Sir, No Sir: Educate yourself tonight (8/25)

Veteran's for Peace is showing an extremely important documentary, "Sir! No Sir!" at the Vet's Hall, tonight at 7pm. The documentary tells the history of soldiers refusing to fight in the war in Viet Nam. Their story has "disappeared" from history and we need to re-learn it! Also, Sharon Kufeldt, national Vice President of Veterans for Peace, will speak. Come out tonight and educate yourself! Read-on for the Wikipedia entry about, "Sir, No Sir!"

Wikipedia entry:
Sir! No Sir! is a Displaced Films/BBC documentary film about the anti-war movement within the ranks of the United States Military during the Vietnam War. It is subtitled "the suppressed story of the GI movement to end the war in Vietnam." It was completed in 2005 and released in 2006. The film won the audience award at the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Golden Starfish Award for best documentary in 2005.

The film was produced, directed, and written by David Zeiger. It consists in part of interviews with Vietnam veterans explaining the reasons they protested the war or even defected.

By the Pentagon figures, during the 10 years of U.S. involvement in the war, 500,000 U.S. soldiers deserted.

The film tells the story of how, from the very first troops that were sent, the Green berets, there was resentment against this war, which was seen as different from, as Jane Fonda put it, the "good wars" that their fathers had fought. In the beginning some just left, as individual actions, but after a while it became apparent that so many were opposed to the war that one could speak of a movement. Howard Levy noticed this when he stopped training soldiers and got a lot of support from fellow soldiers. Protest-newspapers started to be printed. This resulted in a severe crackdown by the Army, sending people to prison for years. The organiser of one protest newspaper was sent to prison for ten years for the alleged possession of marijuana.

Another cause for discontent was that a large majority of the soldiers were black and at the time a black movement was rising. One notion was that blacks should only fight against black oppression and that was not going on in Vietnam, so blacks should not go there. This resulted in one revolt in which people got killed.

The movement made the U.S. Army almost unoperable. In response to this, U.S. president Richard Nixon decided to "Vietnamize" the war, leaving the ground fighting to South Vietnamese troops and limiting U.S. involvement to bombardments. As a result, the presence of U.S. soldiers at the border was denied, leaving these soldiers to fend for themselves. When six of these soldiers were ordered to go on what was effectively a suicide mission, they refused and in stead decided to send a message to the home front. Nixon responded to this by pulling that company out, but then other companies started to stop fighting as well. Some officers were killed by their own men. Because this was often done with fragmentation bombs, it became known as fragging.

When during one offensive more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were used the during the whole of World War II (by both sides), the Navy also started to protest. A ballot was cast on the ship Constellation, in which the crew decided not to go to Vietnam.