Steve Kline was a Sp4 stationed at Fort Jackson when Donna Mickleson and I met him in December 1967. We were transforming a failed Tiki bar on Main St. in Columbia, South Carolina, into a coffeehouse that we hoped would become a hangout for GIs. Kline got wind of our project and offered to help. Later that winter he and a soldier named Bob Tater would be prime movers in a “Pray-in for Peace” at a chapel on post. Tater, who was serious, soft-spoken and saintly, deserted soon after the pray-in. Last I heard he was teaching at a school for blind children in France. That was 55 years ago.
Kline has just brought out a memoir called “The Metta Way,” using a pen-name (George Hendruk). His style is straightforward and informative without any fancy flourishes. He grew up in New Jersey. His father was a successful optician who suffered a massive heart attack when Steve was 11. The family endured a class fall. (I flashed on Charles Willeford’s memoir “I Was Looking for a Street” – high praise, indeed.)
In ‘The Metta Way,’ all proper names have been changed at the insistence of Hay House, a publisher that specializes in “self help, inspirational and transformational books and products.” Kline’s alma mater becomes “Winston University,” although he uses the real name of his friend Howard Porter, the star basketball player who almost led Villanova to the NCAA championship in 1971. Donna becomes “Florence Patterson – a magnificent blonde Goddess, unapproachable as a girlfriend but she always had time to sit and talk.” I become Frank Forest.
About the coffeehouse he writes, “It became my home away from the base. I even helped Frank and a crew plaster a wall after the Columbia building inspector went out of his way to say that a perfectly clean brick wall was ‘dirty’ and would have to be covered over. The UFO gave us disaffected and curious GIs a place to hang out, relax, and talk about what we saw as wrong about the War and the army. And it gave us a base to plot and plan!
“There was a core of about 12 of us who wanted to take some action. We decided on asking permission to have a discussion in the base main chapel along with the Chaplain, who had his doubts about the war and gave us permission.”
Kline quotes an account of the pray-in from Soldiers in Revolt, David Cortright’s very good history of the GI movement: “On the evening of February 13, 35 uncertain but determined soldiers gathered in front of the main post chapel for what had been advertised as a silent protest service against the war. Military police broke up the event before it really got started but two GIs – Bob Tater and Steve Kline – were arrested and thrown in the brig.”
Kline adds: “Just to correct the article, it was to be a discussion, including a period of silence on and for all those who had died in Nam, both American and Vietnamese. At this point I was becoming an activist and had little grounding in ‘spirituality’ as such; I was rebelling against the Church and didn’t yet comprehend the differences. When we were turned away, Bob [that’s his real name] and I looked at each other, spontaneously informed the MPs that we would still have our prayer service/meeting and knelt in prayer. I think of it as my first real adventure in Spirit: something moved us to do that, and it felt as right as it could be. The MPs picked us up under our arms and carried us away and told us to leave. Bob and I looked at each other again and we went back and knelt again! The chaplain almost joined us! Looking back, Spirit/angel/goddess moved me to do this thing.
“Frank had notified the Village Voice, a New York radical counterculture newspaper, of the event, and their reporter Jack Newfield and a photographer got onto base (the bases were wide open then). They got the perfect shot of the MPs dragging Bob and I away. The picture and story hit the wires and the next day was in newspapers all over the country. My gung-ho vet dad picked up the Miami Herald next day and there I was on the front page! This led to some lively discussions, accusations, and finally agreements that saw him supporting Bobby Kennedy for President.”
From Ken Burns’s account of the War in Vietnam I inferred that the group of “wise men” convened by Clark Clifford in the spring of 1968 to advise President Johnson on how to proceed in Vietnam had been seriously upset by news of 35 soldiers attending a de facto protest at Fort Jackson. Newfield’s piece in the Voice had been picked up by the New York Times and hipped the “wise men” to the rate at which dissent within the ranks was growing. Previously, the biggest collective antiwar action had been the Fort Hood Three refusing orders for Vietnam.
I’m halfway through “The Metta Way.” What follows, according to the author’s blurb, includes “his retreat to normalcy, his stirring of spirit, and the opioid epidemic.”
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