pp. 50-51 “The most important new member to enter VVAW that fall (1969) was a black man named Al Hubbard, an Air Force veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. In fact, he claimed to have been on American air transports bringing supplies to the beleaguered French during their war with the Viet Minh, the forerunners of the present Viet Cong. Al was older by at least a decade than most of the other vets in VVAW, and he was already highly politicized. He was a tall, lean, light-skinned black man and wore a militant Afro hairstyle, a goatee, and talked in the lingo of the Black Panthers, to whom he had strong connections, though more as a sympathizer than a member. In Sheldon Ramsdell’s view, Al had ‘a good healthy attitude[on the subject of racism]. We needed him badly. We had to get people of color [into VVAW].’”
“Hubbard was by all accounts a character, what in certain places like Greenwich Village in the fifties would have been called a hipster. He even wrote his own brand of poetry. He had injured his back in a military plane crash, lived on a service pension, and took a large quantity of prescription drugs for back pain. He was always ready to have a good time; and by all accounts, he had a great affinity for the opposite sex. The other vets found him attractive as a leader for a variety of reasons. He had been a sergeant in the Air Force and had the tough discipline of a noncom who’s used to getting things done quickly and efficiently. He also had an angry edge that gave teeth to his social conscience, so that he did not fight from the head only, but also from the heart. In the words of Sheldon Ramsdell, ‘Al had a bit of a complex’ over the inferior roles he’d had to play in life—a black man in a white man’s world, a sergeant doing the work of officers, always making others look good, and helping white men fight two wars against people he considered his dark-skinned brothers. Like a lot of younger blacks in that period, Hubbard felt impelled to stand up to authority and to get some of life’s good things for himself.”
“He started the process by telling people he had been a captain, not a sergeant—a deception that later almost cost VVAW its credibility in the media and before the American people. But from the moment Al came into VVAW he began to make friends and acquire followers, not least of all because of his fierce enthusiasm for reform. ‘I used to get a kick out of him,’ Ramsdell recalls, ‘because he was actually having a good time with all of this [organizational work of VVAW].’”
“Hubbard had grown up in Brooklyn and gone into the Air Force planning to make it his career. But he had been in only twelve years when the plane crash forced him to take a medical retirement.”…
“…Hubbbard’s mind was the most forceful one there.”
Hubbard began to act as a leader from the day he joined VVAW “The guys respected him and he was absolutely crucial.”
“Hubbard was repelled by the blind patriotism of the VFW and the American Legion, which he blamed “for the military attitudes in this country through their unlimited lobbying.”
p. 53. “One of Hubbard’s first moves was to send members out to organize chapters on campuses…The campus chapters of VVAW would become one of the organization’s strongest bases of support in the years to come...”
“…Two other major areas were VVAW recruited were the VA hospitals and black political groups, especially the Black Panthers.”
If the Dept. of Defense has no record on Hubbard, could it be that his service was covert? Were we admitting to having American military in Vietnam when it was a French war?