Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions

Draftees and enlistees — eighteen-year-olds from the South Bronx, factory workers from Buffalo, miners’ sons from Kentucky, unemployed youth from Watts — hate the military and the Vietnam War. They throw a wrench into the Pentagon’s war machine, becoming leaders of the anti-war movement and organizing a union in the conscript military to battle war, racism and their officers. In three other wars — the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 that sparked the Paris Commune; World War I, which sowed revolutions in Germany and Russia; African liberation wars of the 1960s that incited a captains' revolt in Portugal — ordinary soldiers turn their guns around to make revolution. Weaving together letters from servicemen and servicewomen, interviews with GI war resisters and first-hand narratives, memoir and historical research, the author — as participant and historian — highlights the relation between rank-and-file soldier resistance and the struggle for state power.