The Power of Ducks: A Naval Tale

By Robert G. Mahoney

Synopsis of The Power of Ducks

Reaching manhood in an African American family during the turbulent 1960s , the author watched his father and brother challenge the system, only to be struck down and ruined.

Choosing a safer path, he stayed in school and was the first in his family to graduate from college. To fulfill his military obligation he joined the Naval Reserves. Initially, he adhered to his fathers admonition to do what he was told and keep quiet, but eventually he faced a life defining choice - confronted with deplorable living conditions, rampant racism, denial of basic human rights, and an illegal war, should he suppress his core life values or should he speak out?

This story is about the actions taken by the author and his fellow sailors, or ducks, that led to the creation of GIs Against Fascism, the first major movement within the Navy in southern California to expand sailors rights and challenge the Vietnam War. Each paid a price for speaking out, but by forming a bond cemented by courage, determination, and loyalty, they raised the awareness of issues that contributed to a new navy and the end of the Vietnam War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9781453565636

Robert G. Mahoney

Biography of Robert G. Mahoney Robert G. Mahoney is a retired educator who worked for thrity-eight years in educational institutions in the San Francisco East Bay. A love of writing developed through preparing job-related reports, program evaluations, and top rated proposals that won millions of dollars of federal funding. Effective writing also led to obtaining a master’s degree in Educational Psychology and a doctorate in Higher Education Administration. Now free to write his own story, in this first work the author wrote a memoir of his experiences attaining manhood as the youngest son in a middle class African American family during one of the most turbulent decades in American history - the 1960’s. The author currently lives in Danville, California with his wife, two children, mother, and mother-in-law.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Robert Griffith Mahoney.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

65668

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

AFTERWORD

REFERENCES

APPENDICES

I: Examples of Contested Posters

II: Newspaper Articles

III: Conscientious Objector Statement

IV: Miscellaneous Sailor Statements

V: Letters from Congress

VI: Letters from the Navy

VII: Letters to My Parents

VIII: Letters to Congress, President, and Public

IX: Personnel Documents

This book is dedicated to Tom Csekey, Andy Carlson, Dave Wilson, and all Duty Ducks for their efforts to expand the rights of sailors and oppose the Vietnam War.

INTRODUCTION

This book isn’t about ducks, at least the type that go quack. The ducks in this tale wear uniforms with Dixie Cup hats, bell bottomed pants, and jumpers with black neckerchiefs. The book is also about growth, maturity, finding oneself, and coming of age during one of the most turbulent and socially progressive periods in American history - the 1960’s. It is also about having one’s core values tested and deciding how to respond, especially when there is no preestablished script and the possible consequences ranged from social condemnation to imprisonment and even physical harm.

I became a man in the early 1960s, and as the youngest son in an African American family in northern New Jersey, I was the second generation to grow up in an urban setting. Prior generations, at least on the black side of the family, were mostly farmers and domestic servants. Being a member of a family striving to be middle class, I adopted the traditional values of my family and community of working hard, doing well in school, attending Sunday School, at least in my early years, respecting parents and authority, and leading a moral life. Although no one in my family had graduated from college, among my peers and schoolmates there was an expectation that someday I would attend a university, even though my family was financially unable to assist me.

While going through the public school system, my hopes and dreams were fairly modest. I hoped to someday have a job that would pay me at least $10,000 a year and enable me to fulfill a lifelong dream: to rent a $100 per month apartment in New York City. As a youth, I loved New York City and looked forward to every opportunity to visit the city’s many attractions. Nevertheless, in college my perspective began to change and broaden. After a couple of years of study, I knew that I wanted more out of life than living in the New York metropolitan area. A couple of years of studying Spanish made me want to live in a Spanish culture. After seeing the movie El Cid and attending a large exhibit of Spanish culture at Macy’s department store in Newark, NJ, I wrote to the Spanish consulate in New York to ask about job possibilities in Spain. I never received a response, but I was not deterred. I knew that someday I would leave that area.

While growing up, I had the same fascination with cowboys and Indians, playing war games, and violence as any kid, but as I matured, I found that I was more of a pacifist than a warrior. In school, I always went out of my way to avoid fights, even though the culture of my peers prized athleticism and physical toughness, particularly among males. The civil rights movement, with its emphasis on nonviolent protest, was attractive to me and fit into my own beliefs about avoiding confrontation and violence at all costs. Therefore, it was ironic that after graduating from college, I was faced with a situation that easily could have landed me in the heart, or at least the fringes, of the Vietnam War, which had reached its peak just as I graduated.

I call my story a naval tale, but, in a sense, it is a war story, although not in the conventional sense. It is not about the usual tales of heroic deeds undertaken during combat with an enemy, resulting in injuries and loss of life. Since the Vietnam War ended, there have been a number of excellent movies and books describing the many sacrifices made by our soldiers in combat. Yet, with the exception of a few isolated articles in newspapers and magazines and the recent development of the computer Web site, Sir! No Sir! and its companion books, Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright and Protest and Survive by James Lewes, there have been few accounts published about the collateral struggle that went on within the military. On naval bases, air fields, army installations, and ships across the country and overseas, soldiers organized to protest the war, expand servicemen’s rights, and generally improve soldiers’ living conditions. I can assure the reader that I am not equating the sacrifices, loss of life, and bravery of combat veterans to the protesters in my story who were involved in nonviolent resistance. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the fact that the soldiers and sailors who resisted an illegal war, protested the military’s rampant racism, and criticized the military’s suppression of civil rights were harassed and subjected to treatment that placed at risk their military status, reputations, and personal safety. This book is a memoir of the brief period of my life when I was one of those resisters.

The Power of Ducks is one of many stories of protest and resistance that took place during the Vietnam War. As previously stated, similar protests occurred in every branch of the military, but many were just random acts of sabotage which were quickly suppressed. In one widely known incident, several sailors on a San Diego-based warship who didn’t want their vessel to deploy to the war zone threw bolts into the ship’s engine and forced it to return to its homeport. They were arrested, court-martialed, and quickly sent to the brig, never to be heard from again. In contrast, the sailors, or ducks, who joined me engaged in more strategic, deliberate, and enduring activities. We created an organization called GI’s Against Fascism, published a newspaper, Duck Power, and organized community support when the Navy attempted to suppress our activities. Despite knowing that groups similar to ours were being established throughout the military, it didn’t give us much solace. We still felt isolated and at every minute cognizant of the awesome size and power of our opposition. Our adversary was a military branch of the U.S. government, and, quite literally, we could have been snuffed out in an instant.

Nevertheless, there was some force within each of the three original Duty Ducks and our supporters that kept us motivated and moving forward. Maybe it was ego or a sense of pride, a feeling of self-righteousness, a passion for seeking the truth, or adherence to family values that kept us focused and committed to our goals in spite of the risk. We frequently said to each other that we were willing to do everything we could do in pursuit of our goals, up to the point of doing something that would result in receiving a bad conduct discharge. That was naive, because almost everything our little group did could have led to a court-martial and a bad conduct discharge. In spite of the danger, we all believed so strongly in what we were doing that we never faltered or considered disbanding our organization, ending publication of the paper, or giving up what we were trying to accomplish. Once we headed down the road of protest and speaking out, there was no turning back.

From another perspective, this story describes what happens when people find themselves in a morally untenable situation. What do they do when faced with behaviors that are morally reprehensible and totally inimical to their moral code and way of life?

Do they hunker down, keep their mouths shut, and live a lie? Or do they speak up and stand by their beliefs even at risk of their reputations, safety, and even their lives? People who face these situations have to determine their own threshold for action and for putting themselves at risk. Dr. Martin Luther King left no doubts about how he viewed this issue. In a speech in Detroit in 1963, he said,  . . . if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. This story is about how far my fellow ducks and I would go to stand up for our beliefs and how we grappled with this issue.

How successful were we? Was it worth risking life, limb, and reputation in order to satisfy the sense of outrage that was burning in our breasts? While I can’t think of one sailor who we dissuaded from going to the war zone, I believe the popularity of Duck Power on our naval base and at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base north of San Diego, demonstrated that we at least increased soldiers’ awareness of issues about the war, the conditions in which they lived, and soldiers’ rights. Until Duck Power came along, most sailors believed their squadron commanders when they were told that sailors had neither rights nor claim to any personal property. If I can say that we did one thing successfully, it was to raise sailors’ consciousness of these issues. I am confident that my brother ducks would concur that in spite all of the hassles, the risk, and all of the condemnation heaped upon us, what we did was worth the effort.

Many readers may wonder why almost half of the story is devoted to describing my years in college from 1962 to 1967. After all, some may ask what these years have to do with the events involving Duck Power? For me, the experience of attending college at the downtown Newark campus of Rutgers University while living in the Newark ghetto was critical to understanding who I was as a young man entering the Navy in 1967. To a great extent, my values about the fundamental issues humans grapple with, including my beliefs about the meaning of life, work, religion, and human relations, were formed during those years living in Newark. As one of the most stimulating and formative periods in my life, I thought it would be important to include these years as a prelude and foundation for the events that unfolded in San Diego while in the Navy.

It has been over forty years since the events described on these pages occurred - almost a lifetime, but like any traumatic event which occurs in life, the details stayed with me as if they occurred yesterday. Unfortunately, I waited so long to commit this story to paper that I have lost contact with all but one of the original ducks and most of the other people mentioned in the incidents described. Many have moved on and left no forwarding addresses, a few are in bad health, and others have died. I tried my best to give a truthful accounting of each experience, interaction, and conversation. Some names I have forgotten, either totally or in part, and when this occurred I tried to approximate the name as closely as I could. If anyone reads this account and wonders why their name is not accurately represented, I take responsibility for the error and seek their understanding and forgiveness. If they contact me, I promise that any errors will be corrected in future printings. That also goes for any factual errors I have made in dates or in my depiction of events.

In preparing my memoir for print, I had substantial support. I would like to thank Emily Nye, a former colleague at California State University, East Bay, for editing the final manuscript. I would also like to thank fellow duck, Tom Csekey, for reviewing the manuscript for accuracy and reassuring me that time and senility had not corrupted my recollection of events as I described them. Finally, I am grateful to Dave Wilson’s wife, Gwen, for confirming the accuracy of the part of the manuscript describing her husband. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Valerie, for reading the manuscript and giving me pointers on improving its quality.

CHAPTER ONE

Garden State Foundations

The bus hurtled down Highway 3 toward New York City on a cold winter day. I was on one of many excursions to the city to escape for the day or to visit art museums as part of a class assignment for school. As the bus approached an elevated ramp that enabled me to see more of the northern New Jersey landscape, I became even more depressed. The sky was leaden gray, and as far as the eye could see there was hardly any natural color. All of the trees, bushes, fields and grass were varying shades of beige, gray, or black. The only bright colors were on the highway billboards that flew past the bus windows. In the distance I could see the New York skyline, but even that usually breathtaking sight was compromised, because it was shrouded in the all pervasive gray. As I looked around, I realized that I was living in a cold, colorless, and thoroughly depressing world. Right then and there I vowed that someday I would move to an area that was beautiful and colorful even in the winter.

It was the mid-1960s, and I was living with my parents in a depressed area of Newark, New Jersey, on South Ninth Street between Ninth and Central Avenues. We rented an apartment in an old Victorian-era home that had been converted into a triplex. A man named Buck Rogers and his sister lived above us, and two single women shared the apartment on the third floor. We moved there in the winter of 1961, after living in a single family home in a quiet residential section of Montclair, New Jersey for many years. I have always wondered why my father, after living almost his entire life in Montclair, would take his family to live in the Newark ghetto. The change was like the difference between night and day. I never asked him why we moved, but I think it was because after leading a life as a respected businessman and business pioneer in northern New Jersey, he felt embarrassed, even humiliated, when in the early 1950s he lost his two businesses to federal charges of fraud. To make matters worse, he was no longer the main breadwinner in the family. For the first time in my mother’s married life, she began working in 1954 and became the major income earner on the modest salary of a practical nurse. To make a higher salary, she worked the night shift at a local Catholic hospital, a decision that exhausted her and significantly diminished her role as a wife, mother, and homemaker.

The fact that my father was convicted, fined, and given an eight-year suspended jail sentence led, I believe, to his desire to flee his hometown. To his credit, even though he lived in Montclair for many years after his fall from grace, he never bowed his head or gave up his dignity or self-respect. Although unstated, largely unrecognized, and certainly unsought, his ability to carry on in spite of hardship was admired and a model for me and those who knew him during his heyday. At his funeral in 1977, the undertaker, who was a long-time businessman in the community, told me that he and other younger business leaders in the community had a great deal of respect for my father and considered him a business pioneer in Montclair. Considering that he lost everything after his trial, it was understandable why he sought the anonymity of living in a new area. A person of lesser strength and character might have reacted differently and chosen a more self-destructive solution to his problems—alcoholism, social withdrawal, or suicide. About the worst behavior my father engaged in, besides being contentious and overbearing to his wife and children, was smoking offensive smelling cigars and drinking a few too many highballs after work. Yet, drinking was not a problem, and the only time I ever saw him drunk was at his mother’s funeral. Although totally uncharacteristic of him, during the height of his troubles with the government, he smoked cigarettes for a brief period. These failings were mild considering that the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI attempted to destroy him and threatened to do the same to any friend or business associate who stuck by him.

Several years after my father’s death, I grew curious about what really led to his financial ruin, so I sought out people who either worked for him, learned their profession under his tutelage, or engaged in the same business: mechanical dentistry. This profession produces the dental technicians who make dentures and false teeth for dentists. Considering that he was born in 1901 and had a seventh grade education, during a time when most African Americans were domestics and service employees, what he accomplished was remarkable. I wanted to find out from his former colleagues why he had gotten into trouble and whether or not he was guilty. The consensus was that as a recipient of federal payments to train veterans, my father didn’t do anything different than anyone else engaged in similar businesses. In any business that trained former GI’s, there were always cases in which the trainees did not get the training they were promised. Some were irresponsible and after signing in, they took off and went to the racetrack or the beach. My father’s former colleagues adamantly believed the only difference between him and other businessmen serving veterans was that he was a proud African American man whose only crime was being ambitious, overly confident, and, at times, brash.

The Move to Newark

Life in Newark with my parents, while a full-time student at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, was one of the unhappiest periods in my life. Having grown up in South End, the predominantly middle to lower income African American section of Montclair, I was accustomed to living in a nicely landscaped neighborhood with attractive homes. To make matters worse, my street skills were lacking. I had never lived in an area where I had to fear for my safety walking down the street or traveling on public transit. Newark, at that time, had one of the highest rates of violence of any city in America. Nor had I lived in an area that was so depressed, dirty, and congested with people and cars. Although I hated living in Newark, the experience forced me to acquire social skills, street knowledge, and life insights that proved invaluable in the future. It also contributed to the development of several important lessons about life. First, I learned that, generally, you gain more from the bad experiences than you do from the good ones, as long as you come out with your mind and body intact; second, although it is a good quality to be nice to people, you have to look out for yourself, because no one else will; and third, the goodness of people and how they treat you are not determined by their skin color, but by the quality of their character and their values.

I’ll never forget the day we moved into our Newark apartment. Because my father had hired a man from Brooklyn, in addition to a moving company, to assist with the move, I wasn’t involved in transporting our furniture and belongings to the new location. As I look back, I am amazed how disconnected I was from the family’s relocation. Obviously, I did not like the idea of moving, nor did I like where we were moving, and I showed my feelings. As I recall, on moving day I took a girlfriend to New York City where we spent the day visiting museums. When I went home that night, I had to locate our new home, because I had never seen it before. What a shock that was. When I got off the bus in my new neighborhood, it was cold and it smelled like fast-food restaurants, rotting garbage, and filth. The apartment was also a big letdown. Everything was old, reminiscent of another century, the floorboards were wide planks painted an ugly maroon color, and all of the furniture and rugs were scattered helter-skelter throughout all five rooms. Before putting furniture in their proper locations, my parents waited for me to come home. My first few hours at home were spent helping them set up house in our new residence.

What was most unsettling about my new home were the bugs. The place was infested with cockroaches and waterbugs - creatures that were totally new to me. Every time I turned off a light switch in a room, the bugs came out, and as they spread across the floor, they made a disturbing clicking noise. That first night, we sprayed every room with insecticide, but it did little to stem the insect tide. Even after putting down the rugs, setting up the beds, and positioning the furniture, we were plagued with bugs for months. The bug problem did not begin to abate until the building owner, Mr. Perry, brought in professional exterminators who repeatedly sprayed in the basement under the floorboards of our apartment over several months. My father and I supplemented this treatment by periodically spraying around the basement with spray cans of insecticide. Still, this was no guarantee that we wouldn’t, on occasion, see bugs. It was very embarrassing, especially to my mother, to entertain guests, only to have a huge ugly water bug slowly make its way across the living room floor in sight of everyone.

Living in Newark was an inconvenience for everyone except my father, at least initially. While it brought him closer to New York City where he ran a small real estate office in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, it meant my mother had to travel an additional six miles to work. Although either my father or I would drive my mother to her job on the night shift at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Montclair, to get home in the morning she had to take two buses. For me to complete my final year of school at Montclair High School, I was required to take two buses each way, but after I graduated and entered college at Rutgers my commute was shortened considerably. To get to the campus, I only took one bus approximately two miles and walked a block or two to my classes. So, at least in this one respect, moving to Newark was beneficial to me.

What was most disturbing about living in Newark was just that - life in the inner city. Almost everyday, when I walked the block between my apartment and Central Avenue where I caught the bus downtown, I was confronted by the neighborhood crazy, an African American man about thirty years old. Unexpectedly, he would pop out of a doorway or alley as I walked to the avenue and pepper me with a series of bizarre questions. I would never stop to talk with him. Instead, I responded in the briefest of terms, usually with just yes or no, as I walked down the street with him tagging along behind me. When he learned that I was going to Rutgers, every time I saw him he would tell me that he was either applying to Rutgers or planning to begin his studies the following semester. Although large, powerfully built, and somewhat intimidating, after a few days I concluded he was harmless and represented no threat. Subsequently, he became a minor irritant on my path to or from the bus stop.

Although we lived in Newark, my parents continued to do most of their shopping in the surrounding communities. We avoided neighborhood supermarkets for the bulk of our shopping, because ghetto grocery stores tended to have the narrowest selection of goods, the poorest quality merchandise, and higher prices. Because I didn’t have a car, most of my shopping for toiletries, snack food, and haircuts was in the neighborhood. Several times a week, I would stop by the A&P supermarket to buy the one staple that helped get me through college - cookies. Most times, I hated going to the market, because on warm afternoons there was a gang of kids up to no good hanging out in front of the store. When approaching the doorway, they swarmed around you, begging for money and eager to relieve you of anything that was loose and not tied down. Leaving the store, they badgered you, vying with each other to see who could carry your groceries home or to your car. The kids were obviously from the neighborhood’s lowest socioeconomic families, because they were poorly dressed, dirty, and undisciplined. In more affluent areas, kids of similar age would be at the local park ripping and running around the playground, but that was impossible in my neighborhood. There were no parks or playgrounds and hardly a blade of grass.

Life in the ghetto was full of surprises. After I turned twenty-one, I used to stop by a liquor store to buy some wine for dinner. Because I got to know the store clerk, one day I stopped in to say hello. While we were standing at the front counter talking, a black guy walked in who I had never seen before but who seemed to know the store clerk. I could tell by the angry vacant look on his face that mentally he wasn’t all there. He interrupted our conversation, threw a pair of sunglasses on the counter, and screamed at the clerk, Buy them. The clerk said he didn’t need a pair of glasses, so the guy yelled even louder, Buy them! At that point he was getting pretty frantic, so what did the clerk do? He just turned and fled into the back of the store, leaving me alone with this crazy dude. With that, I took my cue and quickly exited the store. I have no idea what happened, and never brought up the incident with the clerk in the future.

Similar incidents seemed to occur randomly in the neighborhood. One summer when my cousins from California drove across country to visit us, they were shocked when, as they drove through the neighborhood, they witnessed a man beating up a woman on Central Avenue in broad daylight. Years later, after my family had moved back to Montclair, I learned that the neighborhood got much worse during the 1967 riots. In fact, Mr. Friedman, the Jewish owner of the local delicatessen which had been an institution in the neighborhood for years, was murdered in his store by robbers.

It is difficult to imagine, but my father commuted six days a week from Newark to his real estate office in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood even more depressed and crime ridden than the one in which we lived. Occasionally, I would accompany him to his office to spend the day with him, something I dreaded, especially in the summer. His office was on Reid Avenue, and in hot weather everyone was outside, because it was too unbearable to stay indoors. The dirty streets, decaying buildings, and the endless stream of neighborhood street characters and hustlers stopping by the office made me want to hurry home to Newark. I couldn’t wait until my father said, Let’s go home.

I’ll never forget the stories my father shared about incredible events occurring in his neighborhood. One story seems hard to believe, but it is true. My father had been involved in an auto accident and went down to the local police precinct to report it. He said he had trouble filing the necessary papers, because the officer at the front desk was too drunk to process them. Another time, there was a shootout between individuals riding in separate cars as they sped down Reid Avenue, reminiscent of old western movies in which cowboys shot at each other as they chased each other on horses. Finally, he described incidents in which people murdered each other over something as insignificant as an argument over a watermelon. And a person could be murdered by taking a contract out on someone’s life for just $50. Other times, when a person was murdered in a club or bar, their bodies were dragged outside and left on the curb, so the owner of the establishment would not be implicated and lose his liquor license. Life was brutal and cheap in that part of Brooklyn.

One memorable New York experience was the time my father and I, on our