The Secret History of GI Opposition To the Vietnam War
When liberals and the fake left think of the military, they tend to go pretty quickly to stereotypes. An idiotic jock or frat boy dragging his knuckles on the ground who can’t wait to go kill Ay-rabs. Certainly some evidence indicates that the military has been actively recruiting sociopaths. Still, the core of the U.S. military’s enlisted men are regular working class people, often enticed to join the military with false promises of job training and money for college. The manner in which the enlisted men are treated by the military brass is closely analogous to how corporations treat their employees.
Desertion is an increasing, but conspicuously unreported, problem in Iraq. You haven’t heard about it in the corporate media. But the U.S. military is so concerned about it that they’ve made a renewed effort to track down Vietnam-era deserters to set an example. Their fears are not unfounded. From the Potemkin mutiny to the strikes against redeployment after World War 2 and its Cairo Forces Parliament, there is a long history of anti-war sentiment within the imperialist armies themselves. In the most recent example of mass resistance to the war within the U.S. military (Vietnam), the occupying army quite literally ground the war effort to a halt.
