Lives of the New Left I

Summer ’13 saw a memorable reunion of the New Left (NL) activists of Indiana University (IU) from the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Those were the days when they took on the war in Vietnam and other pressing issues of social justice.

They arrived back on the campus for the reunion from all parts of the country. Quite a number had not broken bread or lifted a glass together in at least a quarter of a century, while many had neither met nor even spoken for over 50 years. Most were now people of age, in their late 60s or early 70s.

The organizers of the gathering came up with a good way to break the ice and get everyone re-acquainted – a ‘Town Hall’ meeting held in a small auditorium the first morning. Reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters’ long narrative poem, Spoon River Anthology (1915), the result of the IU session was a fascinating compilation of mini-biographies of the activists’ lives at the university and beyond.

The crucial difference was that while Masters’ characters were all “sleeping on the hill,” that is, in the graveyard of the fictional town of Spoon River, the New Left people were alive and well in Bloomington, their old college town. For openers, each one was asked to rise and give a name and a brief ID. Then a couple of dozen of the 60 or so people there were randomly invited one by one to go to the front of the room and bear witness to their long lives on the left – the  affiliation of their youth to which they had maintained fidelity over the years.

Taken together their ‘testimonies’ comprise a remarkably diverse chronicle of life on the left in America since the ‘60s. This post is the first of a series of the self-portraits sketched that morning that we’ll be posting on the blog in the coming months. The first three profiles are of a woman co-founder of the IU New Left; then a man who followed in her footsteps as a campus leader; and finally, a slightly younger speaker whose father, an IU professor, had been a local activist at an earlier critical time in Bloomington.

In their subsequent adult lives, the three became respectively a professional song-writer/musician, a locomotive engineer, and a criminal defense investigator, but all had kept faith with their past. With brief headnotes as background only where needed, the first three stories as recorded and transcribed follow.

Leading off that morning was Nell Levin, the former Bernella Satterfield, a ‘red diaper baby’* originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She was somewhat modest about her interesting background. Nell and David Satterfield first met in North Beach in California, then again in Greenwich Village where they hung out with Bob Dylan before his rise to fame. At IU, Nell and David not only played Country and Bluegrass together – Nell on the fiddle, David on the guitar – but during spring ’65 when the US escalated the war in Vietnam, they also became co-founders of the campus SDS chapter or the Students for a Democratic Society.

Nell described the ’64 group that became the vanguard of SDS as “’outsider’ types – we were beatniks, grad students, often older than the typical undergrad, and some of us were from other parts of the country or the world … we were the weirdoes, the bohemian fringe, the vanguard.”** Brother Jeff Sharlet, back from the war in Vietnam, joined SDS not long after. He was the only ex-Vietnam GI in the group.

The Satterfields lived with their child Cordelia not far from campus, and their living room became the venue for political discussions and early SDS meetings. In her own voice, Nell picks up the story from there:

I got involved with SDS in the early days, probably about 1964 and I was active til the Weathermen*** takeover, and I said, “I didn’t sign up for this.” I started writing songs in Los Angeles (LA) and someone said you have to go to Nashville. I had already been to Nashville in ’78 playing with a band there, the ‘Buffalo Gals’, and I knew a lot of people there. I had left Bloomington in 1982-83 and went to LA for six years, that’s when I started writing songs. That’s when I ended up going back to Nashville.

When I got to Tennessee, I said, ‘Wow’ there’s a lot of problems in Tennessee. You know – it’s the South, education was very low. The main thing was, I went to the grocery store and they had a sales tax on food – I came from California where there’s no such thing – the most regressive possible tax. I ended up working for a group called ‘Tennessians for Fair Taxation’ for four years. I ran that organization, and then I was talking to different people and they were saying “We need a statewide progressive coalition.”

So in 2001 me and a group of people founded an organization called ‘Tennessee Alliance for Progress’ – TAP. I’ve been running that organization for the last 12 years and it’s been an interesting road trying to get the progressive  agenda passed in that red state. Unfortunately, it’s gone from bad to worse now that Republicans control all three branches of government, including the Tennessee legislature.

Nell Levin, 2011

For the first time since Reconstruction, they control everything in Tennessee. In the 2003 election they got a lot of Tea Party people elected so we can’t get anything passed presently. (Question from the floor: Do you still have the food tax?) We still do, yes. We had a huge demonstration in 2002-03 when we came within three votes of getting an income tax passed. We had riots in the streets, it was incredible what we went through over that in Nashville, the state capital. By three votes we failed.

We still have tax on food although it’s been lowered a little bit. We still have no income tax, but we have the food tax. We always get voted one of the most regressive tax states in the US.

We got discouraged by the 2010 election so we said, “Ok, we’re going local.” So now we’re working in East Nashville, my neighborhood and a majority Black neighborhood. We started doing work on environmentalism, tying that to jobs. That’s been our focus for the last three years inspired by the work of Van Jones [an attorney and nationally known environmentalist]. He’s endorsed our work on his web site. We’re very proud to be endorsed by Van Jones.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 12 years running TAP. It’s been a roller coaster, hard to get money in the South for progressive causes. We don’t have a lot of the foundations you have in other parts of the country. Anyway that’s basically what I’m doing.

Along with her activism, Nell continues her long music career. Backup on a Grammy-nominated CD in 2000, she and her husband Michael recently formed the ‘Shelby Bottom String Band’. Their first CD is East Nashville Rag.

Ike Nahem, now an Amtrak locomotive engineer operating out of New York, arrived at Indiana University in the late ‘60s; he was in the second wave, so to speak, of New Left activists. His reunion ‘testimony’ below at the Town Hall was fairly complete and requires little further introduction. Ike covered his activism from the IU years through his current continuing involvement on the left:

I was in Bloomington 1969-73, the best years of my life until I met my wife of course. So great to see people here who were my friends and comrades from those years.  We were so active – I mean it was the height of the Vietnam War – it was an amazing time.

Ike Nahem and his wife

When you think about it, a school that was 2% Black … elected a member of the Black Panther Party as student body president in an election where thousands and thousands of students voted. Where we gathered in Dunn Meadow this morning, we filled that place after the Kent State and Jackson State killings [spring 1970]. Protestors were way out into the streets.

It was an incredible time, and we had a really serious mass movement on this campus, one of the best in the country, and it was also one of the best organized and led. In Bloomington, we had very little of what we called ‘ultra-leftism’ and violence and stuff like that.

We were appealing to people and mobilizing them. I remember a lot of us hard core activists in those primitive ‘old tech’ days would be on a mimeo machine stenciling out things on a leaflet, and spending hours putting something together that we could do in 10 seconds today. We were churning out leaflets and getting ink all over ourselves and going out to demonstrations.

Fifty people would come, 100 people would come, and then one day Nixon invaded Cambodia [April 30,‘70], and the same fraternities, some of them who would scream and yell at us, poured out that day. We ended up having like 10,000 people marching down into Dunn Meadow, so those were the times and they were great times.

Anti-Vietnam War rally, Dunn Meadow, Indiana University, 1969

They marked me for the rest of my life, and today I’m still involved in the struggle. I’m an Amtrak locomotive engineer, I drive high-speed trains from New  York to Washington, and I’m involved in the union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters. I don’t have the energy I had back then, but I’m still very active politically.

The main issue I’m involved with is solidarity with Cuba. We’re trying to stop the US economic and political war against Cuba, and free the ‘Cuban 5’ [in prison in the US]. I’ve also been involved in the Anti-Apartheid struggle. I helped publish some books of Nelson Mandela who I had the honor of meeting as well as Fidel Castro.

It’s great to see everybody after all these years. Those Bloomington years were amazing and it’s great to see so many people who are fighting the good fight!

Ike Nahem is currently the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York and a founder of the July 26 Coalition in support of the Cuban Revolution.

The last of the three activists presented here, Nora Liell was younger than most of the veterans of the New Left’s Town Hall, having been a student at Bloomington High School when most of them were at the university. But even in high school, Nora and her classmates were involved in the Vietnam antiwar movement, in particular opposing the draft.

Like Nell Levin, Nora was a ‘red diaper baby’, but she was also a so-called ‘faculty brat’ as well – her father was John Liell, a distinguished sociologist at IU who had instilled in his children a sense of social conscience.

A specialist on race and poverty, Professor Liell, a well-published scholar, chose not to confine himself just to academic pursuits. He founded the Indiana Civil Liberties Union and served as first president of the Bloomington chapter of the ACLU. In the late ‘60s, President Johnson appointed him to an executive position in the ‘War on Poverty’.

Nora assumed that many of the IU alums at the Town Hall probably knew her father from student days since both he and his wife were prominent local activists. Proud of her father, she drew special attention to one particular action she knew everyone in the room could relate to.

Bloomington, nestled in southern Indiana, had been a town of ‘soft’ segregation well into the ‘50s. Nora’s father had “helped organize the sit-in for African Americans to be able to drink at Nick’s,” the most popular student bar then and now – still there just off campus.

Nick’s, Bloomington, Indiana

Following in her parents’ footsteps, Nora became a community activist and a volunteer in local Bloomington politics. She later became a criminal defense investigator in the Office of the Indiana State Public Defender in Indianapolis, the state capital.

These have been but three of the many personal testimonies heard that morning at Indiana University during summer ’13. In their accounts of their student activism and subsequent lives, Nell, Ike, and Nora presented not only their personal journeys from New Left days, but a view of activism in for progressive causes in America in the course of the decades since those heady times. As Ike Nahem put it, the struggle goes on.

* The phrase ‘red diaper baby’ usually signifies a child born of at least one parent associated with the American Communist Party, although more loosely as one born of radical parents of the Old Left. It’s difficult to know whether a self-described person means the term narrowly or broadly.

** Quoted from  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/heartland-radicals.html

***At the final SDS convention held in June ’69, the organization split into two factions. The Weathermen faction subsequently went underground and engaged in violence.

In the Blink of an Eye -- College Boy to Cold War GI

Many years ago I had a younger brother – now long gone. Jeff Sharlet was his name – he died during the Vietnam War. Seven years between brothers was a big gap in the ‘40s and ‘50s. When I went off to college, Jeff was a 10-year old. As often between younger and older siblings, he tended to look up to me as big brother.

But communication being what it was in those days – expensive long distance phone calls, ‘Your three minutes are up’; or slow snail mail – it wasn’t easy for a college boy and a 7^th grader to keep in touch. Complicating the problem, I had a falling-out with my father and chose not to go home very often. Jeff would send me occasional letters during the ‘50s, describing his schoolwork and athletic progress. 

He usually wrote at greater length about his ‘social life’.  At one point he and another boy had a crush on a popular girl, but feeling he was falling behind in her affections, Jeff decided to outflank his competition: “She lives right near us so I plan to go over to her house to get to know her better.” I never did hear how that turned out.

Meanwhile back at college, I and everyone I knew was reading F Scott Fitzgerald, whose writings about the Jazz Age of the ‘20s were enjoying a posthumous revival, including his  re-issued This Side of Paradise (1920) set at Princeton and, of course, The Great Gatsby (1925). We were also avidly reading J D Salinger’s ‘Franny and Zooey’ stories in the New Yorker.

College life in the elite schools of the East back then was far removed from everyday concerns. Sure, there were wars, but early in the decade President Eisenhower had brought the Korean War to a stalemated end and had generally kept us out of France’s losing struggle to hold on to its Indochina colony.

  

The more nebulous ‘Cold War’ between us and ‘them’ – them being the Soviets – was hardly a compelling concern at New England’s old, all-male colleges. Aside from classes – most students were headed to law or medical school – the chief weekend preoccupation was trying to get up to Northampton in central Massachusetts or down to New London on the Connecticut coast – that’s where the girls were. Longer term planning in that halcyon environment involved the big parties, fraternity house parties when everyone scrambled to bring in dates from the ‘Seven Sisters’, the all-women’s colleges scattered across the Northeast.

Wesleyan University campus, Middletown CT, mid-‘50s

Somehow I got the notion I would become a novelist. I wasn’t the only one – not a few young men in those years harbored literary ambitions. However, I seemed more in a rush than my peers. Philip Roth had begun publishing his short stories and early novels, and he wasn’t that much older. To further my ambition, I took the sole ‘Creative Writing’ course on offer at the college. It was taught by a young literary critic, an Egyptian, educated in Cairo and America, with an undefinable accent – perhaps British colonial. Anyway, he was very good. We were expected to turn in a story a week, and sometimes he would read a good one aloud – once one of mine.

While busy trying to craft my weekly story, the idea came to me to write a full-scale novel – credit the unbridled romance of youthful dreams. I would tell the story of a beautiful Scandinavian girl I had known at another school, a girl older than I and certainly much worldlier. I felt we were close – she had long, wheat-colored hair that caught my eye – but in actuality she artfully eluded my reach.

In my imagination, the girl became akin to ‘Rima’ of W H Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904), a lyrical novel set in the Amazon. A South American man has to flee the capital and encounters the enchanting but mysterious Rima of the rainforest. Was she real or a fantasy, now I can’t remember, but initially when he’d reach out, she would tantalizingly slip away in the mist.

  

To work on ‘my novel’, I had to cut classes. Several friends also swept up in the web of wannabe writers cheered me on. The manuscript progressed, first a handful of pages, then dozens. More classes were sacrificed to my muse, but not the Creative Writing class. As I became increasingly intoxicated with my dream, I thought to myself that I really needed more uninterrupted time for the ‘book’.

So I decided to drop out of school. Tried the plan on my parents by phone; they didn’t think much of the idea. Spoke to the dean who politely questioned the wisdom of such a move. But headstrong and caught up in the romance of the thing, I pushed on with my plan to withdraw. When I announced my intention to my writing instructor, I expected him to understand, to say something like of course you must follow your dream.

On the contrary, he was quite taken aback and suggested we have coffee at the college bookstore down the street. He said I had some talent, but should remain at the college and nurture it. I was tactfully adamant. Finally, in mild exasperation, the professor sputtered very uncharacteristically – he had a precise way of speaking – “Stay in school, finish this, this ‘chickenshit’,” by which he meant the ‘credential’, the BA degree, “then try your hand at writing.”

Looking back as an academic myself, I’m guessing he probably felt some responsibility that a student in his writing class had gotten so carried away that he was taking the radical step of leaving the college – in mid-term no less. Dropping out of school in the mid-‘50s was not very commonplace – it was generally assumed everyone would move forward in step with their entering class, from Freshman Orientation to Commencement four years later. Nonetheless, I packed up, received a small going-away party from my friends, and hit the road.

         

It was early November, and when I got home – where else would a penniless novelist go – my father was surprisingly understanding. He said I could use the finished basement as my workspace. Now free of all responsibilities and assured of three squares a day, I’d go down there every morning to write, but somehow things didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped.

 It was quiet – brother Jeff was off at country day school from early morning to late afternoon after sports practice. I had a table, a comfortable chair and a goose-neck, yet the typewriter was mostly silent. Oh, I managed to knock out another 15-20 pages, but they lacked verve and spontaneity without the zing of cutting classes back at school.

Weeks passed – I paused for Thanksgiving of course – and it was soon more than a month of undisturbed time with little to show for it. Did I have ‘writer’s block’? How could I when I wasn’t even a writer yet except in my romantic self-image. It was time to take stock. What did I have of the great American novel in waiting – maybe 70 largely descriptive pages absent any dialogue.

Neither I as a character nor my Rima had uttered a direct word on the page. Instead, as author, I spoke for both of us in the third person. I thought to myself in the quiet of the house – who could imagine a Fitzgerald novel or a Salinger story without dialogue, and vivid, lively dialogue at that.

I had to face the music. Upstairs at dinner, I told my father – my mother was there too – that it wasn’t working, that I’d have to give up writing the novel. He took the news well I thought, no ‘I told you so’s’. Instead, he calmly outlined my three options at that point in my young years – after all he was a pragmatic businessman.

I could go to work for him in the business, or back to college, or fulfill my military obligation – America had a draft back then, and if you weren’t in school or otherwise deferred, the draft board inevitably expected a two-year stint in the Army. After all, we were in a Cold War with the mighty USSR.

It was my choice, my father said. I sure as hell wasn’t inclined to go into business — in fact I’d been running away from the prospect since graduating from prep school, the same one Jeff was then attending. Back to college – oh god, not after I’d just left propelled by my friends’ high hopes that I’d make it, write the novel. That left just the military.

Shopping around the recruiting offices between Christmas and the New Year, I came up with a couple of options for avoiding the draft and the strong possibility of the infantry. One was a Navy cadet program designed to turn out pilots, the other a special, little-known outfit nominally under the Army, but actually autonomous. It was the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA), the nation’s secretive communications intelligence agency which relied heavily on linguists for translation work and interpreting. The catch was that both required more than the draft’s two-year max – the Navy wanted a 5-year commitment, the intelligence group three. That was an easy decision.

I gave the Army Security Agency (ASA) three years of my life, and they in turn gave me a year’s training in a Cold War language at a military school on a scenic stretch of the California coast. Then two years’ of intellectually stimulating and very pleasant duty followed in an attractive German city. In effect, I had a great Cold War, frequently writing home extolling the toney German social circle I’d lucked into, weekends in the famous spa town Baden-Baden, skiing in the Alps, trips to Paris, and other adventures.

The author (see arrow) at the race track, Baden-Baden, summer ‘57

Jeff, restless in college and impressed with all this, decided to follow in my footsteps – dropping out and enlisting in ASA with the promise of a European language. But instead of the good life in Europe, Jeff got a bad break, ending up in the war in Vietnam, a Vietnamese linguist. But that’s a story for another time.

Journey into the Past – Return of the New Left

I was the outlier at the party. Back in the tumultuous ‘60s I was not ‘on the left’, nor was I an activist on the hot button issues of the day. Instead, I was just a plain vanilla liberal, a young academic, or, in the parlance of the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the ‘30s, what they called a ‘bourgeois professor’.

That’s not to say that I didn’t know a lot about Marxism – on the contrary, as a specialist on Russia and the USSR I in fact did.  I also knew a great deal about an icon of the left in the ‘60s – Trotsky, the Old Bolshevik – especially his role in the internal Soviet power struggles of the ‘20s. But I was neither a Marxist, nor did I take much interest in Trotsky after his political exile. Likewise the Trotskyist movement that emerged in the West and subsequently came to full flower after his brutal assassination at the hands of a Moscow agent was not really on my radar screen.

Until Khrushchev and his successors came along in the postwar ‘50s, the name of the game for professional students of the harsh Soviet system was Stalin, its ruthless autocrat. After Stalin’s death, what the American left was up to was of only peripheral interest to those studying and teaching Soviet politics. Change was afoot in the USSR – the other side in the Cold War dominating the planet – and as Soviet specialists we had our hands full tracking it.

Fast forward: It’s the summer of ’13, the Cold War has long been over, the mighty USSR is history, and I found myself on a journey into the past – literally back to Indiana University (IU) and the milieu of the New Left inhabited by my younger brother Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969). No stranger to the campus – I had taken a PhD there – I had left in ’62 before Jeff, an ex-Vietnam GI, had returned to IU to resume his academic education and along the way acquire a political education among the campus New Left.

Though Jeff and I sat in common classrooms and frequented popular hangouts like the Gables, Nick’s bar, and the Von Lee theater, town and gown ‘landmarks’ were quite different for each of us. For Jeff the New Left activist, IU’s Dunn Meadow and Showalter Fountain were familiar venues, as was Bloomington’s City Hall – all sites of many anti-Vietnam War protests; so was the official presidential residence where he’d led a demonstration in ’67; and Kirkwood Avenue, lined with small shops and eateries with which I was of course familiar, but where Jeff had been arrested leading a peaceful protest.

The IU New Left, a small group of students in the ‘60s and early ‘70s at a large conservative university, was holding a grand reunion back on campus. Some of them had gathered there a quarter of a century earlier, but that occasion had been more about the music and personal connections. This time, thanks to the Internet, it would be a larger and more diverse turnout with the express purpose of taking a full look back some 50 years at what had occurred, what was achieved, what fell short. Now entering what may be called the ‘age of nostalgia’ in their late 60s and early 70s, the veterans of that heady time in their lives were returning to IU.

They arrived in town from all corners of the country and Canada – from the East and West coasts; down from Alberta, Chicago, Indianapolis; up from Texas and all over the Midwest – and there were some who had stayed put, made their careers locally, or retired back to their old college town – Bloomington, the locale of Indiana University.

As Jeff’s older brother writing a memoir about his short but interesting life – despite being an outlier – I had been invited and warmly welcomed by his old friends, nearly 60 or more who made the journey. Many I knew by name – I had read the history of dissent at IU* – exchanged emails with quite a few, and had even spoken with some by phone. But there I was, walking amongst my brother’s fellow activists of long ago, listening avidly as they strolled down memory lane of their younger years at IU – a period that many said had been seminal in their lives.

They held a group conclave and retrospective panel discussions, but most reconnections among activist friends – the conversation writ large – were informal and took place in social settings and smaller groups. There was Robin Hunter, Marxist mentor to the campus New Left; Nell Levin, aka Bernella Satterfield back then, co-founder in ‘65 of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at IU; and Dan Kaplan, Jeff’s successor as SDS president in ‘67.

Robin Hunter at the Indiana New Left Reunion, Summer 2013

From further back there were Ralph Levitt, Tom Morgan, and the former Paulann Groninger (now Sheets) – brave souls who, along with a small band of brothers and sisters, marched across campus and through town at risk of life and limb in support of revolutionary Cuba during the Missile Crisis of ’62. Tom and Paulann had both known Jeff.

(L to R) The author, Paulann Sheets, Dan Kaplan, Bloomington IN, 2013**

Standing before me was Guy Loftman, with whom Jeff had worked closely in Guy’s successful election campaign as the first New Left President of the IU Student Government. Arriving a little later came Dwight Worker, veteran of the Dow Chemical sit-in of ’67, subsequently a legend in book and film, now a gentleman farmer who fondly remembered Jeff’s influence on him as a young activist.

Dwight Worker at his farm outside Bloomington, 2013

Whiling away a mid-summer evening listening to the great sounds of IU’s greying hippie folk/country musicians led by Roger Salloom, award-winning poet-singer-songwriter, I caught up with Cathy Rountree, a key reunion organizer and long-time nurse practitioner back from the Arizona desert where she had driven miles and miles along dusty, unpaved roads helping Navajo in need. Jim Retherford, who’d known Jeff well, joined me at the ‘jam’ – he had been the inaugural editor of The Spectator, the New Left’s alternative paper founded at IU in ’66.

Roger Salloom (center back), Richard Blaustein in the hat, Nell Levin, Michael August, Steve Coll, Bloomington, August 2013**

Most of the New Left alums had been SDS, but quite a number were former YSA or the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There’d been differences in strategy and ideology (or lack thereof in SDS’s case), and even in lifestyles between the two main campus New Left groups, but with their common  battlefield where they’d protested as one against the war in Vietnam long silent, old differences had faded, edges softened.

However, the one thing that struck me most about the group’s fascinating collective journey back to the past, was that nearly all of them at the reunion had retained a strong commitment to social justice in one form or another in the many years since the ‘60s. Whatever their individual takes on the historical scorecard of their earlier dreams of change, for most, their post-university life choices and trajectories continued to reflect core beliefs held in the days of youthful idealism.

Whether ‘red diaper’ babies, IU ‘faculty brats’, or originally from Indiana small town backgrounds, most of those who gathered back at the IU campus in the summer of ’13 had devoted and, in many instances, were still devoting their lives to the so-called ‘good-guy’ causes of society – anti-Apartheid, abortion rights, gay liberation.

Some had gravitated to college and high school teaching, serving as advocates for adding Black Studies and Women’s Studies to curricula. A woman reported teaching a course on Trotskyism at the high school level, while an academic teaches his college courses on politics from a Marxian perspective. Quite a number of the New Left alums became labor activists, labor organizers, and union officials in education, services, and transportation.

♫I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

alive as you and me

Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead"

"I never died," said he

"I never died," said he.† 

Others gave years of their lives to professional activism on the left –
working on behalf of Cuba, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and in the press arm of SWP, translating and publishing Soviet dissident samizdat – writings critical of the regime’s repressive ways barred by state censors. Most of these individuals were also veterans of civil rights struggles and industrial labor battles.

More recently, several activists mentioned their commitments to on-going issues – pushing implementation of Obamacare for those without coverage, assisting needy homeowners to avoid foreclosure, demonstrating for the hunger strikers held at Guantanamo, and reviving a popular ‘60s underground publication as a contemporary blog – in effect, pouring new wine in old bottles.

While many of the dreams of systemic change of the ‘60s – not just ending a war, but changing the ‘system’ – fell short, melancholy and despair were not in evidence at the New Left’s reunion at Indiana University. On the contrary, all had kept faith in the possibility of taking action and changing things in myriad ways for the better. Onward said they – an unforgettable occasion.

This is the first of several posts on the New Left Reunion at Indiana University which will appear in coming weeks and months.

Link to music video

†   http://www.youtube.com/watchv=f_yC4ffyGiw&list=RD02f_yC4ffyGiw

*M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (2002).

**Thanks to Carol Richert Hart, a participant in the IU reunion, for the use of her photo(s).

"Saigon Was No Rear Area"

It was early evening in I Corps (eye core), northernmost of the four tactical zones where US military advisors could be found in South Vietnam (SVN) in 1964. It was the first weeks of spring and already dark enough that Jeff Sharlet, my brother, and a GI buddy with him in the jeep had to turn on the headlights. They were headed back from Hue on the coast of the South China Sea to their base near the small ville of Phu Bai.

The two GIs were on a narrow deserted road flanked with scrub growth when their lights picked up something in the roadbed directly ahead. Jeff hit the brakes; they got out with carbines at the ready and cautiously approached. At that point in the Vietnam War, there wasn’t much Viet Cong (VC) activity in that part of the country – most of the attacks were far to the south in IV Corps, the Mekong Delta, below the capital, Saigon – but occasional incidents were not unknown.

As they got closer, they saw that it was a Vietnamese peasant woman curled up on the road, probably from the nearby tiny hamlet of Huong Thuy just north of Phu Bai, but was it a trap – did she have a concealed weapon or was she dead, a grenade under her body rigged to explode if she was moved? Happily neither – the old woman was just sleeping soundly on the road still warm from the day’s sun, no doubt a more comfortable berth than the bramble to the left and right. False alarm.

That, of course, was the ‘bush’ in Vietnam where groups of American ‘advisors’ to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – as they were then called – were scattered up and down the countryside, relatively isolated in a sea of Vietnamese, friendlies and unfriendlies. One might reasonably assume that Saigon, the HQ of the US military effort to help SVN cope with a guerrilla war directed from Communist North Vietnam (NVN) – was a relatively safe area. Alas, not so.      

During the previous year, Jeff had been based in the Saigon area from late summer into the fall. The concentration of Americans there – enjoying the pleasures of the city called the ‘Paris of the Orient’ – instead proved a magnet for persistent and well-coordinated terrorist attacks by VC cadres who were indistinguishable from other Saigonians.

A Saigon street scene, 1961

Once in office in early ’61, President Kennedy (JFK) had begun a build-up of the small US military commitment in SVN inherited from outgoing Dwight Eisenhower. In effect, during the next 1000 days in the White House until his assassination in late ’63, JFK had significantly escalated the sleepy, low-key internal war between ‘our guys’ in the South and the Communists in the North of the divided country. At that stage of what became the long war in Vietnam, the NVN carried out their campaign to overthrow the government of SVN through their proxy, the shadowy National Liberation Front (NLF) and its tough fighting arm, the VC.

♫They said you're pretty safe when the troops deploy

But don't turn your back on your house boy

When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet-Cong†

In response to JFK’s moves during 1961-62, the underground VC units of the capital responded at first with numerous incidents of terror against the Vietnamese population of Saigon – the implied message being that the regime of President Diem couldn’t effectively fulfill the basic function of government, i.e., the protection of its citizens. However, as the numbers of US military personnel multiplied three-fold in the next two years, the VC began directing carefully planned attacks against venues in the city where Americans – both military personnel and the growing host of civilian contractors and dependents – gathered for diversions.

By the end of ’63, the toll of dead and wounded Americans in Saigon had registered in Washington, provoking discussions of possible retaliatory bombing attacks against the North. The NLF took note and in early ’64 directed its VC cadres to zero in on Americans in Saigon. The new policy of urban terrorism bore two implicit messages – the US should realize how vulnerable their people were in the capital if they decided to strike NVN, and high profile attacks against Americans should have a demonstration effect on their South Vietnamese ‘clients’, to wit the US cannot protect you.

In ’64-’65 the frequency and intensity of VC targeting of US billets and recreational facilities had increased five-fold from ’61. Years later, the atmosphere of bombs going off on the streets of Saigon was cinematically depicted in Robin Williams’ Good Morning Vietnam (1987). On the ground back in the ‘60s, Jeff and his GI pals, all Vietnamese linguists (lingys) attached to a communications intelligence outfit outside the city in ’63, were caught up in the rising tide of VC violence aimed at Americans as can be seen in the following account by a fellow GI of an eventful evening on the town with Jeff and three other lingys:

We were walking down Tu Do Street [the main drag],

headed for the Impérial, a little French open-air bar – a

corner bar – classic French, tile floor, zinc top bar,

uncomfortable stools, bistro menu, maybe a dozen tiny

tables open to the street on two sides, ancient Vietnamese

waiters in khakis, white shirts and flip-flops, no girls – the

 perfect venue for a Pernod or Pastis on a warm night.

Quelle ambiance! …

We were walking toward the bar five abreast, a short

block away, maybe 50-75 yards, when a grenade was

thrown from a motorbike into our intended destination.

It was, for all of us, a strange experience – our first sense

of the explosion was seeing waiters from the bar running

into the street followed, in slow motion, by a flash of light

and a huge horizontal column of a billowing dirty gray

cloud of smoke that appeared to be chasing the waiters –

only then came the sound of the explosion itself which

caused us to momentarily duck our heads before running

toward the explosion – a foolish impulse, but ….*

The bar was in shambles with overturned tables, broken glass, and waiters’ flip-flops scattered about. Happily their favorite waiters were unharmed, and there were no serious injuries. The following night the five guys made Bar Imperial their first stop of the evening and found all the waiters wearing brand new tennis shoes, the better to run with, they told the GIs.

Bar Impérial, Saigon, 1960s

The NLF’s new terror policy had gone into immediate effect in early ’64. On February 9^th, the VC hit the sports stadium where two US service teams were playing a softball game before bleachers filled with cheering American military and civilians: 2 dead, 42 wounded. Exactly a week later on Sunday, a VC team in a well-coordinated attack bombed a packed movie theater exclusively used by Americans watching a Hollywood film. The first VC shot and killed the lone US military policeman (MP) on guard out front, followed by his accomplice rushing into the theater to plant a 25-pound bomb with a 15-second fuse: 3 killed, 32 wounded.

Lest the reader think this was an improvised operation, US forces later captured the 13-page VC document on the meticulous planning and post-attack evaluation for the theater bombing. The document noted with satisfaction that local Vietnamese residents had come by the next day to see the wreckage and were heard to say, “Once they [the VC] have succeeded in attacking this objective, they will easily succeed elsewhere.”**

♫Searching for the Viet Cong in vain.

They left a note that they had gone.

They had to get down to Saigon††

Near the end of ’64, on Christmas Eve, the VC pulled off another high profile strike designed to reinforce their ‘message’, to wit, that Americans in Saigon were vulnerable, hence the Vietnamese population should not count on them for protection. By then Jeff had completed his tour and was back in the States, but a couple of lingy buddies happened to be nearby and witnessed the carnage after a few minutes earlier a 200-pound bomb blew out the back of the 6-story Brink Hotel – quarters for US officers –  and obliterated the small buildings behind it. Dashing to the site, the two GIs instinctively rushed into the dense black smoke and, at personal risk, rescued three stunned and dazed Vietnamese employees of US armed forces radio housed in the building.

Aftermath of the Brink bombing, Christmas Eve, 1964

Again, it was later learned how carefully the VC commanders had planned the attack on the Brink. Observing that South Vietnamese officers freely mingled with Americans at the hotel, the VC assault team acquired ARVN uniforms on the black market, studied the officers’ mannerisms, their speaking style, and even how they smoked – and were thus able to infiltrate the building with their deadly cargo.

Meanwhile standing on the street as Vietnamese police and fire fighters responded, the two lingys could see “the floors buckled upward, re-bar and all, from the blast and ground floor walls now skeletal.”*** It was evident that anyone above the explosion would certainly be dead and, indeed, two were, plus 107 wounded.

Afterward, one of the GIs got cleaned up, changed his blackened uniform, and continued out on the town to celebrate Christmas Eve as initially intended. Therein lies the story of how Americans grew accustomed to VC violence as part of the Saigon landscape in the midst of war, but more on this further on.

The new year of 1965 – the fateful date of President Johnson’s major escalation of the US commitment to the Vietnam War – was another deadly period for American citizens in and about the capital of SVN. Responding to the first sustained US bombing attacks on NVN, dubbed ‘Rolling Thunder’, the VC hit the US embassy killing and wounding Americans, but far more Vietnamese who worked at the compound; in all, the attack left 23 dead and 183 wounded.

Wrecked interior of US Embassy, Saigon, March 1965

 However by far the most spectacular attack of the VC Saigon campaign took place in June ’65 – by which time Rolling Thunder had been backed up by the first waves of US combat troops who had already begun to engage the highly mobile and elusive VC battalions in the boonies. The site of the dramatic assault was the My Canh, a glamorous and popular floating restaurant aboard a boat tethered to a dock on the Saigon River mainly frequented by Americans and wealthy Vietnamese.

It was a two-part VC op – first a grenade was tossed into the restaurant during the dinner hour, predictably causing consternation. Then, as dazed and wounded diners rushed to shore over the boat’s gangplank, an electronically controlled Claymore anti-personnel mine (which fires metal balls 110 yards in a wide killing arc), planted in the riverbank, was remotely detonated causing mass casualties: 32 killed, 42 wounded.

Assisting victims at My Canh floating restaurant, June 1965

A US sailor helping rescue people, shocked to see blood everywhere and so many body parts, subsequently commented, “Saigon was no rear area. It was a very dangerous place.” But should we conclude that the large American community in Saigon was cowed and intimidated by the rash of well-aimed, lethal VC terror attacks in the city – no, according to a good friend of Jeff’s who was there for a number of years, first as a GI and then as a civilian contractor. He and everyone he knew had a personal story of a near miss, and certainly on those occasions emotions swirled, but fear was not one of them.

On the contrary, he told me, a backdrop of violence was a part of the fabric of daily life in the city, a feature of the urban scene in a country being torn apart by a raging war. Young American GIs either based in Saigon or there on furlough, accepted the explosions as a condition of life in a wartime capital and did not allow the bombs and grenades to change their routines or divert them from the city’s pleasures.

One could chalk it up to the conviction of invincibility among the young – it won’t happen to me – or perhaps recall similar reactions among many civilians who survived WWII London and Berlin. Both cities were savagely and relentlessly attacked by vast fleets of bombers, but life went on amidst the death and destruction and, in fact, a little defiantly in both wartime capitals. Sure, English and German children alike were sent to the countryside for safety and Berliners and Londoners of course took to the bomb shelters during air raids, but during intervals people shopped, ate meals, made love, and much else of the routines that define 'the human condition' even in times of crisis.

Back in Saigon during the war, a terrorist incident a few years later perhaps best illustrates the response to routine violence as part of the texture of everyday life. A couple of American civilians lived down the block from a Filipino aid mission – housed in a building protectively wrapped in anti-grenade fencing with a small guard post in front. There were a couple of small openings through which the sentry could fire if attacked.

Waiting for a taxi one evening, the Americans saw a speeding motorcycle with a Vietnamese teenager on the back go flying by the Filipino building as the passenger tried unsuccessfully to hurl a grenade through the firing slit of the guard post. It bounced off the fencing harmlessly and exploded in the street as the guard opened fire on the fleeing cycle.

Coincidentally, a week later to the day and hour, the Americans were again at the cab stand and witnessed an identical failed attack. Again the duo escaped unscathed. Word got around among Americans in the neighborhood, and every Tuesday at 7 PM they’d gather on a protected portico to watch the same scene repeat itself – for six straight weeks until on the seventh try, the guard finally managed to take down the teenage cao bồi, cowboys, ending the weekly entertainment.

By ’66 US security had greatly increased in capital, and by then local VC priorities were changing as their units increasingly faced large, well-armed US combat forces on search & destroy missions in the Saigon region. Although VC urban terrorism had taken a significant toll in life and limb, its intended psychological impact on Americans who served or worked in Saigon fell far short of VC expectations.

Saigon remained a dangerous posting throughout the Vietnam War, but of course the danger there paled in comparison to the extraordinary hazards and the appalling loss of life on both sides of the conflict elsewhere in war ravaged Vietnam.

Links to music videos

†  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_2hlKqRTPg

††  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTyqoV1d2Ys

*Personal communication (8/1/13) from a Vietnam GI buddy and good personal friend of my late brother Jeff Sharlet – to whom I am greatly indebted for his help on the memoir project.

**Quoted in A Study of the Use of Terror by the Viet Cong (prepared by the Military Assistance Command, Nha Trang, South Vietnam, May 1966), 36. Declassified 5/1/78.

***Personal communication of 8/1/13 from Jeff Sharlet’s GI buddy and good friend.

                       

                       

Banish Oblivion - Vietnam GIs Against the War

GI protest against the Vietnam War began gradually in the mid-‘60s like a slow burning fuse, gained momentum, and reached dramatic, even explosive, levels by the early ‘70s. By ‘GI’, I mean troops of all branches who opposed the war in one way or another. GI resistance was never akin to the huge antiwar demos in Washington, New York, and elsewhere – that would have been foolhardy given the draconic military justice system – but it eventually took myriad forms, open as well as covert.

It was called the ‘GI movement’, although it never formally took on the trappings of a real movement. Instead, it was a diverse cumulative force that ultimately contributed enormously to bringing an end to America’s war in Vietnam, the final withdrawal of US combat troops in early ’73. One doesn’t need to read Trotsky on the role of the disgruntled Tsarist soldiers in the Russian Revolution to grasp that Washington could no longer wage war without warriors willing to continue to put their lives on the line.

Even as the war continued during the first half of the ‘70s, ex-GIs and writers had begun chronicling the story of GI resistance – in Vietnam itself, at stateside camps, and on US bases worldwide in Europe and Asia. Although he didn’t live to see the end of the war, ex-Vietnam GI Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969) had played a significant role in raising GI antiwar consciousness through his underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI).† Several of the early chroniclers of GI opposition gave him his due:

In ’74, Matthew Rinaldi, a civilian antiwar activist, wrote about the founding of VGI:

The paper was created by Jeff Sharlet, a vet who had served in Vietnam during the early years of the war. He came back to the States fairly disillusioned …. In early 196[8] he set out to create some form of communication and agitation within the military.That vehicle was Vietnam GI, which was very effective at this time. … The paper was widely circulated and well received. …[It] represented a significant breakthrough when it first appeared, and helped play a catalytic role throughout the service.

Vietnam GI masthead

A year later in ’75, ex-GI David Cortright brought out the first comprehensive book on the GI movement and noted, “Vietnam GI, the most influential early paper … [was] distributed to tens of thousands of GIs, many in Vietnam.”** But even before those critical works appeared, Colonel Heinl, a Marine historian – and certainly no friend of outfits like VGI – writing in an influential military journal in ’71, conceded that:

The Morale, Discipline and battleworthiness of the USArmed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lowerand worse than at any time in this century and possiblyin the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that nowremains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse,with individual units avoiding or having refused combat,murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers,drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.***

After the US forces pulled out, the South Vietnamese army fought on a few more years until North Vietnam prevailed in ’75 and the war ravaged country was unified under communist rule. The conflict in which American combat units had first taken part in ’65 was finally over, and millions of GIs who had served – other than the 58,000+ who didn’t make it – had long returned home although not to a grateful nation with parades, but to an unwelcoming country weary of the war. We had ‘lost’ the war, and the public just wanted to forget the long national nightmare.

Absent a raison d’etre, GI protest, along with its civilian counterpart, withered and died out. Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW), co-founded by Jan Barry in ’67, reached its zenith in ’71 with the Winter Soldier Investigation (a  media event in which dissident ex-GIs revealed shocking atrocities by US forces),  gradually lost membership, and folded. With the war over, the hundreds of GI underground papers inspired by VGI’s example eventually faded away as their editors mustered out of the forces. And, one by one, the many stateside and overseas GI coffee houses that had survived continuous harassment from hostile authorities finally closed their doors.

The Vietnam War soon slipped down the memory hole and with it any awareness of the important part that disaffected GIs had played in bringing America’s benighted Southeast Asian crusade to an end. After a fashion, the majority of ex-Vietnam servicemen readjusted to civilian life, but several hundreds of thousands fell by the wayside. Problems with drugs and alcohol, so easily available in Saigon, Danang, and elsewhere, plagued more than half the Vietnam-era vets after the war.

Among those troopers who had been married while serving in Vietnam, the divorce rate was 90 percent. Over the years, approximately half a million Vietnam vets have run afoul of the law, and even now 100,000 remain incarcerated. By far the most shocking fallout from the war however, is that 150,000 veterans of Vietnam have committed suicide since 1975, nearly three times the number who died in the war.

Indeed, when Ronald Reagan came to power in ’81, Vietnam GIs finally got their parade followed later by a stunning war memorial on the Mall in Washington, but that was largely it. The country had moved on and had more pressing concerns – in the early ‘80s the Cold War briefly flared again into dangerous crisis and then, just a few years later, began its final, unexpected decline, culminating in the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union in ’91. Thereafter, public attention, if at all interested in international affairs, focused on Russia’s rough ‘n tumble transition from communism.

Insofar as the Vietnam War and opposition to it were remembered at all, it was primarily through the memoirs of major civilian antiwar leaders, first among whom to publish were Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin, both former national officers of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest group marching against the war. Hayden and Gitlin mainly celebrated the civilian movement’s part in protesting the war and either ignored or marginalized GI resistance, not to mention the tens of thousands of disaffected troops Colonel Heinl had in mind when he describing US forces in Vietnam in a state of near collapse.

Then in the last years of the old and first years of the new century a small symbolic candle was lit when two very good books on VVAW appeared, although neither garnered a broad readership. The GIs’ part in bringing the war to an end was essentially still languishing in oblivion when along came David Zeiger, a talented and successful documentary film maker. Zeiger took an interest in resuscitating the moribund history of GI opposition to the long ago war in Vietnam.

He had begun filming documentaries in the ‘90s with his first work about Mexican immigrants and Southeast Asian refugees trying to make their way in the New South. His film, Displaced in the New South (1994) made the rounds of ethnic-themed film festivals, was broadcast on PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, as well as Discovery Channel, and screened in Asia and Australia. Zeiger followed with a  number of well-received documentaries, most appearing at mainstream film festivals and broadcast nationally by PBS as well as internationally in Europe and elsewhere.

As a young civilian opposed to the war in the ‘60s, David Zeiger had helped facilitate the Vietnam GI antiwar movement. He had worked as a volunteer at one of the most successful of the national and international string of GI coffee houses, so called since they served as havens for off-duty GIs who questioned the US mission in Southeast Asia. Zeiger was on the staff of the ‘Oleo Strut’ outside the gates of Fort Hood in Killeen TX, one of the largest Army bases funneling troops to Vietnam. ††

Oleo Strut GI Coffee House, Killeen, Texas

The ‘Strut’, as it was called for short, was set up on a shoestring by civilian antiwar activists as a place of temporary refuge from military life for both trainees destined for ‘Nam and returning combat veterans alike. At the Strut they could listen to cool music, rap freely about their doubts, and read the growing underground GI press, including Vietnam GI, the first GI-edited paper addressed to GIs.

Drawing on his firsthand experience among those questioning GIs and his memories of how they had emerged as one of the strongest forces against the war, Zeiger set out to rescue their forgotten story from obscurity and give the antiwar GIs their place in the history of protest against the misbegotten Vietnam adventure. At the outset of his research for the film project, he contacted Tom Barton, a long-time opponent of America’s wars. Back in the ‘60s Barton had worked closely with Jeff Sharlet on VGI.

By the time David Zeiger got in touch, Tom Barton had begun putting out a nightly online newsletter in opposition to George Bush Jr’s Iraq War launched in 2003. Tom’s advice to David for a starting point on GI protest of the ‘60s was to sit down and read through Vietnam GI. Barton gave him a set of the full run of Jeff’s paper and Zeiger took his advice.

A few years later in spring of 2005 I received a phone call from David Zeiger. He told me his new film on the Vietnam GI resistance would soon be premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and – added – it was dedicated to my brother Jeff, “for starting it all,” as David put it. At the time I was in the early stages of researching a memoir on my brother, and, needless to say, the news was exhilarating.

 

DVD cover for Sir! No Sir!

Sir! No Sir! (SNS) (2005) is a rich, fast-paced, compelling, full length film that, as one reviewer put it, moves with “breathless momentum” telling, in the words of the New York Times, the “too often forgotten” story of the GI movement against the Vietnam War. The film incorporates television footage of combat and protest, period music, and, as its cynosure, a number of well-chosen, lively, and revealing interviews with prominent GI, Marine, Navy, and Air Force protestors of the Vietnam era.

SNS opens dramatically with images of a Phantom jet on a  low-flying bomb run, dropping incendiary napalm bombs and leaving behind a trail of grotesque black and orange explosions – as a young woman is heard on the soundtrack singing a wistful rendition of ‘Soldier, We Love You’. The interviews begin with MSgt Donald Duncan, a career Green Beret, softly speaking of his combat patrols in ’65 with prisoners taken and how he bore witness with moral revulsion as South Vietnamese soldiers tortured the captives. A consummate professional soldier, he added sadly, “I was doing it right, but I wasn’t doing right.” Duncan left the Army in ’66 in what he described as a ‘personal protest’.

MSgt Donald Duncan, Special Forces, Vietnam

Still on early GI protest, the camera turns to Dr Howard Levy, a physician detailed to teach Special Forces how to treat endemic tropical skin diseases. In footage from ’65, he refuses orders, is court-martialed, and sentenced to three years in federal prison. Fully aware of the consequences – Levy, like Duncan, saw himself carrying out a personal action against the war.

Soon, as the film shows, GI resistance became collective. A group of three soldiers refused deployment to Vietnam and were sentenced to five years in prison with less than honorable discharges. Two Marines called a meeting to discuss whether Blacks should fight in the war and received six to 10 year sentences for their trouble. At that point in the war, with the number of GI dissidents still small, the military cracked down hard.

However, as the numbers grew, the Pentagon found it increasingly harder to cope. One GI reported that a majority of troops in his stateside unit opposed the war, nine of whom chained themselves in a church, called a press conference, and publicly refused orders for ‘Nam. And those protesting were not only men. A Navy nurse, an officer, hired a private plane and ‘bombed’ aircraft carriers berthed in the San Francisco Bay Area with antiwar leaflets. Again, well aware of the choices she had made, Lt Susan Schnall was court-martialed and dismissed from service.

In an especially moving segment of the film, a hospital corpsman told how he turned against the war. Assigned to a ward at the Fort Lewis WA base hospital for the most severely wounded from Vietnam, he witnessed men so damaged they couldn’t move their limbs, even wiggle, or perform the simple act of turning a page. They’d call him to their bedside and in a low voice ask him to kill them. To a man, he reported, the shattered GIs said their sacrifice was worthless.

Former Lt Louis Font, the first Puerto Rican graduate of West Point, so impressive he was sent on to Harvard’s Kennedy School for a Master’s degree, announced his refusal to serve – the first West Pointer ever to do so. Then Dave Cline, a combat infantryman comes into view. Wounded for the third time in a muzzle to muzzle duel with a North Vietnamese soldier he managed to kill, Cline, looking at his dead adversary, a young man about his age, wondered, did he have a girlfriend, how would his mother feel. Suddenly the war appeared in a different light for Dave Cline, and he never turned back, later becoming a legend in the GI antiwar movement.

Combat infantryman Dave Cline, Vietnam

SNS briskly tells the story of the GI coffee houses – the first one, the ‘UFO’, launched by Fred Gardner near Fort Jackson SC; the ‘Oleo Strut’ outside Fort Hood; and others, all of which were hassled in various ways. In the worst cases, one coffee house staffer was arrested on trumped-up charges, a grenade was tossed into another, and a coffee house at an airbase in Idaho was firebombed. A brief TV clip shows Walter Cronkite of CBS reporting the new phenomenon of the GI underground press and the military authorities’ reaction, regarding the papers as ‘subversive’ material.

Director Zeiger devotes a section of the film to the intersection of the Black Power movement inside the military and GI protest, the most explosive result of which was the violent rebellion at LBJ, the notorious Long Binh Jail, a stockade where the majority of prisoners were Black. As another form of resistance, Terry Whitmore, a Black Marine combat veteran deserted to Stockholm, the center of the GI deserter movement. He had been a model, an unquestioning Marine – one shot even shows him being decorated for valor by visiting President Johnson as Whitmore lay wounded in the hospital at Cam Ranh Bay.†††

Terry Whitmore (3rd from rear) and fellow deserters arriving at Stockholm, 1968

Dave Cline talks about the growing numbers of GI protestors against the war. In Killeen TX on Armed Forces Day 1970, 1000 soldiers based at Fort Hood marched in public protest, calling it ‘Armed Farces Day’. The following year the ranks of antiwar GIs marching had swelled to nearly 4000. Scenes from the Jane Fonda-Donald Sutherland traveling antiwar tour of US bases show them performing their irreverent songs and skits before tens of thousands of wildly applauding GIs, many sporting peace symbols.

Air Force intelligence analysts describe how they withheld information necessary for bombing missions over North Vietnam, and naval officers tell how the crew of the carrier Constellation, being refitted in San Diego, ‘voted’ 6 to 1 against redeployment to Vietnam for off-shore air strikes. Although not mentioned in the film, in addition enlisted men sabotaged the carrier Kitty Hawk, delaying its departure to the South China Sea. On the ground in Vietnam, SNS covers the epidemic of ‘fragging’, disgruntled soldiers unwilling to risk their lives any longer, taking out overly zealous officers and sergeants by rolling live grenades into their hooches.

At this point in his film, Zeiger shrewdly has an actor read Colonel Heinl’s comments on the devastating impact of massive GI protest on the war effort – as well as putting up on the screen the text of the colonel’s remarks on the armed forces in Vietnam in a near state of collapse.

The superbly edited film closes with a clip of Rita Martinson’s tender salute to GIs

♫Soldier we love you

Yeah, soldier we love you

as the camera swings back to Terry Whitmore pronouncing a terse epitaph on the whole misguided war: “God damn! Did I do that? … Did the government push me into that shit?”

Rita Martinson singing ‘Soldier, We Love You’ before a GI audience

Though David Zeiger had told me he dedicated his documentary to brother Jeff, while watching the New England premier before the credits rolled, I was astonished and deeply moved to see not the standard one-liner dedication whiz by, but, slow-speed, a full-screen image of Jeff in ‘Nam, and below it in large white letters:

Dedicated to

Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969)

Founder of Vietnam GI

The first GI underground paper

Sir! No Sir!  received numerous glowing reviews, won a number of prizes, appeared in 80 theaters across the country as well many abroad, and was twice featured on the Sundance Channel. The story of the Vietnam GI movement against the war, rescued from oblivion by David Zeiger, is now part of the warp and woof of American antiwar history.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/vietnam-gis-mission.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/oleo-strut-front-line-of-gi-protest.html

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/03/black-marine-from-war-to-exile.html

* M Rinaldi, “Olive Drab Rebels,” Radical America (1974)

** D Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt:  GI resistance during the Vietnam War, (1975) 324

*** R Heinl, “Collapse of the Armed Forces,” Armed Forces Journal (1971)