Anti-War Soldier’s Hearing Begins

The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee announced that civil liberties attorneys Stanley Faulkner and Selma Samols went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Dec. 13, to argue once again, in the case of Pvt. Robert Luftig vs. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Army Secretary Stanley Resor, the illegality of the war in Vietnam.

Faulkner and Samols, the civilian attorneys for the “Fort Hood Three,” Pvt. David Samas, Pvt. Dennis Mora and PFC James Johnson—who were court-martialed at Ft. Dix in September for refusing to go to Vietnam—will be seeking an injunction to prevent the Army from ordering Pvt. Luftig to go to Vietnam on the grounds that to do so would compel him to commit an illegal act.

Pvt. Luftig, 22, filed his suit against McNamara and Resor in March, 1966—charging that the war in Vietnam violates the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928, the Geneva accords of 1954, the Nuremburg Judgments, the U.N. Charter, the SEATO agreements, and the U.S. Constitution. He charged in his suit that to be compelled to go to Vietnam would place him in the position of being forced to commit illegal acts similar to the Nazi war criminal who said “I was only obeying orders.”

His request for an injunction was turned down by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on April 15, on the grounds that the courts cannot interfere with the prerogatives of the President to guide foreign policy. Luftig, who is stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia with about 9 months left to go in his term of service, appealed this denial. It is this appeal which will be heard tomorrow.

Three months after Luftig filed his suit, PFC Johnson and Pvts. Mora and Samas, who became known as the Ft. Hood Three because they were originally stationed together at Ft. Hood, Texas, received orders to go to Vietnam, and decided to file an identical suit through attorney Faulkner of New York and his associate attorney Selma Samols of Washington D.C. Their suit was denied on June 30, and when on July 14, the three men were actually given direct orders to board transportation for Vietnam, they refused to go.

The three were court-martialed at Ft. Dix in September. The court — martials refused to consider the defense arguments that the war is illegal. Two of them, PFC Johnson and Pvt. Samas were given the maximum sentences, which included 5 years imprisonment at hard labor, and the third, Pvt. Mora, was given 3 years. All are now in the Federal Military Prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, while their cases are awaiting appeal through the army court system.

Stanley Faulkner stated that since the issues raised in the Luftig case parallel the Fort Hood Three case, the decision in the Luftig case will have a direct bearing on the legal appeals of the Fort Hood Three. He expects that either case will eventually be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Related

See related articles in the FE Archive.

See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.