You are cordially invited to Join Us For The World Premiere Of
Sir! No Sir!

At The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival
Sunday, June 19, 7 Pm
Directors Guild Theater
7920 Sunset Blvd
Second Screening Thursday, June 23, 5:00 Pm
Tickets At http://Www.Lafilmfest.Com
Info At http://Www.Sirnosir.Com

Opening narration of Sir! No Sir!:

There is no more appropriate time than now to tell the riveting, incendiary story of the GI Antiwar Movement during the Vietnam War. Help us launch this crucial film into the world by spreading the word and attending the premiere.
In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history.
This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on ships.
It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point.
And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam.
It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile.
And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

1965-1967: A Few Malcontents:

As the Johnson administration turns what was initially a small Police Action into an all-out war and the peace movement begins, isolated individuals and small groups in the military refuse to participate and are severely punished:
Lt. Henry Howe is sentenced to two years hard labor for attending an antiwar demonstration; the Ft. Hood 3 are sentenced to three years hard labor for refusing duty in Vietnam; Howard Levy, a military doctor, refuses to train Special Forces troops and is court-martialed as Donald Duncan, a celebrated member of the Green Berets, resigns after a year in Vietnam; and Corporal William Harvey and Private George Daniels are sentenced to up to ten years in 1967 for meeting with other marines on Camp Pendleton to discuss whether Blacks should fight in Vietnam.

1968-1969: They Thought the Revolution was Starting:

The war escalates as the peace movement becomes an international mass movement, and soldiers begin forming organizations and taking collective action: The Ft. Hood 43, Black soldiers who refused riot-control duty at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, are sentenced for up to 18 months each; the largest military prison in Vietnam, Long Binh Jail (affectionately called LBJ by the troops), is taken over by Black soldiers who hold it for two months; The Presidio 27 prisoners in the stockade on the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco are charged with mutiny, a capital offense, when they refuse to work after a mentally ill prisoner is killed; underground newspapers published by antiwar GIs appear at almost every military base in the country; the American Servicemans Union is formed; antiwar coffeehouses are established outside of military bases.
In Vietnam, small combat-refusals occur and are quickly suppressed, but on Christmas Eve, 1969, 50 GIs participate in an illegal antiwar demonstration in Saigon. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) is formed.

1970-1973: Sir, My Men Refuse to Fight:

Opposition to the war turns militant and the counter-culture rises to its peak: Tens of thousands of soldiers desert and flee to Canada, France and Sweden; thousands of soldiers organize and participate in Armed Farces Day demonstrations at military bases; drug use is rampant and underground radio networks flourish in Vietnam as Black and white soldiers increasingly identify with the Antiwar and Black Liberation movements; combat refusals and fragging of officers in Vietnam are epidemic.
Thousands are jailed for refusing to fight or simply defying military authority, and nearly every U.S. military prison in the world is hit by riots.
Jane Fondas antiwar review, The FTA Show, tours military bases and is cheered by tens of thousands of soldiers; the Pentagon concludes that over half the ground troops openly oppose the war and shifts its combat strategy from a ground war to an air war; the Navy and Air Force are both riddled with mutinies and acts of sabotage.
VVAW holds the Winter Soldier Investigation, exposing American war crimes through the testimony of veterans, and stages the most dramatic demonstration of the Vietnam era as hundreds of veterans hurl their medals onto the Capitol steps.

Epilogue: The Birth of the Spitting Image

As the U.S. military and its allies flee Vietnam in disarray in the Spring of 1975, the government, the media, and Hollywood begin a 20 year process of erasing the GI movement from the collective memory of the nation and the world.

Want know more ?

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 11 2005 21:09 utc | 3

@name – the numbers are really too small to have much statistical relevance, esp. when you look at “growth rates”. I just wonder if they might develop into something significant.
What I am missing so far in the picture is drug usage. Afghanistan is producing record amounts of opium and heroin. The borders from Afghanistan via Iran to Iraq are wide open. The U.S. bases are more closed than in Vietnam, but there are always local workers there.
First news of Heroin usage or other drugs on U.S. bases in Iraq and the Viet Nam pattern will apply. I guess it is there, but there was no report yet.

Posted by: b | Jun 11 2005 21:32 utc | 5

@remembereringgiap
Check out these links
Military Law Task Force Website
Figures for the Vietnam Conflict are also not known but figures for all US forces throughout the world are known.
The Armed Forces Journal in June, 1971
Cheers.

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 11 2005 21:45 utc | 7

I wonder if the problem, at this time, is fragging? Is it possible that enough “grunts” have been injured or killed, with few enough fresh recruits coming down the pipeline, that officers are obliged to put themselves more in the line of fire due to the manpower shortage?
I don’t know enough about the figures, and this post is not coming up properly for me. But it seems like a possibility to be considered at least.

Posted by: Ferdzy | Jun 11 2005 22:05 utc | 9

As I understand it, fragging occurred when commanders insisted that their units go out on patrol in heavily mined terrain. Tripping an IED on a road is a different state of affairs, because it’s not as if the commander were ordering his troops to leave the road and patrol some minefield or other. In fact it occurs to me that a commander’s chances for promotion in Iraq may hinge on keeping his own casualties to a minimum, rather than raising his unit’s “kill ratio”. Two different wars, two different disasters.

Posted by: alabama | Jun 11 2005 22:53 utc | 11

Hmmm, things are certainly not well re the troops morale in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, intentional ‘friendly fire’ incidents, especially premediated fratricide. require as a precondition a complete collapse of the ledaership of the NCO Corps and a near mutinous reltionship between the enlisted ranks and the comissioned officers corps.
I would suggest there is some very considerable way to go yet re Iraq and Afghanistan for those preconditions to be met, yet not the fantastical possibility it would have been considered 2 years ago.
However, official record or reports of ‘fragging’ incidents is anathema within the services, even more so than acknowledgement of allied ‘friendly fire’ due to negligence for obvious reasons. Troops involved also have a vested interested where it occurs in having it ‘written off’ as ‘enemy action’, if even just as a plausible explanation …

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 11 2005 23:27 utc | 13

They’re not speaking for us …
Soldier Rap, The Pulse of War

The sound may be raw, but the lyrics tell a story from Iraq that you don’t often hear—from the soldiers on the streets.
By Scott Johnson and Eve Conant
Newsweek
June 13 issue – It took only a few ambushes, roadside bombs and corpses for Neal Saunders to know what he had to do: turn the streets of Baghdad into rap music. So the First Cavalry sergeant, then newly arrived for a year of duty in Sadr City, began hoarding his monthly paychecks and seeking out a U.S. supplier willing to ship a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones to an overseas military address. He hammered together a plywood shack, tacked up some cheap mattress pads for soundproofing and invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his jerry-built studio. They call themselves “4th25″—pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game—and their album is “Live From Iraq.” The sound may be raw, even by rap standards, but it expresses things that soldiers usually keep bottled up. “You can’t call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED,” says Saunders. “No one talks about what we’re going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they’re not speaking for us. We’re venting for everybody.”

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 11 2005 23:44 utc | 15

debs
a simple reminder
the vietnam war didn’t peter out
it was won by the vietnamese people, heroically
& whatever you want to call the iraqui resistance – in the face of the american war machine – they are heroic

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 12 2005 0:07 utc | 17

@giap I don’t doubt the heroism of the vietnamese people but post Tet they were on their back foot. A different attitude in the US would have had them being “bombed backed to the stoneage” as the war criminals had threatened.
The vietnamese ‘win’, tho I’m not sure the farmers and families living close to the chemical warfare would feel that they won, came about because the US lost their stomach for a fight and reversed as quickly as they could without admitting they were in reverse.
Arguments that the vietnamese won because they destroyed US morale don’t consider that the ppl in the US quite simply weren’t hungry enough in the first place.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 12 2005 0:47 utc | 19

outraged
what was it ho sd
“nothing is more precious than self determination & freedom”
this statement has not lost its value or its truth. it is the reason, as you suggest, why this illegal adventure of the american imperium will not succeed, coud never succeed.
every attempt it makes to assert it hegemony brings death but also brings shame to a world that does nothing to oppose it
outraged, i think you & i through very different routes have arrived at an elemental humanism – at a politics informed by the human heart. our lives before this – just a passage to arrive at what we are committed to do today
& i want as someone who has come to know you from the whisky bar & here -& to trust your researches & in fact to utilise them – that you are also here for the long haul & i want you to take care – to take things slowly but to keep on giving as you do here – because its importance cannot be underestimated. unhappily i just offer a view – you offer the facts – or the routes by which we can arrive at the facts
& it is strange or not so strange – that an aspect of my enlightenment was through a reading, a close reading ofthe texts of kim philby & of the practical histories of james jesus angelton (by the way do you know that roman à vlef about him called ‘flowers for mother'(?) & though the analaysts especially in the vietnam war were my direct enemies – i came to understand that amongs the best of them existed people who really did understand the fragility of this world – whether it was an gee or an mcgovern or any number of people whose counsel was never listened to. today i imagine if an analyst does not understand his or her job as a publicist or propogandist – they have no chance of being listend to at all. i imagine in large part in the last ten years the ‘truthtellers have been emptied from the intelligence temple
in any case wanted you to know again that your hard work is cherished

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 12 2005 1:42 utc | 21

outraged/debs
Is it not mainly a question of perspective? If I want to I can formulate the end of ww1 as a win for the western part of the entente or as the german people not wanting to win bad enough. What differs is who is the subject and who is the object – whos actions are consequences of whos? In american media the US is of course the actor but when we step away from the stories told there are never any prime mover. No one started a process involving many people, they all did in different ways.
In the end those not wanting an american military presence in Vietnam won over those that wanted one. To assign these roles to nations or armies is to simplify things to much.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jun 12 2005 1:53 utc | 23

@A swedish kind of death
I aplogise if my words or sentiment offended.
Yet, I find I can no longer look back through time, history and events and understand why it is that “America, my country, right or wrong!” or “Support the Troops” is still argued or a matter of jingoist patriotic faith.
Stomaching the entrenched bigotry and racism of the ‘pricelous’ value of an American life as somehow more precious than any other is no longer possible.
This nation has inavded and brutalised peoples beyond count since the end of the Civil War throughout the world yet continues to forget or revise history to serve yet another project of venal greed and power.
Truth, Justice and Liberty. Whose truth ? Whose Justice ? Liberty for whom ?
When will the lies, deciet and ruthless gross systemic manipulations end ?
Countless Viet vets have come to terms with thier past in the crime that was Vietnam … others of us have come to terms with our contributions to the racket that is Americas capital driven wars, overt and covert, of aggression, conquest and exploitation.
Its about time we started to stop rationalising, revising, forgetting, justifying crimes against humanity (in the individual spirit and physical aspects of man sense) simply to justify our pseudo-aryan right to an ‘American way of life’ when the cost for that house in the burbs or two car SUV garage is ultimately another human beings or familes lives or qaulity of life somewhere else in the world …
Our corrupt political system crows of our supposed generosity of spirit as a nation and in reality we donate 0.02% of wealth in aid … that really says it all.
Our predecessors killed ~500,000 Phillipinos over a 50 year colonial occupation from the start of last century, man woman and child and probably less than 1 in 10,000 Americans even know … as long as we keep creating excuses for our past and current actions there will be no shortage of future Iraq’s, Vietnam’s, Cuba’s, Chile’s, Hawaii’s, Peurto Rico’s, Grenada’s et al.

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 12 2005 2:28 utc | 25

Fragging, in my experience was essentially a method of exerting the will of a particular unit over its command structure (on the company level). From the troop perspective, any CO or LT taking undue risk, making poor field decisions, would soon get rumors of bounty being placed on their head.
On one occasion, I saw a new LT trying to assert his authority by giving an order to “assult” a couple of NVA positions (dug in) which had pinned the company down. After shouting out the order — he realized that no one had moved, but were instead stareing at him with that special gaze that said “who the fuck do you think you are” — he apparently got the message as he then, I kid you not, shouted out “I”m sorry!” — right in the middle of the firefight.
There is a point I suppose, where the steam just runs out, when it becomes self evident that people are killing for nothing and dying for nothing — and complicity becomes contrary, first in rote self (& comrads) preservation, then as moral imperative.
At that point the genie is pretty much out ah the bottle, with curses not wishes.

Posted by: anna missed | Jun 12 2005 4:01 utc | 27

I saw the same item that Bernhard did and immediately had the same thought — it’s a fragging. But then I had the same thought as Roger — this isn’t a conscript army, these guys are professionals. The facts about the incident in Tikrit are still murky. Let’s not jump to conclusions.
But then I thought about the number of reservists who’ve been screwed over, and the fact that some regulars are coming up on their third tour of duty, and how obvious it must be to many of them that the situation is completely fucked up. I also remembered some articles and letters I saw back in ’03 on David Hackworth’s old site, Soldiers For the Truth, that described what total shits some of the officers were:

I went to a division rear in May and practically got in a fist fight with this Captain up there over letting my private, who hadn’t contacted home since we left the U.S., send an e-mail over his office’s internet. This clown spends his days sending flowers to his wife and surfing the net and he won’t let my private send an e-mail to her husband. Fucking disgraceful and all too typical of today’s army.

And I also thought about how much more violent and borderline psychotic American society is these days than it was 40 years ago. I mean, back home people get popped every day for reasons that are insanely trivial — especially when compared to the shit going down in Iraq.
So now I’m leaning back the other way. I don’t think we’re looking at an epidemic of fragging in Iraq yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it is happening.
When the guys they REALLY ought to be wasting are sitting behind desks in Washington.

Posted by: Billmon | Jun 12 2005 4:22 utc | 29

Doubtless everyone is in bed by now n I’m just back from an outing to see that everyone has had their two bob’s worth on the vietnam thing and as per usual we have all been talking at cross purposes.
I have no doubt that the vietnamese people were heroic and had centuries of experience resisting foreign invaders. I also have no doubt that they outlasted the US invasion but I say again that had as much to do with the psyche in the US at the time as it did with the heroic resistance.
Right isn’t always might you know if it were we wouldn’t be having these conversations every generation or so. People would have learned by natural selection that invasion of another’s lands is always unsuccessful. Were that it be so.
The sad truth is that like most human endeavour there is no absolute truth, no unified field theory. Socratic thinking doesn’t work well when the act of observation inevitably alters the outcome.
Wha? Sometimes the invaders are hungry strong and desperate enough to win even though the invaded have a home advantage. In another time without making any changes to the collective state of mind of the Vietnamese, the US may have prevailed because there was a difference in the US collective state of mind.
I’m not pointing this out to ‘win’ a discussion (which IMHO can’t be won) but rather to highlight another human trait, one that is continually played upon by assholes to get others to die for them. That is the tendency to see things in black and white. In this case the vietnamese as heroes and therefore good and the US as villains and therefore bad.
Now Giap don’t get me wrong I believe that what western countries did in Soth East Asia, in particular the US in Vietnam was morally unconscionable. What I don’t believe is that made the NLF and NVA saints by definition.
On the surface it doesn’t matter does it? I think it does. It is possible to run the argument that the worst possible outcome for WW2 was discovering that the actions of the Nazis in the concentration camps was so foul that rather than looking back at this war as an argument between greedy bullies it was a fight for all that is right, honorable and proper. That outcome enabled politicians to sell future wars as idealistic enterprises in a way that wasn’t possible after WW1 and caused great reluctance on the part of most ordinary people to buy into WW2.
Once the war started the Allies did have evidence of the foulness the Nazis were perpetrating but they kept a lid on that knowledge as best they could in order to prevent some sort of idealism getting in the way of the post war carve up strategy. While they claim now that is why they went to war if you read contemporary accounts from that time, the fate of the european jewish community was well down the list of priorities in the minds of Curchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.
I too have friends from Indochina, some of them are Khmer and not supporters of Pol Pot but they would like their country back. Hun Sen is a despot who still does Vietnam’s bidding. Similarly there are plenty of people in the south around Ho Chi Minh city who aren’t ethnic chinese but do feel the southerners copped the rough end of the pinapple after re-unification.
These people I talk about aren’t heroes or perfect either. I just wish we would all stop believing that for some thing or someone to be right or true, they must always be right and true.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 12 2005 6:11 utc | 31

In some ways it’s a damn shame that they didn’t blow up congress, the vietnamese that is, but lets face it the vietnamese nationalists were nothing if not pragmatic.
Surely there is no credible sense in the US at the moment that the Iraqis will blow them up at Walmart while they are buying the latest piece of crap manufactured in a chinese labor camp?
I know I said above that this war isn’t just against the Iraqis, it’s against virtually the whole of the middle east, but 911 notwithstanding any half wit can see that the ‘enemy’ lacks the resources, much less the will to inflict any sort of serious sustained damage on the US. That could change further down the track, but as far as I can see the only mob capable of doing anything serious (the North Koreans) are being left alone precisely because they have that capability.
I realise that BushCo have worked hard to engender that fear but it must be wearing pretty thin by now. In fact the shortage of any recent red alerts or whatever they call them, surely shows that the spinmeisters know that terror fatigue has set in.
Even if Osama had the resources I doubt they could persuade him to do an encore. After 911 anything else would have to be anti-climactic and would certainly cost Bin Laden credibility with the rest of the middle eastern political class.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 12 2005 7:27 utc | 33

@Debs. I beg to differ. Suicide bombing is low tech. You just need to get them into the country.
I think the clock is ticking.

Posted by: Lupin | Jun 12 2005 14:21 utc | 35

“…there never ever was any credible notion that the Viet Cong would somehow come to the US and strike at us on US soil.”
True of the VC, but not why people said with a straight face “better to fight them there than in San Francisco”. The VC were surrogates for world communism, which was seen as the real adversary. This justified the military of that time. Now we have the largest military on the planet by an order of magnitude. Is this appropriate to the level of threat posed by a few thousand jihadists?

Posted by: Roger Bigod | Jun 12 2005 16:06 utc | 37

skod
the vietnamese as a nation fought a war of loberation against the french, the japanese, the french, the americans & also gave the chinese a bloody nose
it was as a people that those struggles were borne, developed & finally came to fruition
i do not play with little flags on a map skod but concrete realites are what they are. you can dress it up anyway you like – classify it through a labrynthine language which hides the real facts
& the facts were these the french were doomed to lose, the japanese were doomed to lose, the americans were doomed to lose
in history at least empiricism has its place & in the overwhelming majority are hose that write of a victory of the vietnamese people
& a significant loss to the american empire
a loss incidentally which will be repeated in the middle east in a way that will not be as gentle or as forgiving as the vietnamese people
revisionism of any kind upsets me – because whether it is form the right or left – it divorces the most basic reality – the people
re subject/object relations.
the united states is an empire
it uses practically the machiner of empire to consolidate its hegemony
it has & will use any means including violence to retain that hegemony
american history is a history of violence
since the beginning the americans have carried out imperial enterprises, failed imperial enterprises where the body count is horrifying & enormous in anyone’s language, swedish or otherwise
the american empire has used armed forces both within & outside of already existing treaties but for the majority of cases – they have carried out illegal actions – illegal in any jurisprudence you want to name – including american jurisprudence or what is left of it
in using armed force – it has for a considerable time used criminal enterprises & criminal formations to carry out murder – phoenix programme, operation condor, & the current butchery in iraq
in iraq they have murdered at least 100,000 people
these are not subject/object relations skod. these are what are commonly known to historians as, facts
for many a long day – slothrop has castigated me for using the words ‘national character’ in relation to these imperial adventures. but how could it be otherwise – the muirdering & destruction of other cultures has as much to do with friends, ally mcbeal as it does with richard perle or donald rumsfield
the morality of lies – which is deep in that ‘national character’ allowed for the murder/lynchings of the afroamerican people, the morality of lies calles the l a riots a sordid mob action when in fact it was a bloody insurrection in which 60 to 70 people died. the morality of lies have allowed successive administrations to suborn, to destabile, to corrupt & finally to diminish national sovereignthy whether it is italy in 1948, vietnam or greece in the sixties, chile, el salvador, nicaragua
on & on this morality of lies has been protected by a culture which is american. culture is a weapon which the elites have used with great skill & intelligence. one can speak of their use of culture as an almost the only victory they have organised.
but it is an empty victory for while it destroys the national characters of other countries it has destroyed almost completely the moral character of the american people
& we have to be frank here – we are very much in the minority -& a minority they could physically liquidate in a moments notice if they thought that was necessary.
skod – the natuyre of the nightmare has to be named or else you have to live or others have to live the consequences
in indonesia & the phillipines for example – these countries have been corrupted so profoundly by american intervention in all their affairs – that their sovereignty is by nature perverted
the australians after the 1975 constitutional coup have learnt to keep quiet & never upset their american masters
greece is still not free of what happened during the american installation of the greek military junta
skod, you & slothrop can go on all you like about the amorphous subject/object relations but i know who the enemy is – history told me so

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 12 2005 16:54 utc | 39

Heh I KNOW you must all be long gone now..Nah I don’t really want to have the last word well not much anyway. If I was arguing that there was one single cause for the end of the vietnam war then I apoligise for that was not the point I was trying to make. Initially I was trying to point out that is not a good idea to make direct comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam and that the Vietnam war sorta petered out rather than ending in a hiss and roar. I doubted that is what is going to happen in Iraq. I then went on to say that the difference in mindset of the US citizenry in the two wars would be a determining factor in how the Iraq war ended. I was then remonstrated with for ignoring the heroic efforts of the Vietnamese nationalists. I thought I wasn’t ignoring them as much as pointing out that there were other factors that needed to be considered as well. Obviously this was taken as me arguing that the attitude of the US citizenry was the ONLY factor that determined the outcome….Usual meaningless storm in a teacup stuff.
I am concerned though at the ethnocentric vitriol that gets spouted here and it comes from all sides. The other day I in typical overly verbose style drew up a shortlist of nasty imperialist acts over the past few centuries in an attempt to point out that it is a mistake to attribute these greedheads’ actions to some national characteristic. The next post in response came from someone questioning my emotive technique in portraying the couple of Anglo cultural imperialist examples. Nothing was said about the Spanish example in which I was prolly on far dodgier ground. In a way the person merely showed that as lefty, liberal, tolerant or whatever we are we all still have great difficulty in dealing with what we perceive to be affronts to our own culture.
But it is very rare for any of us to stick to the issue at hand. We tend to want to get our own point of view across. So here we all are arguing at cross purposes. Everyone making good points and usually being able to support them with some sort of evidence but none of us really listening to each other.
But we shouldn’t be unduly concerned. I find having to express my point of view in here a great aid in developing and clarifying my thinking. But we’d be crazy to think we could ever convince our duelling partner of our own point of view. Well to have them admit it on the spot anyway, there aren’t many shrinking violets in MoA.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 12 2005 22:37 utc | 41

bring the war home

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 12 2005 23:18 utc | 43

Heh I’ve never been in a bar debate where every spieler carries a recorder and can in an instant verbatim quote back at you something you said a coupla hours earlier…in some ways it helps keep us on track and others merely serves further obsfucation.
No one is addressing our ethnocentricity in a way that might cause a bit of thought before catagorising people by the place they were born. But on the other hand THIS thread/down this end of the bar appears thankfully free of religio-cultural conspiracy theories that sail very close to the elephant that AIPAIC and others would accuse us of having propped on the corner stool every night.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 13 2005 1:05 utc | 45

Initially I was trying to point out that is not a good idea to make direct comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam and that the Vietnam war sorta petered out rather than ending in a hiss and roar
With all due respect, that’s just absurd.
Oh yes, the US and most western media lost interest in the fate of South Vietnam’s people after the US ground forces left in ’73, however, Sth Vietnams ARVN, airforce et al certainly fought on for another bloody and brutal two yaers while US dombs continued to somehow fall from the heavens by ‘magic’. The Regualr NVA campaigning in multiple bitter battles until they finally drove into Saigaon can hardly be described by the parties involved as a conflict ending in a ‘hiss’.
Unless one falls into the trap of ingnoring, discounting and selective forgetting that is the hallmark of our society once we’ve ‘lost interest’ and our attention span of the moment has moved on. We just ‘dismiss’ it and make it invisible and permanently forgotten by collectively making the ‘unpleasantness’ disappear … this cultural perversity, for it is heartily accepted high and low, is what creates the necessary precondition to the creation of yet more farcical pretexts for the then invasion of Iraq, the subsequent and continuing occupation and yet more future wars, overt and covert.
Yes, this continual ‘forgetting’ is evn more sickening because unkie the thirties ‘good Germans’ it is repeated again and again decade after decade thoughout our history. Thsi incredibly usefull trait allows for yet another generation of exploited and surreptitously co-opted troops, in uniform and not, ‘awake’ and realise they’ve been royally fuc__ing HAD.
Forget, revise history and events within the nations consciousness, move on a few years, and repeat ad finitum …

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 13 2005 1:13 utc | 47

One day while I was in a bunker in Vietnam, a sniper round went over my head. The person who fired that weapon was not a terrorist, a rebel, an extremist, or a so-called insurgent. The Vietnamese individual who tried to kill me was a citizen of Vietnam, who did not want me in his country. This truth escapes millions.
Mike Hastie
U.S. Army Medic
Vietnam 1970-71
December 13, 2004

Posted by: Outraged | Jun 13 2005 4:11 utc | 49

Thanks to all participants for creating this wonderful
thread.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jun 17 2005 8:42 utc | 51