Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions, Paperback

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.

From the first napalm bomb that dropped, John Catalinotto hated the U.S. war against Vietnam. By 1967 he was organizing rank-and-file servicemen to resist the war. For the last 50 years he pondered that experience and its lessons for humanity. Now he wants to share this history with all who want to fight injustice.