Title rated 4 out of 5 stars, based on 15 ratings(15 ratings)
DVD, 2006
Current format, DVD, 2006, , All copies in use.
DVD, 2006
Current format, DVD, 2006, , All copies in use. Offered in 0 more formats
In archival footage and interviews, this film tells the story of an almost forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: the war's most crucial naysayers were soldiers--in the barracks and on the front lines--the GI anti-war movement. Beginning with acts of conscience by individuals, dissatisfaction escalated with the number of conscripts. Courts-martial, destroyed careers, imprisonment in military stockades or federal penitentiaries and desertions were common. There were also pirate radio stations, underground newspapers, a modern "underground railway" that helped soldiers desert and move to Canada, coffeehouses near U.S. bases where opinions shaped and altered by first-hand experiences were shared, and groups organized around every imaginable axis, which led to anti-war sentiment among U.S. troops being recognized at the highest levels in the Pentagon. On one level, this film is a corrective to the rah-rah rhetoric about Vietnam pushed by the right wing, while undermining the popular fiction that opposition to the war came strictly from outside the military, and reversing the 20 year process of erasing the GI Movement from the collective memory of the nation and the world.
From the community