The title of David Zeiger’s documentary about resistance to the
Vietnam war from within the armed forces — Sir! No Sir!
— comes without what schoolchildren used to be taught to call a
vocative comma after “No.” Perhaps this is another gesture of
1960s-style rebellion against The Man and the intolerable
oppression of his rules of punctuation. If so it would certainly
fit with the retro feel of the rest of the film. Having been around
and politically aware myself at the time, I well remember the sort
of drug-addled, know-nothing hippy radicalism into which much of
the once-thoughtful antiwar movement had sunk by the time of the
Cambodian invasion in 1970. One of Mr. Zeiger’s interview subjects
says as if he’s proud of the fact, “We really believed that what
would stop the war was when soldiers stopped fighting the war.”
That kind of babyish, “Give Peace a Chance” naivete is something
that politically serious anti-warriors have been trying to live
down for the last 35 years. Mr. Zeiger brings it roaring back.
Not only does he bring it back, but he acts as if it had never
been away. It probably hadn’t been among the radical fringe to
which he belongs. My suspicion is that the new wave of radical chic
to which hatred of George W. Bush has given rise in today’s
Hollywood is what enabled him to make this throwback to the '70s.
Still, you’d think that the film would at least have made a gesture
or two in the direction of balance and judiciousness. Did none of
its interviewees, all of whom protested, resisted, deserted or
mutinied during the war, ever agonize about what he did? Wasn’t
there anyone among the anti-war GIs to whom it occurred to say that
he loved his country and that it caused him indescribable pain to
oppose it, and work against it? Apparently not. Everyone here
really is, it seems, from the hate-America party, carelessly
throwing around charges of “crimes” and “atrocities” against their
democratically elected leaders as if they weren’t even
controversial.
Here, too, the so-called “Winter Soldier” investigations of 1971
are still what their publicists and media apologists said they were
at the time, an expose of a military establishment rife with
corruption and unpunished war criminals. You wouldn’t know that
Winter Soldier had subsequently been shown — by the historian
Guenter Lewy, for example — to have been a miscellany of
unsubstantiated charges brought up as part of a propaganda circus.
Like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which organized that
circus, Mr. Zeiger’s film takes it for granted that the U.S. was
the bad guy, the enemy the good. The question of why we went into
Vietnam in the first place never even arises. I guess he assumes
that it was because we were the fascists, oppressors and warmongers
the communists always said we were, in which case no further
explanation is needed. Naturally, too, the enemy never appears here
in any other guise than as victims of the American war machine.
There they were, it seems, minding their own business, when we
decided to come along to oppress and murder them en
masse.
You would have to say that the quality of thought and argument
in all this is astonishingly low, the propaganda amazingly crude,
except that since the films of Michael Moore came into vogue,
stupidity, crudeness and shrill one-sidedness seem to have become
common in political documentaries. The people who buy tickets to
them don’t expect to learn anything they didn’t already know, only
to have their most treasured political resentments flattered and
encouraged. In other words, they come to the subject of Vietnam in
the same spirit as Mr. Zeiger’s interview subjects, some of whom
did hard time and all of whom have a vested interest in justifying
themselves retrospectively for acts that many people still regard
as disloyal, if not treasonous.
Even the practice of “fragging” — the murder of officers and
noncoms by their own men with fragmentation grenades — is only
mentioned in connection with the prosecution of an alleged fragger,
one Billy Dean Smith, who turned out to be innocent. After his
acquittal, Mr. Smith went off his head, so we are told, which adds
the ruin of his life to the overflowing bill of indictment against
the U.S. Army. Meanwhile, it is (at least implicitly) time to Rally
‘Round the Frag, Boys for Mr. Zeiger and Co., since the victim for
them is not the poor guy, whoever he was, who got fragged but the
guy falsely accused of fragging him. But who cares? Presumably the
fragee got what he deserved, since in order to have been fragged he
must have been among the vile war criminals who made up, on this
film’s showing, pretty much all that part of the army that weren’t
among the protesters and peaceniks.
At the end of his film, Mr. Zeiger blandly informs us that “the
war ended in April 1975.” There is no mention of the Paris treaty
of 1973, of the subsequent violation of it by the North Vietnamese,
of America’s betrayal of its South Vietnamese ally or — of course
— of the misery visited upon those tainted by association with
Americans or the boat people who, over the next decade and more,
were so desperate to escape from the communist prison we left
behind us. There’s not a word, either, about the killing fields of
Cambodia. Do you have to wonder why? At one point in the film we
see a montage of fronts from underground newspapers and magazines
of the period. One contains a mock disclaimer: Warning! This
contains communist propaganda! Though intended ironically, this was
most likely no more than the truth. Anyway, there should be a
similar warning label attached to Mr. Zeiger’s film. That it is
propaganda on behalf of a system which is now in retreat in Vietnam
itself, as in all but a couple of isolated outposts where once it
existed, ought to tell you something about the current state of
political discourse in Hollywood.
