Image by Annie Spratt.
When I attended high school at a school for US military dependents in the early 1970s, I got to know a couple of GIs who wrote for the Frankfurt am Main/Heidelberg version of a GI underground paper. The paper, called FTA (Fuck the Army) With Pride was usually a six page mimeographed collection of articles about local acts of resistance, asshole commanding officers and other stories cribbed from the Black Panther newspaper, Liberation News Service clippings. The graphics were usually simple ink drawings. Since I hung out some in the Post Exchange cafeteria and worked summer jobs at military installations where many of my co-workers were troops, I began distributing the paper in those places and at the high school. The distribution process went something like this. I would pick up twenty or so copies of the latest issue at the local Post Exchange from a GI. Then I would drop off a couple copies on different tables in the cafeteria, give one or two to friends and leave others in places where GIs would find them. Every copy of the paper had the following message prominently displayed: This is your personal property! It cannot be taken from you! This was followed by the appropriate regulation number. Of course, the military brass did not like the paper and, if one was caught reading it on Army time, the lifer who caught you could fuck with you, even if it was against regulations to do so.
We started hearing rumors about a FTA theater troupe being organized in 1971. Two of the names involved with the troupe were Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, both of whom were becoming quite outspoken in their opposition to the war. We hoped the troupe’s tour would bring them to Germany. Unfortunately it didn’t. Instead, the group toured the Pacific Rim, bringing its antiwar and radical message to military members physically closer to Vietnam. Then the troupe disbanded. A little while afterward (1972), a film of the Pacific Rim tour was released, only to be removed from theaters after a couple of weeks. Although questions as to why it was so quickly withdrawn from the public realm remain, the fact that virtually all known copies were subsequently destroyed suggests government censorship. Most people had forgotten about the film until it was remastered and re-released in 2021. That re-release seems to have been part of the impetus for a book just released by film critic and lecturer Lindsay Goss.
Titled F*ck The Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War, Goss’s text is a critical examination of the film, the actors and the work of the show. At the same time, it is a rejection of a revisionist history that pretends antiwar organizers and protesters were against the troops and had little actual interaction with them. By shifting its focus between the GIs in the audiences the FTA troupe played in front of, the involvement of various antiwar military members in the shows and the scripts, and the comments of the soldiers included in the film, Goss provides a convincing argument that the antiwar movement was part of many soldier’s daily reality. This fact challenges the history put forth by the Pentagon and its myth makers that would have us believe the mainstream portrayal of the Vietnam veteran either as a patriot who hated the antiwar movement, a psycho or a tragic figure living on the streets.
As Goss explains, the template for the FTA shows was the US-government sponsored USO-hosted show emceed by comedian Bob Hope that toured military bases every year. This show usually featured a number of second tier Hollywood actors and actresses, a few beauty queens and maybe a couple singers or bands—all held together by Hope’s in-between acts patter of puns, often sexist jokes and not very subtle support for the US war on the Vietnamese. As the war continued and became less and less popular, Hope’s writers modified some of the more nationalistic elements of the script, but there was never any doubt that the show was an attempt to rally support for the war and an eventual victory. Like the FTA shows, the USO tour was filmed. Unlike the FTA shows, it was then edited down to an hour television special that was shown to audiences in the US usually within a few weeks of the last performance on the road. Once again, the propaganda purposes of the televised edition were plain—to garner continued support for the Pentagon’s exercise in mass murder.
Although Hope’s show poked fun at the daily hum drum and idiocies of military life, it never did so in a manner that questioned the actual role of the military as the armed wing of US imperialism. It rarely even joked about the often absurd demands some officers made of enlisted troops and certainly never questioned what or why the United States was in Vietnam. The FTA shows began with these questions. Goss’s book details how as the FTA tour continued, the performance’s political analysis of imperialism sharpened together with a growing challenge to sexism among the troops (and in the greater military and society). In addition, non-actors among the troops were included in various performances, expressing their antiwar views through song and conversation. This element of the FTA tour is prominently featured in the film and discussed in depth in Goss’s text.
Because it was an intentionally political show with definite leftist politics, there was plenty of discussion and occasional disagreements between the cast members. These disagreements did lead to some members leaving the original cast. However, as often happens, the debates also sharpened the politics and the approaches to be taken to get the politics across. It is always a challenge to weave politics and art together, especially in a political environment like that of the United States which is essentially conservative. The right wing culture police will use their power to shut down overtly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist art while the leftist culture police will question the purity of an artist’s politics, especially if those artists are wealthy and famous. The actors in the FTA troupe—especially Jane Fonda—felt the heat in this regard. Indeed, even today some right wing elements continue to refer to her as Hanoi Jane because of her support for the liberation forces in Vietnam. In the 1970s, certain elements on the left didn’t take her seriously, occasionally claiming she was just dabbling in antiwar politics because it was popular.
In the final pages of F*ck the Army, Goss addresses this critique from the Left better than almost anyone I can think of. After pointing out that there is always a danger of a popular actor or other artist being accused of being a “fake pretending to be an ally,” she writes “we must not be more afraid of seeming fake than of pursuing liberation.” (198) In other words, one should focus on the political goal desired, even at the risk of losing income, facing criticism and being mocked or embarrassed. We should not not do what needs to be done.
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