antagonism
Olive-Drab Rebels Subversion of the US Armed Forces
in the Vietnam War
The American invasion of South Vietnam is regularly used as an example of the dangers inherent in occupying and fighting a protracted and domestically unpopular war against an essentially hostile population. The potential for this or that war to turn into someone’s ‘Vietnam’ is repeated ad nauseam. The fact that by the early 1970s the US military “where not near mutinous” was “in a state approaching collapse” (1) is less widely advertised as a reason for their eventual humiliating withdrawal.
The two texts reprinted here attempt to understand the effect that the Vietnam war had on the American military and its ongoing consequences. The first, ‘Harass the Brass’ is the latest version of a leaflet handed out on various occasions at San Fransisco’s ‘Fleet Week’ - a large naval show attended by thousands of enlistees who come into the city from the ships. It provides less specific detail about Vietnam than ‘The Olive-Drab Rebels’ but has a far better analysis of the potential relationship between mutiny in the military and revolution in society as a whole.
‘The Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organising During The Vietnam Era’, written by Matthew Rinaldi and published in 1974, offers a detailed account of attempts by soldiers, civilians and the left to organise within the US armed forces. It provides a lot of interesting and useful information which is not widely available elsewhere, which, unfortunately, is analysed from a leftist perspective. Whilst it makes some mild criticisms of the practices adopted by the groups that tried to parasitise rebellion in the military, these would seem to be mainly that they were unsuccessful and failed to build a proper revolutionary organisation or instill the correct ideology.
Its characterisation of the ultimate goal of military organising as being the winning of “armed contingents for the left” which would then be part of the “armies of the revolution” is simply wrong. The point of military organising is to subvert not to win over groups of soldiers as an army. The events of the Spanish civil war clearly show that when a revolutionary struggle decomposes into a conventional war of fronts between opposing armies, the revolution is lost.
The question of the way that wider contemporary events, such as riots in Watts (Los Angeles) and other American cities as well as widespread mass strikes and other proletarian resistance, related to revolt within the army is also not adequately considered. Its somewhat curious that the author regards it as a period when “the working class in civilian life was relatively dormant”, maybe its due to the fact that rioting, wildcat strikes and sabotage are less susceptible to leftist interference and quietly forgotten about in historical accounts.
The extent to which both warfare and the world in general has changed in the years since ‘The Olive Drab Rebels’ was written raises the question of its relevance to the present situation. Downsizing and mechanisation to minimise reliance on a mass of potentially troublesome human beings has occurred on a massive scale both in the military and industry in general, coupled with the defeat and reversal of the social surge of the 1960s and ’70s. However a number of factors exist which would suggest that the experience of Vietnam has had ongoing repercussions and can still point to ways in which we can resist and undermine capitalist war.
One of the most obvious effects is the deep reluctance of the US to commit large numbers of troops to any one place for prolonged periods, along with a reliance on bombing its victims into submission rather than fighting bloody conflicts on the ground. At some point the possibility still exists that its present colonial adventurism will come badly unstuck and it will be forced to occupy territory physically rather than rely on client states and puppet regimes to do its dirty work.
The fact that almost all armies in advanced capitalist states are volunteer based does not necessarily mean that they will always be willing to die pointlessly, as Rinaldi points out - “There is a common misconception that it was draftees who were the most disaffected elements in the military. In fact, it was often enlistees who were most likely to engage in open rebellion.”
Although the near disintegration of the American military did not lead to anything approaching a revolutionary situation, it shows that even the parts of capitalist society and the state which seem the most stable and powerful are vulnerable and can be dissolved and subverted.
Both of these texts are also available at www.geocities.com/cordobakaf. Other texts and information on opposition to war can be found at www.geocities.com/nowar_buttheclasswar.
(1) Colonel Robert D. Heinl, The Collapse of the Armed Forces, North American Newspaper Alliance, Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971.