Last Thursday, we screened Sir, No Sir, the second film in the Cinema of the Vietnam War series we are co-presenting with Brooklyn For Peace.  It’s an award-winning documentary about anti-war activism within the military, including underground GI newspapers, the coffeehouse movement, and some high-profile cases of resistance such as Dr. Howard Levy’s.

We were lucky to have Dr. Levy himself leading a discussion following the film.  A dermotologist, Dr. Levy was drafted in 1965 and assigned to instruct Green Berets in some simple medicine that they could use in Vietnam to “win hearts and minds” while they continued to bomb the country.  Dr. Levy believed this was unethical use of medicine and therefore refused to continue training Green Berets – a decision for which he was court marshalled and spent three years in prison.

Several people in the audience said that seeing coverage of Dr. Levy’s case on television in the early 60s was a defining moment in their decision to take action in opposing the Vietnam War.

The discussion inevitably lead to comparisons between the anti-war movement then and now, some inspiring, some disheartening.  Did we learn anything from those earlier movements?  Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) certainly did: following one of the strategies of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, IVAW held Winter Soldier hearings this past March and you can watch their testimony online here.

As someone who works with oral histories, I was particularly interested in one part of the documentary where sociologist Jerry Lembcke basically debunks a story we’ve all heard in symbolizing one of the major problems of the anti-Vietnam War movement: a GI returning home from Vietnam in uniform gets spit on and called “baby killer” by a young hippie woman.  Many veterans describe simliar experiences, but according to Lembcke, it’s unlikely that ever happened.  Memory is so interesting: what’s emotionally true versus what’s physically experienced; I’m curious to read more in his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.

Incedently, there’s a great series of photographs of U.S. military who have served Iraq and Afghanistan in this week’s New Yorker by Platon: Service.