?up there had been convicted of raping his pre-adolescent daughter, which was also not a heinous offense.
btf: Have you experienced any harassment since you you've been out?
Levy:  Only from the military.   Whenever I'm in a military town I'm followed.   We went down to Ft. Dix in Wrightstown, New Jersey, and we hadn't been off the interstate for ten seconds when a military car started following us.
btf:  What were your thoughts on the recent Green Beret murder case?
Levy: Well, as I was saying two years ago when I
was so rudely interrupted... my initial reaction was to try to figure out why they tried to bust a whole command in Vietnam.   That's unprecedented. There have been Special Forces men who have b been court-martialed for murder in Vietnam. There's a fellow by the name of Captain John McCarthy who was convicted of murdering a Cambodian nationalist, who was also probably a Russian agent.   And it's a very, very similar type of a situation to what happened this time. But in that case, only one man was court-martialed and the publicity was nil. Sometimes they have to court-martial a guy, because someone screws up somewhere along the line, the wrong people know about it, and there's going to be adverse publicity, locally for example, in this case, the government of Saigon, and they have to find a scapegoat to cover their tracks.   So they pick out a guy like McCarthy and they use him as a scapegoat. . . in this recent instance they didn't use just one scapegoat, they busted a whole command, eight people, seven of whom are high-ranking officers, and that's unprecedented.   You have to assume there was something else behind that.
My tentative theory was that there are a lot of people in the regular army who are worried about the Special Forces; they were hostile to the Special Forces all along.   They are hostile to it because it's another competitive service that's relatively independent of the regular army. . .the regular army now recognizes that the United States is going to involved in counter-insurgency, that they have to re-tool and learn how to fight those kinds of wars. Because if they don't do that, sometime in the future, it would not be inconceivable that you would have a new branch of the service, the Special Forces.
At the time Billy Mitchell was talking about the use of airplanes, the regular army was also very upset and ultimately court-martialed him. There are some parallels here.   They were very much concerned that an air force might develop, and you don't want an air force because it'll get some of the bread, it'll get some of the influence and power.   I think much the same thing may be behind the bringing of charges against the Special Forces.
btf: The incident in question then, is just an ordinary incident over there?
evy: It's an everyday incident in Vietnam.   And most of the time nobody's punished; it's only when something goes awry that someone is punished, and then it's just a scapegoat and not a whole command.   One could speculate that General Abrams leaped upon this thing in an effort to discredit the whole Special Forces program. But one doesn't know, because the case never came to trial.   It never came to trial because some influential Congressmen like Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, Senator Hollings of South^Carolina and Senator Strom Thurmond of Soxith Carolina told Nixon "You better not court-martial these boys".... and the threat was
John Beckman
undoubtably made to the effect that "Look, if you court-martial these people you can forget about your ABM missile. "
btf: What part is the GI movement playing in the anti-war movement as a whole?
Levy: 1 think it's playing the pivotal role.. .for the longest time, after the Pentagon march, there wasn't a whole lot happening in the anti-war movement, except in one place, and that was the military. . .the peace movement wasn't paying much attention to it and hasn't up until the last few months.
Nixon knows you can't win a war without an army and the fact of the matter is, that morale in the army is at an all time low.   GIs oppose the war in Vietnam in significant numbers.. . the morale can only be described as lethargic. If a guy is asked to guard a 600-foot perimeter, he may go out 60 feet.   These guys ain't going to have their ass shot off in Vietnam. . .and if Nixon continues his policy in Vietnam, kind of a holding policy, he may find that he doesn't have any men to hold with.
I'm obviously going to encourage anti-war protests on college campuses; it's of some value, certainly.   But if you got 90 per cent of the students on every campus opposing the war in Vietnam, it still ain't going to make it. Because nobody is really worried about militancy on college campuses--not in the sense that power is being threatened.   Now if you had 10 per cent of the GIs against the war in an organized way, you better believe they're going to worry about it.
btf: What kind of supplementary functions can the campus anti-war movement offer to the GI movement?
Levy:  There ought to be continual support for the coffeehouse.   You ought to be able to raise money for legal fees.   That coffeehouse ought to be self-sufficient locally, it shouldn't have to depend on money from New York City or San Francisco, it ought to be raised locally. And that's crucial, because the more money you can raise locally, the more money can be used to set up coffeehouses elsewhere--they're pretty expensive to open up.   We have six going now with three more in the works.
btf: Aren't several of the coffeehouses involved in hassles right now?
Levy:  Yeah, but the biggest hassle is right here in
Kentucky.   College students ought to be able to take part in protests in the town of Muldraugh to protest the harassment these people have, undergone.   It's important that you make it clear that you support the GI.   It's important
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November 11,1969