[News] People of the Year -- 2003

[News at freedomarchives.org]

People of the Year -- 2003

by Tibor Szamuely
Monday Dec. 29, 2003 at 2:58 PM
<mailto:tiborszamuely at yahoo.com>tiborszamuely at yahoo.com



Harass the Brass

A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War 
told me that before President G.H.W. Bush visited the troops in Saudi 
Arabia, enlisted men and women who would be in Bush's immediate vicinity 
had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away from them. This was 
supposedly done to avoid "accidents." But it was also clear to people on 
the scene that Bush and his corporate handlers were somewhat afraid of the 
enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful 
re-election campaign.

The suppressed history of the last big U.S. war before 'Operation Desert 
Storm' shows that the Commander-in-Chief had good reason to fear and 
distrust his troops. Our rulers want us to forget what happened during the 
Vietnam war -- especially what happened inside the U.S. armed forces during 
the war. Our rulers remember it all too well. They want us to forget what 
defeated their war effort, and the importance of resistance to the war by 
enlisted men and women.

Until 1968 the desertion rate for U.S. troops in Vietnam was lower than in 
previous wars. But by 1969 the desertion rate had increased fourfold. This 
wasn't limited to Southeast Asia; desertion rates among G.I.'s were on the 
increase world-wide. For soldiers in the combat zone, insubordination 
became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as 
mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on 
the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air 
Cavalry Division flatly refused - on CBS TV - to advance down a dangerous 
trail. In the following 12 months the 1st Air Cav notched up 35 combat 
refusals. From mild forms of political protest and disobedience of war 
orders, the resistance among the ground troops grew into a massive and 
widespread "quasi-mutiny" by 1970 and 1971. Soldiers went on "search and 
avoid" missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese, and 
often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting. By 1970, the 
U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the equivalent of four infantry 
divisions.

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In an article published in the Armed Forces Journal (June 7, 1971), Marine 
Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., a veteran combat commander with over 27 years 
experience in the Marines, and the author of Soldiers Of The Sea, a 
definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote: "By every conceivable 
indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching 
collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, 
murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers...Sedition, coupled 
with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an 
audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services..."

Heinl cited a New York Times article which quoted an enlisted man saying, 
"The American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The 
lifers have taken our weapons away...there have also been quite a few frag 
incidents in the battalion."

"Frag incidents" or "fragging" was soldier slang in Vietnam for the killing 
of strict, unpopular and aggressive officers and NCO's. The word apparently 
originated from enlisted men using fragmentation grenades to off 
commanders. Heinl wrote, "Bounties, raised by common subscription in 
amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put 
on the heads of leaders who the privates and SP4s want to rub out. "Shortly 
after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the GI underground 
newspaper in Vietnam, GI Says, publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on 
Lieutenant Colonel Weldon Hunnicutt, the officer who ordered and led the 
attack. "The Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209 
killings) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96 killings). 
Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in 
bivouacs of certain units."

Congressional hearings on fraggings held in 1973 estimated that roughly 3% 
of officer and non-com deaths in Vietnam between 1961 and 1972 were a 
result of fraggings. But these figures were only for killings committed 
with grenades, and didn't include officer deaths from automatic weapons 
fire, handguns and knifings. The Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps 
estimated that only 10% of fragging attempts resulted in anyone going to 
trial.

In the Americal Division, plagued by poor morale, fraggings during 1971 
were estimated to be running around one a week. War equipment was 
frequently sabotaged and destroyed. By 1972 roughly 300 anti-war and 
anti-military newspapers, with names like Harass the Brass, All Hands 
Abandon Ship and Star Spangled Bummer had been put out by enlisted people. 
"In Vietnam," wrote the Ft. Lewis-McCord Free Press, "The Lifers, the 
Brass, are the true enemy..." Riots and anti-war demonstrations took place 
on bases in Asia, Europe and in the United States. By the early 1970s the 
government had to begin pulling out of the ground war and switching to an 
"air war," in part because many of the ground troops who were supposed to 
do the fighting were hamstringing the world's mightiest military force by 
their sabotage and resistance.

With the shifting over to an "air war" strategy, the Navy became an 
important center of resistance to the war. In response to the racism that 
prevailed inside the Navy, black and white sailors occasionally rebelled 
together. The most significant of these rebellions took place on board the 
USS Constellation off Southern California, in November 1972. In response to 
a threat of less-than-honorable discharges against several black sailors, a 
group of over 100 black and white sailors staged a day-and-a-half long 
sit-in. Fearful of losing control of his ship at sea to full-scale mutiny, 
the ship's commander brought the Constellation back to San Diego.

One hundred thirty-two sailors were allowed to go ashore. They refused 
orders to reboard the ship several days later, staging a defiant dockside 
strike on the morning of November 9. In spite of the seriousness of the 
rebellion, not one of the sailors involved was arrested.

Sabotage was an extremely useful tactic. On May 26, 1970, the USS Anderson 
was preparing to steam from San Diego to Vietnam. But someone had dropped 
nuts, bolts and chains down the main gear shaft. A major breakdown 
occurred, resulting in thousands of dollars worth of damage and a delay of 
several weeks. Several sailors were charged, but because of a lack of 
evidence the case was dismissed. With the escalation of naval involvement 
in the war the level of sabotage grew. In July of 1972, within the space of 
three weeks, two of the Navy's aircraft carriers were put out of commission 
by sabotage. On July 10, a massive fire swept through the admiral's 
quarters and radar center of the USS Forestall, causing over $7 million in 
damage. This delayed the ship's deployment for over two months. In late 
July, the USS Ranger was docked at Alameda, California. Just days before 
the ship's scheduled departure for Vietnam, a paint-scraper and two 12-inch 
bolts were inserted into the number-four-engine reduction gears causing 
nearly $1 million in damage and forcing a three-and-a-half month delay in 
operations for extensive repairs. The sailor charged in the case was 
acquitted. In other cases, sailors tossed equipment over the sides of ships 
while at sea.

The House Armed Services Committee summed up the crisis of rebellion in the 
Navy: "The U.S. Navy is now confronted with pressures...which, if not 
controlled, will surely destroy its enviable tradition of discipline. 
Recent instances of sabotage, riot, willful disobedience of orders, and 
contempt for authority...are clear-cut symptoms of a dangerous 
deterioration of discipline."

The rebellion in the ranks didn't emerge simply in response to battlefield 
conditions. A civilian anti-war movement in the U.S. had emerged on the 
coat-tails of the civil rights movement, at a time when the 
pacifism-at-any-price tactics of civil rights leaders had reached their 
effective limit, and were being questioned by a younger, combative 
generation. Working class blacks and Latinos served in combat units out of 
all proportion to their numbers in American society, and major urban riots 
in Watts, Detroit and Newark had an explosive effect on the consciousness 
of these men. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. major riots 
erupted in 181 U.S. cities; at that point the rulers of the United States 
were facing the gravest national crisis since the Civil War. And the 
radical movement of the late 1960's wasn't limited to the United States. 
Large-scale rebellion was breaking out all over the world, in Latin 
American and Europe and Africa, and even against the Maoists in China; its 
high point was the wildcat general strike that shut down France in May, 
1968, the last time a major industrialized democracy came close to social 
revolution.

The crisis that racked American society during the Vietnam war was a grave 
development in the life of what had been a very stable and conservative 
society, but it wasn't profound enough to create an irreparable rupture 
between the rulers and the ruled. In the early 1970's, the U.S. was still 
coasting on the relative prosperity of the post-World War Two economic 
boom. Social conditions faced by working people in the U.S. weren't 
anywhere near as overwhelming and unbearable as they are now. U.S. 
involvement in a protracted ground war in Iraq today or Columbia tomorrow 
could have a much more rapid explosive impact on American society.

A number of years ago, in a deceitful article in Mother Jones magazine, 
corporate liberal historian Todd Gitlin claimed that the peaceful and legal 
aspects of the 1960's U.S. anti-war movement had been the most successful 
opposition to a war in history. Gitlin was dead wrong; as a bourgeois 
historian, Gitlin is paid to render service unto capital by getting it 
wrong, and get it wrong he does, again and again. The most effective 
"anti-war" movement in history was at the end of World War One, when 
proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and throughout Central 
Europe in 1917 and 1918. A crucial factor in the revolutionary movement of 
that time was the collapse of the armies and navies of Russian and Germany 
in full-scale armed mutiny. After several years of war and millions of 
casualties the soldiers and sailors of opposing nations began to fraternize 
with each other, turned their guns against their commanding officers and 
went home to fight against the ruling classes that had sent them off to 
war. The war ended with a global cycle of mutinies mirroring the social 
unrest spreading across the capitalist world; some of the most powerful 
regimes on Earth were quickly toppled and destroyed.

Soldiers and sailors played a leading role in the revolutionary movement. 
The naval bases Kronstadt in Russia and Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in Germany 
became important centers of revolutionary self-organization and action, and 
the passing of vast numbers of armed soldiers and sailors to the side of 
the Soviets allowed the working class to briefly take power in Russia. The 
French invasion of Revolutionary Russia in 1919 and 1920 was crippled by 
the mutiny of the French fleet in the Black Sea, centered around the 
battleships France and the Jean Bart. Mutinies broke out among sailors in 
the British Navy and in the armies of the British empire in Asia, and even 
among American troops sent to aid the counter-revolutionary White Army in 
the Russian Civil War.

Revolutionary unrest doesn't happen every day, but when it does break out, 
it can overcome the most powerful states with a surprising and improbable 
speed, and the collapse of the repressive forces of the state is a key 
moment in the beginning of a new way of life. It's an ugly fact that war 
and revolution were intimately linked in the most far-going social 
movements of the 20th century. With the U.S. governments' self-appointed 
role as the cop for global capitalist law and order, it's likely that the 
crisis that will cause an irreparable break between the rulers and the 
ruled in the United States will be the result of an unsuccessful war. That 
day may soon be upon us. At that point, widespread fraternization between 
anti-capitalist radicals and enlisted people will be crucial in expanding 
an anti-war movement into a larger opposition to the system of wage labor 
and commodity production that generates wars, exploitation, poverty, 
inequality and ecological devastation. An examination of what happened to 
the U.S. military during the Vietnam War can help us see the central role 
"the military question" is going to play in a revolutionary mass movement 
in the 21st century. It isn't a question of how a chaotic and rebellious 
civilian populace can out-gun the well-organized, disciplined armies of the 
capitalist state in pitched battle, but of how a mass movement can cripple 
the effective fighting capacity of the military from within, and bring 
about the collapse and dispersal of the state's armed forces. What set of 
circumstances can compel the inchoate discontentment endemic in any wartime 
army or navy to advance to the level of conscious, organized resistance? 
How fast and how deeply can a subversive consciousness spread among 
enlisted people? How can rebels in uniform take effective, large-scale 
action against the military machine? This effort will involve the sabotage 
and destruction of sophisticated military technologies, an irreversible 
breakdown in the chain-of-command, and a terminal demoralization of the 
officer corps. The "quasi-mutiny" that helped defeat the U.S. in Vietnam 
offers a significant precedent for the kind of subversive action working 
people will have to foment against 21st century global capitalism and its 
high-tech military machine.

As rampaging market forces trash living conditions for the majority of the 
world's people, working class troops will do the fighting in 
counter-insurgency actions against other working class people. War games 
several years ago by the Marines in a defunct housing project in Oakland, 
dubbed 'Operation Urban Warrior,' highlight the fact that America's rulers 
want their military to be prepared to suppress the domestic fallout from 
their actions, and be ready to do it soon. But as previous waves of global 
unrest have shown, the forces that give rise to mass rebellion in one area 
of the globe will simultaneously give rise to rebellion in other parts of 
the world. The armed forces are vulnerable to social forces at work in the 
larger society that spawns them. Revolt in civilian society bleeds through 
the fabric of the military into the ranks of enlisted people. The 
relationship between officers and enlisted people mirrors the relationship 
between bosses and employees, and similar dynamics of class conflict emerge 
in the military and civilian versions of the workplace. The military is 
never a hermetically sealed organization.

Our rulers know all this. Our rulers know that they are vulnerable to mass 
resistance, and they know that their wealth and power can be collapsed from 
within by the working class women and men whom they depend on. We need to 
know it, too.

Much of the information for this article has been taken from the book 
Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today, by David Cortright, 
published by Anchor/Doubleday in 1975.

Readers should please send copies of this article to any enlisted people 
they know.

NOTE: 1. A few far-sighted individuals among the U.S. political elite 
apparently fear that protracted U.S. involvement in a ground war could 
trigger large-scale domestic unrest.

According to Newsweek magazine, at a meeting in the White House during 
President Clinton's intervention in the Balkans, a heated exchange took 
place between Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations, 
and then-National Security Adviser Colin Powell.

Newsweek gives the following confusing and semi-coherent account:

"...Powell steadfastly resisted American involvement. He initially opposed 
even air drops of food, fearing that these would fail and that U.S. Army 
ground troops would inevitably be sucked in. His civilian bosses, who 
suspected him of padding the numbers when asked how many U.S. troops would 
be required, grew impatient.

At one meeting, Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations, 
famously confronted Powell. "What's the point of having this superb 
military that you're always talkingabout if we can't use it?" she demanded. 
In his memoirs, Powell recalled that he told Albright that GI's were "not 
toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board."

An official who witnessed the exchange told NEWSWEEK that Powell also said 
something quite revealing that has not been reported.

"You would see this wonderful society destroyed," the general angrily told 
Albright.

It was clear, said this official, that Powell was referring to his beloved 
Army."

("Colin Powell: Behind the Myth," by Evan Thomas and John Berry, Newsweek, 
March 5th, 2001)

Colin Powell was a junior officer in the fragging-plagued Americal Division 
during the Vietnam War. On numerous occasions, Powell has said that the US 
defeat in Vietnam was the main influence on the way he sees the world. Pow 
ell clearly understands that the armed forces are a function of the larger 
civilian society that spawns them.

Was Colin Powell speaking about the US Army -- or about US society itself 
with his comment about seeing "this wonderful society destroyed?" You be 
the judge!

INTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE:

An American soldier in a hospital explained how he was wounded: He said, "I 
was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly 
Vietnamese was to shout 'To hell with Ho Chi Minh!' If he shoots, he's 
unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled 'To hell with Ho Chi Minh!' and 
he yelled back, 'To hell with President Johnson!' We were shaking hands 
when a truck hit us." (from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).



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