Letters to Workers World Party about Terry Klug’s life

On Dec. 13 Workers World published an article noting Terry Klug’s death and his role in two key events — soldier resistance to the Vietnam War, including founding an organization in Paris, and the Fort Dix, New Jersey, Stockade rebellion of June 1969. These are described here: workers.org/2024/12/82532/ 

We invited some of the comrades who worked closely with Klug and with the American Servicemen’s Union or Workers World Party to contribute some of their memories, which follow:

From Greg Laxer, war resister, editor of The Bond:

I was already a member of the American Servicemen’s Union, with my first court-martial under my belt for refusing to report for duty in Vietnam, when the ASU publication (The Bond) announced that Terry had returned from Europe to face his own punishment. We would meet face to face when I attended a pre-trial hearing for him at Fort Dix, where Klug was being held. In no time, the Army foolishly tried a second time to send me to Vietnam, and I took off AWOL again.

After some adventures here and there, including participating in the largest “GI Sanctuary” action in Honolulu, I got myself arrested in New York City. This led to my becoming a fellow prisoner at Dix Stockade as Terry and the other Fort Dix 38 defendants were prosecuted. (Details of these events can be found in my 2021 memoir “Take This War And Shove It!”) 

Terry Klug definitely had what we call “people skills.” A natural extrovert, he could integrate himself smoothly into whatever collection of people circumstances lumped him, as long as they weren’t racists. He loved to talk about “the fellas.” Like a proper comrade, he took no crap from rightwingers.

Terry was a very kind person, even if he sometimes appeared a bit gruff. Kind and generous to a fault. He ultimately became the top individual donor to my fundraising effort to enable me to self-publish my book, providing one-sixth of the funds single-handedly.

My sincere condolences to his spouse Nina Clayton, any living relatives he may have left and all his friends and comrades in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Let us remember the labor movement slogan of old: “Don’t mourn, organize!” Down with U.S. militarist aggression!

gregorylaxer.com

From Johnnie Lewis – ASU organizer, war resister

I met Terry the night he returned from Paris. A few weeks earlier, I had returned to the U.S. from Montreal. We had been exiles, forced abroad for refusing to take a soldier’s part in the genocidal U.S. war on the Vietnamese people. We had both said “No!” to our orders to go to the war and both returned to continue to fight the war makers. 

That night we were in “the bullpen,” way inside the U.S. Army stockade at Fort Dix, which resembled a concentration camp. Each of its neatly spaced barracks, each with its own fourteen-foot tall chain link fence topped with concertina wire; a parade field; and segregation cells. All surrounded by a double row of chain linked, also topped with razor wire and evenly dispersed guard towers complete with shotgun-toting Military Police. The sign at the prison entrance read: Obedience to the Law is Freedom.

Terry was sitting alone in a corner of the bullpen when I arrived. A guard was giving me a hard time, and Terry shouted: “I’m a member of the American Servicemen’s Union. I represent that guy. You better watch it!”

I was happily startled. That very morning, I had had a sendoff from Andy Stapp and some other [ASU] members at  the Union’s headquarters in New York City. Only a few hours before meeting Terry I had been arrested by the New Jersey State Police on my way to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I’d resume my ASU organizing.

Well, the guard was also startled. But he recovered. He yelled, “You two shit-birds, shut the fuck up! You’re both going to ‘seg’(segregation)!”

We spent that night and a few more in eight by eight cells. Terry on one end of the long cellblock, me on the other. 

But in our hearts and minds, we were not separated at all. We were both happy that we had met each other; that we had a comrade in the struggle just a few cells away, truly in the bowels of the beast. From that first night, we became lifelong friends and comrades. 

Over the next year or so, Terry spent months on end in segregation for being a union organizer and then, as the leader and organizer of the Fort Dix Stockade Rebellion, for which he was acquitted. The idea of segregation is to break the will of the prisoner, make the prisoner depressed, make the prisoner feel all alone and forsaken, abandoned to the hungry wolves of state repression.

But for Terry Klug, segregation had the opposite effect: he was the happiest person I ever met, when on occasion I’d meet up with him in seg for union organizing while inside the stockade or out on Fort Dix. 

He was happy, and, well, I was too, because we had the union, the support of thousands of fellow members, and the support and compassion of hundreds of thousands, no millions more in the civilian antiwar movement the world over. And, too, Terry and I were communists and members of Workers World Party and were quite full of revolutionary optimism.

Terry was the personification of the slogan: Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win! 

From Kathy Durkin, veteran WWP member

I awakened suddenly and realized I had just been dreaming about a time in the early 1970s — we must have all been in our 20s, when Terry Klug and Susan Steinman had come over to my apartment on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn for dinner with me and Mike Tilli.

Mike was a gourmet cook. That night he had cooked rabbit, a food I had never eaten before nor have I since that night.

We knew what Terry had been through. He had a reputation of a “tough guy” who, when he was in his cell at Fort Leavenworth Military Prison in Kansas, made a point of doing push-ups whenever the guards walked by. He wanted to show them he was neither weak nor depressed.

Terry looked down at the rabbit stew and asked, “Are we really going to eat Peter Cottontail?”

And I thought, is Terry Klug really squeamish about eating rabbit?

Kathy Durkin

From Rene Imperato, ASU organizer, war resister

I first came to know Terry Klug while we were halfway around the world from each other 56 years ago. Terry was in the Fort Dix stockade and I was in Vietnam at that time, when I was behind Terry in political consciousness about the role of U.S. imperialism in the war and other wars around the world.

Terry was already in the American Servicemen’s Union, which I later joined before I left Vietnam. I finally met Terry in person while I was on leave after returning from the war. Ten days later I went to my first anti-war demonstration while still having almost one year remaining in the U.S. Air Force. I worked with the ASU to organize active duty GIs at Griffith Air Force Base, New York.

Terry and I worked on many campaigns together, including the ASU campaign in 1973 to compensate Veterans income for time in the military, called “$2500 or fight.” We then went on to be together on the March in Boston against racism in 1974. That march was organized by a coalition initiated by Workers World Party. We also worked in supporting the Prisoners Solidarity Committee.

Terry supported my campaign to run for chapter chairperson in the New York City taxi drivers’ union. We worked in the campaign to stop U.S. aggression in Guatemala in 1981 and we worked together in the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign.

Terry went on to represent workers at Columbia University while I began to become more involved in work in my transgender, gender nonconforming and non-binary community, and of course, in Workers World Party as well which Terry wholeheartedly supported.

Terry will be missed so much by comrades in Workers World Party and all of us at Village East Towers in New York where we were neighbors for over 25 years and Terry had been president of the board of directors of VET. The board of directors this week voted to install a plaque commemorating Terry’s selfless contribution to the VET community. I myself and so many comrades in WWP  will miss him so much.

Terry Klug ¡Presente! 

Rest In Power 

Rene Imperato

From Dee Knight, war resister (once) in exile: 

Terry Klug was my first friend in Workers World Party. In 1976 he recruited me and coached me in what it meant to be a party member. 

Terry helped with a large international war resister exile conference in Toronto a week after President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in January 1977. He was a long-time organizer of the ASU. I had known of his leading role among war resister exiles in Paris, with the Resistance In The Army (RITA) group [and the newsletter Resistance in the Army  (ACT)], which had close relations with my group, Amex-Canada, in Toronto.

Terry was already famous when I met him. As the leader of the Fort Dix Stockade Rebellion of June 1969, he was respected across the massive resistance movement of active-duty U.S. soldiers and sailors during the U.S. war against Vietnam. His friend Andy Stapp, author of “Up Against the Brass,” helped coordinate a successful defense effort that thwarted the Army’s desire to imprison Terry for life for his role in the rebellion.

Instead, Terry served 17 months (of a three-year sentence) in the Fort Dix Stockade and Fort Leavenworth Military Prison, found guilty of desertion. He maintained close and friendly relations with his fellow prisoners then. After his release, Terry immediately started working with the ASU and its newspaper, The Bond.

For decades after the Vietnamese victory, Terry worked as a temperature control technician, first at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and then at Columbia University. He served as a union leader. He was also for many years a board member and president of the housing cooperative he shared with his spouse, Nina Clayton. Union members and coop residents knew and loved Terry as a trusted, steadfast leader, always ready to fight for them.

I will always remember Terry’s comradeship and cherish his friendship.

Dee Knight

From Monica Moorehead, WW managing editor:

I did not know Terry during the late 1960s or early 1970s until I joined Workers World Party in 1975. I did know about his heroic efforts in defying the U.S. military machine’s racist genocidal war against the Vietnamese people and what an inspiration his actions were for other conscious antiwar GIs who refused to go to Vietnam. 

The last time I saw Terry was at a pro-Palestine protest in New York City wearing an “anti-fascist” shirt. I thought that shirt was so appropriate for him to wear, because, knowing that he had a short time to live, he wanted to show his solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance against imperialism and Zionism. 

Like many others, I am saddened by his death. But his legacy of resistance and defiance must be passed down to new generations of revolutionaries who want to see an end to this horrific imperialist system of war, oppression and poverty. 

Terry Klug ¡Presente!

Monica Moorehead