COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Sir, No Sir! An Interview with David Zeiger
Jonathan Stein, motherjones.com
September, 1, 2005
The director's Vietnam documentary Sir! No Sir! chronicles a forgotten movement and presents a history lesson for the present.
The
Oleo Strut was a coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, from 1968 to 1972. Like
its namesake, a shock absorber in helicopter landing gear, the
Oleo Strut’s purpose was to help GIs land softly. Upon returning
from Vietnam to Fort Hood, shell-shocked soldiers found solace amongst
the Strut’s regulars, mostly fellow soldiers and a few civilian
sympathizers. But it didn’t take long before shell shock turned
into anger, and that anger into action. The GIs turned the Oleo Strut
into one of Texas’s anti-war headquarters, publishing an
underground anti-war newspaper, organizing boycotts, setting up a legal
office, and leading peace marches.
David Zeiger was one of the civilians who helped run the Oleo Strut. He
went on to a career in political activism and today, at 55, he is a
filmmaker and the director of Sir! No Sir!, a new documentary on the
all-but-forgotten antiwar activities of GIs from Fort Hood to Saigon.
The GI Movement, as it was then known, was composed of both vets
recently returned from Vietnam and active-duty soldiers. They fought
for peace in ways big and small, from organizing leading anti-war
organizations to wearing peace signs instead of dog tags. By the early
‘70s, opposition to the Vietnam War within the military and
amongst veterans had grown so widespread that no one could credibly
claim that opposing the war meant opposing the troops. Veterans wanted
an end to the war; their brothers in Vietnam agreed.
Zeiger put off making this movie for years, convinced the public
didn’t want to hear another story about the ‘60s. What
finally spurred the project was the Iraq War and the role some Vietnam
vets are playing in keeping America’s young men and women from
seeing the same horrors they saw. When GIs from the current war started
coming home and wondering what they’d been fighting for,
Zeiger’s days at the Oleo Strut took on a new relevance. His film
is a remarkable interweaving of vets’ stories about their
intensifying resistance to the war, starting with the lone objectors of
the late ‘60s and culminating with open disobedience throughout
the ranks in the ‘70s. One vet even recalls an episode from
1972 in which Military Police joined enlisted men in burning an effigy
of their commanding officer. The images that accompany such stories are
just as powerful. As a young doctor is escorted into a military court
for refusing to train GIs, hundreds of enlisted men lean out of nearby
windows extending peace signs in support. It’s an image that the
Army didn’t want the American people to see then, and probably
wouldn’t want the American people to see today.
Sir! No Sir! won the Documentary Audience Award at the L.A. Film
Festival and is slated for broad release before the end of the year.
David Zeiger spoke with MotherJones.com from the Los Angeles office of
his production company, Displaced Films.
MotherJones.com: Talk a little about your history with the GI Movement.
David Zeiger: In the late ‘60s I reached a point where I believed
that there was really no alternative for me than to become part of the
movement against the war. My opposition to the war had grown very
deeply but I hadn’t been really involved in anything. I starting
looking around for what was going to be the most effective place and
situation to help. I ran into this small group from the GI Movement,
some vets and some civilians from Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. It
became obvious to me very quickly that this was the most solid, most
direct way to go after the war. It was a situation where people were
opposing the war that no one thought would oppose the war. Not just
because they were GIs. These were mostly working class guys, guys who
had gone into the military out of patriotic motives or because that was
just what you did. And they were becoming one of the strongest forces
against the war.
MJ: What brought you back to the project, some 35 years later?
DZ: I started making films in the early ‘90s. I always knew that
this story was one that needed to be told and had never been
told. But the way I always characterized it was, “This is a film
that needs to be made but I’m never going to make it.” At
the time, it just wasn’t a film that would have much resonance
for people. It would be another story from the ‘60s. What
prompted me to make the film was September 11, and the War on
Terror’s segue into the Iraq War. I saw that this had suddenly
become a story that would have current resonance, something that would
immediately connect with what’s going on today.
MJ: How did you find the veterans that appear in the film?
DZ: Several of these guys were people I knew because I had been at Fort
Hood. Then there were veterans’ organizations like Vietnam
Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace—I put a call out
for stories through their various means of communication. I also ended
up [getting] in touch with people nobody had ever heard of before.
Their missions were so top secret they were under threat of
federal prosecution if they went public with any of their stories. They
came to me and basically said, “We want to finally tell our
story. We haven’t been able to tell it for 35 years.” We
still don’t know what will happen to them. We’ll know when
the film is in theaters.
Also, Several books played a big role in keeping memory of the movement
alive and giving me the foundation for the film -- especially Soldiers
in Revolt by David Cortright, and A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance
Furing the Vietnam War by William Short and Willa Seidenberg.
MJ: Did it take any effort to get the veterans to open up—the
public conception of the Vietnam vet is of a man too pained to talk
openly about his experiences.
DZ: Yeah, that’s a very big myth. In this situation that was not
at all a problem. These are people whose stories had been suppressed
and ignored since the war. They knew that their story was a story of
the Vietnam War that needed to be told. For most of these
veterans, it was more a matter of finally being able to tell their
story, stories the overall zeitgeist was against being told. It was not
a matter of reluctance.
MJ: The film has already gotten a good deal of interest in Europe. Do you anticipate that domestic interest will be as strong?
DZ: Well, yeah, how to put this? I anticipate that kind of interest,
but until the film was made I think U.S. television didn’t quite
get how relevant the film is in the current world. It was hard to
explain that to people. Now that the film is made we’re getting
much stronger interest. A big strength of the film, and what I think is
going to bring it into the mainstream, is that this is historical
metaphor. We don’t have to say a word about Iraq in the film for
it to be clearly identified with Iraq for people. But [because it
doesn't mention Iraq], the film can’t be shoved into the category
of a propaganda film.
MJ: You mentioned that you were a civilian organizer at Fort Hood
during the Vietnam War. At that time, was the civilian public widely
aware of the GI Movement?
DZ: The evidence suggests that they were. As you see in the film, there
were CBS Nightly News stories about the GI Movement. There is a segment
in the film of Walter Cronkite talking about the GI underground press.
In the state of Texas, where there was a very large anti-war movement
in Austin and Houston, and the center of the Texas movement for a time
was at Fort Hood. The armed forces demonstrations were major events for
the whole state. I think people knew generally that there was
opposition in the military, but they didn’t know the details or
how widespread it was. But it was certainly more prominent than people
remember it. It has been thoroughly wiped out of any histories of the
war.
MJ: How visible was the GI Movement amongst American soldiers in
Southeast Asia? Were they aware that their fellow soldiers were
protesting the war on bases abroad and in the States?
DZ: Yes. The GI anti-war press was everywhere. Just about every base in
the world had an underground paper. Vietnam GI was the first GI paper.
It was sent directly to Vietnam from the U.S. in press runs of 5,000
and they were getting spread all over the place because they’d be
handed from person to person. Awareness of the GI Movement was at
different levels but it was still very widespread.
MJ: How did the GIs manage to write and print these papers, especially when their actions were, presumably, being watched?
DZ: That was where the coffeehouse came in. [The GIs] did the work, for
the most part, off base. At the Oleo Strut we had an office that they
worked in and we had a printer that would print it for us. Some of
these papers would get mimeographed secretly on the military bases
because the guys working on them would be clerks and they had
access to the proper resources. So there was a range, from something
someone had typed up and mimeographed and got out about 500 copies of,
to these pretty sophisticated papers like the Fatigue Press at Fort
Hood, where we’d have a press run of 10,000 copies. We’d
hand them out off base but they’d also be distributed on base.
Guys snuck on base and would go through barracks and put them on beds
and foot lockers.
One story we didn’t put in the film was about some guys at Fort
Lewis near Seattle. They wanted to bring GIs to an anti-war
demonstration, but they didn’t have an underground paper yet.
They took a bunch of leaflets on base late at night and drove around
throwing the leaflets out the window. In the military, if there’s
litter on the base the brass doesn’t pick it up; they send out
the GIs out to police the base and pick it up. So the next morning they
sent several companies out to pick up all this litter and before
they realized what this litter was, it was too late. It’s funny:
repression breeds innovation.
MJ: The movie talks a lot about the GI coffeehouses and how some of
them were attacked and shut down. Did GIs ever claim their First
Amendment rights were being thwarted?
DZ: Yes, and there were cases that went all the way to the Supreme
Court about that. The Supreme Court fairly consistently ruled that
so-called “military necessity” trumped free speech. But
there was a tremendous support network of lawyers during the period of
the GI Movement who would help challenge these things. There were many
cases of GIs challenging the military’s right to not allow them
to distribute the underground papers on base. No one won [laughs], but
there were a lot of attempts to create change.
MJ: Another thing you discuss in the film is the FTA [“Free the
Army” or “Fuck the Army”] tour, a variety show packed
with celebrities that wanted to counterbalance the pro-war Bob
Hope. Where did the tour perform?
DZ: Well, it was banned from bases. What they typically did was come
into military towns that had a support organization like the
coffeehouses, and they would either perform at the coffeehouses, or if
it was possible, in a larger venue. I know when the FTA show came to
Killeen we spent months trying to get an auditorium or even an outdoor
site rented to us and no one would do it. So the FTA Tour came to town
and performed at the Oleo Strut, which had a capacity of maybe 200
people. Rather than doing two shows that day, they did four. When they
did their tour of Asia, which is where we got the footage for the film,
they got a lot of outdoor venues and larger venues, but they were never
allowed on bases. Keep in mind, these were the top Hollywood stars of
the day, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. They had just come off of
Klute, won a ton of awards. But of course they weren’t allowed on
any bases.
MJ: And the GIs who saw the shows were free enough that 800 of them could go see the show in one day?
DZ: Yeah. By 1970 and 1971, the combination of the actual organized GI
Movement and the general culture of resistance that had emerged inside
the military was so strong that you could openly walk around bases
wearing whatever anti-war stuff you wanted to wear. Actually, the guys
in the U.S. couldn’t do that as much; guys in Vietnam were doing
it a lot more. But regardless, that sense of opposition, that sense of
FTA, was so strong the army couldn’t completely stomp down on it.
MJ: Your film never mentions John Kerry. Why?
DZ: Because so many people wanted us to put him in [laughs]. That was
part of it. Frankly, we didn’t have him in mainly because we
didn’t want that to become what the film was about. The film made
about his military service during the campaign, Going Upriver, has a
lot of footage about his involvement with Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, which is also in our film. Ironically, that film was
made to help Kerry’s campaign, but if anything, it hurt it. It
didn’t win over anyone that was against him to begin with, but
people who supported Kerry because of his anti-war stance during
Vietnam saw how startlingly far he’s gone in his ultimate
betrayal of the stand he took in the 1960s. We thought anything like
that would be distraction for this film.
MJ: Why do you think the GI Movement has faded from the public’s memory of Vietnam?
DZ: There’s been a number of factors. There was this whole
element in the mid to late ‘70s of people kind of wanting to
forget. Hollywood, in depicting the war in the 1970s, never mentioned
the GI Movement. Coming Home, which was a very good film in very many
ways, started with a much more radical approach to what GIs had gotten
into. But by the time the film was finished, it was a much more
conciliatory film, and that became the theme that a lot of people
latched onto about Vietnam in the ‘70s: Let’s forget it
all. Then in the ’80s, the political climate with the Reagan
administration became one of rewriting the history of the war. Of
course, if you’re going to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War
from a right-wing perspective, the GI Movement would be written out
completely. Both politically and in every film made at the time, the
Movement was literally written out of history.
MJ: The rewriting of history you mention seems to posit the troops as
honorable American boys that supported the war, distinct from hippie
protestors. Your film makes it clear that that’s a false
distinction, and those are false labels. What impact do you think your
film will have on people from younger generations whose only experience
with Vietnam is a history that has been revised?
DZ: I hope it will really shock people. I want you walk out of
the theater thinking, “Holy shit! I’ve been lied to so
thoroughly I better take a really close look at this stuff.” And
it’s especially important when comparing it to now. I want people
to seriously question this idea that opposing the war means opposing
the troops. Hopefully they will come to the conclusion that it’s
not a given. That’s a political perspective, and it’s a
right-wing political perspective, a very pro-war political perspective.
And it’s a political perspective that undercuts any serious
movement against the war, both among civilians and among GIs. The way
the Vietnam War gets summed up is that the Vietnam War was
“unpopular,” and that’s what screwed up the GIs. So
people today say, “If that’s true, then if the Iraq war is
unpopular it’s going to screw up the Iraq GIs.” Well, the
Vietnam War wasn’t unpopular. The Vietnam War was criminal.
MJ: One of the most compelling images from the film is the entrance to
the Fort Dix stockade in New Jersey, where a sign reads,
“Obedience to the Law is Freedom.” Vietnam began a period
in American life where that axiom could no longer be taken as faith.
What do you think the long-term ramifications of Vietnam are?
DZ: That sign really summarized the Army’s view of military life.
The ramifications are, if nothing else, that it’s possible to go
up against and defeat a very powerful empire. One of the guys in the
film made a point we didn’t end up using: The United States had
the biggest army in the world, the best equipped, the best trained, the
best fed—and we lost. We got beat by an indigenous force that
totally undercut the ability of the United State to get a foothold in
their country. And that’s a universal lesson, and that’s a
lesson that is extremely dangerous for any country that, despite its
protestations, is in fact bent on being a world empire. It’s
inspiring for anyone who doesn’t want to live in that sort of
situation anymore.
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