Site Map

SIR!  NO SIR! -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY

And following the GI and veterans' march for peace, four AWOL G.I.s turned themselves in to the Presidio Army Stockade which was about to reach a breaking point.

RANDY ROWLAND, U.S. ARMY: The moment of my epiphany ...

or the thing that came to me was working in a hospital, in the military hospital up at Fort Lewis on a neurology floor. 

And it was all head and neck injuries, guys that were so paralyzed that they couldn't turn the page of a book, and they couldn't even take a poop by themselves, and they couldn't kill themselves. 

And every day we'd come in as the medics to take care of them and they would beg us, every day, to kill them, because they couldn't kill themselves.

And it was such a horror, it caused me to think to myself -- 'cause I grew up in a military family, my grandfather was a career officer, and my father was a career officer, and I had no reason at all going into the military to think that there was anything wrong with the Vietnam war, or anything wrong with America the Beautiful -- and then there I was, faced with this situation where guys every day were asking me to kill them.

And it was so horrible that at a certain point I just made a vow to myself that I would never put somebody else into the hospital under those circumstances, that I wouldn't be the guy that squeezed the trigger that caused some human being to be in that dreadful situation.

Go to Next Page