San Diego has a long memory for war and a short memory for dissent.
That’s not an accident. This city supplied ships, pilots, technicians, and Marines for Vietnam the way Pittsburgh once supplied steel. The war was not somewhere else. It was here, in the barracks, the flight lines, the shipyards, the college campuses, and the neighborhoods that lived on deployment schedules.
What we don’t talk about is the other side of that same history: the sailors, Marines, students, and shipyard workers who tried to stop the war from inside the military and the city that supported it. They existed. They organized. Some went to prison for it. Some paid with their lives. The story was later buried, quietly and efficiently.
History that threatens power has a way of disappearing. So we will bring it back.
A City Built to Send People to War
San Diego California US Naval Station Postcard 1960s Ships in Moth Balls
By the late 1960s, San Diego was one of the central arteries feeding the Vietnam War effort. Camp Pendleton trained infantry and sent them forward. North Island refit the aircraft carriers. The 32nd Street Naval Station moved bodies like freight. Convair and General Dynamics supplied the technology, avionics, and acoustic warfare systems.
This city was not just a military town. It was an assembly line of war, running smoothly, predictably, profitably.
Which is why it matters that resistance began here — not just in Berkeley lecture halls or on the Washington Mall, but in mess halls, on pier decks, in the backs of Navy buses, and in the small gaps where young men tried to think for themselves.
Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM)
The organizing began in 1969 under the plainspoken name: Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM). The men involved were mostly young enlisted personnel — Marines from Pendleton, sailors from North Island and 32nd Street.
Many were Black or Latino and already knew what enforced hierarchy looked like. Others were working-class white kids who arrived in Vietnam, took one look around, and saw the war’s logic for what it was.
MDM did three things that alarmed military command:
They organized across race lines inside a military that still operated under de facto segregation.
They named abuse of rank as a structural problem, not individual misconduct.
They made resistance collective, not lonely or individual.
This was not one man refusing an order. This was organized refusal.
Reprisals followed — surveillance, forced transfers, “bad paper” discharges, psychiatric classifications — but the movement didn’t end. It went underground, which made it harder to control.
What Was the GI Movement?
The GI Movement (1966–1973) was a nationwide resistance movement led by active-duty U.S. military personnel who opposed the Vietnam War. It operated through legal defense committees, underground newspapers, coffeehouse organizing centers, and coordinated refusals of deployment. San Diego was one of the largest and most strategically important nodes in the entire movement.
Coffeehouses and the Underground Press
Every movement needs space outside the institution it is resisting. Here, those spaces were storefront coffeehouses and borrowed church rooms in Ocean Beach, National City, and Vista.
From these rooms came the underground newspapers — Camp News, Duck Power, The Free You, and others. Printed cheaply. Passed quietly. Folded into boots. Slipped under doors. Shared on liberty.
They told the truth that official channels would not:
Units refusing deployment
Racial targeting within command discipline
Legal rights for dissenting service members
Ways to resist without going AWOL
The first step in any democratic act is speech freed from supervision. That is what these papers provided.
UC San Diego and the Breaking Point
On May 4, 1970 — the same day the National Guard killed four students at Kent State — UC San Diego student George Winne Jr. walked into Revelle Plaza with a sign that read:
“In the name of God, end this war.”
He set himself on fire.
He survived the act but not the burns. Students who tried to save him recalled that he apologized to them.
UCSD did not commemorate him. The city did not remember him. His death was treated as something inconvenient, something to move past. A small plaque was placed decades later — too late to serve memory, only record.
A culture reveals itself not only by what it honors, but by what it cannot bear to remember.
The Connie Vote: The USS Constellation and the Peace Movement in San Diego/Bob Fitch
The Connie Vote Project: San Diego’s Referendum on War
In 1971, San Diegans organized a citywide vote on whether the aircraft carrier USS Constellation (CV-64) should redeploy to Vietnam.
56,000+ residents voted against deployment.
The ship’s return to war was delayed.
This was the only known instance of a major U.S. city attempting direct democratic intervention against a military deployment.
The Point Loma Blockade
In 1972, activists and service members turned their attention to the Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC) in Point Loma — the research site for electronic warfare and submarine detection systems.
A protest blockade was staged at shift change. Not a march. A halt.
Scientists, graduate students, clergy, Navy wives, and enlisted personnel stood together. They blocked the gates. No theatrics. No slogans. Just the physical refusal to let the work of killing proceed quietly behind laboratory doors.
The message was simple: You cannot say you don’t know what your labor is used for.
San Diego remembered the war. It forgot this.
Why the Silence Was So Thorough
San Diego built its identity around the military — orderly, patriotic, respectable.
To acknowledge that thousands of people here opposed the war from inside the ranks would require a different civic story.
So the story was archived, minimized, or politely ignored.
Not denied. Just buried.
That is how history is revised without anyone needing to lie.
What It Means to Remember Now
We do not remember this to create heroes. The people who resisted were young, scared, and improvising.
They were ordinary. That is exactly why it matters.
It proves that even in the places where power seems most settled, there are cracks. And in those cracks, people act.
San Diego once stood up against its own war machine. That is not a myth or a slogan. It is history.
Whether we say it out loud or not is a choice.
Great history! Just a correction: the biggest blockade of NEL was in May 1970 — I was there. See my book, “The May 1970 Rebellion” for more. Frank Gormlie
Excellent reporting on an important but neglected issue. Thanks for sharing this.