The Pacific Counseling Service (PCS) was a G.I. counseling service organization created by antiwar activists during the Vietnam War. PCS saw itself as trying to make the U.S. Armed Forces "adhere more closely to regulations concerning conscientious objector discharges and G.I. rights." The Armed Forces Journal, on the other hand, said PCS was involved in "antimilitary activities", including "legal help and incitement to dissident GIs." PCS evolved out of a small GI Help office started by a freshly discharged Air Force Sergeant in San Francisco, California in January 1969. The idea rapidly caught on among antiwar forces and within a year PCS had offices in Monterey, Oakland, and San Diego in California, plus Tacoma, Washington. By 1971 it had spread around the Pacific with additional offices in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Okinawa, the Philippines, as well as Tokyo and Iwakuni in Japan. Each location was established near a major U.S. military base. At its peak, PCS was counseling hundreds of disgruntled soldiers a week, helping many with legal advice, conscientious objector discharges and more. As the war wound down, ending in 1975, the offices closed with the remaining office in San Francisco printing its last underground newspaper in 1976.
Background
By 1968 the movement against the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding in the U.S. and around the world, and GI resistance among the soldiers and sailors of the U.S. military was growing. The San Francisco area, where several key U.S. military bases served as launching pads for troops heading to the war zone, was developing into a center for disaffected soldiers, military deserters, and GI protestors. In July 1968, nine military men, from all four branches of the armed forces, publicly refused to go to Vietnam and chained themselves to ministers at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Marin City just north of San Francisco. Their arrests, described as "a media spectacle", involved the Military Police entering the church during a Communion service, using bolt cutters to dislodge the protesters, and arresting all nine of the soldiers plus the ministers they were chained to. The incident received international press coverage and served as an early indication of wide spread discontent and antiwar sentiment among soldiers. One of the nine GIs was Air Force Sergeant and radar instructor Oliver Hirsch, who had just escaped in his pajamas from the Presidio Military Stockade where he had been held for a psych evaluation after feigning insanity in an attempt to avoid orders to Vietnam.
GI Help Office
After his arrest, Hirsch, expected an extended stay in Leavenworth military prison, but was instead quickly dishonorably discharged. "I went from facing years in prison . . . to standing on the side of the highway in civilian clothes -- free as a man can be in this country," he told an interviewer years later. Recognizing how difficult it had been to resist the war within the military, he decided there was a pressing need to help other soldiers under similar circumstances. In January 1969 he started the GI Help office in downtown San Francisco as a service to soldiers resisting deployment to Vietnam. This office, in the Mission District at 483 Guerrero Street, was the first of its kind in the U.S. Hirsch had recognized and been an early part of a rapidly expanding expression within the U.S. military of the growing antiwar and anti-military sentiment surrounding the Vietnam War. Military statistics have revealed "there were about 1.5 million AWOLS and 563,000 less-than-honorable discharges between 1964 and 1974." In other words, by 1969 there was a growing and acute need among disaffected GIs for legal counseling and support.