the 1960s. Now people have to decide for themselves, but an unjust war is a war that should not be fought as far as I'm concerned. This is the most important thing I would say. The other thing I would say, and this is irrespective of whether people are in the military, it is very important that there be a movement of resistance throughout society. Just as I needed a movement of resistance to find out what Vietnam was all about because I couldn't rely on the authorities, the government, the military, the media to tell me, people need a resistance movement that is kicking out the real deal on what the war is about. They also need that example of resistance because people are going to be faced up with a tough choice just like I was faced with a tough choice. In L.A. people told me that there are many more military recruiters in the high schools than there are college counselors and that says something about the future this system has in store for youth. People need to know what the situation is. And a third thing--I talked about how I had to deal with the question of whether my fight was in Vietnam or was it here and I decided that my fight was here. Initially I didn't know what that fight was. I knew I was against the Vietnam War, I was against the way that Black people are oppressed. It took me a while to understand that both of these things stem from the nature of this system and the way in which capitalism works and what is needed is a revolution. And it was after that when I became a revolutionary and a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Well, youth today face these same questions. George Bush said about that we have to fight this war on terrorism to keep this way of life in effect. People have to ask themselves what is this way of life he wants to keep in effect. It is a way of life that people should be fighting against and fighting to get rid of. And the way to do that for real, once and for all, is through revolution, to overthrow this system and go on to build a whole new society on the ashes of this messed-up one. That's the challenge that the youth of today face. I know that is a lot to lay out on people but what we do say that people can and must do is to grapple with the nature of the war we are being called on to support and fight. If it is unjust then we have to resist it and we have to resist it going as far as we can in that resistance. And in the course of doing this we want to exchange our revolutionary perspective and hear other perspectives. But we are pretty sure that our analysis is right and that it is the nature of this system that is driving us and the world towards war. This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online