Harass the Brass

Harass the Brass
A refusal of war orders by U.S. troops in Iraq - Is this the first of many yet to come?

By Kevin Keating

According to an AP wire story of Oct 16th, the US Army is investigating up to 19 members of a supply platoon in Iraq who refused to go on a convoy assignment, which they described as a "suicide mission." Relatives of the soldiers said the troops considered the mission too dangerous, in part because their vehicles were in extremely poor condition.

A spokesman for the occupation coalition in Baghdad said that “a small number of the soldiers involved chose to express their concerns in an inappropriate manner causing a temporary breakdown in discipline.”

The reservists are from a fuel platoon that is part of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, based in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The unit delivers food, water and fuel on trucks in combat zones.

Teresa Hill of Dothan, Alabama, who said her daughter, Amber McClenny, was among the soldiers in the platoon, received a phone message from her early Thursday morning saying they had been detained by US military authorities.

Amber McClenny said that her platoon had refused to go on a convoy to Taji, located north of Baghdad. “We had broken-down trucks, non-armored vehicles and, um, we were carrying contaminated fuel. They are holding us against our will. We are now prisoners,” she said.

Hill said Spc. Tammy Reese in Iraq, who was calling families of the detainees, later contacted her.

“She told me (Amber) was being held in a tent with armed guards,” said Hill, who spoke with her daughter Friday afternoon after her release. Her daughter said they are facing punishment that could range from a reprimand to a charge of mutiny.

The incident was first reported Friday by The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. Family members told the newspaper that several platoon members had been confined, but the military did not confirm that.

On Wednesday, 19 members of the platoon did not show up for a scheduled 7 a.m. meeting in Tallil, in southeastern Iraq, to prepare for the fuel convoy’s departure a few hours later, the military statement said.

“An initial report indicated that some of the 19 soldiers (not all) refused to participate in the convoy as directed,” the military statement says.
A whole unit refusing to go on a mission in a war zone would be a significant breach of military discipline. The military statement called the incident “isolated” and called the 343rd an experienced unit that performed "honorable" service in nine months in Iraq.

The platoon has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Hill.

The refusal of war orders by the 343rd Quartermaster Company is the first collective resistance to military discipline among U.S. enlisted personnel in Iraq to be publicly acknowledged. Accounts from independent sources who have visited Iraq and met with soldiers of the U.S. occupation forces report that morale among large numbers of U.S. enlisted personnel is poor, and has been so for most of the period of occupation and the subsequent guerrilla campaign. If resistance of this type was to snowball, the impact against the US war effort could become overwhelming.

A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War said that before President G.H.W. Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia, enlisted men and women who would be in Bush’s immediate vicinity had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away from them. This was supposedly done to avoid “accidents.” But it was also clear to people on the scene that Bush and his corporate handlers were somewhat afraid of the enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing during his unsuccessful re-election campaign.

The suppressed history of the last big U.S. war before ‘Operation Desert Storm’ shows that the Commander-in-Chief had good reason to fear and distrust the troops. Our rulers want us to forget what happened during the Vietnam War. They want us to forget what defeated their war effort -- and the importance of resistance to the war by enlisted men and women.

Until 1968 the desertion rate for U.S. troops in Vietnam was lower than in previous wars. But by 1969 the desertion rate had increased four-fold. This was not limited to Southeast Asia; desertion rates among G.I.s were on the increase world-wide. For soldiers in the combat zone, insubordination became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division flatly refused=on CBS TV=to advance down a dangerous trail. In the following 12 months, the 1st Air Cavalry notched up 35 combat refusals.

From mild forms of political protest and disobedience of war orders, the resistance among the ground troops grew into a massive and widespread “quasi-mutiny” by 1970 and 1971. Soldiers went on “search and avoid” missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese, and often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting.
By 1970, the U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions.

In an article published in the Armed Forces Journal (June 7, 1971), Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., a veteran combat commander with over 27 years experience in the Marines wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers...Sedition, coupled with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services...”

Heinl cited a New York Times article that quoted an enlisted man saying, “The American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons away...there have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion.”

“Frag incidents” or “fragging” was soldier slang in Vietnam for the killing of strict, unpopular and aggressive officers and NCOs. The word apparently originated from enlisted men using fragmentation grenades to off commanders.

Heinl wrote, "Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders who the privates and SP4s want to rub out." Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, GI Says, publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lieutenant Colonel Weldon Hunnicutt, the officer who ordered and led the attack. “The Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209 killings) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96 killings). Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.”

Congressional hearings on fraggings held in 1973 estimated that roughly 3 percent of officer and non-commissioned officer deaths in Vietnam between 1961 and 1972 were a result of fraggings. But these figures were only for killings committed with grenades, and did not include officer deaths from automatic weapons fire, handguns and knifings. The Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps estimated that only 10% of fragging attempts resulted in anyone going to trial.

In the Americal Division, plagued by poor morale, fraggings during 1971 were estimated to be running around one a week. War equipment was frequently sabotaged and destroyed. By 1972 roughly 300 anti-war and anti-military newspapers, with names like Harass the Brass, All Hands Abandon Ship and Star Spangled Bummer had been put out by enlisted people. “In Vietnam,” wrote the Ft. Lewis-McCord Free Press, “the Lifers, the Brass, are the true enemy." Another West Coast sheet advised readers: "Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."

By the early 1970's, the U.S. had to switch from a ground war to an "air war," in part because of widespread resistance among the infantry.

With the shift to an “air war” the Navy became an important center of resistance to the war. In response to institutionalized racism, black and white sailors occasionally rebelled together. The most significant of these rebellions took place on board the USS Constellation off the coast of Southern California, in November 1972.

In response to a threat of less-than-honorable discharges against several black sailors, a group of over 100 black and white sailors staged a day-and-a-half long sit-in. Fearful of losing control of his ship at sea to full-scale mutiny, the ship’s commander brought the Constellation back to San Diego.

One hundred thirty-two sailors were allowed to go ashore. They refused orders to reboard the ship several days later, staging a defiant dockside strike on the morning of November 9. In spite of the seriousness of the rebellion, not one of the sailors involved was arrested.

Sabotage was an extremely useful tactic, and with the escalation of naval involvement in the war the level of sabotage grew. In July 1972, within the space of three weeks, two of the Navy’s aircraft carriers were put out of commission by sabotage. On July 10, a massive fire swept through the admiral’s quarters and radar center of the USS Forestall, causing over $7 million in damage. This delayed the ship’s deployment for over two months.

In late July, the USS Ranger was docked at Alameda, California. Just days before the ship’s scheduled departure for Vietnam, a paint-scraper and two 12-inch bolts were inserted into the number-four-engine reduction gears causing nearly $1 million in damage and forcing a three-and-a-half month delay in operations for extensive repairs. The sailor charged in the case was acquitted.

The House Armed Services Committee summed up the crisis of rebellion in the Navy: “The U.S. Navy is now confronted with pressures...which, if not controlled, will surely destroy its enviable tradition of discipline. Recent instances of sabotage, riot, willful disobedience of orders, and contempt for authority...are clear-cut symptoms of a dangerous deterioration of discipline.”

The rebellion in the ranks didn’t emerge simply in response to battlefield conditions. A civilian anti-war movement in the U.S. had emerged on the coat-tails of the civil rights movement, at a time when the pacifism-at-any-price tactics of civil rights leaders had reached their effective limit, and were being questioned by a younger, more combative generation. Working class blacks and Latinos served in combat units out of all proportion to their numbers in the U.S. population. Major urban riots in Watts, Detroit and Newark had an explosive effect on the consciousness of these men. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. major riots erupted in 181 U.S. cities; the rulers of the United States were facing the gravest national crisis since the Civil War.

Large-scale rebellion was breaking out all over the world, even against the Maoists in China; its high point was the wildcat general strike in France in May of 1968, the last time a major industrialized democracy came close to social revolution.

The crisis that racked American society during the Vietnam War was not profound enough to create an irreparable rupture between the rulers and the ruled. In the early 1970s, the U.S. was still coasting on the relative prosperity of the post-World War II economic boom. Social conditions faced by working people in the U.S. were not anywhere near as overwhelming and unbearable as they are now. U.S. involvement in a protracted ground war, in Iraq today or in Columbia tomorrow, could have a much more rapid explosive impact on American society.

A number of years ago, in a deceitful article in Mother Jones magazine, corporate liberal historian Todd Gitlin claimed that the peaceful and legal aspects of the 1960s U.S. anti-war movement had been the most successful opposition to a war in history. Gitlin was dead wrong; as a bourgeois historian, Gitlin is paid to render service unto capital by getting it wrong, and get it wrong Gitlin does, again and again. The most effective “anti-war” movement in history was at the end of World War I, when proletarian revolutions broke out in Russia, Germany and Central Europe in 1917 and 1918. A crucial factor in the revolutionary movement of that time was the collapse of the armies and navies of Russia and Germany in full-scale armed mutiny. After several years of war and millions of casualties, the soldiers and sailors of opposing nations began to fraternize with each other, turned their guns against their commanding officers and went home to fight against the ruling classes that had sent them off to war. The war ended with a global cycle of mutinies mirroring the social unrest spreading across the capitalist world; some of the most powerful regimes on Earth were quickly toppled and destroyed.

Soldiers and sailors played a leading role in the revolutionary movement. The naval bases Kronstadt in Russia and Kiel and Wilhelmshaven in Germany became important centers of revolutionary self-organization and action, and the passing of vast numbers of armed soldiers and sailors to the side of the Soviets allowed the working class to briefly take power in Russia.

Revolutionary unrest does not happen every day, but when it does break out, it can overcome even the most powerful states with a surprising and improbable speed, and the collapse of the repressive forces of the state is a key moment in the beginning of a new way of life. It is an ugly fact that war and revolution were intimately linked in the most far-going social movements of the 20th century. With the U.S. governments’ self-appointed role as the global cop for capitalist law and order, it is likely that the crisis that will cause an irreparable break between the rulers and the ruled in the United States will be the result of an unsuccessful war.

That day may soon be upon us. At that point, widespread fraternization between anti-capitalist radicals and enlisted people will be crucial in expanding anti-war unrest into a larger opposition to the system of wage labor and commodity production that generates wars, exploitation, poverty, inequality and ecological devastation.

An examination of what happened to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War can help us see the central role “the military question” will play in a revolutionary mass movement in the 21st century. It is not a question of how a chaotic and rebellious civilian populace can out-gun the well organized, disciplined armies of the capitalist state in pitched battle, but of how a mass movement can cripple the effective fighting capacity of the military from within, and bring about the collapse and dispersal of the state’s armed forces.

What set of circumstances can compel the inchoate discontentment endemic in any wartime army or navy to advance to the level of conscious, organized resistance? How fast and how deeply can a subversive consciousness spread among enlisted people? How can rebels in uniform take effective, large-scale action against the military machine? This effort will involve the sabotage and destruction of sophisticated military technologies, an irreversible breakdown in the chain-of-command, and a terminal demoralization of the officer corps.

As rampaging market forces trash living conditions for the majority of the world’s people, working class troops will find themselves fighting counter-insurgency actions against other working class people. War games several years ago by the Marines in a defunct housing project in Oakland, dubbed ‘Operation Urban Warrior,’ highlight the fact that America’s rulers want their military to be prepared to suppress the domestic fallout from their actions -- and be ready to do it soon. But as previous waves of global unrest have shown, the forces that give rise to mass rebellion in one area of the world will simultaneously give rise to rebellion in other parts of the world. The armed forces are vulnerable to social forces at work in the larger society that spawns them. Revolt in civilian society bleeds through the fabric of the military into the ranks of enlisted people. The relationship between officers and enlisted people mirrors the relationship between bosses and employees, and similar dynamics of class conflict emerge in the military and civilian versions of the workplace. The military is never a hermetically sealed organization.

Our rulers know all this. Our rulers know that they are vulnerable to mass resistance, and they know that their wealth and power can be collapsed from within by the working class women and men whom they depend on. We need to know it, too.

Information for this article has been taken from Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today, by David Cortright, published by Anchor/Doubleday in 1975.

Readers should please send copies of this article to any enlisted people they know.
Also see: http://war.linefeed.org/propaganda/iraqandahardplace.html