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From True, The Man's Magazine, July 1967:
"A GI Newspaper The Brass Can't Kill"
By Al Stump
Frankfurt, Germany -
All of us are free to read our favorite newspapers. One dime
buys a copy. But for most soldiers in Viet Nam that's not the
case. When it comes to getting their hands on one particular
newssheet, Gl's have had a big problem. A scene in Saigon last
October will illustrate.
On a steaming day, when combat troops normally wouldn't stir
from the town's tin-shack bars and cabarets, a good many men
left their hangouts ad gathered in the streets and plazas. There,
under the tropic sun, they waited patiently.
Troopers not aware of what was going on were puzzled. Not
only were their buddies sweating -- they were under surveillance.
Officers attached to top Viet Nam commands moved about, watching
the men -- and doing their watching with glum and forbidding
expressions.
The explanation came within the hour when native kids scampered
down Tu Do Street, Saigon's main road. They carried thin bundles
of newspapers and yelled, "He hot son-bitch! Buy quick!"
The kids were selling an item so hard to get in Viet Nam, Laos,
Thailand, Korea, Formosa and Japan that, although it was only
an ll-by-16-inch tabloid with a scrambled scattering of unmatched
type and contained but 18 pages, they were demanding, and receiving,
up to $1.50 for a single copy. Within minutes the GI's on the
spot bought them all.
It was a case of buy quick, or not at all. For this was the
long-awaited arrival and first distribution in the Far East of
the Overseas Weekly. For the past 16 years this small
but bawdy and hell-raising tabloid has been the serviceman's
most controversial piece of reading. It was started for troops
in Europe, but it has followed along wherever American forces
are stationed in number overseas.
Whompingly independent, Overseas Weekly is written
and edited for the ordinary, in-the-ranks serviceman. Put out
by a staff of former Gl's, the paper crusades in defense of the
soldier's rights against anyone, including the Pentagon and the
Administration. OW, as it is called, is tough and factual,
and it defies all censorship. Most Gl's consider OW the
opposite of the Army-operated Stars and Stripes, a journal which
they feel avoids controversy and says what government officials
want it to say.
OW talks the plain, crude barracks language of the
modern dogface. The paper provides him with a forum for his grievances
and regards it as both a duty and pleasure to publish, under
glaring headlines, the sort of copy which makes Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and field commanders
turn livid. The Weekly is the Number One nose-thumbing
critic of the U.S. military establishment. Repeatedly the Armed
Forces have banned it from camp and base newstands. Yet it always
impertinently pops up again.
Frankly sensational and muckraking, the paper is loaded with
sex, crime and corruption. OW calls itself "the enlisted
man's court of last resort." Its targets are autocratic
generals, sadistic junior officers, court-martial boards too
quick with dishonorable discharges, war profiteers in uniform,
civilian crooks operating post exchanges, brutal MP's, unfit
combat commanders, and any others who need the clear light of
publicity.
By well-informed estimate, the Weekly has caused the
transferring or reprimanding of more than 300 high-ranking officers
in Germany and France alone. The troops admire their newspaper,
almost uniformly. Although the embattled tabloid's weekly press-run
amounts to less than 60,000, dog-eared copies pass from man to
man and reach some 200,000 troops in 12 countries, from Iceland
to Germany, England to Turkey, Spain to the Philippines. "The
damned thing even appeared on my breakfast table," snarled
Gen. Lauris Norstad, when he was NATO commander. "It made
me actively ill."
What choked Norstad that morning in 1961 was a typical OW
exclusive report. A documented story from Germany revealed that
Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker had been indoctrinating the troops
of his 24th Infantry Division with extreme-right-wing ideas.
The division's weekly newspaper had published an article from
the John Birch Society's magazine -- an article which spoke of
democracy degenerating into "mobocracy." In a speech
to a group of officers and their wives, the general had described
Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow
and Eric Sevareid, among others, as either "pinkos"
or "communists." OW stormed about Walker's political
tampering. The world's press picked up the story, a Presidential
investigation was ordered -- and, before long, Walker was out
of the Army.
If not for the Weekly's inquiries in Germany, the public
quite possibly wouldn't have learned, in 1966, that tons of brand-new
Seventh Army tires, tools and motor parts were secretly dumped
and bulldozed out of sight. Or what went on in Mainz and Hanau,
where commanders disciplined Gl's who had gone AWOL or otherwise
goofed up by shaving their heads, binding them with ropes and
handcuffs and having them beaten with sawed-off pool cues. As
a result of OW's stories, the responsible officers were
either court-martialed or transferred from their posts.
Securing and documenting the hard facts from security-ringed
military installations isn't easy, but OW has many methods
for getting its information. "In fact," says lanky
Mike Pavich, a star Weekly staff man, "I'm more of
an undercover agent and private eye than a reporter." In
the past few years the paper has exposed a colonel who made men
walk 90 miles under full pack as punishment; an insurance company
which fleeced GI's; and a group of officers who paraded around
in Ku Klux Klan sheets.
The payoff: OW is out of the red and on its way to
making money. But it has also made a long list of enemies --
who have tried to bring about its abolishment time and time again.
And they have come close to succeeding in their aim.
During a Senate investigation in 1962, Secretary McNamara
termed OW "repulsive" and moves were made in
Washington to ban it from circulation. Sen. Strom Thurmond of
South Carolina has called OW "putrid." Ohio
Congressman Samuel Devine has used "slime-mongering, discredited
and foul" to describe the GI's favorite reading matter,
and urged that it be run out of the services.
On four occasions the paper has been forced to sue, or threaten
suit, to compel the Armed Forces to allow it to be sold in post
exchanges and other federal installations. A climax came last
fall and winter, when OW was banned in South Viet Nam
and generally across Asia.
The trouble began early in 1966 when the Weekly attempted
to enter Viet Nam with a Pacific edition, modeled after the European
edition but mainly concerned with what actually went on in a
shooting war.
"When we applied for a permit for on-base sales,"
says OW's editor, a slim, brisk 31-year-old New Yorker
and former 3rd Armored Division enlisted man named Curtis Daniell,
"we were told to drop dead. The Manpower Division in Washington
claimed that Army, Marine and Navy newsstands were overcrowded
and that 'logistically' they had no room for us. That's the same
old attempt to squeeze us out we've met before. We answered by
taking photos of half-empty PX stands, proving there was plenty
of room available. But still the authorities barred us. So we
sued McNamara and his censors to force an even break from Washington
with a hundred other publications that servicemen can buy."
In June, 1966, OW filed suit in Washington District
Court against the Defense Department, demanding access to all
bases in Indochina, Japan, the Philippines, Okinawa and Hawaii.
While legal results dragged, Curt Daniell and his staff barged
into Viet Nam in the only way open to them.
First they set up a Saigon news bureau. Next they rented printing
facilities in Hong Kong, where they ran off the Pacific edition.
Having been refused the use of government aircraft, they hired
the expensive services of two private concerns, Air Cathay and
Air Viet Nam Line, and flew their newspaper into Saigon. Then
they employed a few dozen native kids to peddle OW on
the streets and outside the barracks. Along with a few Saigon
bookstalls and hotel stands, this was their only outlet.
"They won't let us get to you," advertised OW,
"so it's up to you men to find us." Because of shipping
costs, only 2,500 copies could be flown in for the more than
400,000 servicemen in Viet Nam. The first edition last October
23 reached few men in the jungles. Troops located in Saigon were
luckier.
"HELL WITH RED TAPE -- OW HITS THE PACIFIC" howled
the opening streamerline. Then, the fascinated troops read of
happenings all around them, things about which they'd heard little
or nothing. Another publication, hoping to gain Washington's
approval, no doubt would have behaved quietly, at least at first.
But not OW. Its issues last fall blared such meaty headlines
as:
"ADULTERY OKAY FOR BRASS, CHAPLAIN CHARGES" -- a
story that told how a former Navy chaplain, the Rev. Norman MacFarlane,
had blasted the high command in the Far East on the grounds that
GI's were "piously punished" for chasing girls, "but
adultery and illicit sex by officers was wide open."
"VIETNAMESE PARDON DOUBLE SLAYER" -- reported that
Robert Kimball, a State Department official and Army Reserve
major, had quietly gone back to the U.S. with a full pardon from
the Vietnamese government after serving only 15 months in jail.
Kimball had killed another American official and a 26-year-old
Vietnamese woman in a love-triangle case; a civilian court found
that the American's death was self-defense, and convicted Kimball
only of the killing of the woman.
" 'HELL OF A WAR' KNOCKED TO PRESIDENT" -- described
an incident last October at Long Binh, South Viet Nam, in which
men of the 537th Personnel Company sweated out a threatened Viet
Cong raid unarmed. Reason: there were not enough rifles and ammunition
to go around. One trooper wrote to his father in the States,
who in turn sent a protesting telegram to Lyndon Johnson. An
official investigation resulted from the uproar.
At their headquarters in Frankfurt, the OW editors
learned that men in the lines were paying up to $2 for scarce
copies, and that Viet Nam brass hats had let it be known they
didn't want to see men reading the paper. Then, when the issue
of November 27 was flown into Saigon, more trouble developed.
To be sure of getting their copies, a group of Marines had raced
out to Tan San Nhut airport, hoping to liberate papers fresh
off the plane. They failed. As bundles were unloaded, trucks
pulled up and the papers were mysteriously hauled away.
The explanation of the trucks became clear when the Frankfurt
editors received an urgent message from Saigon: "The censors
have cut page five clear out of the current issue. We're on the
streets, but without a page five, or the back of it, page six."
"What the hell! Who did it?" demanded editor Curt
Daniell.
"Viet Nam government censors -- Premier Ky's boys,"
replied an OW staffer. "They now grab every copy
we unload from the planes, take them downtown and go over them.
But this isn't Ky's work alone. You-Know-Who puts them up to
it. They just ripped the page out and our readers are going around
Saigon asking, 'what happened to page five, what was on it?'"
The censored-out page five had contained startling charges,
with a banner headline: "MULTI-MILLION $ SCANDAL ROCKS U.S.
TAXPAYERS." The story alleged that a vast epidemic of corruption,
waste and theft was sweeping Viet Nam. It quoted sources which
stated that American military officials were allowing $1 million
per day in war supplies to be stolen from ports and warehouses.
It also linked U.S. Army authorities and American and Vietnamese
civilian contractors in a kickback arrangement on contracts.
Moreover, said OW, American funds were being extorted
from contractors by the guerrillas in the form of "taxes,"
and were reaching the pockets of the Viet Cong leaders.
The story later broke into the open in Stateside publications,
but the GI's own favorite newspaper was not permitted to publish
its report of the scandal for its readers on the scene.
The missing page five was, in fact, one of the best examples
of why a publishing venture launched in Germany 16 years ago
on a $3,000 shoestring today has become a property worth about
$1 million. The censored page also explained why OW has
taken the play away from the Army's venerable Stars and Stripes,
and various weak-kneed English-language papers published in Europe
and the Far East.
Cartoonist Bill Mauldin has compared the Stars and Stripes
to stale mush. A four-star general directs publication and a
bird colonel is editor-in-chief. The daily claims to have 130,000
readers, but many a GI will say, "Stripes is no friend of
ours -- OW is our buddy. That little bastard isn't afraid
of anybody, and it's our best protection against getting reamed
by the brass."
The official daily avoids any criticism of the Establishment.
This policy caused a furor in February when Stripes ran
a story about the arrest of Michael A. McGhee, 19-year-old son
of the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, George C. McGhee. Col.
George E. Moranda, public affairs officer at Army headquarters
in Heidelberg, Germany, had refused to kill the article, which
reported that young McGhee was arrested in California on a charge
of driving under the influence of LSD. OW, of course,
had run the story. Colonel Moranda was reassigned. The Pentagon
denied that Moranda's transfer had anything to do with the McGhee
story, but a Congressional subcommittee conducted an investigation
of the case.
A Stripes reporter, however, can go anywhere. But OW
reporters, legmen and photographers have it tough. They've been
banned from garrisons, cursed, punched and shadowed, and on one
occasion shot at. One photographer was beaten almost to death.
"We know our office phones have been tapped," OW executives
say. "Friendly agents in the Counter-Intelligence Corps
have admitted this to us. Bribes have been offered our reporters
to tell where we get our information."
One man who knows very well the perils of getting stories
for OW is reporter Bob Stokes, a husky, handsome ex-military-intelligence-agent
who handled German beats before moving to the Saigon bureau.
Stokes was wearing his arm in a sling this past winter, the result
of a wound he received from the Viet Cong in January while covering
a Marine helicopter mission. "In Europe," Stokes said,
"in the Cold War, local government censors don't bother
us much. Our main problem there is U.S. Seventh Army brass, which
thinks it is holy and above criticism. But Premier Ky's boys
are murder. Viet Nam is their country; it's their war and what
can we do when they get out the blue pencil?"
How does the OW consistently come up with information
which escapes others? Can it be believed? Many of its disclosures
smack so much of magic -- going so far beyond ordinary journalistic
enterprise -- that the tabloid's enemies say it manufactures
sensation out of whole cloth. "In that case," replies
Curt Daniell, "why haven't we paid libel damages? We've
been taken to court, but we haven't lost a libel suit yet. What
we print my be 'crude' and it may hurt -- but it's the truth."
Many of the questions about OW's remarkable ability
to tell hot tales can be answered by a visit to an old stone
building at 19 Schillerstrasse in Frankfurt. There the paper
is put together in a drafty, cavernous newsroom by a group of
young men, mostly in their early 30's, who could have stepped
out of a Ben Hecht yarn of the wild, wacky, Chicago yellow-press
days of the 1920's.
The staffers wear sweaters and khaki pants and drink beer
as they work. The 60-foot-long newsroom is a junk heap of littered
files, food cartons, cigar butts, overflowing waste-bins and
war souvenirs. The secretaries are shapely, mini-skirted frauleins,
or recruits from London or the U.S. Windows are grimy. The furniture
is beat-up, walls are covered with pin-up nudes and the typewriters
are old, rickety models. The office boy rushes beers from a nearby
bar, and cussing is standard.
"The joint may look like hell," says six-feet-four-inch,
220-pound Charlie Barr, a 28-year-old former student at Cornell
University, who took an Army discharge five years ago to join
OW as a reporter. "But we work much harder here than
we'd ever work on a Stateside newspaper. Call it responsibility
to the guys we left behind in the Army. Or call it using OW
as our training ground for a newspaper job back home some day.
Whatever it is, we enjoy a job where we can write anything that's
honest, without political interference, knowing that it helps
give the GI some sort of even break in a world he didn't ask
for and which works strictly to his disadvantage."
The surprisingly small staff of seven reporters -- there is
a total of only 15 people on the editorial payroll -- earn subpar
salaries: $300 to $450 monthly. Their working week runs 60 to
70 hours, Sunday often included. Deskmen-editors earn $50 to
$100 more, but work even longer. "Beat men," who cover
various European-British-Far East commands, drive an average
of 2,500 miles per month over ice-sheeted roads or jungle trails,
draw no overtime pay, sleep in cut-rate hostels and sometimes
out in the open. For this, they're expected to produce the kind
of news the Armed Forces do not want disclosed. To get their
stories they have to hang out in bars and deadfalls where contacts
can be made, haunt military courts for hidden items of evidence,
and float in and out of officers' clubs, psycho wards and military
jails. "You want to see how we get a lot of our stories,"
says Charlie Barr, "Stick around."
Before long, the tough, burly Barr picks up his ringing phone.
"Okay, don't get excited," he tells the caller. "Give
it to me nice and slow."
The caller is a Pfc. attached to the 35th Artillery Group
in Bamberg, Germany. "We've had a sonofabitch of a fight
between our unit and 40 Germans," he says. "The Army
wants to keep it quiet, but there was blood all over the street.
About 25 of our guys are in the stockade and scheduled for dishonorable
discharges." The informant describes the brawl: knives,
razors, lugs and broken bottles were used when German toughs
attacked GI's who were leaving a company party in a gasthaus.
"What started it?" asks Charlie Barr. "A Kraut
cabdriver called us 'filthy foreign pigs' when we tried to rent
his cab. We told him off. Then we got jumped by a whole bunch
of Hermanns. We were knocking the hell out of them when five
jeepsful of MP's broke it up."
"What about witnesses? Are there any who aren't in custody
that we can talk to?" Barr wants leads that will help him
verify the facts of the incident.
"Five or six. Some of the guys got away."
"Okay," says Barr, "I'll be in Bamberg tomorrow
with a photographer." Knowing the Army won't permit interviews
with the charged men, he asks, "'Where can I meet you and
the witnesses, without anybody knowing it?" The GI names
a spot. Barr agrees, hangs up and, turning to editor Curt Daniell,
says, "Big rumble in the 35th Artillery. Sounds like our
boys are in jail without good reason. I'll get going."
With nothing more said, Barr later picks up his photographer
and drives, overnight, to Bamberg. No other English language
publication or press syndicate is interested in Bamberg's worst
GI-German outbreak in several years. But OW checks it
out closely. Barr talks to all the sources he can reach, the
German faction included. Photographs show how the riot originated.
Once Barr has full details, the local commander and his public-relations
aides have no choice but to talk to him. Barr's questions leave
no room for evasive answers. OW's coverage of the incident
brings the story out into the open, and in the glare of publicity
the Gl's later get a fair hearing.
Phones ring from midmorning to 3 a.m. at 19 Schillerstrasse.
Dozens of enlisted men appeal to OW each week, and the
majority of "big" stories -- cruelty to or harassment
of the ranks -- reach the office as tips from victimized GI's,
or their pals or wives. "Every goddam soldier in Europe
seems to be a spy for your sheet!" a major bitterly told
Charlie Barr recently. Barr considered. "No, only one in
about every two or three," he replied.
One 1965 day Bob Stokes received a call which left him pale
with anger. "Mr. Big-Nuts, the colonel down here,"
whispered the tipster, "is roping guys together. Their heads
are shaved and they're paraded around the camp like horse thieves."
Busting down to the garrison town of Hanau, near Frankfurt,
Stokes got past gate guards and wandered around the post. "Walk
past the 'beast pen' at 3 o'clock. You'll see something,"
hissed corporal.
OW got photos which showed Pvts. Manual J. Montoya,
19, and Richard Melotti, 20, hog-tied together by a quarter-inch
tent rope and led around the grounds by guards like dogs on a
leash. They showed head-shaven troopers Mike Brist and Albert
McDonald roped together out in the blazing sun.
Stokes went deeper and learned that the order for the treatment
came from Lt. Col. Lochlin W. Caffey, a 42-year-old West Pointer.
The Weekly reported that not just one, but five companies
of men were affected. Colonel Caffey's explanation: a move to
cut down the incidence of AWOL's.
3rd Armored Division CO, Maj. Gen. Walter Kerwin, moved in
at once. General Kerwin transferred Caffey, a captain and a lieutenant
far away -- by federal law the treatment was a criminal offense.
At Mainz, Germany, in a similar case where clubs and pool cues
were used to beat men, OW's exclusive account brought
courts-martial convictions of four officers and noncoms.
Another key member of the staff is Mike Pavich, blond and
hulking. From San Francisco, an ex-Air Force sergeant who earlier
worked on the Hong Kong Standard, 30-year-old Pavich stands
six-feet-five. Pavich's network of GI informants is so extensive
that recently the Army's Criminal Investigation Division offered
him a job as an undercover agent. "I refused. Why should
I fink on the same American troops that OW is out to defend?"
says Pavich.
Size and weight can be an advantage in a job like Pavich's.
OW photographer Heinz Leitermann was once beaten into
a bloody wreck while on an assignment. Some months ago, Pavich
almost got it himself. "A lieutenant was on trial for carnal
knowledge of a German girl of 17. "My job," Pavich
recalls, "was to get a photo of him as he left the courtroom."
Suddenly six officers surrounded Pavich, blocking him from
the lieutenant. Fists slammed into his side as he stood at the
top of a high staircase. The officers were about to shove him
down the stairs, when Pavich knocked his assailants away and
cleared an escape path. "But meanwhile," he says, "the
lieutenant ran out a side door. I followed and chased the guy
for 15 minutes, up and down streets, through a motor pool and
finally into a kitchen. He was hiding behind a cooking pot. It
made a swell picture." The officer was sentenced to one
year in jail and dismissed from the service.
Enlisted men who rape, steal, kill or sell U.S. secrets get
no preferential treatment in the paper. Although feeling against
the officer class is powerful, OW covers its beat impartially.
The paper spent as much money revealing, in 1965, that a sergeant
named Glen Rohrer was a Russian spy as it did in breaking the
news, in 1961, that Air Force Capt. Joseph Kauffman was an espionage
plant of the Soviet.
Back in 1952 the Weekly pulled a brash but telling
stunt. It dressed one of its advertising salesmen, named Ed Cate,
as a German officer. The getup combined parts of the SS, Army
and police uniforms. Cate strolled into an Army PX in Frankfurt.
No one questioned him. Guards leaped up to salute. Cate strutted
about and then strolled out, receiving more salutes. "This
is security?" asked OW, printing a photo of Cate
leaving the PX. "What happened to the guarantee that only
GI's and other ID-card carriers may enter the sacred confines
of an American PX overseas?" Red-faced generals could find
no answer.
The Weekly, at the time, was less than two years old
and already was making trouble for the authorities. Behind the
gadfly attitude were the paper's four founders -- three men and
a woman. The men, Capt. Charles Garnett, Capt. Jim Ziccarelli
and Sgt. Joe Oswald, were scheduled to receive Air Force discharges
in 1950. They joined forces that year with Marion Rospach, a
young California newspaperwoman, to launch OW on a bankroll
so thin and on a theory so shaky that no one believed they could
succeed.
The four chipped in $3,000. Unable to afford an office, they
worked out of their homes and in the back seat of an elderly
Volkswagen. They had less than 100 subscribers, almost no advertising
revenue and no reporter staff. And soon they owed $10,000. With
a sigh of relief the three men dropped out -- frozen on duty
when the Korean War began.
"Our theory was," says Marion Rospach, who today,
at 39, remains OW's publisher-owner, "that servicemen
in Europe would welcome a free press. There seemed to be a large
vacuum in that department. But with creditors howling and nobody
buying us, I began to think we'd been crazy to try it."
Carrying on alone, the stubby, stubborn Marion concluded that
what OW needed was more dynamism. She looked around.
In Orleans, France, GI's were living in misery in muddy swamps.
In Germany, blackmarket racketeers were cleaning up, obviously
in collusion with certain U.S. officials. Across Europe, as any
soldier knew, "The Organization," a syndicate which
held control of military supply centers and some PX's, was earning
millions by kiting prices. Publisher Rospach borrowed fresh money.
Hiring a couple of experienced reporters, she went after those
stories. They found out plenty and OW printed it. By 1953
her paper had 15,000 readers and was showing a small profit.
It was also in so much disfavor that USAREUR (U.S. Army in Europe)
cancelled its contract for distribution on newsstands and in
bookstores operated by the government.
Flying to Washington, Marion Rospach begged then-Sen. William
Knowland of California for help. "The Army says the paper
is lewd and uses too much crime and sexy art," she said,
"but the real reason is that we criticize -- harshly."
Knowland, a publisher himself, bristled. The Hearst organization
also gave support. Rospach filed suit against the ban, naming
Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson as a defendant.
The Army backed down and the tabloid returned to base stands,
but enough months had passed to cut circulation by nearly half
and OW was barely able to hang on. A $15-a-month office-rental
arrangement with the sympathetic Overseas Press Club in Frankfurt
helped save it. "I'm a stubborn broad, you know," says
Rospach today, nervously chain-smoking and sputtering her words,
"We kept on printing the news as it happened."
These days the lady publisher stays in the background and
Curt Daniell and his male associates run the shop. Daniell is
a guy who moves fast at all times. He drives a racing-geared
Porsche and has a pretty German wife. Drafted into the Army in
1958, he was the son of a veteran New York Times reporter
and a graduate of New York's Bard College. He did two years'
service in Europe and then stuck around the continent because
he liked it. Joining OW as a reporter, he soon jumped
to the news editorship. Daniell has developed GI "stringers"
in a dozen countries who feed him the inside poop.
One of OW's most important scoops -- the Walker story -- came
because of the habit of listening to all tips, and investigating
even the least of them. In March 1961, an anonymous phone voice
said, "General Walker's orderly was just found dead at the
wheel of the general's car. Nobody knows why."
It turned out there was no story in the dead orderly, but
in asking questions about the death, reporters Sig Naujocks and
John Dornberg sensed something else wrong at Flak Kaserne, Augsburg,
General Walker's headquarters. Troopers were afraid to talk.
But a few did, and over a period of several months, bit by bit,
Dornberg and Naujocks pieced together the story that rocked the
Pentagon and White House. After the OW exposé broke,
Walker was relieved from command.
OW's success depends on its news sources, and the authorities
would like to cut them off, Daniell says: "The Army's spooks
-- intelligence agents -- have tried bribing OW staff
men and ex-staffers and they've tried getting them drunk. They've
shadowed our reporters to find out how we know so much about
what's going on. They haven't found out a hell of a lot.
While the Weekly clams upon most of its methods, several
are evident. Such reporters as Mike Pavich and Charlie Barr,
as former GI's, have close friends within noncom, MP and military-intelligence
circles. "These men," a former OW executive
confides, "don't like injustice and they leak many big ones
to the paper." The Weekly also is the only publication
abroad which takes the trouble to cover every one of the thousands
of courts-martial.
OW always protects its sources. The Army, for instance,
is still trying to learn how OW blew the lid off a private
officers-club party at Darmstadt, Germany, in March, 1965. Sixteen
officers, dressed in white Ku Klux Klan sheets and carrying burning
crosses, paraded about, drinking and chanting.
"And while that went on," angrily exploded the Weekly,
"Negro Gl's were forced to serve food and drink to these
people."
In spite of heavy pressure, OW never revealed the names
of its informants. In the end, admitting the story was true,
the Army punished the KKK demonstrators.
"That edition was good for 5,000 extra sales," the
paper's circulation manager says with satisfaction.
OW's financial future in Europe may be affected by
recent Congressional moves to reduce U.S. forces there by one
half. However, publisher Rospach and associates are splitting
a sizeable profit from their business success. In 1950 they struggled
along almost without advertising, despite only a 30-cents-per-agate-line
charge. Today charges are triple and the Weekly is heavy
with the ads of major firms, backing up a monthly gross of about
$60,000 on sales and subscriptions. But the profit margin comes
from other sources -- OW has spawned a variety of other
enterprises. These include Europe's largest color-film processing
plant, the German distributorship of Ansco products and a companion
publication, The Overseas Family.
Nowadays the OW staffer can look forward to a comfortable
vacation. He gets five weeks off per two years of work -- and
at the end of the two-year period he gets a free plane ticket
for a trip back to the States.
Beyond doubt, the toughest challenge ever to confront the
independent "Voice of the GI" is the action prohibiting
its sale on Indochina bases, particularly in Viet Nam. Last January
the First Air Cavalry men in An Khe, north of Saigon, signed
petitions demanding that OW be allowed to reach them.
"We know the brass hate our guts," say Daniell,
Pavich, Barr, Bob Stokes and others who make it all happen, "But
in one sense it's a compliment. It shows we eyewash nothing and
don't give a damn about authoritarian attempts to eliminate us.
Right now we can't get into Japan at all. The Pentagon has frightened
Japanese distributors from handling us. The same thing goes for
Formosa and Korea -- even Hawaii. But, in the end, we'll get
to the troops, the way we always have in the past -- by demanding
that right be done."
OW will undoubtedly keep right on demanding -- the
tabloid has one very big incentive. The troops are there, waiting
for their newspaper. Bob Stokes saw this firsthand in Viet Nam
during the action in which he received his wound. In the bullet-riddled
helicopter with him were four badly-wounded Marines. "After
they got a bandage on me," he wrote back to the editors
in Frankfurt, "I looked around and two of those Marines,
who had caught shrapnel and escaped by the skin of their teeth,
were leaning back in that chopper and they were reading copies
of Overseas Weekly which I'd brought along. Hell of a
good thing to see. They'd never read us before. They told me
they wanted to become subscribers."
- Al Stump
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