“Sir! No Sir!,” the title of David Zeiger’s documentary about resistance to the Vietnam War from within the armed forces, comes without what schoolchildren used to be taught to call a vocative comma after “No.” Perhaps this is another gesture of 1960s-style rebellion against the Man and the intolerable oppression of his rules of punctuation.

If so, it would certainly fit with the retro feel of the rest of the film. Having been around and politically aware myself at the time, I remember the sort of drug-addled, know-nothing hippie radicalism into which much of the once thoughtful antiwar movement had sunk by the time of the Cambodian invasion in 1970.

One of Mr. Zeiger’s interview subjects says, as if he’s proud of the fact, “We really believed that what would stop the war was when soldiers stopped fighting the war.” That kind of childish, “give peace a chance” naivete is something that politically serious anti-warriors have been trying to live down for the last 35 years. Mr. Zeiger brings it roaring back.

Not only does he bring it back, but he acts as if it had never left. It probably never did leave the radical fringe to which he belongs. My suspicion is that the new wave of radical chic to which hatred of George W. Bush has given rise in today’s Hollywood is what has enabled Mr. Zeiger’s throwback to the 1970s to be made.

Still, you’d think that the film would at least have made a gesture or two in the direction of balance and judiciousness. Did none of its interviewees, all of whom protested, resisted, deserted, or mutinied during the war, ever agonize about what he did? Wasn’t there anyone among the anti-war GIs who thought to say that he loved his country and that it caused him indescribable pain to oppose it, and work against it?

Apparently not. Everyone here really is, it seems, from the hate-America party, carelessly throwing around charges of “crimes” and “atrocities” against their democratically elected leaders as if it were uncontested fact.

Here, too, the so-called Winter Soldier Investigations of 1971 are still what their publicists and press apologists said they were at the time, an expose of a military establishment rife with corruption and unpunished war criminals. You wouldn’t know that they have subsequently been shown (by the historian Guenter Lewy, for example) to have been a miscellany of unsubstantiated charges brought up as part of a propaganda circus.

Like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which organized Winter Soldier, Mr. Zeiger’s film takes it for granted that America was the bad guy, the enemy the good. The question of why we went into Vietnam in the first place never even arises. I guess he assumes that it was because we were the fascists and oppressors and evil warmongers the communists always said we were.

Naturally, too, the enemy always appears here as the victims of the American war machine. There they were, it seems, minding their own business, when we decided to come along to oppress and murder them en masse.

You would have to say that the quality of thought and argument in all this is astonishingly low, the propaganda amazingly crude, except that since the films of Michael Moore came into vogue, stupidity, crudeness, and shrill one-sidedness have become much more acceptable qualities in political documentaries. Most of the people who buy tickets to these films don’t expect to learn anything they didn’t already know, only to have their most treasured political resentments flattered and encouraged.

It is a similar mind-set that plagues Mr. Zeiger’s interview subjects, some of whom did hard time and all of whom have a vested interest in justifying themselves retrospectively for acts that many still regard as disloyal, if not treasonous.

Even the practice of “fragging” – the murder of officers and noncoms by their own men with fragmentation grenades – is only mentioned in connection with the prosecution of an alleged fragger who turned out to be innocent. After his acquittal, the man went off his head, so we are told, which adds the ruin of his life to the overflowing bill of indictment against the U.S. Army.

Meanwhile, the fragging victim, whoever he may have been, is forgotten. But who cares? Presumably he got what he deserved, since he must have been among the vile war criminals who made up, on this film’s showing, all the parts of the American military that weren’t among the protesters and peaceniks.

Similarly, we are blandly told that “the war ended in April 1975.” There is no mention of the Paris Treaty of 1973, the subsequent violation of it by the North Vietnamese, America’s betrayal of its South Vietnamese ally, or – of course – the misery visited upon those tainted by association with Americans or the boat people who, over the next decade and more, were so desperate to escape from the communist prison we left behind us. There’s not a word, either, about the killing fields of Cambodia.

At one point in the film, a montage of fronts from underground newspapers and magazines of the period appears. One contains a mock disclaimer: “Warning! This contains communist propaganda!” Though intended ironically, this was in fact no more than the truth. There should be a similar message attached to Mr. Zeiger’s film.

That it is propaganda on behalf of a system that is now in retreat in Vietnam itself, as in all but a couple of isolated outposts where once it existed, ought to tell you something about the current state of political discourse in Hollywood.

jbowman@nysun.com