page_title: David Zeiger
section_title: Early life and political activism
hierarchical_section_title: David Zeiger / Early life and political activism
caption_attribution_description: English: 1971 Armed Forces Day anti-Vietnam War demonstration at Ft Hood Army base in Killeen, TX
context_page_description: David Zeiger is an American film director, writer and producer. He is most well known for the documentary Sir! No Sir!, which is the only full-length film chronicling the extensive antiwar and resistance activity of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War; and for Senior Year, a 13-part PBS documentary series about the senior year of a group of students at Fairfax High, the most diverse school in Los Angeles.
context_section_description: Zeiger was born in Los Angeles in 1950 to Irving and Beatrice Zeiger. He graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles and then in the late 1960s, along with many other young people of that generation, dropped out of college to become involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. In a 2005 comment he told Stoney Roads Films, “nothing was more important than joining the fight to end the Vietnam War.” He started looking around for ways to participate and found a group of veterans and civilians in Killeen, Texas near the Fort Hood Army base who had begun supporting soldiers who were against the war or resisting the military or both. 
  Zeiger felt that organizing and supporting dissident GIs would be an effective way to oppose the war itself. These were the guys being sent to fight the war and Fort Hood was a major staging ground for troops heading to the war zone. It was also where many returned after their tours. “These were mostly working class guys,” Zeiger told Mother Jones magazine, they “had gone into the military out of patriotic motives or because that was just what you did. And they were becoming one of the strongest forces against the war.” He worked at the Oleo Strut GI Coffeehouse in Killeen and for the next two years found himself “in the heart of one of the most intense, exciting, and inspiring movements of the 1960s.” He helped resisting soldiers put out their own underground GI newspaper called Fatigue Press, organize demonstrations of over 1,000 GIs against the war and the military, and turn “the Oleo Strut into one of Texas's anti-war headquarters.”
caption: 1971 Armed Forces Day antiwar demonstration at Ft Hood Army base
exif: {}