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Supporting Materials for Sir! No Sir!
The Chips Are Down At Dix
The Brass have leveled charges of arson and riot against 38 men in the Fort Dix Stockade. Charges that could bring sentences of up to 40 years.
Why?
These and a hundred other men in the Dix concentration camp exploded in justified anger last month at the foul treatment that their Brass overseers and lifer guards used against them.
To begin with, these men had been forced into the chain gang, that is, the Army, but in one way or another, for one reason or another, they had resisted. They had gone AWOL, ducked or bucked unjust orders, refused to knuckle under and become a belly-crawling part of the death machine as they were supposed to.
For this they were sent to the stockade, called criminals, degraded, caged like animals, lectured, threatened, starved, beaten, even tortured.
Foremost among those charged with arson, riot, etc., are organizers of the American Servicemen's Union. They are so charged because the Brass fear them. With good reason.
The Brass fear the justified anger of aroused men. But they fear even more that Union leadership can organize and direct this anger so that the men now under the military thumb would stand up together and demand and get their human rights.
That's union powerl
Union power has begun to develop at Fort Dix and elsewhere.
The Brass are trying to break it. If they have their way it will be union-busting time at Dix.
It is a struggle between the oppressive power of the Brass and the rising strength of awakening GIs who want elementary human rights. No matter where you are-in New York, California or Kansas, in Germany, Japan or Hawaii, in Iceland, Alaska or Vietnam--it's your fight going on at Dix.
If they have it their way at Dix, they'll get tougher elsewhere. If we keep up the fight, we begin pushing them back off our necks. It looks as if they have all the power. But they are actually the few and we are the many. We are the rank-and-file people and the rank-and--file GIs. That means muscle when we have the guts and brains and leadership to move.
The demand is: FREE OUR BUDDIES
The Bond, vol. 3, no. 7