The following travel story, the Nord Kaperen, is the last in the series of Against the Army stories of the anti-Vietnam war movement in Paris. The first three stories were directly about the G.I.’s who deserted the military, or chose to “stay inside” and work against the army. Against the army work also took place inside the air force and inside the navy. All of the G.I.’s who passed through the Paris network had been in the army branch of the United States military, however, so we stick to them.
The first of the three is Max’s Anti-Vietnam Network to help U.S. deserters. The network was set up in Paris, mainly by Max Watts, a long time French expatriate, originally from Austria, with an English childhood and an American adolescence. The second story is Soul Vienna, dealing with black U.S. soldiers in what at the time was West Germany. Max coined the name RITA for these soldiers, resistance inside the military, mainly against discrimination, but also against the Vietnam War. The third story is Black Power in the Courtroom and focuses on a military trial inside West Germany where fifty-three black soldiers took their grievances to court.
The last two stories are Six Days with the Vietcong and The Nord Kaperen. Both relate adventures of Max and June, the narrator and his collaborator in working with the G.I.’s. They are “trips with a purpose”: one to Cannes in southern France with four Vietnamese, two from the North Vietnam, two from the South; the second with a Danish commune on the sailing ship, the Nord Kaperen, from Corsica to Mallorca, two islands in the Mediterranean.
To supply some background on the Nord Kaperen: Max Watts was kidnapped by the French secret service, the DST, the equivalent of Internal Security, and sent to Corsica. To put it directly, the DST is the French Secret Police; the Nord Kaperen is a sailing yawl that enabled Max to escape his house arrest on Corsica and the police, both local and secret. To make a political point: Max’s own expulsion testifies to his adroit handling of the thorny problem of deserters from the U.S. Army; none of the deserters themselves were ever expelled, despite one or two exceptional run-ins with the French police on minor charges. Only Max himself was expelled. And, after all, the purpose of “aiding and abetting desertion” was to keep the deserters out of harm’s way, not oneself. In fact, Max was never even charged with aiding and abetting. By the time his expulsion was judged, the Vietnam War had been won by the Vietnamese and the revolutionary May’68 movement in France had disintegrated.
These two key events in French political history were more or less behind Max’s expulsion. This was the main theory held by Max’s friends, but had lost considerable importance for the French authorities by the time his case came up for consideration in the seventies—when it was cancelled out of hand. No official reason was ever given, nor compensation for the disturbance in Max’s life. His lawyers never asked for compensation, and while the request for the grounds of the expulsion remained on the legal books, so to speak, it was never answered. Earlier on there had been a question in the French Parliament by a member who himself was to become a President of France. But by that time, Francois Mitterand had other more pressing affairs to deal with than justice for Max Watts. Max himself had preferred to remain in Germany where he had moved during the period of his expulsion. His political interests were now completely centered on the Resisters Inside the Army, and the U.S. Army was in Germany.
I have framed the telling of Nord Kaperen in the future. Somewhere in the background of most leftwing political work of the sixties in France, whether French students or U.S. soldiers, was that it was going to bring about a revolution that would change things. There have been quite a few revolutions since then, but they have not changed things basically. So the background belief remains a fantasy, only realized in the framework of the Nord Kaperen.
This voyage of the Nord Kaperen takes place, as it did in reality, at the end of the sixties. Escaping from an island on a sailing ship, run by a Danish commune, is certainly in the spirit of the times, as is the activity of resistance inside the military.
Max’s particular wave theory (one of many in the world) was that the third wave was basically the spirit of the sixties, a wave of revolutionary activity from the mass of people in the world, of which RITA was a part. Resistance inside the army has not stopped with the wave of local wars let loose by the controlling capitalist countries in the world, but the forms of this resistance have changed with the times. In North Africa there were many defections of officers, sometimes taking a certain amount of soldiers with them. There are more cohesive movements of rebel soldiers. There are more isolated terrorist acts, presumably also by RITA soldiers. One constant act, common to both periods, has been direct action by the troops against their officers: in Vietnam this took the form of “fragging,” shooting whoever was in command on a foray into the jungle, for example. The colonized army has taken on this technique, using it directly to shoot the officer, usually a non-commissioned officer, in charge of a local troop. These acts, called blue against green (after the respective uniforms), are very open, often during formation. Afghanistan is a prime example of this type of resistance—perhaps developed in the decades of foreign occupation from the British to the Russians to the Americans and their various allies.
This was certainly not a concept of Resistance Inside the U.S. Army back in the sixties. Resistance inside a Third World army like the South Vietnamese, armed and equipped by the U.S., did not occur to us seriously. In point of fact, we had no contact with them except as “the puppet government” contemptuously referred to by the Vietnamese revolutionaries. To my knowledge, no soldier in the South Vietnamese Army ever turned his gun on an American during morning maneuvers and shot him. It is certainly a technique that might have been used during a worldwide revolution which destroyed capitalism, but such a revolution is still only a fantasy of the last of our series of Against the Army stories. Unless, of course, it is beginning in Afghanistan.
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