One of the least known but most important chapters in the history of the American antiwar movement was the rebellion of troops within the military. In June 1971 the prestigious military publication Armed Forces Journal published an article entitled, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” Written by a retired Marine Corps Colonel, the article stated: “The morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.” In virtually every corner of the military, the burden of fighting an unpopular and unwinnable war led to dissent, social disruption and institutional decay.

When I learned the full story of what happened at My Lai, I was in the Army stationed at Fort Bliss Texas. I enlisted in 1968 for a stateside assignment hoping to skate by and avoid the war, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it. Even though I was stationed far from the front, I was part of the military machine and was contributing indirectly to a war I came to see as unjust and unwinnable.

In basic training they made us watch the propaganda film, Why Vietnam?, with President Johnson drawling on about the supposed noble purposes of the war. Our commanders tried to convince us that we were fighting to defend democracy and help the Vietnamese people. The more we learned about what was actually happening, though, the more skeptical we became. As I talked with vets coming home and began to read about the history of the war, I became deeply alarmed and troubled. I could not be silent about something I knew to be wrong. I felt compelled to speak out against the war even though I was an active duty soldier.

This was a time of growing dissent and unrest within the military, as in the rest of society. A widespread antiwar movement was emerging among GIs. We participated in peace demonstrations, signed antiwar petitions and published underground newspapers at military bases and aboard ships.

Fort Bliss had an active group called GIs for Peace. We organized protests against the war and had hundreds of members and supporters among troops at the base. We published a monthly newspaper, The Gigline, and had our own GI antiwar coffeehouse in downtown El Paso. When those of us in the GI movement saw the news of the massacre at My Lai, we were horrified but not surprised. Our ranks included combat veterans who had recently returned from the killing zones. We knew how the war was being fought: combat sweeps and attacks against villages, free-fire zones, and commanders constantly pushing for higher body counts. The military strategy was to drive people out of their ancestral villages into so-called strategic hamlets. In such a war, we knew, civilian casualties were an inevitable and constant reality.

Many of our members at Ft. Bliss were outraged when a low ranking officer Lt. William Calley was the only one convicted for the massacre, while all the higher-ups who ordered the mission got off free. An angry local combat veteran went to the El Paso police department and asked to be arrested, saying if Calley was guilty so was he. GIs for Peace responded by convening a public hearing in which he and other troops testified that they too had attacked civilians and described what they had done.

My Lai was the product of an unjust war that never should have been fought in which American GIs ended up waging war against the Vietnamese civilians they were supposedly sent to protect.

Among U.S. troops in Vietnam, organized dissent were rare, but acts of direct resistance were pervasive and tore at the very fabric of military capability.  By 1970 the Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam were experiencing widespread defiance and forms of noncooperation that affected operational capacity. The most significant form of resistance to the war was combat refusal. On August 26, 1969 the headline on the front page of the New York Daily News read “Sir, My Men Refuse to Go!” with the subtitle “Weary Viet GIs Defy Order.”

You can see the front page headline on the wall of this exhibit.

The article told the story of sixty soldiers in an Army company near Da Nang who refused direct orders from their commander. There were many other instances of combat refusal.  One study found 35 incidents of combat refusal in the Army’s 1^st Cavalry Division during 1970. Some of the incidents involved entire units. This was an average of three combat refusals per month in just one division. If we extrapolate the experience of the 1^st Cavalry to the other six Army divisions in Vietnam at the time, it is likely that hundreds of mutinous events occurred in the latter years of the ground war. When commanders sent their units into the field, they could not be certain that the troops would follow orders.

The most horrific indication of the breakdown of the armed forces was the prevalence of fragging, an attack with a fragmentation grenade.  The Army began keeping records on assaults with explosive devices in 1969. By July 1972, the total number of fragging incidents had reached 551, with 86 fatalities and over 700 injuries. The targets of these fragging attacks were mostly officers and noncommissioned officers. The frequency of fragging in Vietnam War indicated an army at war with itself. It provides grim evidence of the anger and social decay that were tearing the military apart.

By 1971 acts of sabotage by Navy crew members became a serious problem in the Navy. Figures supplied to a Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives listed 488 acts of “damage or attempted damage” in the Navy during fiscal year 1971, including 191 incidents of sabotage, 135 arson attacks, and 162 episodes of “wrongful destruction.”. Two U.S. aircraft carriers were put out of commission for commission for months by acts of sabotage in July 1972, the U.S.S. Forrestal and the U.S.S. Ranger. These actions caused major damage and disrupted Navy operations.

Antiwar dissent and resistance also emerged in the Air Force. The number of GI papers at air bases jumped from 10 at the beginning of 1971 to 30 a year later. Antiwar coffeehouses opened near several bases, and demonstrations and protest actions occurred at or near air bases in April and May 1972.