This review/interview was originally published by the Erie Times-News, April 13, 2008
Few people have ever heard of a Vietnam-era phenomenon called "the GI Movement," a peace-activist storm that swept the country when the war in Vietnam was well under way.
Many attribute the popular ignorance of the phenomenon to the revisionist history that followed our withdrawal from Vietnam.
The Movement consisted of both recently returned veterans and active-duty soldiers. With a brilliant mix of archival film and talking heads, David Zeiger's documentary film, "Sir! No Sir!" examines this period of turmoil, and it deserves to be seen at Mercyhurst College on Wednesday.
Zeiger put off making the film because he was convinced that people simply didn't want to see another story from those tumultuous '60s.
"What prompted me to make the film was Sept.11, and the War on Terror's segue into the Iraq War," Zeiger told an interviewer. "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."
He didn't feel he had to mention Iraq in his film.
Zeiger begins by introducing us to individuals who, in the early war years, made their own feelings known. Convinced of the war's immorality, Louis Font became the first West Point graduate to refuse to serve in a war. Army Special Forces officer Donald Duncan gained brief fame in 1966 when he refused to participate further in "sickening" practices.
Howard Levy, an Army dermatologist, tired of training Green Beret troops to treat Vietnamese children while the U.S. was daily bombing villages and killing untold numbers of civilians. Levy was court-martialed and spent three years in prison.
Late in the film, sociologist Jerry Lembcke, a vet, briefly discusses his book, "The Spitting Image," which reveals there are no recorded instances of hippies spitting on returning vets.
These and other personal accounts are interspersed with references to organized efforts by vets and others to stop the war. The 1968 Tet offensive, which demonstrated massive civilian support for the North Vietnamese, was a turning point in the war. It was an image later perpetuated by the film "Rambo."
Many war resisters within the military were imprisoned in the Presidio stockade, where a sit-in took place in the prison yard. Marches and demonstrations popped up all over the U.S. Various forms of underground press disseminated newspapers and leaflets in and around military bases.
Most provocative, perhaps, was the emergence of FTA (for "Free the Army," or something more obscene), which saw itself as a touring group providing what Bob Hope's USO tours couldn't. One prominent member was Jane Fonda, who appears in the film, and who became notorious among war sympathizers as "Hanoi Jane."
Director Zeiger himself had become an antiwar activist and operated the Oleo Strut, a coffeehouse outside Fort Hood, Texas. Like the helicopter shock absorber for which it was named, the gathering place helped to allow soldiers returning from Vietnam to Fort Hood to land softly.
Those were heady days, and the film captures them with rapid editing, driving guitar music and an effective but unobtrusive voiceover narration by Troy Garrity, Jane Fonda's son. It serves to remind us of what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when in a 1787 letter he asked: "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
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