Mutiny in armed forces

[historian]

Does anyone here think (especially those who have been in the forces) believe or think that it is possible for those poor bastards who are dying in Iraq so Halliburton can make money, will one day say to Bush "F... you and your orders. Im going home"
If that happened it would be simply incredible and that certainly would put an end to bushie slime pit

[Robin Hood]

1. I take offense to your labeling of our people in Iraq.

Poor bastards is a horrible choice of words. You need to edit your posts and truly support the troops like only democrats can.

[punpirate]

4. Well, if I were in the boots of a soldier in Iraq...

... I'd probably be thinking of myself as a "poor bastard."

As for the poster's original question, no, I don't think mass mutiny is a likely outcome--the military justice system is pretty quick on that sort of thing. But, would active duty soldiers and reservists be leaving the military at the first opportunity? Yes, certainly. That's the way that most soldiers register their displeasure with the military--by leaving it. I did just that.

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[buck4freedom]

24. I take offense at your offense.

EOM

[moderate_hero]

2. No

because the military's loyalty is to the Constitution, not to any particular President, ideology, etc. Better to be apolitical than to contemplate a military that would consider doing something like that. I have many good friends headed back and they are certainly not "poor bastards."

[rooboy]

6. Since when

did "poor bastards" become a term of offense? Are all Americans this thin-skinned?

[Eureka]

9. I was going to explain.......

that if historian is an Aussie then the term "poor bastard" is a term of the highest respect. I figure we use the language a little differently over here.

As 'they' say, an Aussie refers to his worst enemy as "a bit of a bastard" and his best friend as "a complete bastard". Must be because we are all upside down :-)

[grasswire]

7. too bad....

...the CiC's loyalty to the Constitution doesn't equal that of those who serve under him. I've only seen disregard for our founding principles and attacks on our liberties from his administration.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

18. But 1)unconstitutional pResident 2)unconstitutional war3)illegal war crime

I'm amazed that the troops who take an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic, don't oust the usurpers currently in the White House.

If they knew the facts, there would be a mutiny.

[9215]

3. During Vietnam the civilian protest movement eventually

hit the ranks. I can see that happening here there is alot of unrest in the military over what is happening.

[Snappy]

5. Poor?

You wouldn't describe them a rich bastards would you?

[Devlzown]

8. I suppose they could.

They would probably be carried off by the military police and charged with desertion. If I were in their shoes, I think I'd just do my best to make sure my fellow soldiers and I made it through the war alive and basically intact.

[demsrule4life]

11. No truer words said

That is how it is in every war, just trying to get you and your buddies home at the end.

[rasputin1952]

12. There are places where I draw the line, this is one of them...

I cannot condone mutiny in any case. There are ways soldiers can and will show their displeasure, but they are bound by the Constitution, and mutiny is not an option.

As a vet, I've had to do many things that I found distasteful, occasionally things that bordered on breaking the Law of Land Warfare, but I know of no soldier, sailor, airman or Marine that would think of mutiny as an option. There may be individual acts, like that one Sgt that fragged his CO, but that is rare. Discipline is high, and for the life of me, I never knew anyone that was always happy in the military; but the thought of mutiny NEVER was mentioned.

Even during the Civil War, mutiny was not an option as thousands stood in ranks being slaughtered. Bad Commanders are usually relieved quickly, (not always the case though), but no unit I ever heard of considered mutiny.

O8)

[BrotherBuzz]

13. Apparently there were a few mutinies in Vietnam

snip
By 1969 many of the U.S. troops had turned
against the war for many different reasons. And by
1971 the morale, discipline and battleworthiness of
the US Armed Forces were lower and worse than at
any time in the 20th century. By every indicator, the
US Army in Vietnam was approaching collapse, with
individual units avoiding or having refused combat,
murdering their officers and non-commissioned
officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not
near-mutinous. The latter stages of the Vietnam
War produced no fewer than ten major incidents of
mutiny, and for each of these major refusals there
were dozens of minor ones or situations in which
combat orders were effectively thwarted. As early
as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the
196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on
the battlfield. And in April 1972 members of the
196th Infantry Brigade (Separate), the last US
combat brigade in Vietnam, refused to go out in
support of ARVN operations. On 29 June 1972 the
196th Infantry Brigade (Separate) finally departed
Vietnam as the last U.S. Army combat brigade to
leave in Increment XII of the U.S. Army withdrawal.
snip
www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/196inbde.htm
••••
••••

Here's one that is a great read, and although one might be leery of the source, the background information explains a lot about how these mutinies were, well, predictable...

Vietnam: The Soldier's Revolt

snip

Until 1967, open defiance of orders was rare and harshly repressed, with sentences of two to ten years for minor infractions. Hostility to search-and-destroy missions took the form of covert combat avoidance, called "sandbagging" by the grunts. A platoon sent out to "hump the boonies" might look for a safe cover from which to file fabricated reports of imaginary activity.40

But after Tet, there was a massive shift from combat avoidance to mutiny. One Pentagon official reflected that "mutiny became so common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of 'combat refusal.'" Combat refusal, one commentator observed, "resembled a strike and occurred when GIs refused, disobeyed, or negotiated an order into combat."41

Acts of mutiny took place on a scale previously only encountered in revolutions. The first mutinies in 1968 were unit and platoon-level rejections of the order to fight. The army recorded 68 such mutinies
that year. By 1970, in the 1st Air Cavalry Division alone, there were 35 acts of combat refusal.42 One military study concluded that combat refusal was "unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past, which were usually sporadic, short-lived events. The progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968-71."43

snip
www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml

I, too, do not condone munity, but if Bush* et al continues with this folly and public sentiment continues to grow against the war, munity may not be that far behind. Hmmmm

[rasputin1952]

14. I will concur that there were 'anomalies'...

but a mutiny, is not just the refusal of accepting an order, it is the overthrow of the command structure. Not the entire structure, but at least the leader within a unit or ship is openly defied and actually ousted as the leader.

There were breakdowns in command structure, and there wer 'fraggings', but complete breakdown and overthrow didn't happen.

It could have, and many reforms were made. 20/20 hindsight.

O8)

[BrotherBuzz]

19. Anomalies? I call it a mutiny

mutiny

\Mu"ti*ny\, v. i. 1. To rise against, or refuse to obey, lawful authority in military or naval service; to excite, or to be guilty of, mutiny or mutinous conduct; to revolt against one's superior officer, or any rightful authority.

Hey, only Rumsfeld would call a mutiny an anomie.

[Paranoid_Portlander]

15. GI revolts in Vietnam...

... at website www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/girevolts.htm There really is a dash after the www not a dot. Warning: 25 pages long, so will take time. It's an essay about the breakdown of the Army in Vietnam.

[BrotherBuzz]

16. Thank you

but my dinosaur computer can't handle a twent-five page essay, thank just the same. Nevertheless, the second link I posted (www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml ) gives a very good condensed account of the breakdown of the US Army in Vietnam.


If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was laid bare. - Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

[Insider]

22. conditionally agree

i won't say that NO person in uniform would think it. that claim doesn't seem rational.

this vet's opinion is that it is not going to happen.

[G_j]

17. Hold On To Your Humanity!!

from: www.bringthemhomenow.org

An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq, by Stan Goff

Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,
I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you—some more extreme than others—are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.

In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of s**t: s**t from the news media, s**t from movies, s**t about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and s**t from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all.

The essence of all this s**t was that we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.

When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
...more...
**this letter should be read to the end! scroll down a bit at: www.bringthemhomenow.org/what/viewpoint/01_2003.html
--------------------
--------------------
**MILITARY FAMILIES AND VETERANS TO RALLY AT FT. BRAGG On March 20th, as the world once again says NO! to war, military families and veterans of the military will take center stage in Fayetteville, North Carolina – the home of Fort Bragg -- as the North Carolina Coalition for Peace and Justice demands that the United States government provide REAL support for G.I.'s and other military personnel by bringing them home now.

This rally will draw attention to the stop-loss policy that keeps personnel in the service beyond the time that they originally committed to, inadequate psychological and emotional services for military personnel and their families, and other key issues of interest to military families and veterans. It will also demand that the government commit billions to education and the creation of jobs, not war and occupations.

Visit http://www.ncpeacehub.org / for more information, or contact Bryan Proffitt at [email protected]
---------
military families speak out: www.mfso.org
Bring Them Home Now: www.bringthemhomenow.org

March 20 Peace mobilization: www.unitedforpeace.org

[Columbia]

20. Well, I'm an OIF Vet

And I don't take offense to poor bastards at all. I think it's a very apt description.

It would be pretty difficult logistically to just pick up and leave Iraq or Kuwait though. Although, it can probably be done (I concocted a few different scenarios when I was over there).

[Paranoid_Portlander]

21. Kick.

.

[Bandit]

23. Come July Bush* is going to say Iraq is now Liberated and Democratic

and bring all the Troops home and they will all go Yeaaa. By November they will be right back in the GOP fold and it will all be just an old nightmare that Bush* saved them from.:shrug: these guys do know how to be political.