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<h1><font size=3 color="#0F0000"><b>Worth considering not just supporting
GIs when they decide to refuse 'suicide missions' but a more long term
strategy for organizing. This article is strong on the impact of such
work during the 70s during the war in Vietnam.<br>
c<br><br>
<br>
</font>Let’s rename ‘Fleet Week’ Mutiny Week!<br><br>
<br>
</b></h1><h3><b>Harass the
Brass</b></h3><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2 color="#0F0000"><i>by
Max Anger<br><br>
</i>‘Fleet Week’ is an annual event in San Francisco, held over a four or
five day period every September. Ships of the US Navy sail into port, and
a team of the Navy’s ‘Blue Angels’ stunt fighter aircraft pretends to
strafe the city. No wonder they call San Francisco
‘Baghdad-by-the-Bay!’<br><br>
Thousands of young enlisted people from the visiting ships flood SF’s
tourist traps in North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf. What follows is the
latest and longest version of a leaflet distributed to them on three or
four occasions since 1985:<br><br>
A friend who was in the US military during the Persian Gulf War told me
that when George Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia before the war,
many enlisted men and women in Bush’s immediate vicinity had their rifle
and pistol ammunition taken away. The bolts were also removed from their
rifles. If this was so, it makes it clear that Bush and his corporate
handlers may have been afraid of the US enlisted people who Bush would
soon be killing in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.<br><br>
The suppressed history of the Vietnam war shows that the
Commander-in-Chief had good reason to fear and distrust the troops. Our
rulers want us to forget what happened during the Vietnam war, and they
want us to forget what defeated their war effort -- and the importance of
the resistance to the war by enlisted men and women.<br><br>
Until 1968 the desertion rate for US 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 GIs were on
the increase world-wide. For soldiers in the combat zone, refusing to
obey orders 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
By 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the equivalent of four
infantry divisions.<br><br>
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 author of Soldiers Of The Sea, a
definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote:<br><br>
"Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching
collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat,
murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers..."<br><br>
Heinl cited a <i>New York Times</i> 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."<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the
GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, <i>GI Says</i>, publicly offered a
$10,000 bounty on Lieutenant Colonel Weldon Hunnicutt, the officer who
ordered and led the attack.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
In the Americal Division, plagued by poor morale, fraggings during 1971
were estimated to be running around one a week. War equipment was
sabotaged and destroyed. By 1972 roughly 300 anti-war and anti-military
newspapers, with names like <i>Harass the Brass</i>, <i>All Hands Abandon
Ship</i> and <i>Star Spangled Bummer</i> had been put out by enlisted
people.<br><br>
"In Vietnam," wrote the <i>Ft. Lewis-McCord Free Press</i>,
"The Lifers, the Brass, are the true enemy...."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
With the shifting over to an "air war" strategy, the Navy
became an important source 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The House Armed Services Committee summed up the crisis of rebellion in
the Navy: <br><br>
"The US 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."<br><br>
Resistance to the war effort by men in uniform was a product of
circumstances favorable to revolt. A civilian anti-war movement in the US
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
generation of activists. 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 many of these men. After the assassination
of Martin Luther King major riots erupted in 181 US cities; 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 was an international
phenomenon not limited to the US. There was revolt everywhere, 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 revolution.<br><br>
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. 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.<br><br>
Ten years ago, in an article in <i>Mother Jones</i> magazine, corporate
liberal historian and New Leftover Todd Gitlin claimed that the US
anti-war movement of the Vietnam period was the most successful
opposition to a war in history. Gitlin was dead wrong; as a bourgeois
historian Gitlin is paid to get it wrong. The most effective
"anti-war" movement in history occurred at the end of World War
One, when proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and
throughout Central Europe in 1917 and 1918, and 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 officers and went home to fight against the ruling classes
that had sent them into the war. The war ended with a global cycle of
mutinies mirroring the social unrest spreading across the capitalist
world. 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.<br><br>
Organized revolutionary mutiny doesn’t happen in every war, but it occurs
more frequently than military historians generally acknowledge. One of
the most significant naval mutinies in history occurred in the Spanish
Navy in July 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. In response
to massive working class unrest, the Spanish military launched a coup
d’etat led by Francisco Franco. Franco’s army was to invade Spain from
North Africa with the aid of ships of the Spanish Navy. But a majority of
Spanish sailors were class-conscious socialists and anarchists, and these
men planned a coordinated revolt in response. After several days of
ship-board combat the sailors won. This almost broke the back of Franco’s
coup attempt. A later study by the Spanish Republican government
estimated that 70% of the Naval officer corps was killed in the
mutiny.<br><br>
The crisis that racked American society during the Vietnam war was a
grave crisis for what has been a historically very stable society, but it
wasn’t profound enough to create an irreparable rupture between the
rulers and the ruled, or give rise to a full-fledged revolutionary
crisis. The US was still coasting on the relative prosperity of the
post-World War Two economic boom. Life wasn't as bad for as many people
as it is now, and that’s why US involvement in a similar protracted
ground war, in Columbia or Mexico for example, could have a much more
explosive impact on American society in the near future. History shows
that a conscript or draftee army is more prey to sedition than an
all-volunteer force. This might be one reason that all-volunteer armed
forces are becoming the norm for the world’s major industrialized
democracies.<br><br>
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 US
governments’ self-appointed role as the global policeman for capitalist
law and order, it’s likely that the crisis that will be necessary to
cause an irreparable break between the rulers and the ruled in the United
States will come from a war. It will be a war the US can't quickly win or
walk away from, a war they can't fight with a proxy army like the
Nicaraguan Contras, a war with a devastating impact on the civilian
populace of the US: a minimum of 5,000 Americans coming home in plastic
bags. Protracted civil unrest or full-scale revolution in Mexico is one
situation that could give rise to this. At that point widespread
fraternization between anti-capitalist radicals and enlisted people will
be crucial in bringing an end to this nightmarish social order.<br><br>
An examination of what happened to the US military during the Vietnam War
can help us understand the central role the "the military
question" will play in a future revolutionary struggle. 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 this mass movement can cripple the effective fighting
capacity of the military, 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 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. Circumstances must
make it clear to officers that they are fighting a losing war, and that
their physical safety can best be guaranteed if they give up, surrender
their weapons and run away. The "quasi-mutiny" that helped
defeat the US in Vietnam offers a significant precedent for the kind of
subversive action revolutionaries will have to help foment in the fight
against 21st century capitalism.<br><br>
As Capital’s global dictatorship causes living conditions to deteriorate
for the majority of humanity, working class troops will be given an
expanding role in suppressing the rebellions of other working class
people. The use of US armed forces during the Los Angeles riots in the
spring of 1992 was a taste of the military’s likely future domestic role
in maintaining this exploitative social order. But the forces that lead
to mass rebellion in one area of the globe will also give rise to
rebellions in other parts of the globe; our rulers’ power and their
economy can be collapsed from within by the working class women and men
whom they depend on.<br><br>
Information for this article has been taken from the book <i>Soldiers in
Revolt</i>, by David Cortright, published by the Institute for Policy
Studies, the pamphlet <i>Mutinies</i> by David Lamb, which may be
available from AK Press Distribution in San Francisco, and various issues
of the Detroit, Michigan anarchist newspaper <i>The Fifth Estate</i>.
Information on the Spanish Civil War is taken from<i> The Spanish
Revolution: The left and the struggle for power</i>, by Burnett
Bolletin.<br><br>
And the US Army’s Psychological Operations manual is quite useful -- find
copies of this last one if you can! <br><br>
Readers should please send copies of this article to any enlisted people
they know.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>INTERNATIONALISM IN
PRACTICE</b></h3><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2 color="#0F0000">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." <br><br>
(from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).<br><br>
</font><h3><b>Notes
</b></h3><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2 color="#0F0000">1. A few
far-sighted individuals among the U.S. political elite apparently fear
that U.S. involvement in a ground war could trigger large-scale domestic
unrest.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Newsweek gives the following confusing and semi-coherent
account:<br><br>
"...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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
An official who witnessed the exchange told NEWSWEEK that Powell also
said something quite revealing that has not been reported.<br><br>
"You would see this wonderful society destroyed," the general
angrily told Albright.<br><br>
It was clear, said this official, that Powell was referring to his
beloved Army."<br><br>
("Colin Powell: Behind the Myth," by Evan Thomas and John
Berry, Newsweek, March 5th, 2001)<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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!<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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