That's right, you read it. So serious was Nixon's threat that it would have preceded The Pentagon Papers. Tricky Dick, whose war planning is post PP findings, was willing to nuke North Vietnam despite evidence that the US knew it could not win the war. Nixon, who came to power proclaiming a desire to end the war "honorably," was willing to defy what planners, like Ellsberg, were telling him and nuke NVM into acquiescence -- for political purposes. In the same section, Ellsberg writes that he was convinced that Kissinger believed that he was "the most dangerous man in America," who "must be stopped at all costs" because he knew too much about Tricky Dick's plans.
And there were other not insignificant factors that were at play in 1972. Many of the draftees -- involuntary soldiers -- were old enough to die for political purposes, but not regarded as mature enough to vote in national elections. This was a major reason for draft card resistance. In addition, there was a serious over-representation of African-Americans in the war. And many of them came to understand that what they were doing -- even without any MSM announcement of Nixon's intention to nuke their adversary -- that what they were doing was essentially performing genocide for the Man. Oliver Stone's Platoon and Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness -- Apocalypse Now hint at the contradiction black soldiers felt. But perhaps the best, and most direct, reference to this consciousness was delivered in Spike Lee's recent Da 5 Bloods (2020). You can see the tension and anxiety brought on by their contradictory mission that Hanoi Hannah goes to work on in her broadcasts. "Why you here, black soldier? You're war at home." Check it out:
While Fonda was "treasonously" carousing with the enemy, the war amounted to criminality. This was especially apparent after Kent State, when even white middle-class people on a college campus could be shot down by military reserves (National Guard) that the aggression in Vietnam was also an aggression against the American People -- who, by and large, did not want the war, and did not buy the Communist-domino effect as causal agent.
All of this is necessary background to a review of the recently re-released film, FTA (1972). The film was chased out of distribution and a very limited run in cinemas, due, to a large extent, not so much the message ("stop the war"), which was widespread by Nixon's second term (which he won in a landslide anyway), but because of the participation of American GIs overseas in the film's making. f*ck the Army, as it's otherwise known as, is a documentary of an anti-war "vaudeville" act that travelled to the troops in the Asian Pacific during the war and was meant as an alternative to USO offerings. Usual fare was sexy ladies brought out on stage to shoot cap guns, followed by comedians shticking 'em up. Check out how Coppola handles it in Apocalypse Now:
At one point, in a latter-day interview, Fonda even references the work of Bob Hope, who, she says, was a cheerleader for the war. FTA intersperses performances with talks with troops opining about the pointlessness of the war.
FTA is a troupe made up of about a dozen people that Fonda very carefully set up to more fairly reflect the racial nature of the war's participants (another complaint about the USO's offerings was its leaning toward whites and males in the audience). There were 21 shows, Fonda tells us, attended by 64000 military personnel. Starring with Fonda was Donald Sutherland, fresh off a stint as the crazed hippy tank driver, Oddball, in Kelly's Heroes (1970), a soldierly anti-war film in its own right, that may (or may not be) a precursor to the first Iraq war-cult hit, Three Kings (1999), starring George Clooney. The film was directed by a nobody, Francine Parker. And its blurb is simple and accurate: "Available for the first time since it mysteriously disappeared in 1972 after only one week in theaters, this raucous film is a riveting slice of the Vietnam anti-war movement." More or less accurate.
Frankly, the folky music produced in FTA is not Woodstock quality, and the anti-military skits may seem stale in today's Forever War environment. Back then, to many of us, it seemed that if we could only end the Vietnam War Americans would realize a "peace dividend." We could finally set our sights on fixing some of the socio-economic ills that had been accentuated by the war and the resistance to it at home. But non, driven of that happened, and the sad reality is that America, driven by a war machine that has continued almost unabated since 1945, and continues to grow and expand -- the most recent budget is its largest ever -- for reasons that are incomprehensible without seeing in it continued unbridled imperial growth, and after two major defeats: Vietnam and, now, Afghanistan. Two of America's longest and costliest foreign wars have been for virtually nothing. And the blood and treasure lost, in combination with the damage done to America's reputation and to the environment, is staggering to consider. The social ills that could have been addressed with that money wasted on unnecessary wars.
A principal joy of the film is the ebullience and energy of the performers and the warm reception they received from their military audience. f*ck the Army ("and the Navy and the Maries and the Air Force") had a lot of resonance for soldiers attending. In fact, their response makes it fairly easy to see why the film may have been assisted in its quick departure from theaters by Pentagon frowns. Nixon was known to hate war protesters -- to the degree he had them infiltrated and wouldn't have easily accepted soldiers protesting the war on film. During the opening sequence of FTA, one of the performers gives a spirited rendition of "My Ass Is Mine" to protest the pawnmanship required to serve the war effort.
In fact the opening minutes of the film provide a micro-glimpse of how the show goes, with skits and music carrying the torch. And, instead of Bob Hope, pleasing military brass at USO shows, FTA GIs get a healthy dose of empathy, satire, and sympathetic politics, Barbarella Unplugged and Unmadeup says f*ck the Aggression. It's also amusing to have a skit where Tricky Dick and his wife Pat worry aloud over "protesters" out front, and when Nixon fears he made need to call in "the third Marines," Pat says "we can't" because they're the protesters. This bit also recalls a piece Sy Hersh wrote for the Atlantic describing the grim Last Days of Nixon, during which he is said to have wanted to call in troops to surround the White House and refuse to leave and military aides secretly conversed on how to ignore any nuclear threats Nixon made (apparently, when he got shitfaced, heads rolled in his mind).
FTA, though a bit long-toothed in places, is, in some places, still prescient and relevant to military activities in the Pacific Rim region that FTA performed in. It is of some use to see pictured the proximity of Japan to Okinawa to Taiwan to China, which provides a graphic impression of the current tensions there. Since the "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor back on December 7, 1941, and the subsequent victory by the US over Japan amplified by the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the region has been important ideological battlefield, and the US, by way of its occupation of Okinawa and South Korea, has sought to control influences in the region. The US government has been doing The Asia Pivot for more than 75 years.
When we read about troubles in the straits of Taiwan, it doesn't tell half the story that this image does about the conflicting geopolitical ideologies at work between the US (in Okinawa and the Philippines), Japan, and Taiwan.
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