Winning the Hearts and Minds of Fort Lewis and McChord GIs during the Viet Nam Era
Michael Royce was born in 1946 into an upper-middle class, intellectually oriented family in Wisconsin. His mother earned a Ph.D. in economics, and later taught at Federal District College in Washington D.C. His father, Henry S. Reuss - Michael changed the spelling of his own last name - was a Harvard trained lawyer who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and as deputy general counsel for the Marshall Plan in Paris after the war. Henry Reuss was subsequently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Wisconsin in 1954, serving 13 terms until 1983. Michael first became involved in the Civil Rights Movement during the summer of 1965 in Mississippi, and later worked as a VISTA volunteer (the domestic form of the Peace Corps). Although opposed to American involvement in Viet Nam, Royce obeyed his draft notice in 1969 in hopes of organizing troops against the war. He became involved with a group of active duty individuals who published the underground anti-war newspaper, the Lewis-McChord Free Press. Royce went on to co-found a successful product liability law firm in Portland, Oregon. In 1997 he started Green Empowerment, a non-profit organization working in developing nations to provide energy and watershed protection. In this excerpt he discusses the charged atmosphere on area military bases during the early 1970s, and describes the various activities of active duty military personnel who chose to speak out against the war.
Note: For the complete version of this project, see call # 1994#05
