Pacific Counseling Service
The Pacific Counseling Service was a G.I. counseling service organization created by antiwar activists during the Vietnam War. PCS saw itself as trying to make the U.S. Armed Forces "adhere more closely to regulations concerning conscientious objector discharges and G.I. rights." The Armed Forces Journal, on the other hand, said PCS was involved in "antimilitary activities", including "legal help and incitement to dissident GIs." PCS evolved out of a small GI Help office started by a freshly discharged Air Force Sergeant in San Francisco, California in January 1969. The idea rapidly caught on among antiwar forces and within a year PCS had offices in Monterey, Oakland, and San Diego in California, plus Tacoma, Washington. By 1971 it had spread around the Pacific with additional offices in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Okinawa, the Philippines, as well as Tokyo and Iwakuni in Japan. Each location was established near a major U.S. military base. At its peak, PCS was counseling hundreds of disgruntled soldiers a week, helping many with legal advice, conscientious objector discharges and more. As the war wound down, ending in 1975, the offices closed with the last office in San Francisco printing its final underground newspaper in 1976.Background
By 1968 the movement against the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding in the U.S. and around the world, and GI resistance among the soldiers and sailors of the U.S. military was growing. The San Francisco area, where several key U.S. military bases served as launching pads for troops heading to the war zone, was developing into a center for disaffected soldiers, military deserters, and GI protestors. In July 1968, nine military men, from all four branches of the armed forces, publicly refused to go to Vietnam and chained themselves to ministers at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Marin City just north of San Francisco. Their arrests, described as "a media spectacle", involved the Military Police entering the church during a Communion service, using bolt cutters to dislodge the protesters, and arresting all nine of the soldiers plus the ministers they were chained to. The incident received international press coverage and served as an early indication of wide spread discontent and antiwar sentiment among soldiers. One of the nine GIs was Air Force Sergeant and radar instructor Oliver Hirsch, who had just escaped in his pajamas from the Presidio Military Stockade where he had been held for a psych evaluation after feigning insanity in an attempt to avoid orders to Vietnam.GI Help Office
After his arrest, Hirsch, expected an extended stay in Leavenworth military prison, but was instead quickly dishonorably discharged. "I went from facing years in prison... to standing on the side of the highway in civilian clothes -- free as a man can be in this country," he told an interviewer years later. Recognizing how difficult it had been to resist the war within the military, he decided there was a pressing need to help other soldiers under similar circumstances. In January 1969 he started the GI Help office in downtown San Francisco as a service to soldiers resisting deployment to Vietnam. This office, in the Mission District at 483 Guerrero Street, was the first of its kind in the U.S. Hirsch had recognized and been an early part of a rapidly expanding expression within the U.S. military of the growing antiwar and anti-military sentiment surrounding the Vietnam War. Military statistics have revealed "there were about 1.5 million AWOLS and 563,000 less-than-honorable discharges between 1964 and 1974." In other words, by 1969 there was a growing and acute need among disaffected GIs for legal counseling and support.Other antiwar activists soon realized that Hirsch was on to something as many GIs contacted the GI Office asking for help. Sidney Peterman, a Unitarian minister and longtime peace activist in the American Friends Service Committee, along with several other area activists, opened a second office in Monterey, California in March 1969, rebranding the overall project as West Coast Counseling. Peterman had been inspired by the burgeoning G.I. coffeehouse movement which was already convincing antiwar activists of the effectiveness of civilian and student support for GIs in their growing resistance to the military and the war. The new office was right next to the Fort Ord Army Base where 40,000 Army soldiers were being trained for Vietnam. Funding was obtained from pacifist and religious organizations, as well as some Vietnam veterans and conscientious objectors. One of the most active early staffers was Alan Miller, a Presbyterian cleric from Minnesota. By the end of 1969, additional offices were opened in Oakland, San Diego and Tacoma, Washington. The Oakland office was set up near the Oakland Army Base, which in 1970 was the main embarkation point for soldiers being sent to Indochina, often sending more than a thousand a day.Expansion to Pacific Counseling Service
During 1969, the U.S. began a major tactical shift of U.S. combat operations in Southeast Asia from the ground to the air. As the ground war stalemated and Army grunts increasingly refused to fight or resisted the war in various other ways, the U.S. "turned increasingly to air bombardment". As a result, much of the U.S. war related activity shifted to bases on the West Coast and the chain of U.S. Navy and Air Force bases ringing the Pacific. Recognizing this shift in early 1970, Peterman and other organizers made plans to expand abroad and replaced "West Coast" with "Pacific" becoming the Pacific Counseling Service. Peterman made a two-month tour of possible Asian locations, and Japanese peace activists recalled Peterman appearing at their Tokyo office in March 1970 "wearing black clerical robes that reached to the ankles with a high collar". Peterman returned to Tokyo to open the first Asian office in April 1970. During the last six months of 1970, additional offices were established in Okinawa, Hong Kong, Olongapo City in the Philippines, and in Iwakuni, Japan. An office was also opened in Los Angeles during this period. As of May, 1971, forty full time staff were working in the eleven PCS projects on the West Coast and in Asia. For short periods of time there were PCS offices in Balibago and Angeles City in the Philippines, Misawa and Yokota Air Bases in Japan, and Honolulu.Political evolution
The name change signaled more than the organization's expansion around the Pacific. In a 1970 report, PCS activists explained that much of their work was "directed towards the support of non-white GIs." They recognized that "a disproportionately high number of service personnel are…members of the black, brown or third world communities." And nonwhite GIs received "twice as many" courts-martial and non-judicial punishments as white GIs. Just as other left activists of the period were looking beyond the U.S. and taking "inspiration from liberation movements around the world", PCS and other GI movement organizers began to move beyond mainly antiwar politics to embrace "antiracist and anti-imperialist consciousness" and to work towards instilling this among GIs. As they put it in a 1974 pamphlet "our efforts must go beyond the short range goal of ending the war and must focus on building the movement to create a new society." Expanding to Asia, they felt, would allow them to organize GIs overlooked stateside while building alliances between GIs and Asian activists. This expansion also helped them recognize "the Vietnam War as a phase of a larger history of the US empire." To implement this, PCS moved beyond mainly legal counseling and discharge advice to offering a more GI Coffeehouse-like environment where GIs could "talk about politics and society, read underground papers and historical and political books not available on bases," as well as meet young men and women "not part of the rip-off honky-tonk environment" around U.S. bases, particularly in Asia. At the Iwakuni office, PSC organized "rock concerts, camping and beach trips" and helped GIs put out an underground newspaper called Semper Fi. Working together with Japanese antiwar activists they developed slogans such as "Break up the American military system. Stop the war machine!" PCS was also instrumental in establishing a women's center in Okanawa, which reflected the growing understanding of women's issues within the progressive movements of the times. The Women's House, "became a center for living, counseling, consciousness-raising groups, and formulating actions and solutions to common problems." And "was the only place of its kind serving the needs of women in the military, military wives and daughters, women employed by the DOD, civilian women working with the GI projects, and Asian women whose work ties them to U.S. bases as baseworkers, prostitutes, and maids." PCS published a women's journal at two of its Asian offices.From its very early days PCS recognized the need for additional legal help when issues of law were involved. Non-legal counselors could offer advice, support and community, but when more serious questions of military or civilian law arose, actual lawyers were needed. The National Lawyers Guild provided many of the attorneys who volunteered to help, advise and defend GIs. Often the NLG would establish an office next door or in the same building as PCS, with the first of these being in Monterey in 1970 and the second in San Francisco in 1971. All PCS offices received help at one time or another from the NLG and several Guild attorneys became regular PCS advisors. As PCS expanded around the Pacific region, the Guild opened offices in the Philippines, Japan and Okinawa, "offering free legal counsel to hundreds of G.I.’s opposed to the Vietnam War." A Congressional Investigation into radical activity among GIs looked into the NLG's Southeastern Asian GI movement project and reported it "working with PCS at four PCS facilities in Japan." Investigators also reported that "NLG representatives" conducted workshops outside Clark Air Force Base in the Philippians "on such subjects as conscientious objector claims, UCMJ Article 138 complaints, and dissent activities in general." They also noted the use of a local GI underground newspaper, Cry Out, to advertise legal services.