GI Blues: Today’s Action Army in Germany
Mannheim, West Germany—Everyone in the bleakly military, green-and-white-painted Third Brigade courtroom looks up as Capt. Charles (Chuck) Jeglikowski, the Army prosecutor, rises to speak.
“Look very carefully again at the offenses,” Jeglikowski, a cool, blond, upwardly mobile New Jersey boy who looks more like West Point than Seton Hall school of law, tells the five-officer jury. “Recall the violence,” he says. “Recall the terror … the fear of the victims … think of the victims, victims of assault … victims of grievous bodily harm.”
The black-robed military judge, Col. William A. Zeigler, a tough nut called by some “the hanging judge of West Germany,” has heard all of this before. He slumps with his back half turned to Jeglikowski, reading a document as the prosecutor tries to rouse the earnest, note-scribbling jury of officers to a suitable state of outrage against the defendants.
“These men,” Chuck goes on, “have violated the fundamental rules of Army discipline. Your sentence must act as a deterrent, and the government insists that your sentence must punish as well. Must punish as well,” he repeats, enjoying the phrase. “Think of the conduct … think of the acts the defendants have been convicted of,” Jeglikowski urges the jury once more. Then he goes for the crusher: “The government demands for each of these defendants nothing less than a Dishonorable Discharge and a long term of confinement—years at hard labor.”
At this, the eyes of the 13 black defendants lose that courtroom glaze. Specialist 4 Reginald Baker stops reading the comic book in his lap. Pvt. Melvin R. Turner, 20, glances up at the prosecutor with an eye-rolling cynical look that says: “Oh wow, man, that’s really heavy.”
And it is heavy. Baker and Turner and the other eleven defendants, all young, all black and all enlisted men, are the “Vilseck 13,” some of the latest casualties of the accelerating series of violent clashes between enlisted men, a growing proportion of them black, and the US Army in West Germany. Wherever the Army’s 300,000 troops, some 15 to 20 percent of them black, are posted in Germany, similar explosions—many of them worse—are being seen on an almost daily basis.
The “13” are guilty. Even Ed Bellen, their American civilian lawyer and about the hottest GI defender in Europe, found it hard to dispute that all along. They did, in fact, on a hot, beer-heavy, Saturday afternoon last August charge into Motor Pool Barracks No. 223 with any weapon that came to hand, break down doors, waste a number of whites and generally run amuck. Nobody’s denying that. They even told a chief warrant officer to “move his fucking ass out of the way,” and when the base commander came around to cool things, some of them gave him much the same advice.
But, as Ed Bellen told the jury, “Nothing happens in a vacuum.” Many of the white GIs were armed as well, sporadic black-white fights and friction had been going on all afternoon, and definite provocation had been offered the black soldiers who numbered only about 30 in a company of over 200 troops. In fact, the “Vilseck Massacre” was just one of an epidemic of racial incidents which have become routine in the God-forsaken little village of 250 persons in Northern Bavaria, as well as other remote Army bases in Germany.
The Vilseck defendants are by no means Black Power advocates. Sitting in the defendants’ dock they look outrageously straight. No defiant afros, none of the symbols of black revolt such as the “power check” (clenched fist salute) which has been all but outlawed by the Army here. No, as black dudes in the Army go, the “13” are definitely non-militant. All had previously clean records, and the Mannheim stockade labeled them all “model prisoners.”
Then why did it happen? The defendants talk about the isolation at Vilseck and the hostility of Germans toward them. “If a Vilseck girl had the choice of going out with me or a duffle bag full of pig shit,” says Turner, a short man from Birmingham with shoulders like Sonny Liston who has been fingered by the Army as one of the real baddies in the incident, “she’d choose the pig shit every time.” They also complain of slow promotions for blacks, incitement by racist white NCOs and total failure of their officers to handle the situation before it exploded.
These latter problems, according to Gen. Michael S. Davison, the Army’s top man in Germany, can be laid to the failure of Army commanders to lead their troops properly. Black militancy and white backlash, Davison says, are due to the Army’s failure to accept black GIs fully. Racial discrimination of any kind, he says, is “intolerable.”
But it’s not the Army that’s facing a heavy rap here in Mannheim. For involvement in what was essentially a barracks brawl in which no one was seriously hurt, the Army came back with a barrage of heavy charges including “riot,” which carries ten years in prison and a Dishonorable Discharge, assault and battery and aggravated assault. One of the defendants, Pfc Thomas Carter, could have received as much as 21 years in prison. As it turned out, the jury resisted the prosecution’s deepest cries for blood and handed the “13” sentences of between one year and six years in jail, and each got a Bad Conduct Discharge, which is better than a DD … but not much.
“We were railroaded,” says Specialist 4 Ozzie L. Terry, 21, a former student at Louisiana State University at New Orleans who drew a year and a BCD. “The whole thing was dying down,” Terry says, and white witnesses agreed, “when some guy in the motor-pool barracks leaned out of a top window and yelled: ‘Right on, whites!’ So we turned around and wasted them.”
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