Sir! No Sir!(2005)
dir. David Zeiger
The soldiers who refused their own war.
Where to watch: Free on Kanopy; OVID (subscription); rent Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home (~$2.99)Letterboxd ↗
A documentary about the GI movement against the Vietnam War, the soldiers who refused orders, published underground papers, set up coffeehouses near army bases and, in some cases, went to prison for it. Built from archive footage and interviews with veterans who were there, it asks why a story of thousands of active-duty troops resisting their own war has been so thoroughly left out of the standard account.
Why it’s here
The film puts the people the war machine depended on at the centre: soldiers who said no. What's punk is the refusal, and the way it's been written out of the record. What's pedagogical is the question the film leaves you with: whose history gets told as 'the antiwar movement', and who got dropped? It is a natural partner to Hearts and Minds, already suggested, and The Things They Carried.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Themes
- activismcivil disobediencecollective actionmoral complicitypolitical protestrebellion against authority
- Topics
- vietnam war
Read Alongside
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A tactics manual for making trouble well.
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Dispatches
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Letters that bleed and bloom.
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Paradise of the Blind
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A Vietnamese woman carries her family's revolutionary wounds to Moscow.
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The Mountains Sing
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Four generations of Vietnamese women. A century of survival.
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The Quiet American
Graham Greene
An American arrives in Saigon with good intentions. People die.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Sorrow of War
Bảo Ninh
Vietnam won the war. Here is what winning cost.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST