Sir! No Sir! tells the story of people who, faced with the realization that they "had no choice," changed history. They include:

 

Donald Duncan

A decorated member of the elite Green Berets, he resigned from the military in protest in 1966 after 15 months in Vietnam. He wrote an article in Ramparts Magazine that became a clarion call for the just emerging GI Movement.

I was really proud of what I thought I was doing. The problem I had was realizing that what I was doing was not good. I was doing it right, but I wasn't doing right.

Howard Levy

A dermatologist who was drafted in the early 60s and assigned to train Green Beret medics, he refused to continue training them in protest of the war and was court-martialed and sentenced to 3 years in prison, which he served.

I think the most startling thing to me occurred as the court martial began…It was the most remarkable thing when hundreds, hundreds of GIs would hang out of windows, out of the barracks and give me the V-sign or give me the clenched fist. This was mind boggling to me. This was a revelation, and at that point it really became crystal clear to me that something had changed here and that something very, very important was happening.

Dave Cline

Wounded three times in Vietnam, he became an organizer for the GI Movement after returning to Ft. Hood in 1968.

When you just went through an experience of that nature, and you find out that it's all lies and that they're just lying to the American people and your silence means you're a part of keeping that lie going-I couldn't stop. I mean I couldn't be silent.

Keith Mather

In the summer of 1968, he joined the "Nine for Peace," soldiers who refused orders to Vietnam and took sanctuary in a church in San Francisco. After his arrest and confinement in the Presidio stockade, he helped organize a sit-down protest when a mentally ill prisoner was shot and killed by a guard. Facing the death penalty when the Presidio 27, as they became known, were charged with mutiny, he escaped and lived for 18 years in Canada.

I had nothing to lose, and I had no idea what was going to come. That's a free place. It's a really free place, you know? You don't know what's going to happen, you don't know where you're going, but you know what you're doing.

Randy Rowland

He was an army medic who also helped organize the Presidio stockade protest.

The Commanding General Of the 6th army, which was the jurisdiction, said that they thought that the revolution was about to start and they really had to set an example, Come down hard, and we were the guys that they decided to do that with, and they did. I mean we were on trial for our life. You know, I kind of came in as an AWOL (Absent Without Leave) and within 2 days of hitting the stockade I was facing a death sentence-for singing "We Shall Overcome."

Susan Schnall

A Navy nurse, she was arrested for flying a small plane over several military bases in the San Francisco Bay Area, dropping leaflets for the first demonstration of GIs and veterans against the war.

I remembered hearing about the B-52 bombers that were dropping leaflets on Vietnam, urging the Vietnamese to defect. And I thought well, if they can do it overseas…

Louis Font

Sent to Harvard by the military after graduating from West Point with honors, he became the first West Point graduate to refuse to fight in a war.

I remember calling my parents and they were in tears, thinking that I would end up in prison, instead of getting a Masters Degree from Harvard.  But, I told them, "You always taught me to do what is just, to do what is right."  And I really felt that I was doing the right thing.  And I believe that to this day, 34 years later. I know I did the right thing.

Jane Fonda

One of the best known actresses of the 1960s, she became a political activist after meeting a group of GI resisters in Paris. In 1970, she and Donald Sutherland organized the FTA Show, an antiwar cabaret that performed for tens of thousands of GIs near bases around the world. With the claims that persist to this day that she "betrayed the troops," this chapter of her life has been ignored.

Here was a way that I could combine my profession, my acting, with my desire to end the war. It just seemed like a perfect fit.

Bill Short

Like hundreds of soldiers, he refused to return to combat after several months in Vietnam.

I didn't know that there was a GI movement.  I just had this strong moral sense of something not being right.

Terry Whitmore

An African-American Marine, he was in the hospital with serious wounds when Lyndon Johnson pinned a medal on him during a visit. Weeks later, he was ordered back to Vietnam just as Black people were rioting across the U.S. in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Seeing federal troops in his hometown of Memphis, he decided to desert and made his way to Sweden.

Then you actually see what I saw, what was going on in the States. Dudes were running down the streets wearing the same kind of uniform that I got.  They're in Memphis. They're beating up on people. Wait a minute, we're over here beating up on people over here and you're beating up on Black people. Dogs are running everywhere. Tanks are on the streets.

Joe Bangert

Having served in Vietnam in the Marines, he testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation, a hearing organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The veterans testified to war crimes committed as a matter of policy by the United States in Vietnam.

America went through a choke, because they didn't want to believe that these things occurred in the name of the American people, supposedly supporting freedom and liberation and democracy throughout the world. And there was this terrible slaughter, this terrible inane slaughter.

Billy Dean Smith

By 1970, hundreds of officers in Vietnam had been killed by their own men in a practice called "fragging"-throwing a fragmentation grenade into an officer's tent. After one such incident, Billy Dean Smith, an African-American GI, was arrested and charged with murder. His case became a cause of the GI Movement, and in 1971 he was acquitted after spending 22 months in solitary confinement.

I was chosen for the trial because I was an outspoken critic of the war.

The WORMS

They were Air Force interpreters, trained in Vietnamese, who flew over North Vietnam intercepting radio communications. Seeing the difference between what they knew was going on and what the American people were being told, they formed the WORMS, "We Openly Resist Military Stupidity." During the infamous 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, many of them went on strike.

…The bombing of populated areas, civilian areas; the bombing of hospitals-things that the US denied over and over again that we were engaged in. Those are things that we were engaged in and we had access to that information. And the lies were so stark, it challenged your own dignity, it challenged your own loyalty, it challenged your own humanity.

Jerry Lembcke

Having returned from Vietnam to become a professor of sociology, he wrote the book, The Spitting Image, in which he investigated and found no actual cases of GIs being spat on by antiwar protestors-a claim that was widely spread during the buildup to the Gulf War.

If you looked back at the front pages of newspapers in 1969 and 1970, what are you going to see about Vietnam Vets?  They're in the streets.  They're political activists.  They're on the Capital Lawn.  They're giving the Nixon Administration fits.