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I watched a great "anti-war"
movie the other day. No, not Grave of the Fireflies; Grand Illusion;
Hearts & Minds; or Dr. Strangelove, though I highly recommend
them all. The documentary I watched is on par with all of them,
even more compelling (and certainly more honest) than Errol Morris'
Oscar-winning Fog of War which appallingly made a hero
out of the counterfeit contrition of the forever evasive Robert
MacNamara.
David Zeiger's "Sir! No Sir!"
documentary chronicles the "seditious" Anti-war Movement
of active duty GI's and their supporters during the Vietnam War.
This lost, er, stolen, from our collective memory Movement had
as much or more to do with the US Military Machine's eventual
abandonment of its devastating multi-million corpse-creating
SE Asian wet dream as did its civilian counterpart.
The film is populated with
the GIs and supporters telling their story themselves --- no
war criminals seeking to remake themselves; no "stars"
except for a short take with Jane Fonda, who recently has been
apologizing for that famous photo posing with a North Vietnamese
anti-aircraft gun. She certainly has nothing to apologize for
concerning her, Donald Sutherland and company's brilliant and
well-received FTA ("Fuck the Army") counter-Bob Hope
troop tours. The archival footage of those tours and the thousands
of appreciative GIs in the audiences gives ample proof of FTA's
and Fonda's true impact.
And, we can certainly be thankful
that the self-serving, sonorous John Kerry is nowhere to be found.
Rebellion
in the Ranks
This history with the Pentagon
itself citing a total of 503,926 "incidents of desertion"
from 1966--1971 alone; officers being "fragged" (killed
by their own troops); and, by 1971, entire units refusing to
go into action is brought to life here at a yet another time
of Imperial overreach.
Superb archival footage is
shrewdly used --- though some of it is tough to take, such as
shots of entire villages, fields and forests being obliterated.
We see the story of the Presidio 27 unfold and then hear from
its vets --- prisoners in the San Francisco base's stockade who
are threatened with execution for treason when they refuse to
work after a mentally-ill fellow prisoner is killed by a shot
in the back.
We see the history and hear
from the vets of the Ft. Hood 43--Black soldiers who refused
to do "riot-control" duty at the 1968 Democratic National
Convention--each was sentenced to 18 months hard time. (Can you
just imagine if they HAD been there and armed when Mayor Daley's
thugs went on their rampage?)
The story is told of how the
Long Binh Jail (LBJ was the appropriate nickname for Vietnam's
largest prison) was taken over by Black soldiers who held it
for two months. Riots broke out at US military prisons all over
the world! Thousands were jailed for refusing combat. Tens of
thousands deserted and fled to welcoming nations; primarily Canada,
France and Sweden.
Anti-war coffee houses sprung
up around military bases. Zeiger himself worked at one of the
main ones, the Oleo Strut, started in 1968 outside Ft. Hood,
the base with the most sustained GI opposition. Up to 300 underground
anti-war, soldier-run newspapers came out. Underground radio
blossomed under the noses of the brass in Vietnam itself ---
at a time when hit songs like The Animals' We Gotta Get Out
of This Place, John Fogerty's Fortunate Son, Edwin
Starr's War and Kenny Rogers' Ruby, Don't Take Your
Love to Town were banned from official Armed Forces Vietnam
Network stations. The American Serviceman's Union and the Vietnam
Veteran's Against the War (VVAW) were formed. They organized
thousands of active duty soldiers who protested at virtually
ever military base worldwide on Armed Forces Day. On Christmas
Eve 1969, 50 GIs even staged an anti-war protest in Saigon!
On January 31, 1971, with funding
raised by Fonda, Sutherland, social critic/comedian Dick Gregory,
musician/activists David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash
and Phil Ochs, VVAW held the three day Winter Soldiers Investigation
(WSI) in Detroit. This citizen tribunal of honorably discharged
GIs brought to light the enormity of the war crimes still occurring
in SE Asia. VVAW also staged the dramatic (maybe, the most dramatic)
protest of the era when they threw their medals onto the Capitol
steps. The documentary has archival footage of both these events.
Kicking
"Vietnam Syndrome" with Myths?
The movie also debunks the
intractable "Myth of the Spitting Hippie." You know,
it goes like this: valiant GIs return home to America-hating
dirty hippies and are spat upon on the tarmac. Tediously wading
through media accounts of the era, the producers cannot find
a single instance of any such spitting; though the lie can be
traced directly to Sylvester "Rambo" Stallone's whiney
use of it in the 1982 movie First Blood. Returning soldiers
first arrived at military airfields, not the San Francisco airport
of the myth in the first place! Sure, they weren't welcomed home
with marching bands and all; but the real disgrace ever since
has been the abandonment of Viet vets by the government, not
the public.
The spitting legend was and
is an integral part of the government's playing the "kicking
Vietnam Syndrome" card to justify it's later incursions
in Central America and today in the Middle East. The fable was
amplified during the 1990 run-up to the Middle East Wars, as
was the erasure of the very history of this ground-breaking and
vital GI movement.
In 1991, after the end of the
Persian Gulf stage of the Middle East wars, President Poppy Bush
weirdly said, "The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest
beneath the sands of the Arabian desert." Former Assistant
Secretary of State and Kerry campaign advisor Richard Holbrooke
accused Bill Clinton of caving into "Vietmalia Syndrome"
when Bubba quickly withdrew all troops from Somalia after the
disastrous Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. (This fixation with how
the public views ineffective military actions undoubtedly cost
Holbrooke the Secretary of State job when Clinton replaced Madeline
Albright with Warren Christopher in 1997 --- not that "Vietmalia
Syndrome" stopped Clinton from blasting the Balkans.)
Just a few months into the
disastrous Iraq occupation, General Ricardo Sanchez angrily asserted,
"It's not Vietnam and there's no way that you can make the
comparison to the quagmire of Vietnam."
A Story
No longer Untold
Out of the over 100 movies
to date about Vietnam, not a one tells the history of the GI
anti-war movement. None mentions the heroic account of navy nurse
Susan Schnall, who was jailed after dropping anti-war leaflets
from a plane over the Presidio. None tell the story of Greg Payton
(and comrades), one of the organizers of the LBJ revolt. None
tell of Dr. Howard Levy who served three years in jail for refusing
to train troops --- or the many others who tell their stories
here.
See this necessary documentary.
Better yet, buy the DVD
and send it to an active duty GI you know. Heroic GIs helped
stop US war crimes in SE Asia once before and they could well
do it again in the current madness.
MICHAEL DONNELLY owes much to these astounding men
and women. By the time he was drafted and declared himself a
Conscientious Objector in 1971, all he faced was a year in limbo;
not the incarceration and execution threats these true American
heroes experienced. He can be reached at: pahtoo@aol.com
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