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.
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