[Marxism] WW Review of Sir! No Sir!

["Gregory Butterfield" <gregb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Review of "Sir! No Sir!"
-----------------------
Sir! No Sir!?break the chains
By John Catalinotto, Workers World
Published Jun 16, 2006

From the first moments of ?Sir! No Sir!? the film grabbed
me and hurled me back to the sights, sounds and political
taste of 1968: to the struggle to stop the war against
Vietnam, to the struggle to stop the war against Black
America and to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. youths
who, while wearing a uniform of one of the armed forces,
fought to end that war, fought racism and tried to upend
the U.S. war machine.

If you lived through that period, see the film to remind
yourself what it was like. If you didn?t, see it for a
glimpse of what was possible, and imagine what can be
possible.

Producer and director Dave Zeiger?s portrayal of the
events he chose to show was accurate, though one?s heart
beat faster seeing five years condensed into 90 minutes.
Moving back and forth between more recent interviews and
archival footage, he lets GIs and dissident officers and
Jane Fonda tell their stories.

Some of the best archival footage is from the FTA?not Fun,
Travel and Adventure but F?k The Army?tour that Fonda,
Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland did in 1970 as an
anti-war version of Bob Hope?s USO tour. Fonda had to
perform off base, but still played before tens of
thousands of GIs in Japan and Okinawa.

Zeiger was himself part of what was known as the
?coffee-house movement.? These were anti-war activists,
youths for the most part, who set up ?coffee houses? in
towns near the large military bases where tens of
thousands of GIs were being trained. Zeiger was at the
coffee house in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood, called The
Oleo Strut?named after a helicopter part.

I don?t remember ever meeting Zeiger, but we experienced
many of the same events, at a different angle. I was a
civilian organizer from 1967 to 1971 with the American
Servicemen?s Union (ASU) and circulation manager for The
Bond, the ASU?s monthly newspaper?which reached tens of
thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of GIs. In August
1968, and again in October of that year, I was in Killeen
and at Fort Hood with other ASU members to help with the
legal and political defense of the Black soldiers known as
the Fort Hood 43.

A broad span of resistance

?Sir! No Sir!? manages to cover a broad span of military
resistance. It shows the moral repugnance to an unjust war
felt by officers like Capt. Howard Levy, who refused to
train Special Forces to cure skin ailments?a talent they
used to try to win the confidence of villagers in order to
better murder the political leaders of the Vietnamese
liberation movement.

It also shows how some Black soldiers, fed up with racism,
identified more with the Vietnamese than with their white
officers, and how all were affected by the revolutionary
upsurge in the Black communities in 1968.

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April of
that year, there were rebellions in 100 U.S. cities, some
of which were repressed through the intervention of the
U.S. Army. So should it be any surprise that 50 to 100
Black GIs at Fort Hood, all having recently returned from
a tour in Vietnam, balked at being sent to Chicago for the
Democratic National Convention?

Zeiger examines ?fragging??the action by rank-and-file GIs
of killing particularly vicious, racist and bloodthirsty
officers and sergeants with fragmentation grenades. It
happened a lot during the Vietnam War. The film focuses on
the case of Billy Dean Smith, a Black activist GI who was
obviously framed on a fragging charge because he was
politically outspoken. He finally won the court-martial,
but only after spending a long time locked up.

A number of movie reviewers in the corporate press
attacked Zeiger because, to them, the film seemed
sympathetic to the fragging. ?Is he for violence?? one
asked, apparently forgetting that those who ?frag? are
soldiers and marines who are trained and ordered to kill
Vietnamese people who did them no harm. These troops have
simply awakened and pointed their weapons at those who
order them to kill.

Even more reviews chided Zeiger for ?not presenting the
other side.? We hope as many people watch ?Sir! No Sir!?
as watched the one-sided, racist ?Rambo? fantasy or
distortions of history like ?Forrest Gump.?

The voices you hear first and most often in ?Sir! No
Sir!??at least those giving the most complex explanations
for their resistance?are from dissident officers like Levy
and Lt. Susan Schnall, Special Forces Master Ser geant
Donald Duncan and a group of Air Force codebreakers. Their
explanations about why they were ready to face punishment
are honest, centering on their moral revulsion to the war,
in stark contrast to the hypocrisy of the Johnson and
Nixon administrations and the Pentagon brass.

The movie represents best that part of the 1960s movement
that was not oriented toward the working class and the
class struggle, but that had a revolutionary spirit, a
growing solidarity with the Black liberation struggle and
with the Vietnamese and a disdain for authority.

The army in class society

There was, however, another dimension to the GI movement.
The military is an instrument of rule by the capitalist
class over the working class. The military?s own struc
ture also reflects, in a more rigid way than in civilian
life, the class differences and class privileges in
society.

Instead of the civilian worker, supervisor and boss, in
the army there are enlisted people, officers and generals.
Rules that forbid fraternizing and make obedience to
orders a prime virtue help exacerbate these differences.
Breaking this rigid system, breaking the chain of command
in any way, has revolutionary potential.

There?s no doubt that the heroic struggle of the
Vietnamese people to liberate their country was a driving
force of the resistance of enlisted people inside the U.S.
military, and that the Black liberation struggle had an
additional impact. But in addition, the GIs who joined the
ASU also hated being forced to salute their officers and
call them ?sir?; they hated the orders and those who
handed them out; they hated the privilege of rank and
wanted to elect their own struggle leaders.

This class attitude came through in ?Sir! No Sir!? in the
scenes with the Black enlisted men. Also in one of the
interviews with a white GI in Vietnam about fragging, the
interviewer asks him about attitudes toward the officers
and sergeants. ?Well,? the GI answers, ?you know we call
them ?pigs.? That?s our name for them.?

If you go to the site www.sirnosir.com you?ll find a
schedule of where the film is showing, and lots of GI
movement history?including many references to ASU
organizers Pvt. Andy Stapp, Pvt. Terry Klug, Pvt. Tom Tuck
and others who made it clear during the organizing from
1967 to 1974 that the battle of GIs against the Pentagon
is a class struggle. They too were willing to risk
punishment, but their goal was to organize enough of their
class brothers and sisters to win that struggle.

Today, let?s make sure that ?Sir! No Sir!? gets to this
generation?s enlisted people in Iraq.

Email: jcat@xxxxxxxxxxx


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