Armed Forces: The Defiant 43

Throughout a long Texas night, 43 troubled soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division squatted defiantly in a parking lot at Fort Hood, far out in the wasteland between Waco and Austin. They had been ordered to Chicago as part of the force massed by Mayor Richard Daley to guard the Democratic Convention from antiwar demonstrators and a feared eruption of Negro militants. The violence that later engulfed the convention was viewed with cool, apolitical disdain by Chicago’s Negroes, but Daley was taking no chances. The 43 troopers were black too. And rather than risk having to oppose soul brothers with bayonets and gas grenades, they were determined to flout their orders and face punishment by military courts.

In the group were 26 veterans of Viet Nam. “We feel that we’ve done enough for our country,” said one. “We shouldn’t have to go out there and do wrong to our own people. I can’t see myself spraying tear gas on my fellow people.” A few minutes after 6 a.m., a colonel vainly ordered the 43 to leave the parking lot. Then MPs closed in and quietly led the protesters off to Fort Hood’s barbed-wire stockade.

“A lawful order must be obeyed,” said a Pentagon general about the unpleasantness at Fort Hood. “It is as simple as that.” It is not, of course, by any means as simple as that. The Army may well be summoned into action again in Negro ghettos in the future, and the generals are troubled by the possibility that black soldiers will find that they owe higher fealty to the black community than to the U.S. Army. “The problem is so fearful,” admits one officer, “that we won’t even discuss these people as Negroes.” Yet the Army, officially colorblind, cannot single out black soldiers and question their reliability in advance.

Sensibly, the generals are therefore straining to prevent the protest at Fort Hood from becoming a case of Negroes v. the Army. When the demonstration began, the soldiers’ division commander, Major General John K. Boles Jr., even spent close to an hour pleading with the recalcitrant troopers, persuaded 17 men to abandon the sit-in and return to barracks. By arresting the 43, in the parking lot, the Army ruled out bringing a charge of refusal to board the airlift to Chicago later in the day. The Army might also have tried them en masse. Instead, they will go before individual courts, accused of disobeying an order.