Sir! No Sir! - The Unveiling Of A Vietnam GI Movement That Changed The War!

David Zeiger informs me that JULY 2006 is the now confirmed TARGET DATE for the DIRECT PURCHASE from the SNS Home Page:

www.sirnosir.com...

The FIRST version will INCLUDE a special AUDIO CD which will have a lot of neat stuff, including some of the Radio First Termer Vietnam RESTORED CLIPS of the only surviving show.

I will let everyone KNOW when it is available. The DVD from STORES version will be released a few weeks later. If you are LIKE ME.... you will simply BUY it from their WEBSITE and then BURN IT to your own DVD.

Dave

With "Jean's" permission...... here is her photo along with the SNS press release about the DVD being released EXCLUSIVELY from the Sir! No Sir! HOME PAGE on July 15th, 2006.

www.sirnosir.com...

Dave

Sir! No Sir!
Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times

rogerebert.suntimes.com.../20060608/REVIEWS/606080304/1023

Quick question: When Jane Fonda was on her "FTA" concert tour during the Vietnam era, who was in her audience? The quick answer from most people would probably be, "anti-war hippies, left-wingers and draft-dodgers." The correct answer would be: American troops on active duty, many of them in uniform.

"Sir! No Sir!" is a documentary that about an almost-forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: Anti-war sentiment among U.S. troops grew into a problem for the Pentagon. The film claims bombing was used toward the end of the war because the military leadership wondered, frankly, if some of their ground troops would obey orders to attack. It's also said there were a few Air Force B-52 crews that refused to bomb North Vietnam. And in San Diego, sailors on an aircraft carrier tried to promote a local vote on whether their ship should be allowed to sail for Vietnam. One of the disenchanted veterans, although he is never mentioned in the film, was John Kerry, who was first decorated for valor, and later became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testified before Congress.

After the turning point of the Tet offensive in 1968, troop morale ebbed lower, the war seemed lost, and a protest movement encompassed active duty troops, coffeehouses near bases in America, underground GI newspapers, and a modern "underground railway" that helped soldiers desert and move to Canada. According to Pentagon figures, there were some 500,000 desertions during the Vietnam years.

The film has been written and directed by David Zeiger, who worked in an anti-war coffee- house near Fort Hood, Texas. In a narration spoken by Troy Garity, the son of Fonda and Tom Hayden, his film says, "The memory has been changed." The GI anti-war movement has disappeared from common knowledge, and a famous factoid from the period claims returning wounded veterans were spit on by "hippies" as they landed at American airports. According to the film, that is an urban legend, publicized in the film "Rambo II: First Blood."

When we reviewed "Sir! No Sir!" on "Ebert & Roeper," we cited the film's questions about the spitting story. There is a book on the subject, The Spitting Image, by Jerry Lembcke, whose research failed to find a single documented instance of such an event occurring in real life. I received many e-mails, however, from those who claimed knowledge of such incidents. The story persists, and true or false is part of a general eagerness to blame our loss in Vietnam to domestic protesters, while ignoring the substantial anti-war sentiment among troops in the field.

Parallels with the war in Iraq are obvious. One big difference is that the Vietnam-era forces were largely supplied by the draft, while our Iraq troops are either career soldiers or National Guard troops, some of them on their second or third tours of duty. The Vietnam-era draft not only generated anti-war sentiment among those of draft age, but supplied the army with soldiers who did not go very cheerfully into uniform. The willingness of today's National Guardsmen to continue in combat is courageous and admirable, but cannot be expected to last indefinitely, and the political cost of returning to the draft system would be incalculable.

A group of recent documentaries has highlighted a conflict between information and "disinformation," that Orwellian term for attempts to rewrite history. The archetype of "Hanoi Jane" has been used to obscure the fact that Fonda appeared before about 60,000 GIs who apparently agreed with her. The Swift Boat Veterans incredibly tried to deny John Kerry's patriotism. The global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" is being attacked by a TV ad campaign, underwritten by energy companies, which extols the benefits of CO2.

No doubt "Sir! No Sir!" will inspire impassioned rebuttals. No doubt it is not an impartial film, not with Fonda's son as its narrator. What cannot be denied is the newsreel footage of uniformed troops in anti-war protests, of Fonda's uniformed audiences at "FTA" concerts, of headlines citing Pentagon concern about troop morale, the "fragging" of officers, the breakdown of discipline, and the unwillingness of increasing numbers of soldiers to fight a war they had started to believe was wrong.

sirnosir.com...

Dave

A documentory about the 'Sir, no Sir' movement was shown on English Television last night. I watched it, it was pretty good. It was almost pure mutiny. They should have given you a shout out, Dave Rabbit.

Hi Communication_Burger....

Actually..... David Zeiger had the film already edited and cut and ready for distribution when I finally found out about this alternate life that was going on. When I contacted David, shortly after I found out, February 9, 2006, he told me that he had used three clips.... one for the beginning of the movie, one in the middle and then the last one at the end. Sometime in August 2006, I am flying out to Los Angeles to do an ON CAMERA interview with David which will be included in the SPECIAL EDITION VERSION which will be released October 2006. There is going to be just the movie that will be available from David's home page:

htto://www.sirnosir.com

He is also going to have a CD that can be purchased which will have the Rita Martinson song "Soldier We Love You" which was on the movie as well as some selected clips from the Radio First Termer Show and some other audio stuff.

Anyway.... thanks for the note. By the way.... I'm just curious how the show was received by my British brothers and sisters? If you get a sec..... would love to hear that one.

Dave

This is a GREAT and IN DEPTH interview with my friend, David Zeiger who is the Creator, Producer and Director of the critically acclaimed documentary "Sir! No Sir". I ask David about MEL GIBSON, the ISRAEL and LEBANON CONFLICT, the RACE WAR in Vietnam between the BLACK and WHITE SOLDIERS plus much, much more. A LOT of the things David and I discuss he was never asked before in other interviews or made a public comment about. So sit back, relax and listen to this candid LIVE conversation that David and I did on Labor Day 2006.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Dave

[edit on 9/4/2006 by Dave Rabbit]

To be honest, and in my opinion, I am deeply shocked and stunned...

Shocked and stunned i am..

Why oh why oh why is this topic not discussed more on ATS or ..let's say...every news channel/paper/disinformation/propaganda giving total global coverage of this subject...

Why have no terrorist factions taken this video and played it on stolen American widescreen TV's in front of US troops?

Any 'terist' would win any war. All the troops would do exactly what they should have done in the first place, stood up and shouted

SIR! NO SIR!

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 8-2-2008 by Extralien]

reply to post by Communication_Burger


I was in grade school in the 60's and new about people protesting the war because in Omaha where I live people protested by forming a human link across Doge St (main street in Omaha) to shut it down and I went to watch and Police were beating people with their billy clubs, it was shocking to me only being 10 at the time. I watched Sir no Sir last night and I was amazed that so many service Men protested the War and it only took 40 Years for me to find this out. I was apauld to see how or Goverment handled things and puzzeled why people dont have the guts to stand up for whats right these Days like in the 60's. Thanks for enlighting me to what really happened back then. CJ

Hi Dave

I was Searching ATS for anything on

Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick and found your thread. To say I am surprised by some of the info is to say too little.

The GI anti-war movement has disappeared from common knowledge, and a famous factoid from the period claims returning wounded veterans were spit on by "hippies" as they landed at American airports. According to the film, that is an urban legend, publicized in the film "Rambo II: First Blood."

The sad fact is that far too many think they know history not realizing that it is based on what they saw in a film. Good example for me is "Saving Private Ryan" in that I met people who were basing their impressions of war on this film. This is not an exclusively US based problem, it is a mechanism of propaganda the world over.

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte