Hi friend,

America has always been a place of two stories.

It has always been a place where we’ve seen the best and worst of humanity.  When it comes to the military, it’s where both of these elements meet. In this week’s episode, The Quiet Mutiny, we take you to the battlefields of Vietnam, where many young soldiers faced a moral conflict while just trying to stay alive. This is the first part of our look at resistance on the battlefield.

GIs, like George Silver and Roy Barrington, practiced “search and evade” tactics where they would avoid engaging with the enemy. And, the military had to confront the prevalence of drug use fundamentally driven by a collapse of morale amongst troops.

Marine Joe Bangert talks about what he witnessed arriving in Vietnam: “I saw GIs, throwing sea ration cans out and hitting kids in the forehead and knocking them out… the Vietnamese kids gave them the finger. And I remember some of the people in the back of the truck picking up their M-16s and just shooting about three or four of them. And it was just sort of like, you know, a squirrel's been killed. That was my first day in Vietnam.”

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A big thanks to the Zinn Education Project for including us on their history podcast page, and their Vietnam War Teaching Resources.

Listen to our episode part 1 on in-country resistance in Vietnam, and look out for part 2 soon! Thanks for listening.

In solidarity,

The team at A Matter of Conscience

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(FYI: "GI" is slang referring to soldiers as “Government Issued” equipment.)