Sir! No Sir! (2005)

1. The following program is in living color...

2. and has been rated "X" by the Vietnam Academy of Maggots.

3. This is Radio First Termer,

4. operating on Dave Rabbit's own frequency...

5. at 69 megacycles on your F.M. dial.

6. The purpose of this program is to bring vital news,

7. information and hard acid-rock music...

8. to the first-termers and non-reenlistees in the Republic of Vietnam.

9. Radio First Termer operates under no Air Force regulations or manuals.

10. In the event of a vice squad raid,

11. this program will automatically self-destruct.

12. You must understand that I liked being a Green Beret.

13. I thought it was good.

14. When I did go in the military, I went in there gung ho.

15. In basic training, you have this 500 points that you score.

16. I scored like 501 or something. I mean...

17. You know, I was really, you know, ready.

18. I was certain that every male member of my family...

19. had their war, and there would be a war for me, and! would go off and be a hero...

20. and fight the good fight for this country.

21. I've tried to spend my whole life having people live a better life...

22. and basically feel better.

23. That's what nurses do, right?

24. You know, it took us almost three weeks to cross the Pacific.

25. And there wasn't too much to do on a troopship.

26. So we'd sit up on the deck at night and have raps.

27. And a lot of the times, it would get to what we were going to... whether it was right or wrong.

28. And we'd go back and forth, back and forth.

29. And, uh, we'd always end up concluding,

30. “Well, let's hope we're doing the right thing because that's where we're going."

31. In the early 1960s,

32. the United States government began sending combat troops to South Vietnam.

33. I was really proud of what I thought I was doing.

34. The problem I had was realizing...

35. that what I was doing was not good.

36. I was doing it right, but I wasn't doing right.

37. I was asked to train Green Beret people, Special Forces men.

38. Why were they training these guys in dermatology?

39. Well, they were training them to do dermatology in Vietnam...

40. because they knew that if they were able to offer a few simple remedies...

41. and help cure a few children of some simple bacterial infections,

42. that that would ingratiate themselves to the Vietnamese community.

43. And you remembered the phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people."

44. So this was how you were going to win the hearts and minds of the people.

45. And while they were offering the Band-Aids of helping to cure a few cases of impetigo,

46. uh, they were bombing the hell out of the villages.

47. I was out on a patrol, uh, near Hip Hoa,

48. and, uh, um, we took a couple of prisoners.

49. Whether they were combatants or not, who knows.

50. The patrol was led by Americans,

51. but there were Vietnamese ARVN there.

52. And they were turned over to ARVN,

53. and ARVN used the old-fashioned methods of interrogation.

54. Force, torture. And that was pretty common practice.

55. I tell you, as bad the... As bad as that treatment was,

56. the cynicism that attached to it was the part that was really sickening, I thought.

57. Anathema to everything I was taught, everything I'd learned, everything I grew up with...

58. This is just not the way you treat human beings.

59. And it was all done for the good of the cause, I guess.

60. I got out of the military in 1966.

61. I got out because of the things I saw, the things I was doing,

62. and the reasons that we were given for doing them.

63. It was a personal protest. It was just me getting out of the service.

64. There was no movement to join.

65. I found the war in Vietnam more and more repulsive.

66. And I felt that I just couldn't be a part of it.

67. Eventually, I said, “Look, I'm not training you guys anymore.

68. "I don't agree with what you're doing. I think it's immoral.

69. I think it's medically unethical."

70. And I just stopped... Threw 'em out of the clinic.

71. Uh, uh... It took a few weeks for the army to catch up with that.

72. And when they did, they invited me into the commanding officer's office and said,

73. “Look. What are you doing here?"

74. I told them exactly what I was doing. I'm not training 'em.

75. And they said, "Well, you know, you should know the consequences of that."

76. And I said, “I'm perfectly aware of the consequences of it. I'm not training them."

77. At that point, it was obvious that I was going to be court-martialed.

78. And a few days later, I got the court-martial notice.

79. Howard Levy spent three years in prison.

80. Along with him, three G.I.s at Fort Hood who refused orders to Vietnam...

81. and received five years hard labor and a dishonorable discharge.

82. Army Lieutenant Henry Howe, who carried a sign at a demonstration reading,

83. "End Johnson's fascist aggression in Vietnam,"

84. was sentenced to two years.

85. And two marines, William Harvey and George Daniels,

86. received six-to-10 year sentences for organizing a meeting...

87. about whether black people should fight in Vietnam.

88. And on March 3, 1966,

89. former Green Beret Donald Duncan was the featured speaker...

90. at an antiwar meeting at the town hall in Manhattan.

91. I just wanted to do what I knew about it,

92. and let-let people then judge for themselves.

93. I think the most startling thing to me occurred, however,

94. as the court-martial began.

95. What would happen was we would walk from the parking lot...

96. to the building where the court-martial was being held.

97. And it was the most remarkable thing when hundreds...

98. Hundreds of G.I.s would hang out of windows, out of the barracks,

99. and give me the "V" sign or give me the clenched fist.

100. This was mind-boggling to me. This was a revelation.

101. And at that point it really became crystal-clear to me that something had changed here,

102. and that something very, very important was happening.

103. How many people in the army...

104. do you think feel the same way, perhaps, as you do, are against the war?

105. I wouldn't vent... I really don't know how many,

106. but I know how many I met.

107. And that was a majority of the men that I met in the service were opposed,

108. but really didn't know how to voice their opinion.

109. 1968 was the turning point.

110. By then America had over a half million troops in South Vietnam.

111. But during the lunar New Year holiday called "Tet,"

112. the enemy... the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front armies...

113. Launched an offensive that overran the entire country before being pushed back.

114. The Tet Offensive revealed that the enemy had widespread support from the Vietnamese people,

115. and America was mired in a war it couldn't win.

116. And with soldiers beginning to question the war in the wake of the Tet Offensive,

117. thousands began going AWOL, or absent without leave.

118. Many found their way to San Francisco where a series of events...

119. brought the emerging G.I. antiwar movement onto the national stage.

120. Have you given much thought to the penalty of being AWOL?

121. Yes.

122. Can we see your chains, please?

123. We joined together in July 1968.

124. We took sanctuary in a church and chained ourselves to ministers.

125. We essentially called the press and said to them,

126. “We're not going to Vietnam. We're refusing our orders,

127. “and in fact, we're resigning from the military.

128. Come and get us."

129. The fact that it took 'em three days to decide how to deal with this tactically,

130. that was great.

131. I had nothing to lose. And I had no idea what was gonna come.

132. And that's a free place. It's a really free place, you know.

133. Y-You... You don't know what's gonna happen,

134. where you're going, but you know what you're doing.

135. And that was my introduction to the San Francisco Presidio stockade.

136. The population fluctuated, usually upwards.

137. It was built, I think, and could hold, like, maybe 60,

138. and there were some... sometimes double that in there.

139. Uh, overcrowded, toilets backed up,

140. uh, food was short, guards were mean.

141. It wasn't... wasn't any fun.

142. With The Nine for Peace held in military prisons,

143. soldiers throughout the Bay Area began planning...

144. for the first antiwar demonstration in the country organized by G.I.s and veterans.

145. I! was a member of the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

146. We got together a number of times...

147. and talked about how we were going to organize...

148. active-duty G.I.s to go to the peace demonstration.

149. And then I remember also hearing about the B-52 bombers...

150. that were dropping leaflets on Vietnam, urging the Vietnamese to defect.

151. And I thought, well, if they can do it overseas,

152. then we can hire a small private plane,

153. load it up with leaflets, and drop the leaflets...

154. on military bases in the San Francisco Bay Area.

155. Thousands and thousands of leaflets.

156. At one point I know we were a little concerned about getting shot down,

157. but nothing happened.

158. Evidently, they landed pretty accurately.

159. That's what they testified at the court-martial.

160. And on my way driving in to the demonstration,

161. I decided I was going to wear my naval uniform.

162. My opinion was fairly straightforward.

163. It was if Westmoreland could wear his uniform...

164. being for the war and talking in front of congress,

165. then as an active-duty person, I certainly had the same rights that he did,

166. and I could wear my uniform protesting the United States's involvement in Vietnam.

167. Susan Schnall was court-martialed...

168. for making a political statement while in uniform.

169. And following the G.I. and Veterans March for Peace,

170. four AWOL G.I.s turned themselves in to the Presidio army stockade,

171. which was about to reach a breaking point.

172. The moment... my epiphany... Or the thing that came to me...

173. was working in a hospital... In the military hospital...

174. up at Fort Lewis in a neurology floor.

175. And, um, it was all head and neck injuries.

176. Guys so paralyzed that they couldn't turn the page of a book,

177. and they couldn't even take a poop by themselves,

178. and they couldn't kill themselves.

179. Every day, we would come in as medics to take care of them,

180. and they would beg us every day to kill them,

181. because they couldn't kill themselves.

182. And it was such a horror.

183. It caused me to think to myself...

184. 'cause I grew up in a military family.

185. My grandfather was a career officer, and my father was a Career officer.

186. And I had no reason at all going into the military to think...

187. there was anything wrong with the Vietnam War,

188. or anything wrong with America the beautiful.

189. And then there I was faced with a situation where guys every day were asking me to kill them.

190. And it was so horrible, I had to...

191. At a certain point, I just made a vow to myself that-that-that...

192. I wouldn't ever put somebody else into the hospital in those circumstances...

193. That I wouldn't be the guy that squeezed the trigger...

194. that caused some human being to be in that dreadful situation.

195. The other thing that bothered me was those guys that could talk...

196. The ones that would beg you to kill them, that couldn't turn the page,

197. that couldn't wiggle anything from their chin down.

198. And none of 'em felt like they had made their sacrifice for a good reason.

199. They all told stories of, you know... of brutalizing the Vietnamese people,

200. of being the thugs.

201. And not a single one of 'em felt like his sacrifice was for a good cause.

202. For 19-year-old Private Michael Bunch,

203. life in the army had been little more than a series of AWOL violations.

204. His last stop was here, the Presidio stockade,

205. where he was fatally shot last Friday while trying to escape from a work detail.

206. So, um, I'd been assigned kind of by the movement people...

207. to go into the stockade and find out what was going on...

208. 'cause they had shot this prisoner and killed him.

209. The guard shot him and killed him, you know, point-blank.

210. And his only crime was not wanting to be there...

211. and, um, going AWOL.

212. And he was cut down at a real young age and, uh, for no good reason.

213. Not unlike a lot of his brothers in Vietnam.

214. You know? Uh, so, um...

215. So we reacted, uh, viscerally...

216. and, uh, with anger and disgust and outrage.

217. We tore that jail apart.

218. Uh, we ripped the wires out of the walls,

219. ripped the squawk box off the wall.

220. Then things started to calm down, 'cause we Started to plan.

221. We came to a decision the best thing we could do was to have some kind of a demonstration.

222. And it was at the roll-call formation.

223. We had a signal when we were supposed to break ranks. We did.

224. And then we walked over here and sat down. At a certain point,

225. commandant came out and read us the mutiny act.

226. And we just kept singing louder and kind of linked arms and sing and sing.

227. We were scared, man. I'll tell you. We were really scared.

228. We had 'em right where we want them. They were finally listening to us, man.

229. That's the first time I can ever remember...

230. anybody listening to us while I was in the military.

231. The commanding general of the Sixth Army, which was the jurisdiction...

232. And he said that they thought that the revolution was about to start,

233. and that they really had to set an example, you know.

234. Come down hard. And we were the guys that they decided to do that with.

235. And they did. I mean, you know, we were on trial for our life.

236. You know, I came in as an AWOL, and within two days of hitting the stockade,

237. I was... I was facing the death sentence...

238. for singing "We Shall Overcome."

239. Initially sentenced to 16 years for mutiny,

240. the Presidio 27 spent up to two years in federal prison.

241. And facing decades in fail for both The Nine for Peace and Presidio sit-down,

242. Keith Mather escaped from the Presidio stockade and made his way to Canada,

243. where he spent the next 18 years living in exile.

244. But in the summer of '68, as thousands of supporters...

245. protested the jailing of the Presidio 27, the G.I. movement had arrived.

246. My background is Puerto Rican.

247. I was born in New York City.

248. When I was 17 years old, I entered the United States Military Academy at West Point.

249. I graduated with honors,

250. and the army sent me to graduate school at Harvard University...

251. to the Kennedy School of Government.

252. I was there for a year and a half,

253. at which point I wrote to the army...

254. and said that I would refuse to serve in the Vietnam War.

255. I came to believe it was a war of aggression by the United States against the Vietnamese.

256. It was really a troubling decision.

257. Because I knew that, um, my career would be over,

258. and I didn't know what the future would bring.

259. At the time, the press said that I was the first West Point graduate...

260. to refuse to serve in a war in the history of West Point.

261. I remember calling my parents, and they were in tears.

262. I mean, just totally in tears, uh, thinking that I would end up in prison...

263. instead of getting a master's degree from Harvard.

264. But I told them... I remember in that conversation...

265. I said you always taught me to do what's just,

266. to do, uh, what is right.

267. And, uh, I really felt that I was doing the right thing.

268. And I believe that to this day.

269. Thirty-four years later, I know I did the right thing.

270. [Man ] I was wounded three times while I was out in the bush.

271. The third time I was wounded was on December 20, '67.

272. We got overrun by North Vietnamese regulars.

273. They started like a human-wave attack.

274. And a guy came up behind our hole and stuck his rifle in the hole.

275. And I saw the front side of an AK-47 and a muzzle flash.

276. And I had my M16 pointed up, and I started pull...

277. Pulled my trigger when I saw the AK sight.

278. And a bullet hit me in the knee and I blacked out.

279. I came to a few minutes later, and my gun was jammed and my knee was shattered.

280. After the fighting ended, and the sun came up,

281. and they carried me over to this guy who had shot me.

282. And he was sitting up against a tree stump, and he was dead.

283. He had three bullet holes up his chest, and he had his AK laying across his lap.

284. And the sergeant said, “Here's this gook you killed. You did a good job.”

285. And I seen this guy, and he was about my age.

286. And... And I started thinking, you know, why is he dead and I'm alive?

287. It was just a matter of pure luck.

288. Then I started thinking, I Wonder if he had a girlfriend...

289. and if his... how his mother's gonna find out and things like that.

290. When you just went through an experience of that nature,

291. and you find out that it's all lies, and that they're just lying to the American people,

292. and your silence means that you're part of keeping that lie going, I couldn't stop.

293. I mean, I couldn't be silent, you know. I felt I had a responsibility to my friends,

294. and to the country in general and to the Vietnamese.

295. The last guy who I shot... I don't consider him as the first guy I shot,

296. but it was the first guy I shot where I was shooting it out barrel-to-barrel with him...

297. and looked him in the face afterwards.

298. And I felt a certain amount of responsibility to him, to make that if his life...

299. If his death not be in vain meant that I had to try and advocate for the justice...

300. that he was fighting for, because II believed he was fighting for his country.

301. So I became involved in the movement. That's what happened with me.

302. With more and more soldiers turning against the war,

303. a handful of peace activists opened the first of what would become a network...

304. of dozens of antiwar G.I. coffeehouses...

305. located in the towns that hover near military bases.

306. The dusty Texas town of Killeen, just outside Fort Hood,

307. which housed over 30,000 troops,

308. became the home of the G.I. coffeehouse known as The Oleo Strut.

309. Being in the army, I can get over here,

310. and I can sit down and write poetry.

311. I can sit here and listen, and I can forget I'm in the army...

312. for about 15 minutes to an hour or something like this.

313. We have three very simple rules here.

314. Three very simple rules, and that's all.

315. We got no holding in the place.

316. If you're holding, it's a bad place to be.

317. The sign over there says, "The man is welcome."

318. But always remember, the man is welcome here.

319. It's not so much that he's welcome. It's that he's just here.

320. You guys know what I'm talking about.

321. The name "Oleo Strut” came from a shock absorber on a helicopter.

322. So that's what The Oleo Strut was.

323. It was a place where you go there and they sold sodas,

324. and they had a record player and all the latest rock records...

325. and underground papers, and you just hang out and rap.

326. Fort Hood was both a combination of guys going to Vietnam...

327. and guys who'd been to Vietnam and came back.

328. And as time went on, the guys who had been to Vietnam played...

329. a subversive role to the guys who were going.

330. And they go out on ambushes. Like for a one-month period,

331. we go out on ambushes and we kill over 50 people in the early hours of the morning.

332. And you start looking at bodies, because they've got to get their body count.

333. And who's there? A majority were women and children.

334. And what were they doing? What was their crime?

335. They were carrying food. They were carrying food to their friends up in the hills.

336. For anyone who thinks that they can duck out of it...

337. and hopefully, be a clerk typist and not have to see any of that,

338. he's making a mistake because he's supporting the war.

339. I remember one of our campaigns that was probably a pretty good effort...

340. was the Tyrrell's boycott.

341. Tyrrell's was a jewelry store at a number of bases throughout the country.

342. And they used to have these guys standing out on the sidewalks soliciting you.

343. G.I.s would come into town, and they'd say,

344. "Hey, why don't you buy your mother a ring? Why don't you buy your girlfriend a ring?"

345. Particularly, they were trying to get the guys who were gonna go to Vietnam.

346. “Better buy something for your mother. You might not get to see her again.

347. Something to remember you.” They'd... They'd be out there hustling.

348. And they knew all the different raps to pull on a lonely G.I.'s heartstrings.

349. And then they used to have this deal where if you bought the ring,

350. and you were killed in Vietnam, any payments were suspended.

351. The ring was paid off at that point.

352. And they put your name in the window on the Tyrrell's Roll Call of Honor.

353. Which was outrageous, because it was like, "Oh, you owed us money and got killed,

354. so we're gonna put your name in the window to get some other guy to do it."

355. So we decided to start a boycott at the store in Killeen.

356. And we began picket lines in front of the Tyrrell's place.

357. They arrested picketers at several times.

358. We'd try and maintain the picket lines.

359. But what happened was the Tyrrell's boycott...

360. started spreading to other places around the country,

361. 'cause word of our protest started spreading.

362. There was G.I. activist groups all over the country by this point.

363. But along with the growth of the movement came the attacks.

364. The Shelter Half coffeehouse near Fort Lewis in Washington...

365. was declared off-limits by the military.

366. And in Columbia, South Carolina, the staff of the U.F.O. coffeehouse...

367. was arrested and charged with maintaining a public nuisance.

368. Night riders shot into a movement center...

369. near Camp Pendleton marine base in California, seriously wounding one marine.

370. And in Mountain Home, Idaho, the Covered Wagon coffeehouse...

371. was firebombed and burned to the ground.

372. In the little town of Muldraugh, Kentucky, home of Fort Knox,

373. a scene worthy of Franz Kafka emerged.

374. Soldiers were mostly the driving force, and we were the supporters.

375. And they did things like put up pictures of Che Guevara.

376. They put up a... one whole wall was an American flag painted upside down.

377. The stars part of it was a toilet seat.

378. And if you lifted the toilet seat up, there was Lyndon Johnson's picture.

379. And when the police officer who came in to examine the place saw that,

380. he just hit the roof.

381. 1 got sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to protect the nation's gold supply.

382. I got to Knox at a time when...

383. their coffeehouse was experiencing a lot of repression.

384. I spent 13 days in this little jail...

385. that still had a trapdoor from when they did lynchings from before the Civil War.

386. There was a hook up on the wall.

387. What they were trying to do was drive us out of town.

388. But we weren't going away. They indicted six people for two offenses.

389. One was “maintaining a place...

390. visited by idle and evil disposed people."

391. We always thought, "'Idle and evil disposed people'? You mean, like soldiers?"

392. The whole emphasis of the coffeehouse in giving us...

393. an off-base center to congregate and meet was a good thing.

394. But in defending those centers to exist, it pulled us off the base,

395. which is where we were effective and, um, powerful.

396. Put us in a coffeehouse, we were just like a bunch of other young people in a coffeehouse.

397. Put us in a barracks with a stack of papers and half a dozen guys around us,

398. and we were fucking Atlas.

399. A new phenomenon has cropped up at several army bases these days...

400. A so-called underground G.I. press, which consists largely of antiwar newspapers.

401. Military authorities are clamping down hard on the papers.

402. There was an underground newspaper laying on the bed,

403. and it was called the Last Harass.

404. They freaked out, man. They were freaking out.

405. "This is unauthorized material. And this is subversive material.

406. You're not allowed to have any copies of this inside barracks. Turn this in immediately."

407. That night then, the paper then went around in the barracks.

408. Everybody's reading it... Two or three guys at a time,

409. sitting around on a bed... around guys' beds and stuff... checking out this paper.

410. What I liked about it was the officers hated it.

411. - To me... - It had to be good.

412. It had to be good. There had to be something about this that was good.

413. Typed, mimeographed, printed, the G.I. underground press exploded.

414. Fun, Travel and Adventure, the Last Harass.

415. Fed Up! Fort Benning, Georgia,

416. Chanute Air Force Base, A Four-year Bummer, Fort Dix, New Jersey, Shakedown.

417. Fort Hood, Texas, Fatigue Press /s published by a group of radical soldiers...

418. stationed at this army base.

419. And we used to distribute it clandestinely on base.

420. We'd go around and leave bunches of 'em in barracks.

421. We'd go through barracks at night and leave 'em on footlockers.

422. If you were caught distributing literature on base, that was a court-martial offense.

423. Shortly after the first issue was published,

424. the G.I. who founded the Fatigue Press, Gypsy Peterson,

425. was pulled over by Fort Hood police.

426. And they vacuumed out his car and claimed to have found remnants of marijuana...

427. and arrested him for possession of marijuana, in an attempt to suppress his movement.

428. Following a two-day trial in a Texas court,

429. Gypsy Peterson was sentenced to eight years in prison.

430. Despite the military's best efforts,

431. the underground press became the lifeblood of the G.I. movement,

432. as the army's own recruiting slogan, "Fun, Travel and Adventure,"

433. turned into the popular G.I. expression,

434. "Fuck the army."

435. There must have been close to 300 antiwar newspapers...

436. written, produced and published on bases all throughout the world.

437. It was wherever there were G.I.s...

438. American G.I.s in the world.

439. Linking soldiers around the world,

440. the G.I. press also inspired many outside the military.

441. I grew up believing that if our flag was flying over a battlefield,

442. that we were on the side of the angels.

443. My father fought in the Second World War. He won awards and medals and...

444. You know, I grew up during the "good wars."

445. Here's this woman...

446. who steps out onto the world stage as a famous actress,

447. comes from one of the ruling class families in Hollywood,

448. and makes a political decision to change Sides.

449. She steps onto the side of the people, and particularly the Vietnamese people.

450. She stands with the G.I.s, and she stands with the G.I. movement.

451. And she says, "I'm going to stand with this. I'm going to give vent.

452. I'm going to help support it and build it, et cetera."

453. And the F.T.A. show...

454. Mr. President, there's a terrible demonstration going on outside.

455. Oh, there's always a demonstration going on outside, Pat.

456. Yeah, but, Richard, this one is completely out of control.

457. Well, what are they asking for this time?

458. Free Angela Davis and all political prisoners,

459. out of Vietnam now, and draft all government officials.

460. Well, we have people to take care of that.

461. They'll do their job, you do your job, and I'll do my job.

462. But, Richard, you don't understand. They're storming the White House.

463. In that case, I better call the Third Marines.

464. You can't. Why not?

465. It is the Third Marines. Oh.

466. For years, pro-war comedian, Bob Hope,

467. had toured Vietnam entertaining American troops.

468. But soon, the cheers turned to jeers,

469. and a new kind of entertainment emerged.

470. Howard Levy, himself a celebrity within the G.I. movement,

471. he met with Donald Sutherland and me, and he said,

472. “What if we put together an antiwar show...

473. that's, you know, the opposite side of the coin from the... from the Bob Hope show?"

474. "F" the army. We always said "Free the army,"

475. or "Fun, Travel and Adventure,"

476. but it really meant... the army.

477. Say it.

478. - Fuck the army! - [Man ] And the navy and the marines!

479. Here was a way that I could combine my profession, my acting,

480. with my desire to end the war.

481. It just seemed like a perfect fit.

482. The show... The show that we bring to these bases...

483. is not trying to tell the people on the bases anything that they don't know.

484. We are coming in response to what is...

485. probably the most powerful movement going on in this country.

486. The movement of the men inside the military... and women...

487. Who are beginning to understand how they're being used,

488. and what the nature of American foreign policy is.

489. And we come there because they have asked us to.

490. We come there because for the last year we have read in the newspapers from Vietnam,

491. from West Germany, from Okinawa, from the Philippines, from Japan...

492. What we want is entertainment. We want people who speak to how we feel.

493. The majority of us don't know why we're going over there.

494. We don't know why we're being shot up, we don't know why our buddies are being killed,

495. we don't know why we're killing those people.

496. If it'd been another time and place and another war,

497. I might have actually been a very good soldier,

498. because there's part of the military life that I really liked.

499. This replaced my dog tags.

500. This little teardrop peace sign became my official dog tag for myself.

501. I went through my whole tour in Vietnam without a set of dog tags.

502. Anything but thinking about where you were.

503. You started thinking about where you were, that's when you started getting in trouble.

504. That's when I started getting in trouble.

505. "Cause then I started, you know...

506. I started really seeing...

507. I started seeing stuff like I'm seeing right now.

508. Um...

509. You know, it's-it's, um...

510. The way we judged our success...

511. was through body count.

512. And most of the time,

513. even though I was part of the, um, command structure...

514. Being first a squad leader and then a platoon sergeant...

515. Um, most of the time,

516. it's supposed to be my responsibility to, um,

517. you know, do things like check the bodies and...

518. But, um, I never wanted to do that.

519. That's... I...

520. That's not what I wanted to understand that I was doing.

521. I was brought into the, um, company Office.

522. And I was told by a major...

523. that I would be brought up on charges...

524. of leading and conspiring to mutiny against the United States government,

525. because there were three of us who were refusing to go on combat operations,

526. and that I would be facing a 20-to-life sentence.

527. And so I just... I walked out of there in shock,

528. thinking, "Well, I'm going to jail for a long time."

529. I didn't know there was a G./I. movement.

530. I just had this strong moral sense of-of something not being right.

531. And then they sent me to see the, quote, "company shrink."

532. He said, "Well, what are you really concerned about?"

533. I said, "I don't care about prison time. I just want to have...

534. some connection with my home."

535. I didn't want to be ostracized from American culture and society.

536. And he said, "Well, let me show you something."

537. And he reached into the... Into some drawer that he had,

538. and he pulled out this New York Times newspaper.

539. And there's a full-page ad that had all these signatures...

540. of all these people who were opposed to the war.

541. It was a full-page advertisement...

542. signed by 1,400 active-duty soldiers,

543. denouncing the war and supporting the November 15 demonstration...

544. The November 15 moratorium demonstration.

545. The discussion started going to say, "Well, man, why don't we do something?"

546. On this day, November 15, we're all gonna wear these black armbands.

547. - Mm-hmm. - As a form of symbolic solidarity...

548. with the protest in the United States.

549. We were up all night long just talking about this. And I was so...

550. I couldn't sleep. There was no way. I was so... so excited by this point.

551. So we go out in the morning formation. All our guys had black shoestrings on.

552. We'd get over to the combat engineers now, though, it was a different story.

553. The company commander had grabbed... had some guy by the... by the collar...

554. And had his.45 pistol up to his head.

555. - Damn. - You could vaguely hear him threatening this guy...

556. to summarily execute him on the spot, because he's inciting a mutiny.

557. [Man ] I've seen Charlie, Luke the Gook,

558. whatever you want to call him, N.V.A., right there laying down as I walked by.

559. ! looked at him. He looks at me.

560. Keep going about my business. This man didn't do me nothing.

561. He didn't hurt me in no way. He didn't hurt none of my black people, my families.

562. So why should I shoot him?

563. I feel all black men should be exempt from, uh, military duty anyway.

564. Because, uh, Right on.

565. The only place a black man should fight is where he's being oppressed.

566. I'm not being oppressed in Japan, I'm not being oppressed in Vietnam,

567. and I'm not being oppressed in Pakistan.

568. Guys were coming from all over the country.

569. So you're getting people coming in with different information...

570. about black power struggle at that time, and, you know,

571. black unity, and, you know, feeling real good about yourself.

572. And you had to really question what you were doing in Vietnam.

573. I remember one day this first sergeant was talking about gooks.

574. Show you how naive I was, I didn't know that gook was a racial slur.

575. I didn't really understand that, you know.

576. One day he was talking about gooks, and a light went off in my head.

577. And I said, "Wow. A gook is the same thing as a nigger."

578. My whole tour in Vietnam, when you met a black soldier,

579. you know, he had a dap, you had a special handshake.

580. You got to the point where you could even tell what part of the country he was from,

581. because everybody had their distinctive... the dap or handshake.

582. And you definitely could tell if he wasn't in your company,

583. because everybody had their little nuance.

584. This is the greeting. This is the greeting of a brother... of my brother.

585. I'm glad to see him. I don't have to know his name. Yeah.

586. Just the fact that he's black is good enough for me. You dig?

587. Then we... we know we got a common ground. We got a cause to fight.

588. Far out. Oh. Oh.

589. - You slap this way. This way. - Okay. Other way.

590. Then fist, fist, then high.

591. And then the down this way like this. Oh, yeah.

592. Oh, let's do this one again. I like that. You come down, you grab.

593. - There you go. That's it!

594. Like in the marine corps, the Bloods... especially on the bases...

595. They-they-they been going to jail for giving dap, the power, the handshake.

596. But this is the way we greet each other. This is the way.

597. They been going to jail for doing it... just for doing it.

598. Long Binh Jail was the stockade in Long Binh, Vietnam.

599. It was pretty much just like jails in America... 99.9% black.

600. There was a lot of violence in this prison, a lot of stuff going on.

601. People were angry. It was a pretty dire situation.

602. A group of inmates got together,

603. and we decided that, uh, we were going to escape from this place.

604. And, um, what happened was is that...

605. the result of was a Long Binh rebellion...

606. where a lot of G.I.s, um, accosted guards,

607. and, uh, they burnt down the fail,

608. and it was just mayhem.

609. I'm a survivor, so I was going to survive no matter what.

610. The president, uh, shaked my hand...

611. and pinned a medal on, uh, me.

612. You can say that that was one of the most proudest moments of my life.

613. How did you come to the decision to desert?

614. You know, when you're laying on your back, and you can't move for day in and day out,

615. you have a lot of time to think.

616. So, um,

617. you think about what you did, you know, what you've done,

618. things that you've gone through, the people that you've killed,

619. the people that have died.

620. I mean, there's always something that reminds you...

621. of, uh, things that you've done in Vietnam.

622. The things that you've seen.

623. Then you actually see what I saw,

624. what was going on in the States.

625. Dudes are running down the streets...

626. and wearing the same kind of uniform that I got.

627. They're in Memphis.

628. They're-They're-They're... They're beating up on people.

629. Wait a minute. We're over here beating up on people over here,

630. and you're beating up on... black people.

631. Uh, dogs are running everywhere. Tanks are on the streets.

632. In the summer of 1968, army and National Guard troops...

633. were sent in to American cities as thousands of black people rioted...

634. - following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

635. That spring, troops were used...

636. against antiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon.

637. Then in August, soldiers at Fort Hood were told they would be sent to Chicago...

638. where antiwar demonstrations were planned for the Democratic Party's national convention.

639. Hey, we just come back from fighting the Vietnamese,

640. and now they want us to fight the Americans.

641. The night before the troops were supposed to leave,

642. there was a meeting of black G.I.s that gathered up in a parking lot...

643. in the first armored division section.

644. And they were out there all night in the parking lot talking.

645. And they were having, like, a rap session or rally...

646. Why they were opposed to going to Chicago.

647. We were making it clear that it was a genocidal thing that was going to go on,

648. and how can I go and commit genocide on my people?

649. Shoot my people? There were hundreds of black G.I.s out in this parade field.

650. Brothers came up and really started pouring it on then...

651. about, you know, discrimination and unfair treatment,

652. not getting the rank that they needed...

653. and about what was happening with the war.

654. As the meeting stretched into the night,

655. Fort Hood's commanding general showed up to talk to the G.I.s.

656. He said, "I'm just a two-star general. Let me go and talk to my boss,

657. and I'll have an answer for you I the morning."

658. So, you know, we just relaxed, you know, went to sleep.

659. All of a sudden, crack upside the head. They cracked me upside the head.

660. What the hell? You know, uh, what the hell's going on? M.P.s all around us, man.

661. They came at us with bayonets.

662. I got cut. You know, I got hit right here with a bayonet.

663. And then, every now and then, they opened this formation up.

664. And a group of M.P.s come in and grab a brother...

665. and take him back in the back and beat the shit out of him.

666. You hear him screaming in the back. You know, shit like that.

667. I said, "Damn."

668. And they were court-martialed...

669. Brought up on various court-martial charges,

670. But it scared the hell out of the military.

671. Then they went around and went through the roster of all the units...

672. who were supposed to go, and took off who they considered to be, quote, "Subversives."

673. So a number of people, myself included, were not sent to Chicago.

674. In one of the most infamous events of the 1960s,

675. Chicago police brutally attacked the demonstrators...

676. in front of the Democratic Convention.

677. Although the army had sent a contingent of riot-control troops...

678. to Chicago from Fort Hood, they kept them off the streets.

679. It was no longer certain which side the G.I.s were on.

680. The military had a problem on its hands,

681. and it was about to go from bad to worse.

682. We were in, uh, the breakfast line, I believe.

683. It was a long line, and all of a sudden we see this commotion,

684. kinda start at the beginning of the line,

685. and then start to come up towards us.

686. And we could see people... like, one guy would turn to the guy behind them, and they'd...

687. There'd be this excited conversation, and that guy would turn to the guy behind him,

688. and finally, the guy in front of me got the news,

689. and he turns around and he says to me,

690. "They're killing women and children in Vietnam."

691. I said, "Who's killing women and children? The Vietcong?"

692. And he said, "No. We are.”

693. March 16, 1968. The soldiers of Charlie Company,

694. 11th Brigade, Americal Division...

695. entered the village of My Lai.

696. 24 hours later, over 500 villagers...

697. Men, women, children... lay dead,

698. brutally and wantonly murdered in cold blood.

699. Around the world, the My Lai Massacre would become the touchstone event...

700. of the Vietnam War.

701. For over a year, the American military covered up the My Lai massacre,

702. claiming only enemy soldiers were killed.

703. And when the truth was finally brought to light by journalists,

704. the highest-ranking officer tried and convicted was William Calley,

705. a lieutenant.

706. In a cramped Detroit hotel, a new organization,

707. Vietnam Veterans Against the War,

708. held an unprecedented investigation that exposed a much deeper truth.

709. I think the Winter Soldier investigation was to try to point out...

710. It wasn't really in defense of Calley,

711. but it was, uh, going after...

712. the notion that the policies of the U.S. military...

713. created things like My Lai, okay?

714. That it was a policy... it was both a written and an unwritten policy.

715. And the truth has to be told. You can't duck away from the truth.

716. You can't lie and put up the smoke screen and Say,

717. "Oh, this is a"... the words they used back then...

718. "an isolated instance of aberrant behavior."

719. You weren't just coming home sayin' I'm against the war.

720. You're saying, "This is what we did. This is how we did it.

721. This was a crime. This was wrong."

722. Helped people to really cross the bridge and to see us...

723. in a way that I think the antiwar movement had not seen G.I.s before.

724. America went through... Went through a choke, okay?

725. Because they didn't want to believe that these things occurred...

726. in the name of the American people,

727. supposedly supporting freedom and liberation...

728. and democracy throughout the world.

729. And there was this terrible slaughter. This terrible, inane slaughter.

730. So I think the question was,

731. why are they going after Calley, where Calley was doing...

732. precisely what we were all told to do when we were in Vietnam... essentially.

733. Okay? Which is, kill them all, and sort it out later.

734. In Quang Tri city, I had a friend who was, uh,

735. he was an adviser with an ARVN group, and one time he asked me,

736. would I like to accompany him into a village that I was familiar with...

737. and see how they act... So I went with them, and, uh...

738. They didn't find any enemy, but they found a woman with bandages.

739. So she was questioned with about...

740. She was questioned by six ARVNs, and the way that they questioned her...

741. was, since she had bandages, uh, they shot her.

742. She was hit about 20 times. So after she was questioned,

743. uh, of course, dead, uh...

744. This guy come over, who was... knowing him, he was a former major...

745. who was in the service for 20 years, and he got hungry again and came back,

746. workin' with U.S.A.I.D.

747. Aid International Development.

748. And, uh... He, uh,

749. went over there and ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and...

750. cut from her vagina, all the way up... well, just about up to her breasts.

751. And pulled her organs out. Completely out of her cavity.

752. And threw 'em out. And then he stopped, and knelt over,

753. and, uh, commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body.

754. And left her there, as a... as a sign for something or other.

755. And sol gave other testimony... One about the rabbit lesson,

756. which I thought was very important, and I still think it is.

757. And that was, at the end of staging battalion, at the Camp Pendleton base,

758. uh, in California, for Marines, before you went to Vietnam.

759. Where the Staff N.C.O. comes out and he has a rabbit,

760. and he's talking to you about escape and evasion, and survival in the jungle,

761. and he has this rabbit, and then, in a couple of seconds,

762. well, everyone just about falls in love with it...

763. Not falls in love with it, but, you know, they're humane there...

764. He cracks the neck, skins it, disembowels it just like I said...

765. Testified that this happened to a woman...

766. He does this to a rabbit, and then they throw the guts out in the audience.

767. And takes the skin of the rabbit and turns it inside out and makes...

768. Makes a little bootee for his foot,

769. and says you might have to do this in case your helicopter crashes in Vietnam.

770. Or you're separated from your unit.

771. And I thought the subtext of that little lesson was to-to...

772. To completely brutalize people.

773. You can get anything out of that you want, but that's your last lesson...

774. in the United States before you leave for Vietnam.

775. And I went and listened to the three days of testimony,

776. and absolutely came away from it emotionally drained and floored by it.

777. I never grasped, even up to that point,

778. how powerful was the genocidal plans and strategy...

779. of the U.S. towards the Vietnamese people.

780. On every level, you know, whether it was Agent Orange,

781. and Dow Chemical reconfiguring the napalm,

782. because the napalm wasn't sticking to the Vietnamese skin enough.

783. I mean, that was, you know... all of this just added to the overwhelming sense...

784. of the criminality of the United States.

785. Claiming to have "a secret plan to end the war,”

786. Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1968.

787. But in 1970, he expanded the war,

788. ordering an invasion of Cambodia, Vietnam's neighbor.

789. That spring, I drove across country for two months,

790. and during that time, Nixon invaded Cambodia,

791. four students were killed at Kent State,

792. two were killed at Jackson State...

793. I mean, it was somethin'.

794. As anger over the invasion and killings exploded,

795. the G.I. movement entered a new era.

796. This was Armed Forces Day, and in many cities across the country,

797. there were the usual parades, displays and bands.

798. But the recent surge of protest over the war in Indochina...

799. cast a shadow over today's activities.

800. This was even true at some military bases,

801. where the presence of antiwar demonstrators...

802. led to the cancellation of planned observances.

803. A thousand G.I.s marched the first year,

804. right outside the base... and they told people it was off limits,

805. and they told people that if you went there, you were gonna get arrested.

806. The store owners downtown were putting up plywood coverings on their windows,

807. 'cause the cops told them it was gonna turn into a riot.

808. But then people decided to change it to "Armed Farces Day," because you know,

809. we thought makin' fun of your enemy was as valuable as yellin' at him.

810. And in Killeen, we had three demands.

811. We had a pretty extremist slogan:

812. “Avenge the Kent State and Jackson State killings."

813. So we had "End the War."

814. The third slogan, I think, had to do with the political prisoners goin'.

815. Because, at that time, the Black Panther Party was...

816. starting to gain some strength, and there was repression against them.

817. The second year, 1971, there had to be 3,000-4,000 on the street.

818. I've had quite a few letters recently,

819. uh, concerning some of the different items...

820. that Radio First Termer has to offer its followers.

821. And one of the biggest things...

822. is the Official Dave Rabbit sweatshirt.

823. For those of you who are unaware of what a Dave Rabbit sweatshirt is,

824. I'll tell you.

825. It's a white sweatshirt.

826. On the front of it, it has a large white rabbit.

827. And the rabbit's dick is completely hard.

828. The rabbit is carrying a sign.

829. On the sign, it reads,

830. "Fuck it, before it fucks you."

831. "By every conceivable indicator, our army,

832. "that now remains in Vietnam,

833. "is in a state approaching collapse,

834. “with individual units avoiding, or having refused, combat,

835. “murdering their officers, and non-commissioned officers...

836. Drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous."

837. In the face of a determined enemy,

838. an unprecedented antiwar movement, and a military near collapse,

839. the Nixon administration announced the policy of "Vietnamization"...

840. An effort to shift the burden of combat to the South Vietnamese army,

841. while American jets bombarded North Vietnam from the skies.

842. Nixon promised that American ground troops...

843. would no longer be involved in offensive combat.

844. This is Richard Boyle, Firebase Pace...

845. About two kilometers from the Cambodian border.

846. I'm sitting in a bunker, with about a dozen grunts of the First Cav Division.

847. A lot of the people are kind of wonderin' if anybody back in the world...

848. knows that we're out here, you know? They don't.

849. Like, uh, they say that only two batteries of artillery are supposed to be here,

850. and no grunts are here... you know, like, nobody... we don't even exist.

851. We're just meat.

852. American troops were not supposed to be in combat.

853. That's why the American army denied...

854. that they were there... you know,

855. as far as... the briefers in Saigon, there were no American troops along the border.

856. Does anybody know what we're fighting for?

857. Do you believe you're fighting for democracy here?

858. I tell you. The only thing you fightin' for...

859. is your own life... You fightin' to go back home.

860. The North Vietnamese had two crack regiments...

861. totally surrounding the firebase.

862. It's suicide, going out there in the middle of the night.

863. There's a thing about givin' an order,

864. and there's a thing about usin' your head too.

865. It's always the higher-highers, man.

866. They don't have to go out there, they just send us.

867. As soon as we start goin' out there, we'll be sittin' ducks.

868. The captain, Cronin, ordered six men...

869. to go out on a night ambush.

870. Which was basically a suicide mission.

871. I mean, send six guys out against two regiments.

872. And-And they said, we ain't gonna do it. We ain't gonna go.

873. And the only option there was, was to get word out to the outside world.

874. - And they wrote a petition.

875. “At the writing, we are under siege in Firebase Pace.

876. “We are faced daily with the decision of whether...

877. "to take a court-martial, or participate in offensive drill.

878. "In the event of mass prosecution of our unit,

879. our only hope would be public opinion, and your voice."

880. [ Soldier ] Incoming. Got a rocket.

881. Nixon was so afraid...

882. He ordered that company pulled out.

883. They sent in another company. They had heard...

884. about the refusal of Alpha Company...

885. The other company also refused to fight.

886. And after that, no company... no troops in Vietnam were willing to fight.

887. They said, look, we're not gonna fight anymore.

888. There are more problems to winding down...

889. the Vietnam War than just holding the enemy at bay,

890. and moving South Vietnamese troops into the line.

891. One unforeseen problem is trying to keep up the morale of G.I.s...

892. who know they're going home, but not soon enough.

893. It has produced flagrant insubordination,

894. shooting of officers by their own men,

895. and a deadly practice called "fragging."

896. Their purpose, in my mind, was either to get me...

897. or, uh, intimidate myself and...

898. and all others in authority in the company and the battalion.

899. Sergeant Gene Tingeley is saying that some of his own men...

900. tried to maim or kill him... but it's not an isolated incident.

901. Since then, one officer has been killed, another wounded at this base,

902. and there have been dozens of similar incidents all across South Vietnam.

903. I've, uh, seen more than one big group meeting...

904. where...

905. actually, all they talk about is fraggin', as we Call 'em, pigs.

906. By “pigs,” you're talking about your senior enlisted men and your officers?

907. Uh, that's correct. That's uh, one of our most common terms.

908. Because the fragmentation grenade is often the weapon used,

909. the violent attacks on authority have come to be known as "fragging."

910. And many G.I.s talk openly about fragging,

911. and the military countermeasures.

912. A fragmentation grenade was thrown into the quarters of some officers...

913. Two killed. Two killed? Was that it? Okay.

914. Billy, I think, was almost immediately placed under arrest.

915. Things just developed from there.

916. I was chosen for the trial because I was an outspoken critic of the war.

917. He would speak his piece. If I don't like somethin', I'm gonna tell ya about it.

918. This war wasn't meant for me. It wasn't meant for us.

919. I mean, uh, black men, "cause we're not your slave.

920. And he would let 'em know. You know, I don't care to do everything you Say.

921. And they had some vendetta against him for speakin' his mind.

922. The irony of why he got selected for prosecution...

923. could almost be a comedy of errors.

924. His commanding officer decided that he must have been the target,

925. because he was planning to send Billy home.

926. Now, to us, I mean, that was absolutely absurd.

927. If Billy thought he was being sent home,

928. he would have swam home!

929. None of the original evidence pointed to Billy at all.

930. Eyewitness descriptions did not match Billy,

931. and as it turned out later, he was off someplace gettin' high.

932. The case was really a milestone in many ways,

933. because it's the case that surfaced the issue of fragging.

934. The message did get out, you know, among the soldiers.

935. What was going on, and how we needed their support.

936. In our wildest dreams, we never would have realized...

937. people cared that much about the movement, and what was going on.

938. A lot of Vietnam veterans came to the trial,

939. and were there to show support.

940. It crystallized a lot of issues, and you know, racism not least.

941. May I say that the system of military justice...

942. is still riddled with injustice.

943. "Prosecution Witness Confesses Army Made Him Lie."

944. I mean, that would happen all through the trial.

945. The whole thing was just bizarre from start to finish,

946. and of course, before it was over, the army would try to manufacture evidence...

947. with these grenade pins that they said that they could match,

948. and it turned out that... [ Love ] Which they didn't.

949. It was impossible. There was no such science at all.

950. No matter how hard they tried, the case just wouldn't hold together.

951. It is clear that the army had no evidence of my guilt.

952. Front page! "Private Smith Acquitted of Fragging Charges."

953. "Smiling Billy Dean Smith was acquitted today."

954. When the verdict was read, I mean, it was like pandemonium.

955. Everybody just... the cameras and everything... we piled out the door.

956. Uh, it was one of the best days of my life.

957. I was simply singled out as a scapegoat for incidents of fragging which had occurred...

958. in the last four years in Vietnam, and which reflects...

959. a low state of morale among enlisted men.

960. Billy was... My impression of him, anyway...

961. Was he was a gentle person.

962. He was drafted, and in a matter of months,

963. was in the killing fields. Mm-hmm.

964. That in itself was a trauma.

965. Then once he was arrested for this crime that he didn't commit,

966. - they put him in isolation... - Twenty-two months, and he was only out one hour a day...

967. out of 24. Solitary confinement.

968. You sittin' up there that long, you gonna automatically go crazy...

969. lookin' at yourself, and your hands and your fingers and toes, and that's it.

970. And he got back to the United States, but his health has been destroyed.

971. - His mind has been destroyed. - Periodically, he gets medicated.

972. Periodically, he's been hospitalized.

973. But without pretty constant supervision, he stops taking the medication,

974. and then, um, reverts to the terrors.

975. While Billy Dean Smith was in solitary confinement,

976. the House Internal Security Committee at the United States Congress...

977. held a series of hearings on the G.I. movement.

978. The congressmen declared there was no movement,

979. only a handful of what they called "militant extremists of the far left."

980. But the hearings, spanning nine months,

981. produced thousands of pages of testimony...

982. illustrating how broadly and deeply the G.I. movement had spread.

983. Many of us are very convinced Nixon had to go to an air war...

984. because he couldn't trust us on the ground.

985. And for good reason. We were shooting his officers and refusing direct orders...

986. to go into combat, where we could.

987. He had to go to an air war, where there is no relationship.

988. It's totally impersonal. You know, the pilots fly from Guam.

989. You know, a thousand miles away. They drop, you know,

990. several tons... how many tons of bombs... they fly back again, they don't see the damage.

991. There's no relationship to what they do, their job to people's lives.

992. 1! still wanted to fly. I was getting the impression that the war was wrong.

993. I was gonna be part of it.

994. I wasn't gonna be carrying a gun. I wasn't going to be shooting these people.

995. It was rationalization on my part.

996. But I still wanted to fly. I still wanted to have that... that experience.

997. During basic training, I got the opportunity of...

998. half a day off of training if I took the language test.

999. So I took the language test, and little did I know that was...

1000. That was the end of that story. I was taught Vietnamese,

1001. taught radio intercept, and went immediately to Southeast Asia.

1002. Bomb damage assessments.

1003. We would be given notification of where air strikes were going to take place.

1004. Part of our job was to monitor...

1005. the actual North Vietnamese assessment...

1006. of the damage of that air strike.

1007. Primarily what we had there was really sophisticated...

1008. electronic eavesdropping devices...

1009. so we could eavesdrop on communications...

1010. that were taking place between Vietnamese units...

1011. and their commands.

1012. We would receive information...

1013. which was then analyzed,

1014. and that became intelligence,

1015. and then that was picked through and become product...

1016. for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President...

1017. One of the things about me, that changed my mind,

1018. was that 1 knew what was happening...

1019. in country was not what was being told to the people of the United States.

1020. The bombing of populated areas,

1021. civilian areas, the bombing of hospitals...

1022. Things that the U.S. denied over and over and over again,

1023. that we were engaged in... Those are things that...

1024. we were engaged in, and we had access to that information,

1025. and the lies were so stark... you know, it challenged your own dignity.

1026. It challenged your own loyalty, it challenged your own humanity.

1027. Given the very job that we did, which was...

1028. "listen to the Vietnamese,"

1029. is that we were allowed to enter their minds.

1030. And we were allowed to enter their hearts, their feelings...

1031. People began to develop relationships.

1032. Mental relationships with the people that they were listening to every day.

1033. That was a real conscientious contention there also.

1034. A dichotomy, in that if we did our job right,

1035. we would save the lives of Americans.

1036. If we did our job right, we would cost the lives...

1037. of tens of thousands of Vietnamese.

1038. And so it put us into that position where we had to...

1039. Uh, there was no way we could win.

1040. I had to do something. And that's the point of what that is:

1041. We did something. We had to do something.

1042. We went to V.V.A.W., we went to, uh,

1043. as many groups as we could find, and tell them...

1044. what we were gonna do... we were basically gonna back to N.K.P...

1045. and do what we could to stop the war.

1046. And I think that we made the decision on that leave...

1047. that we were gonna do the paper.

1048. You know, we were gonna do as much as we could,

1049. during this last year of our service, to stop what was goin' on.

1050. Yeah, we did everything that we could, legally, to get their goat...

1051. And that's how it kinda... The worms got started.

1052. And we began to have parties, and then they started talking about,

1053. “What is the lowest thing on the Earth?"

1054. And somebody said, "Worms." And there was the acronym, WORMS,

1055. which stands for, "We Openly Resist Military Stupidity."

1056. "We don't write Worms Eye View to convince.

1057. "We write Worms Eye View to communicate. We don't need money. We need each other.

1058. We openly resist military stupidity. And we openly love each other."

1059. We had a big party one night, and I! remember we had taken...

1060. an effigy of our commanding officer.

1061. After we burned our commanding officer in effigy,

1062. I looked around, and there was a large group of people...

1063. on the perimeter, that had circled us.

1064. And it was the Security Police.

1065. And, uh, they were startin' to close in on us. They had dogs.

1066. And they had dogs, right. They had dogs.

1067. And once they got close enough to figure out what we were doin'...

1068. They joined us. They joined us.

1069. With the air assault coming mainly from aircraft carriers,

1070. sailors and airmen became the center of the G./I. movement.

1071. On the U.S.S. Coral Sea, 1,200 signed a petition demanding their ship stay home.

1072. And San Diego, California, home of the carriers Constellation and Kitty Hawk,

1073. spawned a movement led by a group of navy officers and enlisted men.

1074. We truly believed what would stop that war...

1075. was when the soldiers stopped fighting it.

1076. I was still an active officer, as were all these other guys,

1077. and sailors and enlisted people.

1078. As we sat around and brainstormed...

1079. about what kind of a nonviolent action can we take...

1080. that can actually touch sailors?

1081. So we looked around and we saw the aircraft carrier,

1082. which is the biggest ship in San Diego Harbor,

1083. it's the most impressive symbol of American power.

1084. It's hard for people to realize this, but that ship...

1085. is not a naval ship anymore,

1086. it's really part of the air power that we use to attack peasants.

1087. It's the weapon of a bully. It's a weapon of aggression.

1088. The original concept came, well, let's do something...

1089. where we allow the people on board that ship...

1090. to cast a ballot as to whether or not they think they should go back to Vietnam.

1091. Let's just hear their voice. Then we said, no.

1092. This election should be held in every shopping center in San Diego County.

1093. And every Safeway store ought to have a little polling booth outside...

1094. and we ought to see how many ballots we can collect...

1095. and we're gonna point toward a day.

1096. Stay. Okay.

1097. I think we should go.

1098. Stay. Stay.

1099. Stay. Stay.

1100. Stay.

1101. Heck, I was a carrier-qualified aviator,

1102. and that gave me a lot of credibility with people, earned or not earned.

1103. And even though I hadn't been in combat, uh,

1104. people would give you a certain amount of credence, of course,

1105. because I knew a whole lot about how the military functioned.

1106. See, I used to be a lieutenant in the navy. U.S.N.

1107. And I've flown. I'm not kiddin' ya. You're kiddin' me.

1108. I can prove it to ya. I'm a retired master sergeant from the air force.

1109. - Yeah. - My, uh, my only question is,

1110. why do you people have to look so weird?

1111. Like this one here. Uh, can't you just look normal, like everybody else?

1112. Don't I look normal?

1113. There was nobody, from the captain of that ship, to the mayor of the city,

1114. who did not hold a press conference about this project.

1115. Everybody was commenting on it. U.S. senators were commenting on it.

1116. You know, even if the city votes for that ship to stay,

1117. we're still going... well, I guess so.

1118. The captain of the ship says, "Well, I know...

1119. "there's a lot of people who don't want to go,

1120. but the military's full of malcontents." He said that.

1121. We believe...

1122. that peace is at hand.

1123. You know, the peace that was at hand quickly disappeared...

1124. after the reelection, and of course, given the vantage point...

1125. of everybody working in a... in an N.S.A. unit,

1126. you know, we knew what was coming up.

1127. A decision by the president of the United States...

1128. and by Henry Kissinger...

1129. to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age...

1130. as their last message to the Vietnamese...

1131. before we withdrew entirely.

1132. I think everybody that was involved in our operations...

1133. was faced with the stark reality of participating in something which...

1134. bordered on what we consider to be criminal, genocidal, unprecedented.

1135. So we felt very much in solidarity with other G.Is...

1136. who were refusing to participate...

1137. Particularly people refusing to fly B-52s over the north.

1138. People stopped producing the intelligence product...

1139. that we were supposed to be producing by monitoring North Vietnamese communications.

1140. When you're not interpreting what you're hearing,

1141. and you're not passing along the intelligence that you're receiving,

1142. the people who are supposed to be getting the information don't get any information.

1143. The air force was no longer a reliable instrument, okay,

1144. for carrying out the war.

1145. The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975,

1146. as North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front troops entered Saigon.

1147. And even as the last remaining Americans were returning home,

1148. the memory and reality of the G.I. antiwar movement was being rewritten.

1149. Yeah, they love everybody back there.

1150. Cats. Dogs.

1151. Niggers, spics, and they're real fond of Luke the Gook back home.

1152. Y'all can believe that.

1153. They love everybody but you.

1154. The typical story of a spat-upon vet...

1155. is arriving at the San Francisco Airport,

1156. and... where he's met by demonstrators.

1157. And he says, "The first thing that happened when I got off the plane in San Francisco,

1158. "a girl in love beads and a headband...

1159. spat in my face and called me a baby-killer."

1160. That version of the story has been told over and over and over again.

1161. Being a Vietnam vet, and having come home...

1162. and worked with the antiwar movement...

1163. these just didn't resonate as true, to me.

1164. So I began to be... get interested in then, where did these stories come from?

1165. And how long had they been around?

1166. Who had began telling them? I went back to the point in time...

1167. The late '60s, early 1970s...

1168. To see whether there's any reports in newspaper stories...

1169. that activists were spitting on Vietnam vets...

1170. No, I didn't find anything. I looked at some National Lawyers Guild...

1171. observation projects of demonstrations, whether there's anything at their archives...

1172. about this... No, nothing there.

1173. Were any Vietnam vets claiming that they were being spat on?

1174. You know, were any pro-war people then claiming that Vietnam vets were being spat on?

1175. No. So! thought, well, now, this is getting really interesting.

1176. I was telling a friend of mine, who's a psychologist,

1177. she also teaches in women's studies.

1178. I was telling her that I was working on a book about Vietnam vets having been spat on.

1179. And she said, "Well, that's really interesting." She said, "Who had done the spitting?"

1180. I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, you know,

1181. the demographics of the spitters."

1182. And I said, "Well, you know, young women, protestors,

1183. you know, hippies."

1184. And she broke out in this big smile and she says,

1185. "Gotta be a myth, huh?"

1186. And-And I knew what was coming next. I knew what she was gonna Say...

1187. Next, which was that, "Girls don't spit."

1188. Now, whether girls spit or not, um,

1189. I've had some other conversations about that.

1190. But it seems pretty unlikely that these spitting incidents occurred.

1191. A lot of these stories, again, begin with,

1192. “Well, we arrived at the San Francisco Airport."

1193. No, you didn't arrive at the San Francisco Airport.

1194. Nobody did. You maybe arrived at Travis Air Base, near San Francisco,

1195. and then you were discharged, or you were processed out,

1196. and then you went to the San Francisco Airport, you know?

1197. That's possible. But... But that's not the way the stories are told.

1198. They're, you know, "We were met on the tarmac at"...

1199. “At San Francisco Airport.” Too many guys got off at the San Francisco Airport.

1200. Somebody's making something up here.

1201. And certainly, if it was at, um...

1202. If it was at military, you know, air force bases...

1203. There couldn't have been... couldn't have been protestors on the base,

1204. much less on the tarmac, or-or at... you know, at gateside...

1205. to meet people.

1206. There are stories... Many stories of...

1207. wounded Vietnam vets being unloaded,

1208. people on stretchers being carried from the plane...

1209. And-and they are spat on by protestors who are,

1210. you know, who are lining the walkway.

1211. Some of those stories just really defy common sense.

1212. But-But these stories are picked up.

1213. They're picked up and they're used, they're used...

1214. They're used very authoritatively.

1215. Then I come back to the world...

1216. and I see all those maggots at the airport...

1217. protestin' me, spittin'... callin' me a baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap...

1218. Who are they to protest me, huh?

1219. If you went back and looked at the front pages of newspapers...

1220. in 1969, 1970,

1221. you know, what were you gonna see on the front pages of newspapers about Vietnam vets?

1222. They're in the streets. They're political activists.

1223. They're on the Capitol Mall. They're givin' the Nixon administration fits.

1224. This was stuff that was in living rooms all over America.

1225. So people knew this, and this is an important piece for talking about,

1226. how memory about the war...

1227. has been rewritten.

1228. Has been reconstructed. This is gone.

1229. This has been erased.

1230. This has been displaced.

1231. You mention the war in Vietnam to a lot of people,

1232. and they'll say, "Yeah, and what happened to those guys when they came home was sure a shame."

1233. You ask them about, um,

1234. any of the major events of the war, and it's like, people have no clue.

1235. In the spring of 1977,

1236. the F.T.A. show toured Asia.

1237. Despite being banned from military bases worldwide,

1238. the show performed in Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines...

1239. for over 60,000 soldiers.

1240. And at every stop, G.I.s took the stage with them.

1241. We can no longer remain silent...

1242. about the atrocities and injustice being perpetrated by the United States military...

1243. on peoples of other nations, nor the petty harassment that servicemen and women...

1244. are made to endure, day after day.

1245. We demand an end to all discriminating policies...

1246. against persons because of their race.

1247. We demand an end to all discrimination...

1248. against persons such as antiwar G.I.s,

1249. because they do not agree with U.S. policies.

1250. Right on!

1251. And we demand an immediate... immediate and total withdrawal...

1252. of all air and ground troops and C.I.A. from Vietnam,

1253. as well as from Korea, Guam, Okinawa, Japan,

1254. the Philippines, Israel, Cambodia, Thailand,

1255. Germany, England, Panama...

1256. Guantanamo Bay, Laos...

1257. I mean, it seems unthinkable now, that we could have done this.

1258. And that you could have a hall full of guys with their fists in the air.

1259. So happy that we had come...

1260. to acknowledge their reality.

1261. I used to love to watch the faces of the G.I.s...

1262. when she sang that... it was like this shell of tension would drop away.

1263. And you would see the youth and the innocence and the vulnerability underneath.

1264. In April of 1977,

1265. just five years after Howard Levy and Donald Duncan's lone acts of protest,

1266. thousands of Vietnam Veterans Against the War converged on Washington, D.C...

1267. and threw their medals onto the Capitol steps.

1268. We don't wanna fight anymore, but if we have to fight again, it'll be to take these steps.

1269. You know, it's kind of a unique opportunity.

1270. It's... It's very rare, I think, in anybody's life,

1271. that you have an opportunity to really think that you are changing history.

1272. That you're a part of history.

1273. The reality is, at first they couldn't believe G.I.s were protestin' the war.

1274. That-That blew their minds.

1275. When we had 1,000 G.I.s in 1970,

1276. they thought... they didn't know how to react to that.

1277. "Cause they thought, ah, a bunch of them, they go down there,

1278. and they're probably all just talkin', but how many of them are there?

1279. They tried to turn me into a killer.

1280. They tried to turn me into somebody who would take another life.

1281. If there's one thing in my life I feel like that I've accomplished...

1282. it's that I... I didn't allow that to happen.

1283. I really learned so much, you know, just spendin' day after day after day...

1284. you know, just people talkin' about, you know,

1285. what's it all about, and how are we gonna deal with this stuff?

1286. How are we really gonna move it forward? Change the world.

1287. That's what everybody wanted to do. We wanted to change the world.

1288. We were pretty sure this sucked. We were pretty sure none of us deserved to be here.

1289. And... So that didn't leave much room but to change the world.

1290. People say, "Well, you keep going back. Why are you going back to Vietnam?"

1291. We have to go back to Vietnam because I'll tell you what... the other side does.

1292. They're always going back. And they have to go back. The hawks.

1293. You know, the patriarchs. They have to go back because...

1294. And they have to revise the going back...

1295. Because they can't allow us to know...

1296. what the "back there" really was.

1297. And then you think about this shit, man.

1298. Then you Say,

1299. "Goddamn!

1300. "Did I do that?

1301. “Did I actually live in that shit?

1302. Did this government push me into this shit?"

1303. What's the... What's the pride in sayin' you're a veteran...

1304. if you were... what you're a veteran of is somethin' wrong?

1305. It's like, uh,

1306. being a veteran of the massacre...

1307. at someplace or another, you know?

1308. That... No, uh... There's no pride to that.

1309. And so, don't talk about it.

1310. Go away. Don't talk about it.

1311. So it's amazing to me that as many...

1312. As many G. II.s that were actually in Vietnam...

1313. Actually there...

1314. Uh, then spoke out against it, and demonstrated against it.

1315. After they got back. I just thought that was... amazing.

1316. That there were... That, if there had been 100,

1317. I would have been amazed.

1318. That there were thousands is just...

1319. Incredible. Incredible.

1320. And that's the news for this early edition.

1321. Next news will be later on.

1322. The voice of news information and hard acid-rock music,

1323. this is Radio First Termer, at 69 megacycles...

1324. on your F.M. dial.

1325. Good night, Nguyen. Good night.