Ex-Bentonville resident detained over Vietnam film
Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006
BENTON COUNTY — Former Bentonville resident Ann A. Wright was briefly detained and handcuffed May 21 at Fort McNair in Washington, D. C., after trying to distribute on the military base there some flyers about a documentary playing in the area, she said.
A Bentonville High School graduate, Wright, 59, served in the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service and later, in 2003, resigned in protest against the U.S. war in Iraq and against U.S. policies elsewhere. The postcard-size flyers she wanted to distribute were about a film, "Sir, No Sir," then playing in Washington, D. C. The historical documentary is about G. I. resistance during the Vietnam War, said Wright, a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army/Army Reserves.
A military police officer at the fort said the flyers she had been trying to give out were seditious material, Wright said. The 24-year-old MP detained her, sometimes putting her in handcuffs, she said. "That’s what the little military policeman … (said, that the material) was: seditious. As it turned out, no one else in the command said it was. What they said was, ‘You just need to get authorization from the post commander to hand them out.’ But in the meantime, the little MP, this … kid, put me in handcuffs, put me in a patrol car, then took me to the police station, chained me, or shackled me, to the chair," Wright said.
It took about 90 minutes for a more senior officer to arrive, and that officer investigated, offered no criticism of the content of the flyers, and let her go, Wright recalled.
Throughout the incident, she stayed calm but emphasized that neither the handcuffs nor the detention were necessary, Wright said. "The young kid that detained me didn’t have a clue. He just knew there was this woman who was on the base and had left some of those postcards. And he didn’t agree with the content of them. So he just, on his own, came over and detained me and investigated. … I told him, ‘Listen: You’ve got a 59-year-old woman with arthritic knees that is not at all violent or trying to resist what you’re doing, so why … are you handcuffing me?’" Wright said. "I kept telling them, ‘ You probably ought to go get a senior officer to resolve this thing.’ Finally, the lieutenant colonel, who was a military lawyer, came down. … He didn’t say anything about the content of this little postcard," she said.
She was at Fort McNair expecting to see the court martial of a soldier facing prisoner-abuse charges, and to participate in a planned demonstration that would urge that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld also be put on trial, Wright said. The venue for that legal proceeding was changed, so she got some postcards promoting the documentary and decided to try to distribute them on the military base, she said.
She’s glad for the publicity surrounding the incident because it gives her another opportunity to repeat her stand against the war in Iraq, she said. "We need to end the war in Iraq. The longer it goes on, the more disastrous it is for both America and Iraq," Wright said.
Wright served 15 years as a diplomat and was deputy chief of mission in U.S. embassies in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She also had assignments in Somalia, Uzbekistan, Krgyzstan, Grenada and Nicaragua.
She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism as charge d’affaires during the evacuation of Sierra Leone in 1997.
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