He battled the warmakers: Terry Klug, 1947-2024

Terry Klug, who many participants in anti-war actions of the 1960s and 1970s know as an iconic active-duty anti-war GI and a leader of the 1969 Fort Dix Stockade rebellion, died Dec. 5 in New York at the age of 77.

Klug was a true sixty-eighter, that is, someone who came of political age in or around 1968 and committed to fighting for a better world for all. His most dramatic political contribution was as a leader in the anti-war, anti-racist American Servicemen’s Union combating U.S. imperialism’s war against Vietnam and as a militant in Workers World Party. He never stopped battling injustice.

The U.S. ruling class first underestimated Klug in the summer of 1967. An Army recruiter lied to Klug. Promised to be assigned somewhere in Europe, he was on the list for Vietnam instead. He made his first hard decision.

Klug later said:  “They gave us leave one month before we had to go to Vietnam. I went to my grandmother’s house. … Grandma gave me $2,000. I bought a one-way ticket to Rome.” (“Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” 2017 – hereafter referred to as TGA)

He wound up in Paris with a group of young people who had also deserted from the U.S. military. They formed, he said, “a loose group of young deserters. We called ourselves Resistance Inside the Army or RITA.” The group came out publicly in December 1967 at a news conference in Paris. They were introduced by Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Turé, a leader of the Black Power movement.

May 1968 in Paris – general strike

In France 1968 what started as a youth rebellion quickly spread. Here’s how Klug described those days:

“In Paris we anti-war GIs were getting radicalized quickly. Then came the explosive May-June events of 1968. This was an uprising of students and workers, with massive demonstrations every day, and workers in the CGT [General Confederation of Labor] asking their party [Communist Party of France (PCF)] and union to arm them.

“We would make Molotov cocktails in our small room and then would be walking loaded down with them to Boul’ Mich, to various corners on the Left Bank. I was all excited being part of a revolution there. If we had been captured by police while carrying the Molotov cocktails we’d have been expelled [from France], but we were caught up in the struggle, and so we ignored the dangers.” (TGA)

Disappointed that the massive general strike of 10 million workers stopped short of an attempt at revolution, Klug made another big decision: return to the U.S. and join the struggle within the U.S. Armed Forces with the American Servicemen’s Union. He soon faced a court martial for desertion at Fort Dix, N.J., where he was sentenced to three years in military prison.

Fort Dix Stockade burns

While Klug’s attorneys appealed his case, the Army held him in the Fort Dix Stockade, along with hundreds of other dissident and disobedient soldiers. As he explained:

“For weeks building up to June 5, 1969, the anger of the GIs in the stockade had been growing. Their issues: inadequate food, long confinements without trial, racism in the stockade system against Black and Puerto Rican GIs and interference with their mail. With temperatures in the sun over 90°F, the guards ordered the GIs housed in prison blocks 66 and 67 to stand in formation for hours that afternoon.

“That evening, hundreds of prisoners smashed windows, threw beds and footlockers out of the barracks, and some set buildings afire. The stockade authorities sent in 250 troops armed with riot guns and tear gas.” They arrested and charged 38 of the GIs with serious crimes. (TGA)

The heaviest charges were against Klug, who the stockade officers considered a “ringleader.” He faced more than 56 years in prison. By this time most of the U.S. population had turned against the war, and support for the defendants grew. At Fort Dix on Oct. 12, 1969, thousands of people, led by women, stormed Fort Dix in support of the Fort Dix 38.

The officers threatened and pressured Klug’s fellow prisoners to testify against him. By the time his court-martial was held, no one would rat on Klug. He was acquitted.

A little over a year later Klug won an appeal on the desertion charge, left military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and joined the staff of the American Servicemen’s Union in New York. He said later about his role in the GI movement: “I regret nothing.” (TGA)

Klug is survived by his life partner, Nina Clayton, and by his comrades and fellow GIs, sixty-eighters and others, who fought alongside him in those tumultuous years and the decades that followed.

More on the Fort Dix Stockade rebellion at workers.org/2019/06/42480/.