Winter Soldier – 1972 Anti-war Documentary (full video)

by Scott Creighton

This is why they don’t want a draft. One reason at least.

When you have a fully volunteer military force, most of the folks who sign up are already of the right mindset for this kind of occupation and invasion, the kind we’ve been perpetrating for decades.

You’ll have a few who end up conflicted after learning their initial impressions of modern day warfare aren’t entirely accurate, or that the rightness of our actions overseas isn’t quite so cut and dry as they have been told on CNN and Fox News their entire lives.

Of those you will unfortunately have a number who come home broken, one way or the other, and commit heinous crimes against others or even themselves (suicide) if they are denied proper care as they transition back to the land of the big PX.

And as we all know, until they can effectively privatize such care, it will be denied to our returning soldiers.

When you draft millions of young people to go fight wars of aggression and occupation overseas, you expose the kinds of people to our particular brand of warfare that should probably never be exposed to it because they aren’t easily programmed into the right-think needed to make good soldiers of this kind.

This film details the testimony in the early 70s of just such soldiers returning from Vietnam and telling the stories of the people they killed and the crimes committed in our name.

With the recent revelations about the targeting of hospitals, various massacres and our drone program in general, it’s clear our methods have not changed that much. The only difference is the number of those returning soldiers willing to take a stand and recount their personal experiences during the Overseas Contingency Operations as they are called today.

Notice, around the 6 minute mark, yes, that is warmonger John Kerry sympathetically interviewing some of the returning troops. I guess a lifetime in the corporatist congress and a marriage to a billionaire can have a dramatic effect on one’s anti-war stance.

It’s a good documentary and one we should remember. It was released in ’72 and the Vietnam war officially ended in ’75 (though secret bombings continued for years to follow)

At the 17 minute mark, you see a soldier named Singer. I think he’s the inspiration for a character named Jacob Singer played by Tim Robbins in the 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder. Just my theory.