Posted on 06/10/2006 11:26:50 AM PDT by KeyLargo
Sir! No Sir! Just saying no
Release Date: 2006
Ebert Rating: ***
BY ROGER EBERT / Jun 9, 2006
Quick question: When Jane Fonda was on her "FTA" concert tour during the Vietnam era, who was in her audience? The quick answer from most people would probably be, "anti-war hippies, left-wingers and draft-dodgers." The correct answer would be: American troops on active duty, many of them in uniform.
"Sir! No Sir!" is a documentary that about an almost-forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: Anti-war sentiment among U.S. troops grew into a problem for the Pentagon. The film claims bombing was used toward the end of the war because the military leadership wondered, frankly, if some of their ground troops would obey orders to attack. It's also said there were a few Air Force B-52 crews that refused to bomb North Vietnam. And in San Diego, sailors on an aircraft carrier tried to promote a local vote on whether their ship should be allowed to sail for Vietnam. One of the disenchanted veterans, although he is never mentioned in the film, was John Kerry, who was first decorated for valor, and later became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testified before Congress.
After the turning point of the Tet offensive in 1968, troop morale ebbed lower, the war seemed lost, and a protest movement encompassed active duty troops, coffeehouses near bases in America, underground GI newspapers, and a modern "underground railway" that helped soldiers desert and move to Canada. According to Pentagon figures, there were some 500,000 desertions during the Vietnam years.
The film has been written and directed by David Zeiger, who worked in an anti-war coffee- house near Fort Hood, Texas. In a narration spoken by Troy Garity, the son of Fonda and Tom Hayden, his film says, "The memory has been changed." The GI anti-war movement has disappeared from common knowledge, and a famous factoid from the period claims returning wounded veterans were spit on by "hippies" as they landed at American airports. According to the film, that is an urban legend, publicized in the film "Rambo II: First Blood."
When we reviewed "Sir! No Sir!" on "Ebert & Roeper," we cited the film's questions about the spitting story. There is a book on the subject, The Spitting Image, by Jerry Lembcke, whose research failed to find a single documented instance of such an event occurring in real life. I received many e-mails, however, from those who claimed knowledge of such incidents. The story persists, and true or false is part of a general eagerness to blame our loss in Vietnam to domestic protesters, while ignoring the substantial anti-war sentiment among troops in the field.
Parallels with the war in Iraq are obvious. One big difference is that the Vietnam-era forces were largely supplied by the draft, while our Iraq troops are either career soldiers or National Guard troops, some of them on their second or third tours of duty. The Vietnam-era draft not only generated anti-war sentiment among those of draft age, but supplied the army with soldiers who did not go very cheerfully into uniform. The willingness of today's National Guardsmen to continue in combat is courageous and admirable, but cannot be expected to last indefinitely, and the political cost of returning to the draft system would be incalculable.
A group of recent documentaries has highlighted a conflict between information and "disinformation," that Orwellian term for attempts to rewrite history. The archetype of "Hanoi Jane" has been used to obscure the fact that Fonda appeared before about 60,000 GIs who apparently agreed with her. The Swift Boat Veterans incredibly tried to deny John Kerry's patriotism. The global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" is being attacked by a TV ad campaign, underwritten by energy companies, which extols the benefits of CO2.
No doubt "Sir! No Sir!" will inspire impassioned rebuttals. No doubt it is not an impartial film, not with Fonda's son as its narrator. What cannot be denied is the newsreel footage of uniformed troops in anti-war protests, of Fonda's uniformed audiences at "FTA" concerts, of headlines citing Pentagon concern about troop morale, the "fragging" of officers, the breakdown of discipline, and the unwillingness of increasing numbers of soldiers to fight a war they had started to believe was wrong.
Cast & Credits
A documentary narrated by Troy Garity and featuring Edward Asner, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Terry Whitmore, Donald Duncan, Howard Levy, Oliver Hirsch, Susan Schnall, Randy Rowland, Louis Font, Dave Cline, Bill Short, Dave Blalock, Greg Payton, Darnell Summers, Michael Wong, Terry Whitmore, Joe Bangert, Richard Boyle, Jerry Lembcke, Terry Iverson, Tom Bernard and Keith Mather.
Balcony Releasing presents a documentary written and directed by David Zeiger. Running time: 85 minutes. No MPAA rating.
The MSM and Roger Ebert, lefty and notorious gay-friendly movie reviewer continue to hype anything anti-war or anti-military.
I will be skipping this pile of horse dung, so-called film.
What a wet dream. Any soldier who admired Jane Fonda was a traitor, just like that POS Kerry. they deserved to be lined up and shot.
The article is correct that American military morale declined dramatically towards the end of the war.
Among other things, who wants to be the last soldier to die in a lost war?
There was also a huge drug problem in the military during this period.
I remember that one of the big 3 abcnbccbs caught an army patrol, on film, in VietNam, near the end, refusing to go down a path. the MSM was calling it mutiny.
He's stopped reviewing movies and devolved into a mere huckster; and like so many other Libs lately, he is willfully squandering what little good will he had built up over the years.
I wonder how his sponsors will feel about it.
Are any of these troops at the Fonda gatherings like the 'troops' that John Kerry brought along on his anti-war whistle stops?
Ask Roger Fatbert why are enlistment levels surpassing expectations. I stopped reading his reviews. He was at U of Va
hosting a film series. I remeber him saying that european voters were much more sophisticated than americans. After that I avoided his reviews. It was at that time when Siskel was ill
and Michael Medeved appeared on Chicago radio... a breath of fresh air.
I found Michael Medeved's reviews to be more insightful and
agreeable.
this guy's supposed to be a film critic? yet he doesn't know that the line concerning civilians spitting on soldiers is to be found near the end of "First Blood" - the FIRST Rambo movie (the actual title of the second movie is "Rambo: First Blood PART TWO")?
As this guy doesn't even know the subject of his own field of specialty, why the hell should anyone heed his other assertions of "fact"?
For the record, the spitting-on-soldiers story was well established in my youth in the 1970's, to the point that I recall "sensitive" hippie types BRAGGING that they had DONE this.
"The Swift Boat Veterans incredibly tried to deny John Kerry's patriotism."
Ebert: liberal leftist.
Your honor, I rest my case.
Rog, your side won that war. Get over it.
"The Swift Boat Veterans incredibly tried to deny John Kerry's patriotism."
Typical Lefty misrepresentation. The SBV rightfully questioned his veracity about his own conduct, and his accusations against US troops. And there wasn't anything "incredible" in doing so.
Keep that Kerry propaganda were it belongs, in the dust bin of history.
"The last man to die for a mistake" is a classic Kerry post-vietnam quote. The Vietnam war was WON by 1968, Kerry and Fonda, with the collusion of foreign intelligence and communist spies, turned victory into defeat by convincing the US we couldn't win the war, that it was a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake to the estimated 2 million southeast Asians who died in communist purges after the US left.
That's not an untrue statement, though. And the long-term effects on recruitment are evident, as many people who would have signed up as only a Home Guard (without overseas deployment except following military attack by another nation) no longer have a place to enlist.
If we are going to be an active participant in overseas nation-building/interventionism, then we need a larger active-duty regular military, not the current alignment of National Guardsmen for offensive combat. Besides, the current regulations have limits on redeployment of Guardsmen, such that we are having to dig deeply into inactive reservists, like the 70-year-old sent to Afghanistan in 2004.
He gave the Gore movie 4 stars. Nuff said.
“Sir! No Sir!”
“Are you allowed to eat jelly doughnuts, Private Ebert?”
“Sir! No Sir!”
“And why not, Private Ebert?”
“Sir, because I’m too heavy, Sir.”
“Because you are a disgusting fatbody, Private Ebert!”
Not if Fatso has anything to say about it.
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