08/25/2026
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Forty-three Black soldiers fell asleep in a Texas parking lot because a two-star general gave them his word he would come back with an answer in the morning. Twenty-six of them had already served in Vietnam. The answer never came, and what came instead left a blade scar on a man who would still be showing it to a camera almost forty years later.
One of the largest organized refusals in the history of the United States military was punished on the word of an officer who never came to court to give it.
Forty-three Black soldiers went to a stockade that morning. They are known, when they are known at all, as the Fort Hood 43.
It happened on the night of August 23, 1968, and into the morning of August 24, at a parking lot and a patch of grass on the corner of 65th Street and Central Avenue, on an Army post outside Killeen, Texas. To understand why those men would not move, you have to go back four months.
On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was killed in Memphis, and Chicago's West Side burned. By April 6 the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division had been ordered off Fort Hood and into that city, part of a federal force of five thousand soldiers backing more than six thousand Illinois National Guardsmen.
Eleven people died in Chicago that week, all of them Black. The city never released an official accounting of how, and to this day the sources cannot agree, some saying most died in the fires and the New York Times reporting that at least six young Black men had been shot, presumably by police.
Mayor Richard J. Daley then told reporters he had instructed his police superintendent to shoot to kill anyone holding a firebomb, and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting a store.
The men of the 1st Armored Division had stood on those blocks with rifles while that was the policy. They had seen who was on the other end of it, and they had watched a city bury eleven of its own without ever saying plainly who did the killing.
So when word came down in the third week of August that thousands of Fort Hood soldiers were being readied for civil disturbance duty at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Black troops of that division did not hear an abstraction. They heard a return trip.
Word moved through the barracks on Friday the twenty-third. There would be a meeting that night at the main intersection on post, out in the open, where anybody could see it.
They started gathering around nine in the evening.
More than a hundred men came. At one point there were reportedly more than a hundred and sixty of them out on that grass, and what had started as talk had plainly turned into something else.
Around midnight, the commanding general of the 1st Armored Division came out to them himself.
Major General John K. Boles Jr. had taken over the division in April, the same month it was sent to Chicago. He did not arrive at 65th and Central and give an order, and by the account published that September in The Bond, the newspaper of the American Servicemen's Union, he came out to plead with them, and the men did not move.
What the general said to them that night has survived, and it tells you what he thought he was dealing with. He assured them he had nothing against colored people, and offered as proof that "there are colored soldiers who work in my house."
Then he made them a promise. Worried about how much support these men had from the rest of the post, he told them they could stay out there all night with no consequences.
He raised his right hand and swore to it, with eight colonels standing there as witnesses.
Some of the men asked him to put it on paper. He would not sign.
So the night went on with a general's word as the only thing holding it up. The men stayed out there and talked, and what they talked about was not only Chicago.
They talked about promotions that never came for men who had earned them. They talked about what the war was doing to them and who it was for.
One of the colonels who had been out there negotiating later explained the whole thing to the press by saying the grievances were typical of the colored race, and that he found the evening most unusual. That was the caliber of listening on offer.
Twenty-six of the forty-three had already served in Vietnam.
One of them told a reporter afterward that they had done enough for their country. He said he could not picture himself spraying tear gas on his own people.
Elder Halim Gullahbemi, who was out on that grass, used a harder word for what was waiting in Chicago. Describing it decades later for the documentary Sir! No Sir!, he called it genocide.
Private Guy Smith, a combat veteran, put it plainest of all. The Black GIs out there already knew what the job in Chicago was going to be, and nobody had to explain it to them.
Around five in the morning, General Boles came back.
He talked with them for close to an hour. By Gullahbemi's account, the general told them he was only a two star general, that he had to go speak to his own boss, and that he would have an answer for them in the morning.
Seventeen men took that and walked back to their barracks.
Forty-three stayed. Then, having been told by a general that an answer was coming, they lay down on the grass and went to sleep.
At 5:45 a.m. the post provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Kulo, stood over them and said he wanted them all back in the barracks. He had already been out among them several times since three, saying it would be in their own interest to leave.
At 5:58 he told them the military police would take them in.
At six o'clock, two companies of MPs cleared the grass. The answer the general had promised never came.
What came was a formation of men with bayonets.
Gullahbemi's account of it is short and it does not soften. They came in on sleeping men, he was struck in the head, and a blade cut him.
He carried that scar for the rest of his life and showed it to a camera almost forty years later. He described the formation opening every so often, MPs coming in, taking one man out of sight, and the sound that came back from where they had taken him.
Forty-three were arrested and marched to the post stockade.
They were processed in, then walked across the base to the stockade annex and told to go inside. They stopped and said they wanted to speak to lawyers first.
The MPs were called again, sixty of them.
Andy Stapp of the American Servicemen's Union went down to Fort Hood afterward and put together what happened in that doorway. The major who ran the prison started it himself, swinging his steel helmet into the face of one of the forty-three.
One soldier carrying wounds he had taken in the kidneys in Vietnam was struck in the kidneys until they opened again. Another man's arm was broken.
Fifty-eight of those sixty MPs were white.
The two Black MPs standing in that formation did not raise a hand. Nobody has ever found out what it cost them.
That is two refusals in one night, on the same patch of Texas, by men in two different uniforms facing the same choice.
An official spokesman at Fort Hood told the press the men had been escorted to the stockade. The next morning, a young intelligence lieutenant named Michael Uhl was the weekend duty officer when his boss called and told him to get over to the military police lockup.
There had been a riot, the major said. Scores of Black soldiers in a parking lot, over forty arrests, something about Chicago and the men wanting a guarantee they would not be used against their own people.
The major had a theory, and the theory was outside agitators. Uhl's job that morning was to interview the leaders and find out who was pulling their strings.
Read that theory again, because it is the whole Army in one sentence. Twenty-six combat veterans had spent a night deciding they would not go shoot Black Chicago, and their command's first assumption was that somebody must have put them up to it.
The man Uhl found behind the bars was a buck sergeant.
His summer khakis were still crisp. He wore three stripes and several rows of ribbons, and beneath them the Combat Infantryman Badge, which the Army does not hand out for showing up.
Uhl, by his own accounting, wore one ribbon, the one they give everybody.
The sergeant was terrified, and he lied. He told the lieutenant it was mistaken identity, that he had been asleep in the back seat of his car and swept up because he was Black, and he asked him to please call his company sergeant to come and get him out.
A man with a Combat Infantryman Badge on his chest was asking a lieutenant with one ribbon to make a phone call for him. Uhl made it.
The voice on the other end belonged to the sergeant's own company sergeant first class, and what he said was that he had seen that boy out there personally, and "he can rot in that cell" before he would lift a finger.
Uhl hung up and walked away, and that is where the record leaves the man in the cell. We do not know his name.
What the Army did next shows it was not merely angry. It was careful.
The airlift to Chicago did not leave until later that day. By arresting the men at six in the morning, in a parking lot, hours before there was a plane to board, the Army made certain that not one of them could be charged with refusing to deploy.
Time magazine laid that out in its issue of September 13, 1968, and noted the second decision as well. The Army could have tried the men together as a group, which is the kind of case that makes a country look up.
Instead each man went before his own court, for disobeying an order.
The thirty-five facing the lesser charge were brought in five at a time, which is not an accident of scheduling. It is the size at which a court-martial stops looking like history and starts looking like paperwork.
You will read that these men were locked up for missing morning reveille.
The Army's paperwork said willful disobedience of a direct order, and the order was Kulo's six o'clock instruction to disperse. The Servicemen's Union made the sharper point at the time.
Whatever you called it, these were men being broken for a barracks infraction that normally costs a soldier two days of kitchen duty and a talking to.
On August 27 the Army announced that eight men, called the leaders, would face general courts-martial, and that the rest would face special courts-martial where the ceiling was six months. Then the case ran into a problem, and it was the Army's own.
By the time the trials began, Kulo had retired from the Army and moved to Florida, and the Army could not get him back into a courtroom to repeat what he had said. The man whose order the entire prosecution rested on was gone.
So two junior officers from the provost marshal's office testified in his place. They had heard Kulo tell the men it would be in their best interests to disperse, and in their minds that had been a direct order.
In their minds.
Of twenty-four men tried that way, thirteen were convicted and eleven were acquitted. They were defended by civilian attorneys the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent down to Killeen.
The general courts-martial of the first six opened on October 30, with Michael Kennedy of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee defending, and those men were facing up to five years and a dishonorable discharge. Sergeant Robert Rucker and Ernest Bess were acquitted.
Guy Smith and Ernest Frederick were given bad conduct discharges with no time, which is a thing that follows a man into every job interview he will ever sit in. Tollie Royal got three months without confinement, and Albert Henry got three months and served them.
Three more men were tried later by general court-martial, and that trial is the one to hold onto.
Defense witnesses testified that none of the three had been anywhere near the area where the order was supposedly given. One of the prosecution's own witnesses was caught lying on the stand.
The prosecution could not establish that the order had ever been given at all.
All three were convicted. Two drew nine months and one drew eight.
The men who were convicted were stripped of their rank and fined two thirds of their pay for every month they sat in the stockade. Then, because stockade time does not count as service, they owed the Army roughly another six months on the far end.
That is the arithmetic of a conviction. You lose the stripes, you lose the money, you lose the months, and then you owe the months back.
Now set that beside what the Army did eight weeks later.
On October 14, 1968, twenty-seven prisoners in the Presidio stockade in San Francisco broke formation, sat down on the grass, read out a list of grievances and sang. For that the Army charged them with mutiny, and sentences of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years came down.
The Sixth Army commander was asked afterward why he had come down so hard. He said they had believed the revolution was starting and they were trying to crush it.
The Presidio case went national and then international, and Life magazine sent a writer down.
Everyone reading this has a better chance of having heard of the Presidio 27 than of the Fort Hood 43, and the difference is not the courage of the men. It is that one Army command reached for the biggest charge in the book and the other reached for the smallest one that would still ruin a man.
Inside the Army, nobody treated Fort Hood as small. The historian Beth Bailey found that the Army's Special Civil Disturbance Board worried these men were the front edge of something, that other Black soldiers would look at Fort Hood and do the same.
So the Army got what it wanted twice over. It kept the men out of a single courtroom together, and it kept the trials out of the papers.
The sit-in made the wires and it made Time, but almost no reporter sat through the court-martials that followed.
It survived in GI papers, in a documentary, and in two university-press histories. It never once made it into the version of 1968 the rest of the country was taught.
You can measure how little anyone was watching.
The sources still do not agree on how many of the forty-three were finally convicted, with counts running from twenty-six to twenty-nine. They do not agree on the longest sentence either, with figures from six months to ten.
Add up the trials one at a time, the way the papers of the period reported them, and the arithmetic never comes back to forty-three.
The names are worse. Out of forty-three men, the public record has held onto seven.
The seven are Ernest Bess, Guy Smith, Albert Henry, Ernest Frederick, Robert Rucker, Tollie Royal, and Halim Gullahbemi.
Thirty-six others sat down at that intersection, took what came at six in the morning, and carried it for the rest of their lives, and you cannot look up what they were called. The sergeant in that cell with the Combat Infantryman Badge on his chest is one of them.
Those thirty-six names are not gone. They are sitting in families right now, in Chicago and Texas and everywhere in between, in the memory of somebody's mother who knows her uncle came home from Fort Hood with a discharge he would never talk about.
If that is your family, the record is waiting on you, because the Army is not going to fill it in.
The post itself has been renamed twice in the last three years while the country worked out whose name belonged on the gate. In all that arguing over a name, nothing has ever been put up at 65th and Central.
There has been no pardon. No public record shows those convictions vacated, those bad conduct discharges upgraded, or any of these men given a hearing at which Kulo was made to speak.
He never testified, and the convictions still stand.
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