Toward an honest commemoration of the American War in Vietnam

The Full Disclosure campaign is a Veterans For Peace effort to speak truth to power and keep alive the antiwar perspective on the American war in Viet Nam — which is now approaching a series of 50th anniversary events. It represents a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize the Vietnam war and to thereby legitimize further unnecessary and destructive wars.

August 1969, date unspecified:

• GI Press Service reports that “in an effort to stifle dissent in Armed Services, draft boards ordered to defer any person working for an underground newspaper.”
• Thirty-five GIs are granted sanctuary in Hawaii for a month.
• GIs for Peace is founded in Fort Bliss, Texas.

August 4 Henry Kissinger conducts his first secret meeting in Paris with representatives from Hanoi including Xuân Thủy.

August 6 Supreme Court Justice William Douglas orders Howard Levy be released on $1,000 bond. [Levy was charged with promoting “disloyalty and disaffection” among soldiers at Ft. Jackson for protesting the war by refusing to teach. See chronology entries for December 28, 1966, May10-June 2, 1967.]

August 9 At Fort Dix, New Jersey, Spec/4 Hal Muskat is sentenced to seven months at hard labor for distributing an antiwar newspaper and for “contemptuous utterings to the court.”

August 12 The NLF begins a new offensive attacking 150 targets throughout South Vietnam.

August 15-18 The Woodstock Festival (billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”) is held at Max Yasgur‘s farm in Bethel, New York. During the rainy weekend, 32 acts performed outdoors before an audience of 400,000 people.

August 25, 1969 Company A of the 3rd Battalion, the 196th Light Brigade, refuse to advance further into the Song Chang Valley of VietNam after five days of heavy casualties; their number having been reduced from 150 to 60. This is one of countless mutinies that took place in VietNam.