Rules of Disengagement: What You Can Do To End Illegal Wars

By Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd, PoliPoint Press. Posted June 13, 2009.

“The Nixon administration claimed and received great credit for withdrawing the Army from Vietnam, but it was the rebellion of low-ranking GIs that forced the government to abandon a hopeless suicidal policy,” Vietnam War veteran David Cortright wrote in his book Soldiers in Revolt. Rebellion among Army soldiers became so strong that the Pentagon consciously shifted its strategy from ground combat to an air war over Indochina, relying on Navy and Air Force resources and personnel.

Sailors and airmen responded by increasing their protests and refusals. Underground newspapers began appearing on Navy ships, and some sailors staged demonstrations onboard. Others joined together in rebellions such as the one on the San Diego  based USS Constellation in 1972. There, black sailors formed an organization to protest racial discrimination and poor, unsafe working conditions on aging Navy ships that were pressed into service in repeated deployments. More than 100 black and white sailors staged a sit-in and demanded that the Constellation’s commander hear their grievances. One hundred thirty men refused to board the ship. They held a militant dockside strike, one of the largest acts of mass disobedience in naval history. None of the men were arrested; some received early discharges, and others were reassigned to shore duty.

This rebellion and literally hundreds of other protests by black service members were evidence of a new awareness of racism in the military and its relation to the war. African American and white sailors began to discuss the links between racism at home and racism used to instill hatred of the Vietnamese people. In a similar way, women in the military and their civilian supporters began to explore the ways in which sexism was used to train and motivate soldiers, bringing to light serious problems of sexual discrimination, harassment, and abuse in the armed forces.

The Constellation incident captured the Pentagon’s attention. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt met with 80 top admirals and Marine Corps generals to discuss the situation. The House Armed Services Committee appointed a special subcommittee to investigate the “discipline problems” in the Navy. The committee concluded that the resistance of the sailors undermined naval combat operations during the 1972 bombing campaign. Resistance in the Air Force also crippled U.S. bombing operations.

Ten years after the United States began bombing Vietnam, the deadly war finally came to an end. It had claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and 2 million to 3 million Indochinese. The termination of American involvement in Vietnam was largely a result, in addition to the resilience of the North Vietnamese, of the antiwar movement, particularly the resistance by American GIs.

Despite conservative and revisionist histories that speak of the Vietnam War as a failure of will, GIs, veterans, and the public today remember that movement and its symbols — peace signs, raised fists, and broken rifles — on the covers of underground newspapers and on soldiers’ helmets in Vietnam. Those symbols were picked up again, and the lessons of the movement were considered during Operation Desert Storm. The energy and strength of the GI antiwar movement has been reflected in service members’ peacetime struggles against sexual discrimination and military homophobia in the decades since the Vietnam War.

Now a new generation of GIs and veterans is discussing the examples and lessons of the Vietnam era. Military resistance to the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan is growing and beginning to have a real impact on the conduct of those wars. Like soldiers and sailors during the Vietnam War, service members today have chosen many forms of resistance and protest, ranging from going absent without leave (AWOL) and refusing orders to publishing newsletters and mounting petition campaigns. Some GIs protest the war while still on active duty. Others seek to get out, often organizing service members to oppose the war once they are no longer in the military. Some speak out peacefully; others engage in militant action. Many GIs seek conscientious objector status, claiming opposition not just to the Iraq war but to all war.

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Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.

Kathleen Gilberd has worked as a military counselor for over 30 years. She is co-chair of the National Lawyer’s Guild’s Military Law Task Force and a frequent contributor to its legal publication, On Watch.

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