Post by Sid9Post by Sid9Post by PLMeritePost by S. L'GreeYa mean Bush lied to me during he said the troops belived in what
they were doing and were in great spirits. HMMM
Nah, the CIC is just a little out of touch with reality.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041016/ap_on_re_us/military_poll_3
Post by Sid9Post by Sid9Post by PLMeritePost by S. L'GreeMaybe it's time he got a clue.
Maybe it's time an officer with some balls shot the first prick who
refused a direct order.
Regards, PLMerite
Didn't they have a word for dead officers in
Viet Nam that died from sources unknown?
Oh, yes...they called it "Fragging"
http://tinyurl.com/6zp6r
Ah, a dirty little secret about 'Nam that is rarely discussed these days.
"20 to 25 percent of all officers killed in the war were killed by their
men, not 'the enemy'." That percentage seems kinda high, but back then
hardly a week went by without an AP or UPI story about some butter-bar or
first-looie having grenades tossed under his bunk in the middle of the
night. Yeah, I'd forgotten about all the "underground" newspapers that made
the rounds, the most notorious being something called "Camp News" if I
remember right.
Viet Nam: How the soldiers stopped the war
The Vietnam war was not stopped by large, legal protests alone - it was
stopped by the very GIs who were ordered to fight it.
The American military in Vietnam was mostly made up of working class
conscripts and enlistees; their officers, on the other hand, tended to be
from the middle and upper middle class. The officers - or "lifers" as they
were called derisively - often put their men in deadly situations, in order
to get promotions. This was not the only source of tension. GIs increasingly
resented the fact that they had been lied to; they were not defending
democracy in South Vietnam, they were defending a hated police-dictatorship.
In the U.S., some young workers were becoming radicalized by the ghetto
uprisings and wildcat strikes, and came into contact with left-wing ideas
through the student anti-war movement. Other young workers drafted in these
years were radicalized after they went into the army - when they came into
conflict with the "lifers" and were forced to defend a government that the
Vietnamese didn't want to defend.
In 1968, in the wake of the Tet offensive, tensions within the army
exploded. Drug use and AWOLs skyrocketed.
Mutinies erupted over the next two years and spread from individual units to
whole companies. One Pentagon official admitted that, "mutiny became so
common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead
of 'combat refusal'".
"Fragging" - the GI term for using violence against their officers for their
behavior - was extremely widespread in Vietnam. The army still cannot
account for how 1,400 officers and non-commissioned officers died. This
number, combined with the official fragging statistics, suggests that 20 to
25 percent of all officers killed in the war were killed by their men, not
"the enemy".
In addition to widespread individual and collective rebellion, rank-and-file
GI papers sprang up on bases, ships, and in units in the field. The roughly
200 papers were enormously popular, because they told the stories of
soldiers' struggle in the language of soldiers - and were produced by
soldiers themselves. Vietnam GI, a national paper with a circulation of
10,000 - most of it in Vietnam itself - carried stories of technicians
sabotaging bombs, exposed Nixon's peace initiatives as the fraud they were,
and interviewed soldiers about their experiences in "the Nam".
As the war within the army grew more intense, many soldiers began to realize
that their real enemies were the "lifers," politicians, Pentagon brass, and
corporations, not the Vietnamese people. The slogan of the U.S.'s brutal
war - "search and destroy" - became "search and avoid". Patrols into the
field deliberately evaded contact with the National Liberation Front (NLF)
and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), and night patrols would halt and take
up positions a few yards beyond the base perimeter. Another tactic was for a
patrol to secure a safe place in the jungle and camp there.
In this way, GIs declared their own cease-fire with the NLF. In fact, the
NLF and the NVA were ordered not to fire on U.S. troops wearing red bandanas
and peace signs, unless fired upon first. Two years into the tremendous
soldiers' upsurge, GI combat deaths were down more than 70 percent from the
1968 high.
The war was ended from below - and because it coincided with urban
uprisings, wildcat strikes, and mass protests in the U.S, the American
ruling class decided it would rather keep Detroit and lose Vietnam, rather
than lose Detroit over Vietnam. This is why Washington has been reluctant to
use working class troops as cannon fodder for its economic and political
domination of the globe ever since.
The soldiers' revolt in Vietnam showed that people in the military can
become a major force in fighting against war and occupation. But in order to
do that tomorrow, the work of patient explanation and organizing must begin
today.
http://www.traveling-soldier.org/9.03.vietnam.php
