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A VIETNAM STORY: FROM OTHERING TO SOLIDARITY  
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JJ Johnson
April 29, 2025
Washington Spectator
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_ Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, JJ Johnson reflects
on the journey that led him, along with two fellow Fort Hood soldiers,
to refuse orders to Vietnam and on our situation today, "the darkest
period in my lifetime." _

Private Dennis Mora, Private First Class David Samas and Private
First Class JJ Johnson (left to right) were the first were the first
U.S. soldiers to publicly refuse deployment to Vietnam in 1966,

 

In my 1950s East Harlem household, solidarity was akin to religion. In
my family’s two-bedroom tenement, all were welcome, irrespective of
race, ethnicity, religious belief, or sexual orientation. As a child,
five-syllable words like _solidarity_ were not in my vocabulary, but
fairness and kindness were.

Although we were poor, my parents—both of whom were orphaned for
parts of their childhoods—always found room in our two-bedroom
walk-up for relatives and friends who needed a place to stay.

My dad was also a trade union activist in District 65, then a small
scrappy union of wholesale and warehouse workers. In my childhood I
took little interest in his work and unions as a whole, but later in
life I realized how profoundly I was influenced by his teachings and
his example.

I dropped out of college during my sophomore year. In November 1965, I
received my “Greetings From Uncle Sam”—the actual wording of
U.S. Army induction orders at the time.

I was drafted in December and assigned to a Fort Hood, Texas, signal
battalion for basic training. In the spring of 1966, I began my
advanced training as a signal unit switchboard operator at Fort
Gordon, outside Augusta, Georgia. There I joined a study group of
seven GIs who had questions about our nation’s involvement in
Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

I needed justification for taking up arms against a nation of farmers
and peasants 10,000 miles from our shores. The training films we were
forced to watch in basic offended more than informed. I also found
offensive the derogatory terms applied to the Vietnamese people and
others from Southeast Asia.

Two of the members of the Fort Gordon study group had been political
activists. They provided most of the reading material. They also
arranged meetings with local anti-war groups and members of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an early opponent of the
war and led at the time by Stokely Carmichael.

Reading the literature, especially from SNCC, taught me that as a
Black American, my battleground was at home, not in Southeast Asia. I
also learned that Black soldiers were disproportionately assigned to
the infantry and were dying at a rate far above our percentage in the
country.

I read that Ho Chin Minh, the revered leader of Vietnam’s
anti-colonial independence movement, lived in Harlem in the 1920s and
wrote a pamphlet denouncing the lynching of Black Americans. This
helped to endear me to Uncle Ho, as he was affectionately called, and
to the plight of the Vietnamese people who had fought for decades for
the right to self-determination.

During the summer of 1966, I and two other members of the study group,
Dennis Mora and David Samas, announced that we would not comply with
our orders to serve in Vietnam. “We refuse to take part in an
illegal, immoral and unjust war,” our joint statement read.

The support of our families, friends, and the growing anti-war
movement helped us stand our ground and sustained us during our 28
months in prison. The growth of the opposition outside and within the
military convinced us that making our opposition public had helped to
build the movement.

I took special pride in heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s refusal
to step forward for induction and his contention, “I will not go
10,000 miles to help kill innocent Brown people.”

Weeks earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his “Beyond
Vietnam” address at Riverside Church, in which he called for an end
to the war and a “radical revolution of values.” He also said that
the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today.”

The corporate media and even organizations like the NAACP condemned
him, arguing that Dr. King should not link disparate issues—war and
civil rights. In his “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech in Atlanta
later that year, Dr. King said, “We must see now that the evils of
racism, exploitation, and militarism are all tied together. And you
can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other.”

Dr. King connected the dots. The problem was systemic. Years later, I
would better understand the connections. I became a labor journalist
because I wanted to help other working people connect the dots and see
the intersection of the evils.

A clearer understanding of our common cause, I felt, would knock down
walls, build bridges, and move us closer to a more equal and humane
society. We’ve alternately taken some steps forward and backward. A
major setback has been the decline of the labor movement, although the
stirrings in recent years are encouraging.

Today, we have entered the darkest period in my lifetime. Far-right
authoritarianism (some call it fascism) has arrived on the heels of a
racist campaign of otherism. Our nation is now controlled by an
oligarchy headed by the world’s richest man—a child of apartheid
South Africa.

The current president is not the first to stoke racism and xenophobia,
but he has taken it the furthest in generations. A nation founded on
the exclusion and removal of its Indigenous people and erected on the
backs of enslaved Africans helped write the book on racism and
othering.

The guardians of our nation’s vaunted exceptionalism would have us
believe that our borders and way of life are threatened by immigrants
of color. Like immigrants of earlier generations, they are simply
seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Many have
fled to escape governments and conditions for which U.S.
administrations are responsible.

“We are here because you were there,” say immigrants when
questioned about why they left their place of birth.

The process of othering is not just about who gets to be defined as
the true or real American. And it’s not simply about race. It’s
about tightening the grip of the corporate class and billionaires. As
Dr. King stressed, our fight is against the triple evils of racism,
economic exploitation, and militarism. One can’t be fully addressed
without addressing the others.

To keep the world safe for multinational corporations, the United
States commands roughly 800 military bases in some 80 countries around
the world. That enormous military presence also enriches the military
industrial complex that the late Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower warned our nation about in his 1961 farewell address.

Militarism together with the climate catastrophe are the chief factors
that have moved the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock to
89 seconds before midnight, indicating how close we are to destroying
the world.

A bedfellow of today’s militarism is Christian nationalism. _The
New York Times_ reported that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a
Louisiana Republican, is the first Christian nationalist to hold that
post.

Many Christian nationalists are Christian Zionists, who believe the
restoration of Jewish people to Israel is a prerequisite for the
second coming of Christ. That helps to explain the absence of
sufficient outrage over the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Red Scare of the last century has been replaced by the war on
terrorism. Today Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are the main
targets. Also in the crosshairs are immigrants of color, especially
students who oppose the policies of the Israeli administration.

The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act to harass,
silence, and kidnap immigrant students and workers. In April, the
Supreme Court lifted a restraining order that had prevented mass
deportations. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying that “not
only non-citizens could be taken off the streets, forced into planes
and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if
judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.”

The United States has been a flawed democracy from its inception. But
today we are threatened with the loss of our remaining rights.

Our only choice is to fight back—including us seniors—by forming
alliances and coalitions that are even broader and deeper than those
that helped to end the war against the Vietnamese people. In this
fight back, while respecting differences, there is no them or other,
only us.

_JJ Johnson is one of the Fort Hood 3, who in 1966 were the first U.S.
soldiers to publicly refuse to serve in Vietnam. He is a retired labor
journalist._

_The Washington Spectator [[link removed]] is
an independent, progressive and reader-supported journal of politics
and the arts published each month in print, and updated daily online
at washingtonspectator.org [[link removed]]. Click
here to contribute to The Washington Spectator
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* Ford Hood 3
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* Militarism
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* Christian nationalism
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* Solidarity
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