<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div class="entry-date">
Weekend Edition October 10-12, 201<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/g-i-resistance-to-the-vietnam-war/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/g-i-resistance-to-the-vietnam-war/</a><br>
<br>
<div style="float:right;">
<div style="float:right;">
<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style">
<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/g-i-resistance-to-the-vietnam-war/#"
title="Facebook" class="addthis_button_facebook at300b"><span
class="at16nc at300bs at15nc at15t_facebook
at16t_facebook"><span class="at_a11y"><br>
</span></span></a><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/g-i-resistance-to-the-vietnam-war/#"
title="View more services" target="_blank"
class="addthis_button_expanded"></a>
</div>
<div id="_atssh" style="visibility: hidden; height: 1px;
width: 1px; position: absolute; z-index: 100000;"><iframe
src="http://ct1.addthis.com/static/r07/sh175.html#"
style="height: 1px; width: 1px; position: absolute;
z-index: 100000; border: 0px none; left: 0px; top: 0px;"
title="AddThis utility frame" id="_atssh559"></iframe></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big>The Collapse of the Armed
Forces</big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">G.I. Resistance to the Vietnam War</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by KEVIN KEATING</div>
<div class="main-text">
<blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><em>– From 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91
Persian Gulf War says that before President George 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 is a standard practice
when a President meet the troops, but along with obvious safety
concerns it was clear to those on the scene that Bush and his
corporate handlers were at least somewhat afraid of the enlisted
people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful
re-election campaign.</p>
<p>The suppressed history of the last big U.S. war prior to
‘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, and the
importance of resistance to the war by enlisted men and women.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>By 1970, the U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the
equivalent of four infantry divisions.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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 non-commissioned officers…Sedition, coupled with
disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented
with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable,
infest the Armed Services…”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Heinl cited a <em>New York Times</em> 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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop
movies or in bivouacs of certain units.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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…”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One hundred thirty-two sailors were allowed to go ashore. They
refused orders to re-board 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. In one of these instances, on July 10,
1972, while moored at Norfolk, Virginia, the aircraft carrier
U.S.S. Forrestal was disabled by a catastrophic fire in an O-3
level computer room, immediately beneath the flight deck. This
fire was apparently set by a member of the crew. In an attempt
to put out the fire from above a hole was cut into the flight
deck and hundreds of gallons of water were pumped into the
computer room. This ruined crucial computer equipment and the
aircraft carrier took on an exaggerated list, prompting concern
that the aircraft carrier might capsize. After this a nickname
for the Forrestal among sarcastic sailors was the ‘Forest Fire.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The House Armed Services Committee summed up the crisis of
rebellion in the Navy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 earlier 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 most recent point at which a major
industrialized democracy came close to revolution.</p>
<p>Some years ago, in a deceitful article in <em>Mother Jones</em>
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 to war. The war ended with a global series of
mutinies mirroring the social unrest spreading across the
capitalist world; some of the most powerful regimes on Earth
were quickly toppled and destroyed.</p>
<p>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 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.</p>
<p>The collapse of the armed forces is a make or break event for
any mass revolutionary movement. In July 1936, Francisco
Franco’s invasion of Spain from North Africa was hampered by a
mutiny that nearly destroyed the Spanish Navy. A study by the
Spanish Republican government during the subsequent civil war
concluded that roughly 70% of the officers of the Spanish Navy
were killed in this revolt. During the May 1968 revolt in
France, President Charles de Gaulle fled the country to consult
with commanders in Germany, in part over his concern that he did
not know if he could count on the loyalty of French troops in
the event of the mass strike wave continuing and turning into a
civil war.</p>
<p>As recent events in Egypt show, any mass social movement that
thinks “the army is on the side of the people” is doomed. An
examination of what happened inside the U.S. military during the
Vietnam War can help us see the central role “the military
question” is going to play in new mass social movements in the
21st century. It isn’t a question of how a chaotic and
rebellious civilian populace can out-gun the well-organized,
disciplined armed forces 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 and ongoing 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 future 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.</p>
<p>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 a decade ago by the Marines in a defunct
housing project in Oakland, California, 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 both military and civilian versions
of the workplace. The military is never hermetically sealed off
from the forces at work in the larger society that spawns it.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Kevin Keating</strong> can be reached at: <a
href="mailto:kevinkeating2010@gmail.com">kevinkeating2010@gmail.com</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>Readers should please send copies of this article to any
enlisted people they know.</em></p>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>