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 The Secretary of “Defense” at the end of the Vietnam War was Donald Rumsfeld. This is the same Donald Rumsfeld that was relieved of that office by Bush, but who remained in the Pentagon until “the Change,” which could mean that he might still be there as a carry over from the last administration. Think about that while you read this – please.
From the Vietnam War all the way to Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza; the policies of the US Department of War have never varied. Tactics have changed because government can no longer ‘depend’ on the loyalty of an informed American public; so a huge private army of mercenaries was hired to do what GI’s might no longer do, since they saw the light in Vietnam. There’s a film called SIR! NO SIR, that spells this out: It’s needed now, because the history and the facts of Vietnam, that could have stopped the War on
Iraq – have been nearly annihilated since the Vietnam War ended in our surrender on June 30, 1975.
“Doin the right thing in Vietnam – ‘Doing-right’ – but not Doing it Right”
This is the story in the film, by David Zeiger (1)
The war in Vietnam was a Lie. By 1968 the US had over a half million men in South Vietnam when the North Vietnamese launched their TET Offensive that overran the entire country, before being pushed back. This was the turning-point at which it became clear that the people of Vietnam were clearly on the side of the North Vietnamese. ‘It was also clear that the USA was mired in a war that we could not win.’
US troops began to go AWOL or refused to fight, and that’s where the Anti-War movement really began to become visible on the global stage. In this country the Anti-War Movement began in San Francisco, where the sign over the military stockade in the Presidio read:
“Obedience to the Law is Freedom.” San Francisco hosted the first ‘GI’s and Vets March for Peace,’ organized by veterans. A small plane was hired that dropped leaflets on every military base in the Bay Area, and a huge crowd attended.
There was a Navy lieutenant, a nurse, who was later tried for wearing her dress uniform in the demonstration. She cited the fact that General Westmoreland (the commander in Vietnam), wore his uniform when he spoke in favor of the war before congress; so she thought that she had the same right to wear her uniform, when she chose to speak out against the war and to the public through the demonstration. The stockade in the Presidio was soon crammed with prisoners, and a riot broke out. The prisoners began to sing “We Shall Overcome” and the commanding general of the Sixth Army, headquartered at the Presidio, thought that the revolution was about to start. The protestors were charged with Mutiny and were facing the death penalty, for singing that song. In the summer of ‘68 when thousands protested at the gates of the Presidio, over the jailing of the GI’s; it did indeed appear that things had begun to change. Anti-War coffee-shops began to spring up around military-bases throughout the US, as GI’s started to question the war-policies of the Pentagon that were based on the body-count in Vietnam.
GI’s questioned: Why are we being forced to kill so many men, women and children in Vietnam, and ‘what is this policy for’? The Vets and the new recruits were stationed on the same bases, and the vets began to counsel the inductees. As the Anti-War movement grew, more and more troops refused to go. An underground press was created on many bases throughout the country. The Army Recruiting Slogan of the time was: Join the Army for Fun Travel &
Adventure – the movement turned that slogan into FTA (F#%k The Army).
Bob Hope and the USO shows were touring Vietnam, as they had done for all our wars, but the cheers were beginning to turn to jeers from the troops that were disillusioned with almost everything about the Vietnam War. FTA was formally created to perform for the troops as an alternative to the traditional government propaganda show. In the spring of 1971 the FTA Show toured Asia, despite being banned from all US military bases. They played to over 60,000 in Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines, where GI’s joined them on stage at every stop. GI’s wanted to know why they were in Vietnam, why they were being killed or why they were killing people indiscriminately. The FTA allowed the troops a way to talk about these questions, and they looked to FTA to tell them about what was really going on in the world beyond Vietnam.
This became another turning point for the military-industrial-complex; because soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines were refusing to fight in real numbers. The Pentagon was doubly concerned because the troops were mostly draftees and were beginning to refuse to fight. The New York Times ran a full page ad that listed the signatures of over 1,400 active duty GI’s that supported a November 15 Moratorium Against the War. To show their complicity with their brothers-in-Arms not in Vietnam: The combat troops wore black armbands on November 15, to show their support for the Anti-war
position – and that became national news.
Black troops in Vietnam began to notice that ‘back-in-the-states’ people wearing the same uniform they were wearing in Vietnam were being used to beat up their families and friends. Many had also noticed that the term “gooks” for the Vietnamese was very similar to the military’s use of the word ‘nigger’ for black GI’s in US uniforms. Back in the states the Black Power movement began to grow and statements were issued that said: “The black man should only fight when and where he is being oppressed.” Black GI’s in Vietnam began to notice that the Vietnamese were not oppressing the black
soldiers – however it was becoming increasingly clear that the US military was indeed oppressing the black troops under its command. During the Vietnam War over 503, 926 incidents of desertion were recorded by the Pentagon.
Blacks, in country, also began to notice that in the states people wearing US uniforms, their uniforms, were being turned loose, with dogs, upon their friends and families. “We’re over here beaten up on people over here; and you’re beaten up on black people; dogs are on the street, and tanks are on the streets.” In the summer of 1968 the Army was sent into the streets of America to quell the riots that ensued over the death of Martin Luther King. And there was another explosion in Vietnam between the races, on the battlefields and in the barracks of Vietnam. The need for civil rights legislation became abundantly clear!
In 1969 the scandal over the Massacre of My Lai (3-16-68) was revealed, and a lone Lieutenant Calley was charged. What Americans began to hear for the first time was that American GI’s were killing men, women and children indiscriminately; and at My Lai they murdered an entire village. What most refused to believe was that this could actually be the Pentagon’s War policies in action. (2)
What was revealed at the trial was that the slaughter in My Lai was not “an isolated instance of aberrant behavior,” but was in fact US Policy. What happened in My Lai has been repeated hundreds perhaps thousands of times since in ‘US wars’ all over the planet; Fallujah, in Iraq comes to mind where the secret death toll was much, much higher. The world got a glimpse of this ‘tactic’ in Gaza where our pit-bull, the sadistic Zionist state, has followed our policies to the letter. During the Vietnam War the Veterans Against the War organized “Winter Soldier” to explore what was really happening in the war, by obtaining testimony from combat veterans. By compiling these experiences the Winter Soldier hearings were able to document and demystify the “dots” that confirmed the lies behind the War on Vietnam.
The returning GI’s coming back from Vietnam were not just saying: “I’m against the war.” They were saying: “This is what we did, and this is how we did it. This is wrong!” Anti-war movements had not seen GI’s in this light
before – but the GI’s were disturbed because they all knew that what Lt. Calley did, was no different that what all GI’s were told to do; which was “Kill them all and sort it out later.” This is of course exactly what the IDF just tried to do in Gaza, as well.
In Vietnam we used Napalm, and Agent Orange when that wasn’t strong enough, we also used phosphorus and committed genocide, all as matters of US policy. The US military has been broken since
Vietnam – which explains why we must now use mercenaries for everything that’s really
obscene – because the common GI can’t be trusted to commit war-crimes as frequently as they clean their weapons. The Viet Nam War only lasted ten years but it included Cambodia and Laos as well.
In all three of those countries we used napalm on people, and phosphorus while committing genocide, just as Israel has been doing now for the last sixty years. The US military machine is broken, and it has been since their failure in Vietnam; yet apparently the only people that are aware of this are the same people that have replaced the draftees of that bygone era (1965-1975) with the paid mercenaries that have provided us with a private army equal in size to the “US forces” that we talk about as being the occupation forces on the ground in Iraq. This was done to avoid the fragging that became common in Vietnam; which involved the killing of officers and non-commissioned officers in large numbers, which went hand-in-hand with the refusal of US troops to fight.
In Vietnam the Pentagon lost control over the US military – which became clear when the citizens of San Diego voted by a 6 to 1 margin to keep the Navy's warships from going to Vietnam. The result of this was that the US decided to do exactly what Israel just did to Gaza: We bombed hospitals, population centers, and infrastructure indiscriminately that in the ten year course of that war murdered hundreds of thousands of people. Then, in the end, we tried to bomb North Vietnam back to the stone-age, as our going-away present to Vietnam; just before we had to flee the country in disgrace. Again - reminiscent of what Israel just did to Gaza.
Along with all of this there was an underground press around the Anti-War movement that succeeded, and there was an alternative road show called the FTA that made huge inroads against the propaganda put out by the Pentagon. All of this made the national news then and has nearly all been totally erased from the public’s memory because the New World Order and the Illuminati do not want you to know that individual people can and did make a real difference: because they did END-THE-WAR in Vietnam!
We can ‘Change-the World’ but we’ll never know that unless we begin to act against what’s going on. Meanwhile the Hawks have been “going back” to Vietnam to try revising “the truth” and to cover this up since 1972 with Kissinger and all his lies; and this has continued to the present moment. If the public had realized now just how effective they had been in Vietnam, in stopping that war; then that knowledge could have been used AGAIN, to stop the War on Iraq.
There’s a second film that compounds the truth of what happened in Iraq, it’s called “No End in Sight.” Anyone interested in who should be arrested and charged with War Crimes needs to watch this film as well – there really is nothing about how we got into this that is not known: all that remains is for us to demand consequences for everyone involved in these war-crimes and our crimes against humanity that the government has been committing since 1965. (3)
Jim
Kirwan
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