SIR! NO SIR! (2005) **** Demands a reconsideration of who the American heroes of the Vietnam War were. The anti-war demonstrators, obviously, among whom the hippies seem to get all the credit while everyone forgets about the pacifist Christians...wouldn't want "normal" people thinking they can go around acting like that. The ones who already understood, who sought refuge in Canada or allowed themselves to be interned like criminals, more patriotically I've heard, too. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, who found new and uniquely American ways to celebrate celebrity (singing sex appeal to power, in her case). But what about, David Zeiger demands, the ones who were conned at first, but organized in the belly of the beast? The ones who understood, too late, but not too late, and refused orders in the jungles of Vietnam (unlike Lt. Calley, for example, or his commanders), or who refused to attack Americans in Chicago (unlike the police), and who risked everything in gestures as simple as circulating underground newspapers among their friends? You can't call them stupid, and you're a lying idiot if you call them cowards. In fact Zeiger makes a compelling argument that the soldiers who insisted on thinking are the ones who finally broke the spirit of the beast. How do you have a war if the troops won't shoot people? How do you have a war when they won't respect fascist losers based on a bizarre, pathological and deranged system of rank endowment? How can you know whether to even deploy them, when they won't attack whomever you want? I'd say that they not only played a heroic war role, but the definitive one in destroying the draft forever. What's the point of making 'em march around and wear dumb suits, if they're just going to bite you back by making everyone around them think? We'll weed out the smart ones, by giving 'em a choice. I was a basketball-loving kid attending school on an army base, incidentally, when the Fuck The War movement really got going. I saw the FTA graffiti sprouting up everywhere, on walls and dumpsters and bowling alleys and cars and fire hydrants...and I wondered why everyone was so excited about free throw attempts all of a sudden.
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