The founding of R.I.T.A. (Resistance Inside the Army) in Paris 1967, (Richard Perrin, 2d from right)
Richard Perrin was born in Massachusetts in 1948 and within a few years, moved with his family to Rutland, Vermont. By the time Richard was nine years old, the Perrin family had settled in Springfield, Vermont. When he was fifteen, he had traveled to Chicago to visit his brother who was a student at Northwestern University and was strongly influenced by the growing Civil Rights movement while attending and marching in a demonstration where Dick Gregory and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. After graduation from Springfield High School in Vermont, Perrin traveled to San Diego, California to live with his brother.
While in California, Perrin had registered for the draft when he turned eighteen, and then enlisted. He was processed by January of 1967 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and took his basic at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Within months, Perrin was recognized as an outstanding soldier and was selected as Colonel’s Orderly for being judged, “most proficient in knowledge of General and Special Orders, general military subjects, your weapon, manual of arms, and your soldierly appearance.” After basic training, Perrin continued to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri to learn wheeled-vehicle mechanics. During this period, Perrin began getting more interested in the Vietnam War and began reading constantly about it, searching for answers and an understanding to his growing moral dilemma about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In June of 1967, Perrin met Andy Stapp, a private still in the military, who had been recently court-martialed for antiwar organizing at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Together, Perrin and Stapp, along with several others, began distributing antiwar leaflets and the antiwar publication, The Bond. Perrin’s subsequent activities eventually resulted in a court-martial for a minor pass infraction. After fifteen days of incarceration and harassment, Perrin was released with an officer noting that he had not been jailed for a pass infraction, but more so for his political activities. Part of the release agreement was that if Perrin would not work with Andy Stapp again and discontinue his talks with GIs about the war, he would be sent to Germany, not Vietnam. Once in Germany, Perrin could not ignore the racism he found in the U.S. Army. For Perrin, it was no longer only the Vietnam War, but his entire experience in the army. Over Labor Day weekend in 1967, Perrin made the decision and deserted the army, traveling by train from Heidelberg to Paris.
In Paris, Perrin connected with other deserters and publicly formed RITA (Resistance Inside the Army), not with the idea trying to get soldiers to desert, but in order to encourage resistance from inside the army. The publishing of ACT by RITA, considered the first underground GI paper, had a mailing list of about ten thousand and had a worldwide circulation. In Perrin’s own words, “it turned on a lot of guys and opened up a lot of avenues.”
In January of 1969, Perrin flew to Regina, Canada, as the political situation in France was becoming unsafe for deserters to remain. Once there, Perrin worked at a university teaching a seminar on the U.S. Army, and by June, had started the Regina Committee of American Deserters that gave housing, and assistance to deserters. Six years later, with the granting of an amnesty that allowed him to return to the United States, Perrin crossed the U.S./Canadian border for the first time in many years to visit his parents in Vermont, who had been working for years to obtain his amnesty. Perrin currently lives in Canada and in 2001, published his autobiography, G.I. Resister: The Story of How One American Soldier and His Family Fought the War in Vietnam, available through Trafford Publishing, Canada.