?Dr. Howard B. Levy
Levy: There was actually no medic training program at Ft. Jackson.   The founder of the Special Forces medics program-made a tour of Ft. Jackson and he said he thought the program was lax, in fact, not there.   Most of the guys were not training them, not for political reasons but because they were lazy and didn't want to be bothered with them.   And they didn't think it was possible to train them anyway.   Six months to a year after I was court-martialed, another doctor adamantly and openly refused to train them and he was never given a direct order to train them and was never court-martialed.
Originally, my commanding officer intended to give me an article 15--a non-judicial form of punishment which could have amounted to something less than a jail sentence. . . restriction on post, a fine, a reprimand. . .and the papers were all written up for it.   At that point my commanding officer, Colonel Fancy, was visited by Military Intelligence and they plopped a G-2 dossier on his desk.   180 pages on me. After reading it he dertermined I was a communist and then dropped the article 15 and proceeded with the court-martial,
I don't know what was in the dossier, but I do know who complied it:  Agent West, and Agent West lives in Newberry County, South Carolina, where I was doing my voter registration work.   And we've alleged, and I think we're going to prove (in a review before a Pennsylvania district court in the next few months), that Agent West has had very close ties with racists in Newberry County, including the Klan.
btf:  Were you sent straight to Leavenworth once you were court-martialed?
Levy:  No, I spent six months at Ft. Jackson. And the Army, in their infinite wisdom, made a series of mistakes from that point on.   In the beginning they had me in solitary confinement, lights on 24 hours a day, no mail, nothing.
After about a week or two of that, we finally got out a press release; threw it across the
blue-tail fly
front page of the New York Times.. .and the \'W: Army panicked.   They were reeling from aH r^m the bad publicity, so then they opened the ss^l&S floodgates wide--they gave xne my mail, books, magazines, unlimited visitors and an incoming m telephone.   That was a mistake--because we then proceeded to organize.   The six months I spent at Ft. Jackson were the most profitable months I spent in South Carolina.
For example, we organized the first ACLU chapter in the state. . . we got the students at the University of South Carolina involved in relating to GI's. . . we related to GI's who came to visit me often and they later, after I was transferred to Leavenworth, organized the first pray-in on a military post--one of the early manifestations of organized GI dissent. . . and I was in communication with Freddie Gardner and Donna Mickleson, who organized in Columbia, South Carolina, the first GI coffeehouse.
So there was a lot of stuff going on, and much -of it was centered around my cell, they were cell meetings.   We'd have 20 people in there at times.   Well, the army got tired of that after about six months and transferred me to Leavenworth. . . I was treated very well at Leavenworth, because I was an officer still--technically--and they segregate the officers and our living accomodations were considerably better than that of the general inmate population.
They harrassed me, though, as they did many of the political prisoners, in other ways. For instance, they wouldn't let me work as a physician . . . they wouldn't let me teach up in the education department. . . they wouldn't let any political prisoners work on the prison magazine or for the radio station.   One political prisoner asked about that and was told the reason he couldn't was because he had committed a heinous offense, the heinous offense being that he had refused to serve in Vietnam.   At the same time, one other prisoner, a professional man, a dentist from New York, was teaching up there and he had been convicted of having sodomized a Boy Scout troop, which was not a heinous offense by the Army's criteria.   One other guy who was working
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