“Thank you for your service”: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, January 2024
Thank you for your service.
catchphrase of the day
The world was in upheaval in 1968. I identified with the anti-Vietnam War movement at the time and even considered myself a pacifist for a minute. I helped with the Quaker-run draft counseling held at the Ventura Unitarian Church and joined the War Resisters League. And I attended local anti-war demonstrations every chance I got, affiliating with a community group called Ventura County Committee for Peace. That was when I was a junior in high school. In September, 1969, my senior year teachers and administrators herded the males of our school class in small groups into a classroom where we were confronted by a man dressed in full Army uniform. After introducing himself, the recruiter got right to the point.
“You owe six years of your life to your country in military service. Two years active duty, two years ready reserve, two years inactive call-up, or some combination thereof. You will need to register for Selective Service within thirty days of your 18th birthday to fulfill this obligation.”
The Army recruiter was matter-of-fact, and I was freaking out. How dare he claim I owed any of my life to the government!? What about becoming a Conscientious Objector to all war? When’s the next bus to Canada?
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I was almost a year away from having to register for Selective Service and acquiring my student deferment (1-S) in 1970. But I was already compiling evidence for my intended Conscientious Objector claim (1-O), having no desire to end up in the rice paddies of Indochina. Terrified as I was by that possibility, the process of putting together a file to defend my case for refusing to comply with serving in the military was both an act of resistance and intoxicating. One stipulation of the rules governing conscription allowed me to put anything in my file that I considered as influencing me in my anti-war convictions. So once registered I could walk into my draft board and insist that they put in the latest Jimmy Hendrix album or part of a highway sign graffitied with peace symbols or a rotting fish carcass that revealed the plight of the world and my commitment to peace and my CO status.
Thus my fear of being drafted was counterbalanced by my excitement over “sticking it to the Man” through my anti-war activism. But things quickly got complicated once Nixon took office. America’s war in Indochina had sparked the broadest, most persistent anti-war movement in US history. The movement rapidly spreading in terms of consciousness, activism and resistance to other parts of society, and which Nixon attempted to quell at all costs. In addition to an extensive law and order campaign that unleashed the FBI, state and local police against The Movement, he promised to relieve the class and racial inequities built into conscription by first introducing a lottery draft system (12–1–1969) and then by moving to an all-volunteer military (AVM, 1973). Nixon’s other measures-withdrawing US troops, Vietnamization of the ground war, expanding and intensifying the air war, negotiating the Paris Peace Accords-didn’t amount to crap. By 1970, and my birthday’s high lottery number, I gave up my CO claim because it was just too much trouble. By 1973 the anti-Vietnam War protest movement had been decimated. By May 1, 1975 the Vietnamese people had won their war against the greatest military power the world had ever known.
I grew my hair long, started smoking dope, talked big about The Revolution and continued participation in anti-war activities. But I was also a middle-class happy-go-lucky college student, first at Ventura Community College and then at UC Santa Cruz. That’s where I met Walter Goldfrank, a junior professor who taught Sociology, specifically World Systems Theory. When I told him my rather petty travails of getting out of military service he told me that being drafted into the US Army was the best thing that ever happened to him. Wally was an upper middle class Jewish boy from Brooklyn who graduated from Harvard and whose first real encounter with people of different races, in particular black and brown folks, was in the military. He considered the Army a profoundly democratic and democratizing experience. Now, at the time I attended UCSC, Wally was a full-on Maoist, an admirer of Red China, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the People’s Liberation Army. So, there was some affinity between his politics and his evaluation of his military service even as he became a full professor, department chair and eventually professor emeritus.
What we in the Long 60s called The Movement had plenty of elements dedicated to toppling the United States of America. There were New Left groups committed to armed struggle and overthrowing the government-Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, May 19th Communist Organization, etc. And there were countercultural groups ardent about dropping out and moving back to the land-Drop City, the Diggers Kaliflower Commune, the Farm, etc. But Wally and I, and most of us in The Movement, were “Summer soldiers and Sunshine patriots” in the words of Tom Paine. We considered ourselves revolutionaries but in truth we’d essentially made peace with “The System.”
I became a member of the Winter Soldier Organization of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1975. VVAW/WSO was the vanguard of the GI/Veterans Movement during the Vietnam War, a practical example of revolutionary defeatism. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments.
American soldiers were considered a horror and an abomination who killed babies, perpetrated genocide, and promoted imperialism. Drug use among the troops-from marijuana to heroin-was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s multilayered strategy went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off-base where propaganda, support and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building.
VVAW pioneered some of the more imaginative tactics known to The Movement. It advanced veterans rights and health advocacy, fighting to recognize the dangers of Agent Orange and the disabilities of PTSD. After 1973, it pursued a more and more explicit anti-imperialist line, and opened its membership to civilians with the Winter Soldier Organization auxiliary. But by the time I started volunteering for VVAW/WSO’s Vets Coop in Santa Cruz in the beginning of 1975, participation in The Movement and membership in VVAW/WSO had declined precipitously. The Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) started infiltrating the organization, seizing control of the National Office through which it removed members, expelled chapters, disbanded the WSO and placed the organization under ideological conformity. VVAW was integrated into the RU which-with the Revolutionary Student Brigade, Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, National United Workers Organization and Wei Min She-reconstituted itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) under the pro-Gang of Four leadership of Bob Avakian.
Vietnam veterans were a minority of American veterans in 1975 yet their problems-homelessness, indigence, drug addiction, suicide, physical disabilities, mental illness-became the default face of all veterans. What’s more they were accorded no sympathy because they were supposed to have served their country out of patriotism, nationalism and loyalty, yet had rebelled and mutinied to the point of crippling the US military.
Military mutinies among conscripts have been common throughout history. The first World War was nearly scuttled by waves of revolutionary defeatism-mutinies and rebellions of enlisted and drafted soldiers and sailors on both sides of the conflict. Leaving aside dubious notions of “honor” military conscripts are duty-bound to serve, forced in fact by law. They’re not told “thank you for your service.” That phrase came into vogue after the advent of the All-Volunteer Military as sport stadium’s full of lazy entitled civilian spectators gave standing ovations to thank volunteer troops for serving in the military. I’d rather honor the Vietnam-era soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots-draftees all-whose greater service to humanity nearly broke the American empire with acts of revolutionary defeatism.
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Originally published at http://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com on January 1, 2024.