page_title: Court-martial of Susan Schnall
section_title: Court-martial
hierarchical_section_title: Court-martial of Susan Schnall / Court-martial
caption_attribution_description: English: Lieutenant Susan Schnall, a U.S. Navy nurse, on the day of her January 1969 court-martial for anti-Vietnam war activity
context_page_description: The court-martial of Lieutenant Susan Schnall, a U.S. Navy nurse stationed at the Oakland Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, took place in early 1969. Her political activities, which led to the military trial, may have garnered some of the most provocative news coverage during the early days of the U.S. antiwar movement against the Vietnam War. In October 1968, the San Francisco Chronicle called her the “Peace Leaflet Bomber” for raining tens of thousands of antiwar leaflets from a small airplane over several San Francisco Bay Area military installations and the deck of an aircraft carrier. The day after this “bombing” run, she marched in her officer’s uniform at the front of a large antiwar demonstration, knowing it was against military regulations. While the Navy was court-martialing her for “conduct unbecoming an officer” she was publicly telling the press “As far as I’m concerned, it’s conduct unbecoming to officers to send men to die in Vietnam.”
context_section_description: Two days after the demonstration, both Schnall and Locks were charged with violating the UCMJ and were set to receive general courts-martial. On November 14, 1968 Schnall faced a formal hearing at the Treasure Island Naval Base where she was officially charged with disobeying a direct order not to wear her uniform and conduct unbecoming an officer. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a smiling photo of her with the caption “She is charged with leaflet bombing”. She was officially charged with marching in the GIs and Vets March for Peace in her uniform and dropping leaflets “with design to promote disloyalty and disaffection among members of the armed forces of the United States.” If convicted on both charges, she faced up to four years in military prison.
  At the court-martial in late January 1969, the military presented evidence of Schnall’s political activity, which no one disputed, while Schnall testified in her own defense arguing that the order barring her from participating in a “partisan political” demonstration was a violation of her right to free speech. She said she was an officer and a member of the military, and felt it was “proper and dignified” to wear the uniform while exercising her right to say she was against the war. The military court found her guilty after twenty minutes of deliberation and sentenced her to six months of hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and dismissal from the Navy. Locks, one of the principal organizers of the October 12th demonstration, was separately court-martialed and sentenced to a year at hard labor, forfeiture of all pay, reduction in rank to airman basic and a bad conduct discharge.
  Schnall later told Redbook that she finally felt good about herself as Lieutenant Schnall. “It represented not what is going on in Vietnam, but my own stand for peace, for an end to all wars.” She described the march and speech she gave as “my coming out as a human being.” Due to an obscure Navy policy that any woman sentenced to less than a year in prison cannot be confined, Schnall served out her sentence as a nurse at the Oakland Naval Hospital. Ironically, the staff at where she worked kept a scrapbook of news clippings about the Navy hospital and its staff which is now immortalized on the internet — Schnall’s clippings are carefully pasted into many of its pages.
caption: She is charged with leaflet bombing
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