On Monday, Ann Wright, a Retired Army Colonel and former U.S. diplomat,
found herself handcuffed to a chair inside the Fort McNair military base
in Washington after being detained at the base. Her crime: passing out
a flyer for the film ‘Sir, No Sir: The Suppressed Story of the GI
Movement to End the War In Vietnam.’
Transcript from Democracy Now interview (5/24) with Ann Wright and “Sir, No Sir!” producer and director David Zeiger below.
IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO THE TRANSCRIPT: Ann Wright has not been charged with sedition, as reported on Democracy Now, but simply detained.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’re going to look at someone else who
was accused by the military of sedition. Her name is Ann Wright. She’s
a retired Army colonel, former U.S. diplomat, spent 29 years in the
military, later served as a high-ranking diplomat in the State
Department. In 2001, she helped oversee the re-opening of the U.S.
mission in Afghanistan. In 2003, she resigned her State Department post
to protest the war in Iraq. Well, this week, on Monday, she found
herself handcuffed to a chair inside the Fort McNair military base in
Washington after being detained at the base. She joins us now in
Washington to explain what happened. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ann
Wright.
ANN WRIGHT: Well, thank you Amy. It’s good to be here this morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened?
ANN WRIGHT: Yes. I was over at Fort McNair. I’m going to
take this out, because there’s some interference on the line. I was
over at Fort McNair to be at a court martial for the young soldier who
is on trial for part of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, dog handler. We
were over there to protest that Rumsfeld ought to be court-martialed,
as well as that young kid, and while we were over there and found out
that the court martial was not going to take place at Fort McNair, but
at Fort Meade. I decided to take the opportunity to leave some of the
materials that were there, and the materials were on Sir, No Sir.
AMY GOODMAN: So you were handcuffed for giving out the pamphlet, Sir, No Sir?
ANN WRIGHT: That’s correct. The young military police
officer or police sergeant that came over said I was leaving seditious
materials all over the post and that I needed to be detained, and he
said as a part of detention that I had to be handcuffed. And I said,
‘Well, I’m a 59-year-old Army colonel, retired, with arthritic knees
and no belligerency at all,’ and while I certainly agreed to go with
him to the police station and discuss this, there was no need to
handcuff me. However, that argument did not work with him, and I was
handcuffed out on the picnic grounds of Fort McNair, placed into a
patrol car to go 75 feet to the station, took them longer to get me in
there in the police car than it took to get to the police station.
And then I was handcuffed, ultimately, to the chair for
another 45 minutes, until a military lawyer came down and said — as
I’d been requesting, I said, “Guys, you probably need to go up and get
some higher authority on this one.” So, finally the lawyer came down
and said, “Uncuff her,” and then we had a discussion on whether or not
materials should be placed on a military base, materials like the
postcard that announces the showing in Washington, D.C. of the
historical documentary of G.I. resistance in Vietnam called Sir, No Sir.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we invited the Army to join us on the
program, and they declined the offer. An Army spokesperson did issue a
statement defending its treatment of you, Ann Wright. The statement
read, quote, “Colonel Wright was inappropriately distributing
literature in violation of Army regulations 210-7 and 360-1, Section
3-8, which prohibit distribution of any non-DOD material on an Army
installation without prior permission from the installation commander.”
Well, we’re going to turn right now to an excerpt of the film, Sir, No Sir, that she was putting out pamphlets about. We’re going go to that film and then go to the filmmaker who made Sir, No Sir.
WALTER CRONKITE: A new phenomenon has cropped up at
several army bases these days: a so-called underground G.I. press which
consists largely of anti-war newspapers. Military authorities are
clamping down hard on the papers.
MONTAGE: Fort Knox, Kentucky, Fun, Travel and Adventure, Fort Gordon, Georgia, The Last Harass, Fort Lewis, Washington, Fed Up, Fort Benning, Georgia, Chanute Air Force Base, Four Year Bummer, Fort Dix, New Jersey, Shakedown, Fort Hood, Texas, Fatigue Press is published by a group of radical soldiers stationed at this Army base.
DAVID CLINE: And we used to distribute it clandestinely
on base. We’d go around and leave bunches of them in barracks, as we’d
go through barracks at night and leave them in foot lockers. If you
were caught distributing literature on base, that was a court-martial
offense.
NARRATOR: Despite the military’s best efforts, the
underground press became the lifeblood of the G.I. movement, as the
Army’s own recruiting slogan, “Fun, Travel and Adventure,” turned into
the popular G.I. expression, “F— the Army.”
SOLDIER: There must have been close to 300 anti-war
newspapers written, produced and published on bases all throughout the
world. It was wherever there were G.I.s, American G.I.s in the world.
SUSAN SCENALL: We got together a number of times and
talked about how we were going to organize active-duty G.I.s go to the
peace demonstration. And then I remember also 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, then we can
hire a small private plane, load it up with leaflets, and drop the
leaflets on military bases in the San Francisco Bay Area, thousands and
thousands of leaflets. At one point I know we were a little concerned
about getting shot down, but nothing happened. Evidently they landed
pretty accurately. That’s what they testified at the court-martial.
JANE FONDA: I grew up believing that if our flag was
flying over a battlefield that we were on the side of the angels. My
father fought in the Second World War. He won awards and medals, and,
you know, I grew up during the ‘good wars.’
JANE FONDA: [playing Pat Nixon] Mr. President, there’s a terrible demonstration going on outside.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: [playing Richard Nixon] Oh, there’s always a demonstration going on outside, Pat.
JANE FONDA: Yeah, but Richard, this one is completely out of control.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: What are they asking for this time?
JANE FONDA: Free Angela Davis and all political prisoners, out of Vietnam now, and draft all government officials.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: Well, now we have people to take care of that. They’ll do their job, you do your job, and I’ll do my job.
JANE FONDA: But Richard, you don’t understand. They’re storming the White House.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: Oh, in that case I’d better call out the Third Marines.
JANE FONDA: You can’t, Richard.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: Why not?
JANE FONDA: It is the Third Marines.
MICHAEL ALAIMO: Oh.
JANE FONDA: What if we put together an antiwar show that’s, you know, the opposite side of the coin from the Bob Hope show?
FREE THEATER ASSOCIATES: [Singing] I went down to that
base. / They took one look at my face / and read out an order to bar
me. / I said, “Foxtrot Tango Alpha / Free The Army!’
JANE FONDA: “F– the Army.’ We always said, “Free the Army!” or “Fun, Travel and Adventure,” but it really meant, ‘F— the Army.’
DR. HOWARD LEVY: I think the most startling thing to me
occurred, however, as the court martial began. What would happen was,
we would walk from the parking lot to the building where the
court-martial was being held, and it was the most remarkable thing when
hundreds, hundreds of G.I.s 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.
NARRATOR: And with soldiers beginning to question the
war in the wake of the Tet Offensive, thousands began going AWOL, or
Absent Without Leave. Many found their way to San Francisco, where a
series of events brought the emerging G.I. antiwar movement onto the
national stage.
INTERVIEWER: Have you given much thought to the penalty of being AWOL?
AWOL SOLDIER: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Can I see your chains, please?
OLIVER HIRSCH: We joined together in July 1968. We took
sanctuary in a church and chained ourselves to ministers. We
essentially called the press and said to them, ‘We’re not going to
Vietnam. We’re refusing our orders, and, in fact, we’re resigning from
the military. Come and get us.’
KEITH MATHER: They had nothing to lose, and they had no
idea what was going to come, and that’s a free place. It’s a really
free place, you know? You don’t know what’s going to happen, don’t know
where you’re going, but you know what you’re doing.
And that was my introduction to the San Francisco Presidio stockade.
REPORTER: For 19-year-old private, Michael Bunch, life in
the Army had been little more than a series of AWOL violations. His
last stop was here at the Presidio stockade, where he was fatally shot
last Friday while trying to escape from a work detail.
KEITH MATHER: So we reacted viscerally and with anger
and disgust and outrage. And then things started to calm down, because
we started to plan. We came to a decision that the best thing we could
do was to have some kind of a demonstration.
SOLDIER PROTESTER: At a certain point, the commandant
came out and read us the mutiny act, and we just kept singing louder
and, you know, kind of linked arms and sing and sing.
KEITH MATHER: We were scared, man. I’ll tell you, we
were really scared, but we had them right where we wanted them. They
were finally listening to us, man. That’s the first time I can ever
remember anybody listening to us while I was in the military.
SOLDIER PROTESTER: The commanding general of the Sixth
Army, which was the jurisdiction, and he said that they thought that
the revolution was about to start and that they really had to set an
example, you know, come down hard, and we were the guys that they
decided to do that with, and they did. I mean, you know, we were on
trial for our lives. You know, I kind of came in as an AWOL and within
two days of hitting the stockade, I was, you know, I was facing the
death sentence for singing “We Shall Overcome.”
INTERVIEWER: How did you come to the decision to desert?
TERRY WHITMORE: You know, when you laying on your back
and you can’t move for day in and day out, you have a lot of time to
think. So you think about what you did, you know, what you’ve done,
things that you’ve gone through, the people that you’ve killed, the
people that are dying.
Then you actually see what I saw, what was going on in the
States. Dudes are 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.
NEWS ANCHOR: This was Armed Forces Day, and in many
cities across the country there were the usual parades, displays and
bands. But the recent surge of protest over the war in Indochina cast a
shadow over today’s activities. This was even true at some military
bases, where the presence of antiwar demonstrators led to the
cancellation of planned observances.
DAVID CLINE: A thousand G.I.s marched the first year
right outside the base, and they told people it was off limits, and
they told people that if you went there, you were going to get
arrested. Store owners downtown were putting up plywood coverings on
their windows, because the cops told them it was going to turn into a
riot, but then people decided to change it to “Armed Farces Day,”
because, you know, we thought making fun of your enemy was as valuable
as yelling at them. The second year, 1971, there had to be three or
four thousand on the streets.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the film Sir, No Sir, as we go to the phone right now to speak to its director, David Zeiger. Welcome to Democracy Now!
DAVID ZEIGER: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s good to have you with us. At the
top of this segment we were talking to Ann Wright, who was handcuffed
on a military base for handing out the fliers that advertise this film.
Your response?
DAVID ZEIGER: Well, this is the film that tells the
long-suppressed story of the G.I. movement against the war, the scenes
that you just showed. It’s not surprising to me that the military
responded this way. This is something that over the last 35 years,
particularly beginning with the Reagan administration, the government
and the military has gone to great lengths to suppress any knowledge
that this movement happened. I mean, here is a movement that involved
over 300 underground newspapers, thousands of G.I.s demonstrating, a
level of resistance that led to the pulling out of the ground troops in
the early 1970s, and yet no one knows anything about this movement.
It’s been replaced with the myth of G.I.s being spat on by antiwar
activists when they returned. So, of course, it doesn’t surprise me
that it would be responded to by the military in this way, referring to
it as sedition and whatever. Our response is that it just brings out
how important this story actually is. This isn’t just a story about
history. It’s a story that really speaks to the situation that’s faced
by hundreds of thousands of soldiers today.
AMY GOODMAN: According to the Pentagon, half a million
soldiers deserted during the Vietnam War, and also what I think was so
impressive about it is the military publications, the underground
military publications, and how many there were around this country and
the world.
DAVID ZEIGER: I don’t think there’s ever been something
like this at any time in history. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of
underground publications, mimeographed, printed. I mean, people were
putting these things out daily, and sometimes it would be a couple
hundred, sometimes it would be five thousand, fifteen thousand, and
these were all put out by soldiers themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: David Zeiger, I want to thank you for being with us, producer and director of the film Sir, No Sir,
currently playing around the country in theaters. His production
company is Displaced Films, and he’s made films that have been shown on
PBS, HBO and festivals around the world, and for those who are
wondering, our music break, what it was. It was from the film, and it
was Rita Martinson singing “Soldier, We Love You.” And that does it for
today’s broadcast. Thanks also to Ann Wright who joined us.