Sir! No Sir! (**3/4)

The history of U.S. military opposition to the war in Vietnam, as told by the participants, raises as many questions as it answers.

David Zeiger’s debut feature tells the story of perhaps the most powerful drive to oppose the American war in Vietnam, the one within the American military. It began with isolated individuals but burgeoned in coffeehouses near military bases, in underground newspapers, and in Army barracks. (This was the war that gave rise to the term fragging, which referred to the killing of an officer by his own soldiers.) The movie is the history of a movement, not the story of the war itself. (For people who don’t know much about Vietnam, this isn’t the place to begin.) Nor is it particularly meant to persuade. Zeiger, a former protest organizer, more or less takes for granted his subjects’ view that the war was immoral and lets the ex-soldiers tell the story of what they did about it. There are no historians, no journalists (other than in period footage), and just about no non-soldiers in the interview segments at all, save the ubiquitous Jane Fonda. Fonda has been a lightning rod for critics of antiwar protesters for decades. Love her or hate her, though, the footage of her and others being cheered on at overseas rallies by thousands of in-uniform soldiers at the height of the war makes it clear that she spoke for a great many of the military rank and file. I would have liked to see more of an attempt to quantify the film’s implication that opposition to the war was the rule, not the exception, among the lowest ranks, but the period footage alone clarifies that this was a mass movement. (One statistic that the movie does throw out is that there were over half a million “incidents of desertion.”)

The sole reliance on the participants to tell the story is both the strength and weakness of the movie. It gives the film focus, but also raises many questions about which a historian’s perspective might shed light, such as the idea that the widespread reluctance of ground troops to carry out their missions was what caused President Nixon to switch to an air-based strategy. Near the end, the film explores a bit (not enough) of the revisionist history that has followed the war, notably the myth of the spit-upon Vietnam veteran. I’m not sure it completely justifies its subtitle, “The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam.” After all, the issue surfaced not long before this movie was produced in the presidential campaign of John Kerry (who’s not seen in the movie). Yet Kerry’s opportunistic strategy of portraying himself as a war hero, not a hero of the antiwar movement, suggests that those who supported the Vietnam War have been successful in framing the issue as one of protesters versus troops. In fact, Sir! No Sir! shows that the fierce debate about the war pervaded the military itself. As one veteran states, these soldiers weren’t proud of their service, and didn’t think themselves heroes, because what their government was asking them to do wasn’t heroic.

IMDb link

posted and slightly revised 8/15/13