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Protest
and Survive; Underground GI Newspapers
by Thomas F. Barton As discontent within the Armed Forces over the war in Iraq spreads, more interest is being taken in how a soldiers rebellion during the Vietnam War brought the army to its knees. This book is a valuable introduction to that story, with photos and cartoons reproduced from soldiers' anti-war newspapers extremely difficult to find elsewhere in print today. The last 40 pages form a "Partial Chronology of Dissent, 1965-1970", calendaring important events in the development of the GI resistance movement. A second appendix brings together a list of GI Publications, by name, location, and dates of issue. I haven't seen a list like this currently available in book form elsewhere. Of course there are glitches. Vietnam GI, the leading anti-war GI publication of the day, is located in Miami when in fact it came out of Chicago. Compared to the contribution made, that's small potatoes. The opening two chapters are a bit heavy, "semiotics"
and so forth, but once past the academic groundwork, a story
begins to unfold that makes exciting reading in chapters like
"Response and Repression," and "Envisioning Resistance."
Tables showing year by year "Reported Incidents of GI Dissent," "Military Antiwar Activists Arrested," and "Average Sentence per GI Activist," are fresh contributions, documenting what we felt at the time: the more the resistance grew, the weaker the Army became in trying to suppress it. For instance, in 1966, the average sentence per GI Activist
was +40 months at hard labor. By 1969 it had fallen to less than
5 months at hard labor. "Our minds have not become warped and closed by twenty years of blind obedience to a corrupt, blind institution bent on not building, but destroying everything for which our country has good these last two centuries. We as intelligent human beings are pressured to adopt these same standards with their moral and human wrongs. "This we cannot, in all good conscience, do. As a result of this feeling, the GI Movement has become an important first step, one so unified and strong that for the last two years the brass have been faced with something they still don't fully understand. And it frightens them. They can no longer expect their impulsive moves to end our struggle. This has been proven many times in the past..This has prevented much of the kangaroo court activity for which the military is infamous." What does all this have to do with Iraq? The Bush crowd like to repeat a new mantra: "Iraq Is Not Vietnam." They're right. It certainly isn't. It took years for resistance to an Imperial war to grow in the army in Vietnam. It has taken only months in Iraq. There was no limitary families' movement during the Vietnam war, because most troops were single men who had no immediate families. Today husbands, wives, and even children of troops are organizing and beginning to raise hell right alongside their loved ones in Iraq and elsewhere in the service. The ironic joke is that the "professional, all-volunteer army" was supposed to be a cure for the kind of rebellion that broke out during Vietnam. Instead, the resistance now has a home base. Books like this are so important because they show our hidden history of resistance to Imperial Dreams and hearten us all about what can be. It's not that what happened before could happen again. What happened before is happening again, right in front our eyes, at a higher level of awareness and organization. It's our job to lend a helping hand. Thomas F. Barton is a hospital worker and union member. In a previous life, he was East Coast Organizer for Vietnam GI. |
James Lewis, Prager,
Westport, Ct., 2003, 243 pp.