From Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent © 2009 by Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd. Reprinted with permission from PoliPointPress, LLC, Sausalito, CA.
The continuing occupation of Iraq and the growing war in Afghanistan are leaving permanent physical and emotional scars on a whole generation of soldiers. Not since Vietnam have so many GI's objected to a war, and never have military families spoken out so strongly for withdrawal. This new book comes to the aid of distressed military personnel and their families. It examines the reasons men and women in the military have disobeyed orders and resisted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With a practical as well as theoretical focus, this book discusses what resisters have done, and what readers can do, to help end illegal orders and wars. It also examines race and sex discrimination in the military, including the epidemics of rape, sexual assault, and suicide in the military, as well as inadequate health care for service members. It examines the dehumanization of soldiers and civilians, and the ways in which military training promotes racial and sexual violence.
Rules of Disengagement places modern issues regarding the Iraq and Afghan wars in the historical context of earlier military dissent movements, notably during the Vietnam War. The authors analyze numerous issues of constitutional, international, and military law, including conscientious objector status, rules regarding military discharge, the right and duty to disobey illegal orders, the international laws of war and human rights, and the constitutional rights of free speech, association, assembly, dissent, and protest.
The following is an excerpt from the introduction:
The Vietnam-era GI Movement
The similarities between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam are remarkable and sobering. Although political, technological, and cultural changes create many differences in war and warfare, the questions and dilemmas that soldiers faced in the 1960s and 1970s are strikingly similar to those they have confronted in recent years. So, too, are the decisions of growing numbers of soldiers to disengage from the wars similar to the choices made then.
The number of soldiers and sailors who refused to fight in Vietnam is larger than most people would expect. Many soldiers and sailors sought to be declared conscientious objectors. Many claims were wrongly denied at the local command level and never reported to military headquarters. Rates for other discharges soared as disgruntled service members searched the regulations for ways to get out of the military. Many walked away. The Department of Defense (DoD) estimated that there were 73.5 desertions per 1,000 soldiers from the Army and 56.2 per 1,000 from the Marine Corps in 1971. Over the course of the war, more than 500,000 soldiers deserted. A support network of civilian attorneys and lay people set up military counseling centers around the United States and overseas to provide assistance for GIs seeking discharge or dealing with the legal consequences of desertion. As frustrations rose among the troops, killings of officers by angry enlisted men, known as fraggings, occurred at the rate of at least one per week. Colonel Robert Heinl, a military policy analyst, wrote in 1971, “The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.”
Many GIs felt betrayed by their government. All over the United States, in Germany, and in Asia, they established underground newspapers and set up coffeehouses and centers where service members met and discussed politics and strategies for resisting. Quiet opposition turned into a tidal wave of resistance that developed throughout the course of the Vietnam War. Some GIs complained in their churches about what the military was teaching them. Many GIs began to salute trash cans or mail dead fish to particularly loathsome officers. Mass protests were held, and a number of GIs were prosecuted. The draft galvanized the antiwar movement among college students.
“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.
During Vietnam soldiers and sailors were conscripted into the armed forces, whereas today we have an “all-volunteer” military. Many cite this difference when comparing the GI movement in the Vietnam era with resistance to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet much of the GI resistance to the Vietnam War came from volunteers, not draftees. The majority of dissenters and organizers were enlistees from working-class backgrounds. Young men with money and education had an easier time obtaining student deferments, conscientious objector status, and other deferments and exemptions from the draft. “Draftees expect shit, get shit, aren’t even disappointed. Volunteers expect something better, get the same shit, and have at least one more year to get mad about it,” Jim Goodman wrote in the Baumholder Gig Sheet, an underground newspaper produced by GIs in Germany during Vietnam. Today we have a “poverty draft,” where the bulk of those who enlist have few options other than joining the military. And the stop-loss program has created a “backdoor draft,” which keeps many soldiers in the military involuntarily even after their contracts expire.
As this book goes to press, official counts admit that 4,227 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have been killed in Iraq, and 640 have been killed in Afghanistan. The military acknowledges that 31,004 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq, and 2,679 have been wounded in action in and around Afghanistan. Many more have returned from combat zones with undiagnosed injuries or illness. Over 1 million Iraqis have been killed.
More than 1.6 million men and women have served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or both since October 2001. Deployments have grown longer, redeployment to combat zones has been common, and breaks between deployments are inadequate.
Soldiers, their families, veterans, and civilians around the country see rising death and injury tolls, news reports of atrocities and brutality in combat areas, and “victories” that evaporate overnight. They hear warnings about “perpetual war,” and “a long struggle” against some vague enemy, and they learn about legal experts and foreign officials who challenge the wars as illegal. These experiences raise questions for all service members and civilians: do we have a duty to carry out the wars and support them at home, or a duty to resist?
Copyright by Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd 2009.
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