I remembered that recently when I downloaded a four DVD set of Australian journalist John Pilger’s documentaries and watched the first one he ever made, in 1970 in Vietnam, called “The Quiet Mutiny.”

In 26 minutes, he cuts through all the bullshit and explains why the Vietnam War was ending: because the 80,000 “grunts” –overwhelmingly draftees who did the actual fighting out in the field– were refusing to go on with the war.

“The grunts are dying, at a level acceptable to both the American military and the American public,” Pilger says in a standup halfway through the documentary. “Another 65 this week, about the same next week, and the next, and the next, until the very last American division … combat division … is withdrawn, and so far for all the words from Washington only paper soldiers have gone home.

“The war isn’t over, but it is ending. It is ending not because of the Paris talks or the demonstrations at home. It is ending because the largest and wealthiest and most powerful organization on earth –the American Army– is being challenged from within. From the very cellars of its pyramid — from the most forgotten, the most brutalized and certainly the bravest of its members. The war is ending because the grunts are taking no more bullshit.”

Black GI: “I just don’t like, I just can’t take too much pressure from the army.

Pilger: “What happens to an unpopular officer out in the field?”

Black GI: “Mostly the unpopular officers, from what I heard, if they mess with the grunts too much they get shot up.”

White GI: “A friend of mine, a captain, got shot in the back.”

Pilger: “What was he doing, what was the captain doing to deserve being shot in the back.”

White GI: “Well, my friend said he was telling them to just go on through They were getting hit pretty bad, and he was telling them to just keep on going. They said no. He kind of got shot.”

Latino GI: “Well, yeah, there’s a lot of mistakes. But, you know, the grunts don’t always do what the captain says. The captain will stay back and tell a platoon or something to go out so many hundred meters, you know. We don’t do it. We only go as far as to get out of sight and sit down. We don’t want to hit contact, that’s the one thing we don’t want to hit.”

* * *

This was Pilger’s first documentary and it shows. There is a jump cut (from one take of Pilger looking at the camera to another) in the “standup” I quoted, and a number of abrupt transitions not handled very artfully in either the writing or the film editing. The image quality is tolerable but won’t benefit from being put up on a really big screen, like just about all TV news film of those years.

But if anything, the relative lack of production values, as well as its brevity, only heightens the film’s impact. This IS the way things were, honestly filmed, honestly told and honestly presented, and without the bullshit “balance” of American TV News to obscure the truth.

Pilger says in what I quoted that the war wasn’t ending because of the protests at home, and in a direct sense that was certainly true. But he does single out the importance of the antiwar movement and the youth radicalization in general earlier in the piece.

“The grunts in 1970 are a very different kind of American foot soldier,” Pilger says a couple of minutes into the film. “They are mostly from a world unknown to their commanders. They’re the graduates of an American rebellion that stemmed from the war that they’ve been sent here to fight. And quietly but massively they’ve brought that rebellion with them, here, to Vietnam.”

“For the grunts are unraveling the very fabric of the military. They’re growing their hair, wearing love beads, smoking pot, flourishing the peace sign of peace. And some are refusing to fight. The young men you see in this film are not a selected griping minority. I’ve spoken to hundreds of young soldiers, and the rebellion they feel so deeply is everywhere.”

I was struck by Pilger’s report that the U.S. had 80,000 front line troops in Vietnam (although when asked about this at one of the daily “five o’clock follies” press briefings, the briefing officer refused to confirm the figure, saying “60%” of the then-403,000 troops in ‘Nam were combat or direct combat support). It is striking that by then, 150,000 troops had been withdrawn, but no combat units, according to Pilger.

At any rate, 80,000 is roughly the same number of front line troops as are in Iraq now, by my calculation, or more precisely, that are in the fighting units (Brigade Combat teams) in Iraq, though a number of the 4,000 troops in a BCT –I *think* a few hundred– are really in support functions. Since I don’t know how the Vietnam number was arrived at, or whether it includes the Marines, a very exact comparison is impossible, but this does confirm that Iraq is not a qualitatively smaller war than Vietnam was, which is the impression you get by looking at the total troop raw number (160,000 in Iraq now versus 550,000 in Vietnam at the peak of the war).

The resilience of the Iraqi resistance becomes all the more astonishing given this reality.

This documentary is included in the collection “Documentaries that Changed the World,” of which there appear to be a couple of different editions, with the more complete one not available at all in the U.S.

Amazon UK does carry a four-disk version, but they are Region 2 DVD’s, meaning they won’t play on DVD players sold in the US Market, at least not until you’ve hacked the region restrictions (usually done by entering a few numbers in a hidden menu — instructions for many players can be found with a Google search).

The American version of the collection is just one disk but it does include Quiet Mutiny and is available only through Bullfrog Films . It is a DVD-R (i.e., burned, just like a home-made one, not manufactured) and older players may have a problem with it.

This US release is priced at –get this!– $595, although you can rent it for $200. This obviously is meant for universities and institutions and I assume includes the necessary permissions to use for public showings. By comparison, the FOUR disk British DVD –for home viewing only– is 16 pounds, or $32.

You can save yourself a lot of hassle and a little money and just download the DVD’s through bittorrent as “ISO” files. An “iso” is an image of a DVD in a single file that you can burn to a writable DVD using a program like Nero Burning ROM. Just do a search for Pilger at http://www.onebigtorrent.org (formerly chomskytorrents.org).

BTW, this case is a good illustration of why Hollywood anti-”piracy” measures are really attacks on free speech, and the importance of a free Internet –and what the media monopolies decry as “piracy”– in combating this censorship.

It’s quite obvious why no American branch of the media mafia will distribute Pilger in this country — they make their money, ALL their money, on government-granted and enforced monopolies.

Pilger’s most recent documentary, “The War on Democracy,” about the U.S. role in Latin America, is being successfully shown in movie theaters in Britain and Australia, but the only way to see it in this hemisphere is through file-sharing.

* * *

There are obviously quite a few differences between the draftee “grunts” of the Vietnam era and today’s “troops.” But what proved decisive in Vietnam –the attitude of those being ordered to do the fighting and dying– will also be so in this case.

Good idea though, and nothing he says about the reason for Iraq (or the candidates’ promises) is untrue.