Contraband: Underground Newspapers in US Military Prisons

During the Vietnam War, the military justice system devised ingenious ways to isolate and intimidate agitators, deserters, and others who protested U.S. involvement in Vietnam, or organized against racism in the military. As the presence of American troops in Vietnam increased, so did the number of men imprisoned in dozens of unit-level brigs and stockades scattered across the globe, not to mention the roughly three-thousand men doing hard time at the military’s two maximum-security facilities: the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Naval prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Yet the military’s capacity to isolate antiwar GIs was not absolute. Many of those incarcerated for their beliefs used their time behind bars to construct pockets of nonviolent resistance.

Drawing from archival sources, oral histories, and the GI press, this paper will show how underground newspapers allowed radical antiracist and antimilitary ideas to continue to circulate in prison. These papers, often produced in partnership with civilian peace activists, turned confinement facilities into “schools of rebellion” and unlikely sites of critical knowledge production. Historians of the Vietnam era GI press have overlooked the role played in the GI movement by the soldiers, sailors and marines who were incarcerated for their beliefs. Thus, this paper seeks to recover the forgotten history of how dissident political identities were formed and reinforced inside military prisons through the production and circulation of underground newspapers.

By examining how dissident GIs overcame the constraints of incarceration to produce and distribute radical literature, this paper makes an important contribution to growing scholarship on the U.S. prison movement. Specifically, it builds on research by Dan Berger, Toussaint Losier and others to challenge the idea of prisons as fortress-like and impermeable, revealing them instead to be porous, and open to penetration and collaboration by “free world” social movements.