Thursday night at the Wealthy Theatre, approximately fifty people attended a screening of the new film Sir! No Sir!, the first major event sponsored by the Grand Rapids chapter of Code Pink. The film, produced by David Zeiger and Displaced Films, focused on resistance to the Vietnam War from within the United States military. The film covered the start of that resistance with a few soldiers making the conscious personal decision not to take part in what they came to view as an immoral war up to the end of the war when the military was essentially in a state of mutiny and soldiers were actively disobeying their orders, refusing to fight, and in some cases, killing their officers. Multiple facets of this resistance were covered, including the underground GI press, the network of antiwar coffee houses that sprung up outside of military bases, pirate radio in Vietnam, and the Winter Soldier investigation of atrocities committed by United States’ troops in Vietnam. The film also featured an interesting discussion of how this history of the Vietnam War has been forgotten amid subsequent efforts to remember soldiers as “patriotic” people fighting a war while being belittled by antiwar protestors, who as the myth goes, held them personally accountable for their actions and had a hatred of all soldiers in Vietnam. A critical segment in the film was Veteran and author Jerry Lembcke’s debunking of the myth that United States soldiers were spat on once they returned from Vietnam, a myth that seems to have arisen because it was a convenient way for the ruling class and the military to control the memory of the Vietnam War.
Following the film, there was a discussion featuring two veterans of military service—John Arnold who served in the United States Marine Corps from 1968 to 1971 and a current member of the National Guard who spent one year in Iraq. John Arnold, a resident of Grand Rapids and former editor of the underground newspaper Head On! (sample articles: 1, 2), found the film and its coverage of the GI resistance to be “overwhelming” and described how following his enlistment in Vietnam as a radio operator—an enlistment that resulted from his families patriotic history—it took him just 30 seconds to realize that the United States did not belong in Vietnam. His first actions against the war were collecting statistics on race and the military, as he observed at Camp LeJune that the decision of who was going to be sent to Vietnam appeared to be based more on race. These statistics were taken to the United States Congress, and following this action, he realized that he had to act because whatever the military could punish him with could be no worse than sending him to Vietnam. His underground newspaper was part of a network of hundreds of papers, which using the infrastructure built up by the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, distributed articles across the country via resources such as Liberation News Service. Arnold also described the rise of the GI movement as a “big breakthrough” in building widespread opposition to the war.
The second panelist, a current member of the National Guard who will consequently remain nameless in this article, described his experience in Iraq as an “eye opening experience” that shifted his view of how he saw both the world and the United States’ role in the world. He explained how he was a conservative Republican before the war and that he enlisted due to a sense of patriotism instilled by his family but that following a viewing of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Iraq he realized that the majority of those serving in the military were poor people. This, coupled with the fact that he saw the resentment on Iraqis’ faces towards the occupation of their country, changed his view to one opposing the war. He also explained how he saw many parallels with Vietnam both in terms of the language the military is using to mask its defeats and to paint a positive picture of the war as well as with the atrocities that are being committed by United States soldiers towards the Iraqi people. He advocated the immediate withdrawal of United States troops to Iraq and challenged the notion that if the troops leave that there will be nothing but a “mess” remaining in Iraq, asking “how can using a bomb be used to clean anything up?”
The two panelists also discussed the prospect of a new GI resistance movement in response to the Bush administrations “war on terror” and specifically the situation in Iraq. With over 7,000 soldiers AWOL and the recent refusal of Lieutenant Ehren Watada to be deployed in Iraq, John Arnold explained that he was “yearning for a new GI movement in Iraq.” However, both panelists explained that they believed the situation in Iraq and its differences with the Vietnam War were preventing this, specifically with the military’s extensive public relations effort to manage the war, the military’s efforts to psychologically control soldiers by isolating them on military bases and thus insulating them from the war’s impact on the Iraqi population, and the fact that there is currently no draft. The panelists speculated that the war would foster a mass movement when it becomes “the” issue for people and advocated ongoing organizing whether that is public protests or writing letters to legislators demanding an end to the war. Blogs were described as the “new underground newspapers,” although there was no discussion about how they could match the reach and effectiveness of the underground newspapers during the Vietnam era. Similarly, there was little discussion about the particulars of organizing a GI movement against the war.
