R.I. P. George McGovern

George McGovern died Sunday at the age of 90. I remain proud that my first vote for a presidential candidate was for him in 1972. I covered aspects of his campaign for the Boston Phoenix, and met him briefly. I've never seen as devastated an election night headquarters as I did in Boston that November, even though Massachusetts was the only state he won.

During that campaign I wrote about what reporters were digging up about Watergate, and about the Nixon administration which McGovern rightly called "the most corrupt in history." Not that anybody listened, until later when everyone was forced to listen. And so for years I proudly carried on my guitar case the bumper sticker, "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts."

In his remembrance of George McGovern at Daily Kos, Meteor Blades (who is one of my touchstones for my generation) quoted this passage from McGovern's last book, which he published when nearing that age of 90:

"During my years in Congress and for the four decades since, I've been labeled a 'bleeding-heart liberal.' It was not meant as a compliment, but I gladly accept it. My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad. A bleeding-heart liberal, by definition, is someone who shows enormous sympathy towards others, especially the least fortunate. Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills. And sympathy is the first step toward action. Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction "Love the neighbor as thyself." —George S. McGovern, What It Means to Be a Democrat (2011)

This was his faith, the faith of a liberal. It's always seemed more than ironic to me that the original bleeding-heart liberal was Christ. That's the source of the phrase--it's the bleeding heart of Christ. George McGovern, a World War II bomber pilot from South Dakota, ran for president in 1972 to end the war in Vietnam. Because of the extent of his electoral loss, he became something of a disgraced figure. Yet he served honorably in the Senate--a stalwart public servant--for decades more. He continued to represent a flinty goodness--a faith in the better aspects of our nature, which don't really need or depend on the religious imagery. "You'd do the same for me" is a human faith, regardless of any injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself, which is psychologically dubious anyway.

  The other side of that leads to a vital sternness of principle. There is nothing mamby-pamby about this 1970 McGovern statement in support of his Senate amendment to end the war, which MB also quotes:

"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us."

Only Bobby Kennedy could have been so forthright and eloquent, and McGovern had been forced by his assassination to take up his banner. It was a terrible time. But his brave voice spoke for many in my generation, including me. And for that especially I remember him.  (Here's another summation of his career.)

Rest in peace, George McGovern.You led an honorable, thoughtful, courageous public life, and this country is better for your service.

Among the Forgotten

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It's not often that the decisions young men had to make in the 1960s about Vietnam and the draft come up, and almost never is the decision  to oppose both and refuse to participate in either given any respect. But Lawrence O'Donnell does it here, in the context of highlighting the amorality of Mitt Romney in actively supporting the war and the draft, and taking a deferement that apparently only Mormons got, so he was not drafted and did not risk participating in the war he advocated.

It is all still a very sore subject.  Soldiers returning from that war felt disrespected.  Perhaps for that reason alone, although probably for others as well, it has been harder for many Vietnam vets to make peace with protestors of that war than it has been for them to make peace with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers they fought against. 

It has been decades now since anyone has experienced anything like what we experienced, being subject to the draft at the height of the Vietnam war.  Once again there are the naive proponents of a new draft as a way to solve the very real problems of those who serve in the military today.  They don't know what they're talking about. 

How America treats its military veterans is criminal.  But First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, wife of the Vice President, have persistently highlighted their plight, and advocated for them.  O'Donnell is right to point the finger at Mitt Romney, who sees the military, and the horrors of war, only in terms of money.  All he can say is that he wants to increase military spending.   It is money that largely fuels war--money that people like Romney make in huge quantities, while poor young men and women suffer and die so those "builders" can become richer.  That's the brutal truth of it.

In the meantime, there remains another set of young men who made moral decisions in the 1960s who have been disrespected ever since.  O'Donnell's words are rare, and welcome.

When Will We Ever Learn?

Those of us who experienced the 60s, though we may bore younger generations with reminicences, also tend to forget that these generations didn't go through them, especially emotionally. This was brought home to me recently by a diary at Daily Kos called "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"by Whiskey Sam.

I'm going to reproduce much of that diary here, though if you follow the link you'll get the full version as well as video renditions of the song. But of course the diary is only partly about the song--it's about what we learned, and what has not quite been passed on.

There was a comment to the diary I responded to which I'll also include here--on the matter of reviving the draft as a kind of antiwar tactic. It's ironic to me that in a diary about learning one lesson--to smell out an unjust and immoral war--there's added a proposal for something else we should have learned is pernicious: the draft.

Here are large excerpts from the diary itself:

"
I found myself thinking back about this war in Iraq and about how much things have changed. Back in 2002/03, the conventional wisdom was that Saddam had WMD's and he would sell them to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry who wanted them. We heard it all around, and the majority of the country believed it. I didn't, many of us on this forum smelled out the bullshit when it was being presented for us.

This diary is about how right the liberal community was on this issue, and how damn disgusting it is that we were. But it's also about how right, how MUCH MORE right, the older Vietnam generation was about this war and how some of the Gen X / Y liberals failed to realize the gravity of their warning.

In early 2003, when war became the obvious conclusion to Bush's 6 months of rhetoric, I was sitting at my UU Church in Raleigh North Carolina. The minister at the church was simply a hero in leading her congregation against the coming war. Every single sermon included talk about the distruction and the needlessness of the actions that would be taken in our names.
I remember it well. I remember also thinking it was a bit over dramatic. I found myself feeling that way often about the "Vietnam era" anti-war people. After all, it couldn't be nearly as bad as those old timers were making sound like it would be.

I was wrong, they were very much right.
One Sunday our minister began by passing out lyrics to an old Pete Seeger song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone". Being young and dumb, I hadn't ever heard of the song. The "Vietnam People" in the room all instantly teared up. God this was all so overly draamtic!!! Even if Bush gets his war, I thought, there's NO WAY it'll last for years. How could it?
Still, I mumbled through the lyrics

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

OK OK, I get the point... Vietnam was bad, and your friends got drafted and died, but that's not what's going to happen here. JESUS people, if we overplay our hand, if we over dramatize this situation then we look like a bunch of kooks!!!! Pass the tin foil!

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

nice song, by this point the "Vietnam people" were flat out crying. This is before a single American was wounded in Iraq. Come ON folks, less than 200 American soldiers died in the first Gulf War -- we're going to hit our targets and the country will roll over!!!

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone? Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone? Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

Almost five years later I know now why the "Vietnam people" were so moved by this song. I know now what I need to know for the next time a group of warmongers deceive our country into a war that destroys generations of our finest men and women. I know now what the "Vietnam people" knew when they used to sing this song.

They were right. My god they were right. They weren't being overly dramatic, they saw what was going to happen and they were doing everything in their power to warn people like me about the gathering storm. "

The comments included this one:

"with the hippies (4+ / 0-)
this time things are gloomy, the right has won by depressing us all. The old peace movement was filled with college kids who were against not just war but the lottery that could make them fight in one. That touched everyone, and it's why we need the draft back, so that everyone will be watching, if not for everyone's kids, for their own. If we as a nation claim the right to 'protect' ourselves with soldiers, we need to shoulder the responsibility. Our nation is so powerful that citizens need to be involved personally in the decisions our leaders make in our name. "

This is my reply to the comment:

two evils don't make a right (2+ / 0-)
unless they make it a rabid right--because the draft is as evil as the war. I am one of those "Vietnam people" who knew how bad this was going to be, and I can tell you from experience that a draft will not help, it will only ruin the lives of even more young people. First of all, the highest draft calls of the war were before the lottery was instituted, so when you turned 18 or lost your college deferement, you were facing being drafted, and basically, you were on your own. Nobody but you understood what it meant. Parents, family, women, friends were all conflicted, because the choice was to go and possibly die and/or kill, or bring shame to your family, ruin your life, flee to Canada, go to jail, etc. to resist it. Unless your family had the money and connections to buy you out of it with pull or doctors, and that believe me would not change if the draft began again. Trying to force people to go kill other people or die trying is immoral. Even slaves weren't forced to do that, and slavery is unconstitutional as well as immoral.

I'm sure you, like many others making this proposal, are well-meaning, but that's what's most upsetting to me. At least some of the people who got us into this war were well-meaning. Just wrong. They didn't see the Bushite lies and how they were going to use this war for their own ends. Those are exactly the same people who would be running the draft. If there's a war that has to be fought, Americans will fight it, without being forced. "

And another poster added:

"No draft--ever
I absolutely agree about the draft. We will institute a new draft over the dead bodies of many of the Vietnam generation who experienced it. Since I'm female, I didn't have to worry, but my brother did. So we all worried. I hate to tell you what happened to the kids I knew who were drafted. They were scarred for life though some were killed and some are still MIA. One is insane and has been since he was in Vietnam. All of them were forced to serve in the military. I will never support a draft. I agree that if we really need to fight a war, people will volunteer. We didn't really need to fight in Iraq or Vietnam. War is horrible beyond description. We should avoid war if possible and never be the aggressors."

Hiroshima, August 1945 

After Hiroshima, Terrorism Is What Bombing Is For

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb used in warfare. Three days later, President Truman began a pattern of lies that characterized the nuclear age.
But another lie also emerged from World War II, when the kind of bombing we see today--from the air, on urban centers and civilian populations--was first done regularly, on a large scale. The lie is that bombing is an effective, reasonable and legitimate method of waging war, whereas there are other despicable and illegitimate acts committed by uncivilized and ruthless enemies, called terrorism.

The truth is that bombing is terrorism, no matter who does it, and it always has been.

As Norman Solomon recently reminds us, the immense explosion at Hiroshima was followed by an immense lie. On August 9th, President Truman told the Amercan people: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians."

Solomon continues:

Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb's deadly power -- in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately or eventually. If Truman's conscience had been clear, it's doubtful he would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the dawn of the nuclear era.

In fact, Hiroshima had no military significance, and had not been bombed before--one of the principal reasons it was chosen for the A-bomb, so its destructive power would be more obvious to the Japanese and clearer for Americans studying those effects. It was considered a "safe city" to the extent that some parents in California who were forced into internment camps, sent their children to the safety of Hiroshima. So the victims of the U.S. atomic bomb likely included American children.

Truman's was the first of many lies of the nuclear era, including the initial lies about the effects of radiation. Some 75,000 people died in Hiroshima from the blast and fire of the Bomb. Five years later, radiation effects more than doubled the dead, to some 200,000. The vast majority of those who died from the Nagasaki bomb were from radiation, months and years later.
But the biggest lie is not about the atomic bomb, but the very practice of bombing. The facts show (as described in Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing and Gerard DeGroot's The Bomb: A Life, among other works) that the effect of bombing cities is not a strategy of war but a strategy of terror, and that it doesn't work.

The idea of this kind of bombing is not to kill enemy combatants or destroy military bases, but to destroy the population's will by terrorizing them with the threat of random death and destruction. Although the idea of this kind of bombing is now apparently acceptable, it is relatively new in the history of warfare.

While many nations experimented with it, especially imperial powers who bombed restless colonies, it was first used as a policy by the British in World War II in Germany. It did not result in a revolt of the German people against its government. The U.S. followed in its bombing campaign against Japan, at first aimed at military and industrial support targets, but eventually using saturation bombing against cities. It was the failure of this campaign to terrorize the Japanese population into submission that led to the decision to use the atomic bomb.

As Gerard DeGroot points out, when We (whoever We are) drop bombs, it is to destroy the enemy's capability to fight--the logic that says if you are going to destroy the enemy's tanks, then destroy the factories that build the tanks, and kill the people who work in those factories. But when They bomb Us, using the same logic, it is brutal, indiscriminate killing. "The difference is contrived--a matter of perspective. Indiscriminate bombing means killing civilians for the sake of attrition--the killing is the object."

But it isn't only attrition, and in less than the kind of total war that World War II was, it is more obviously aimed at terrorizing the enemy population. Hezbollah fires bombs into Israel to terrorize the population, hoping to eventually win concessions or ultimately to destroy the state of Israel. Israel fires bombs into Lebanon to destroy rocket implacements but also to terrorize the population into not supporting Hezbollah, either by allowing them to operate out of their neighborhoods or by supporting them politically. The strategy in both cases is the attrition of terror.

Argument on the morality of targeting civilians in war go back hundreds of years. All too ironically, the first known code that forbade the killing of non-combatants was promulgated by Abu Hanifa, a legal scholar in Baghdad. Western powers adopted a double standard: war between "civilized" European nations would be conducted in this civilized manner. But war against lesser peoples was total war, against the population as well as combatants. Primitive people were not only lesser, but more easily frightened by western technology's advances in explosives and methods of delivering them. World War II ended even these distinctions.

Now bombing is normal, and far from being the last resort, it is often the first option. Nations use it now because it is cheaper, and since no troops are endangered, there is no grumbling at home about the loss of life. Bombs of all kinds constitute a thriving business. In use, they have a very brief productive life before it's time to buy more. And there's plenty to chose from. Small groups can plant various kinds of bombs along roads or in parked vehicles, or use suicide bombers. Larger organizations can use bombs attached to small rockets. Nations can use bombs with sophisticated targetting capabilities, launched on rockets or fired from ships or dropped from airplanes. Long range missiles with thermonuclear weapons are still pointed at the U.S. and Russia.

From the smallest to the largest-yield weapons, bombs are instruments of terror. They sever the limbs of children, burn babies alive, destroy homes that send families into a tailspin of poverty, wreck the urban infrastructure that makes daily life possible, and send millions of traumatized people wandering into nightmare through the piles of broken homes and schools and hospitals, shards of bone, crushed bodies, smoldering flesh, hot twisted metal and clouds of toxic smoke, because they are supposed to. This is what bombs are for.

a fateful moment at the campus coffee shop.
photo by Bill Thompson.

Wars Within Wars

The Iraq war is becoming as long and agonizing as Vietnam--one poll says it is even more politically divisive. A Republican Senator said that the situation on the ground in Iraq is an "absolute replay" of Vietnam. A reporter who covered Vietnam sees a tragic repetition of the Vietnamization policy of the Nixon war, during which most Americans were killed and most of the destruction was done. And there are other resemblances as well.

Rather than make comparisons for you, let me simply tell a few stories about that time that seem relevant. These are recollections, with some poetic license, and like all stories, just one way of telling about it.

I obviously can't speak for everyone who was young in the Vietnam era. So when I say "we," it's shorthand for the people I knew. However, there were a lot like us. If you were draft age, and especially if you were in college, you were involved in these discussions to some degree.

Some of us talked about Vietnam and associated moral and political issues virtually every day. Some years (for me, the late 60s) there was hardly a conversation in which these subjects didn't come up.

There was one set of discussions about Vietnam: the politics, history and other contexts of the war. These began with the campus Teach-Ins in 1965 and became a major part of our education.

All of these discussions were in the context of a lot of information on campuses and in print--books, and extensive journalism, analysis and argument in the New York Review of Books, Ramparts and other publications. Many organizations sprang up and issued pamphlets, booklets and newsletters.

We listened to new young leaders and to established public figures, more and more of whom--from old Left firebrands and new poets to anthropologist Margaret Mead--were talking about the war and all the issues involved.

We also had novels (like Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five) and poetry influencing the discussion. And especially music, that dealt with issues pretty directly (Dylan's "Masters of War" for example) or contributed in terms of spirit, and of suggesting alternative culture and ways of being.

There was a related set of discussions having to do with the morality of participating in an immoral war. It had to do with decisions that young men like me were being forced to make, because we were being drafted. For us, the discussions went beyond politics and academic discourse. We were trying to decide what we were going to do, because we were being forced to make a decision, about our lives, about life and possibly death.

Bob Dylan

I turned 18 in the summer of 1964. I walked down the alley from the building where I was working, for the Voter Registration Drive sponsored by the Democratic Party and the local of the AFL-CIO's political committee, called COPE (I don't remember what the acronym stood for) to the draft board registration office. Actually, I hobbled. I was on crutches from catching a football as I was falling into a ditch. I don't recommend it as recreation.

I had the student deferment (2-S) during college, but we still had to report for physicals when called. I got called in 1967 during the highest draft call month of the war. My first physical was in Chicago, a chaotic nightmare of hundreds and probably thousands of young men in their underwear standing in lines and filling out forms.

We quickly learned that who passed and who didn't was almost entirely arbitrary, based on whether the person examining you at each station wanted you to get out or not. In my group, the top swimmer on our college team got out because somebody was a fan of college athletics. I was in the next line, and I was (and am) entirely deaf in one ear. I passed.

I also remember the young officer (a white guy) in charge of instructing us on filling out our forms. He was very authoritarian and by the book. Then when we were done he closed the door, and told us that anybody who went to Vietnam was a sucker, so get out any way you can.

Before that day and after, I consulted draft counselors in Chicago. There were several sets of them, from various organizations, and although they all gave you the information you needed about your rights, and the forms, etc. they each advocated a different approach to resistance. The Quakers advocated conscientious objector status. A more political organization preferred overt resistance, and jail as protest. However, by the time I was drafted, at least one of these groups changed their tactic. Draft protestors were singled out in prisons, they learned, and so they advised against going to jail if you had any other alternative, such as leaving the country (which generally meant Canada.)

March on the Pentagon 1967

The moral questions we had to answer were many. They started with locating our beliefs about war. Am I against this war, or all wars? Under what conditions would I fight or kill?

Is it moral to avoid the draft when another will have to take your place? Is it moral to accept the draft and refuse to be a combatant, meaning another will take your place on the battlefield? On the other hand, is it moral to do anything, inside the Army or outside, that enables the war machine to continue?

For draft age men, there were practical questions that resulted from these quandaries. When I am called what should I do? Do I comply and hope for the best, hoping that either I don't get into combat situations or that I will make moral decisions if I do? Go into the army, and request a non-combatant role? But aren't non-combatants enabling others to kill, and isn't that equally immoral?

Do I resist and go to jail, and risk being in situations where I choose between being harmed and harming? Again, the issues of violence and nonviolent resistance.

Do I refuse by going to Canada, leaving behind everything and everyone I know?

To help answer these questions, we learned more. We learned more about how we would be trained, how the military worked, and how that would limit our choices once we were in it. We learned a little about what we could expect in prison. There was even less information on Canada, but we knew it meant we couldn't return, even if our families accepted our decision.

This makes it sound like a wholly rational procedure. It wasn't. It was nuts.

We saw a memo purporting to be a Selective Service document called "Channeling." It said that part of the purpose of the draft was to channel young men into activities that help the state--either in the armed services or into war work areas that were deferrable (weapons research perhaps), or if they were malcontents and protestors, channel them to jail or out of the country.

Those not faced with these imminent decisions debated the best ways to resist. Work within the electoral system--though there were few antiwar candidates? Was revolution the only answer? Analysis of the war led to analysis of reasons for the war, which led to moral issues involving racism, cultural as well as political imperialism, the military-industrial-academic state.

We spent a lot of time talking to each other about these issues, and trying to persuade other guys that fighting this war was wrong, that the army wasn't what they thought it was, and once they went in, they would regret it. These got to be passionate arguments, with a lot of angry words. Some women ended up in tears of frustration and sorrow for what these young men would be doing, and doing to themselves.

Besides the draft, there were also recruiters who came to campus, and we had ROTC on our campus as well. On the theory that reducing the number of people who go into the armed forces would reduce the ability to fight this immoral war, we protested recruitment on campus, and harassed recruiters when they showed up. We challenged them, as we challenged politicians, to start telling the truth. Because they were all lying, just about all the time.

There was no active protest against ROTC on my campus that I recall, but I do remember looking up from a newspaper I was reading in the student union to see a classmate in his ROTC uniform, and spontaneously giving him the Nazi salute. To me this was a bit of guerrilla theatre, something out of a Beatles movie even. But to him, as it turned out, it was very disturbing. We had a long talk about it on the patio outside the union building many months later, just before graduation. He told me his feelings about defending the country, and learning about honor and duty, and also about trading a couple of years in the Army for what they paid towards his college education. I told him my feelings about protesting the war and refusing as a patriotic act, and so on.

It was a sad conversation--especially since graduation was taking place at the same time as Bobby Kennedy's funeral-- but a real one. I'm glad we had it. A few weeks after graduation he was sent to Vietnam. He'd been there for two weeks when he was killed.

Buffy Sainte Marie

While months earlier, as I agonized over all this, I used every delaying tactic and bureaucratic opportunity I could to delay induction. By the time my induction physical was scheduled for Fort Des Moines, Iowa, I knew what I was going to do. First, I knew my rights down to the paragraph, and what appeals were due me. I had all my hearing tests and other information about possible physical disqualifications.

If all my efforts failed, I would refuse induction by stepping back when the oath was given. That would trigger more appeals. In the meantime, I had my conscientious objector papers ready to file. CO status was hard to get if you weren't a member of a church recognized as pacifist. I was raised Catholic, and the Crusades weren't a real good precedent.

But if I was going down, I would go down writing. I remember including the lyrics of a song called "Universal Soldier," written by Buffy Sainte Marie, but made popular by Donovan. It began:

He's five foot two, and he's six feet fourHe fights with missiles and with spears......He's the one who gives his body as a weapon in the war and without him all this killing can't go on...It ends:He's the universal soldier and he really is to blameHis orders come from far away no more/they come from himAnd you and me/and brothers can't you see/this is not the way we put the end to war.

I had come to the conclusion that it was a violation of my constitutional rights to be compelled to kill somebody. So I wrote that. I felt putting myself in position to be told to kill somebody, or to aid in killing people, without my informed consent, was immoral. I said that by pursuing an immoral war, the government and the army had ceded its moral authority.

But I had also come to the conclusion that personally I would not survive the army of these times. I was convinced that whatever I had that would be of use to the future would be destroyed in the army. It would drive me crazy in one way or another. (And in that I was sort of proved right.) Jail was the same kind of alternative. If I let them force me into one or the other, I figure they'd won. The war against the war was a guerilla war.

So if all else failed, I was going to head for the border. This was a big deal for me, because I had little conception of how I would survive. I've never been good at the making a living part of living, and I was really naïve then. My family was sympathetic about what I was going through, my parents didn't necessarily support the war (they had doubts) but they were frightened to death of the idea that I might refuse induction. And in any case, you soon learned that when you face these decisions, you really face them alone.

I took a long bus trip from Iowa City to Fort Des Moines, paid for by the Army. As I was the only member of my group on this trip, I was designated by the Army as the head of it. It was my first and last command.

I bunked at the barracks with a lot of farm boys pleased as punch to be going into the army and getting away from home, plus a few other college kids who found each other quickly and formed a squad for mutual self-protection. The army guys in charge pushed the kids around, but left us on our own.

My physical turned out to be a battle between the sergeant at station #1, regular army (black), who was thorough and flexible to the point that I was certain he was more than ready to let anybody who didn't want to be in the army just go home, and the doctor at station #9, a draftee (white) who eventually told me that no matter what I did or what my test results said, he was going to pass me, because if he had to do his two years, everybody did.

RFK campaigning in 1968 

This physical lasted three days. I had my hearing tests, and #1 sent me to a doctor in town for confirmation. With confirmation in hand I went to #9, who passed me. Same with other physical ailments. But I was getting the idea that #1 was going to let me string this out as long as necessary, so I began inventing things. I filed petitions based on the first ten amendments, separately, and on the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I wrote in rhyme wherever possible. I moved to the psychological claims.

As a kid from a working class culture I'd never even seen a psychiatrist up close before, but they sent me to a couple. After two and a half days of this, I was pretty convincingly crazy. I thought there was a film crew following me. To this day I don't know if it was a hallucination or not. Just before one of my appointments, I was facing a closed door. After twenty minutes or so, I saw the door open and a nurse come out of a broom closet, smiling at me. That's when I went in to see the shrink.

There was a different #9 that day and they wished me good riddance. They also told me that I'd never get a real job with this on my record. It took me a long time to recover from that period of time, the year or so from the first physical to the second, and I doubt I did completely. Between the two, Martin Luther King was killed, and the candidate I counted on to end the killing, Bobby Kennedy was killed. In the chaos of all this I couldn't take certain courses seriously and fell slightly short of my graduation requirements. Others of lesser academic standing had been given a waiver when they were that close. But as a well-known antiwar loudmouth, I was not.

I guess I've gone on so long about this to give you the context for what I'm about to say, which is the point of this diary. I did what I had to do to survive, body and soul. I did not survive unscathed. No one did. There were no moral certainties and though I'd been excessive at times in my criticism of those who became part of the war machine, I was ready to see things in a context which was in some ways larger, and in other ways, very specific.

I am not for a moment trying to say my experiences were equivalent to what soldiers went through in Vietnam. I was in a lot of protests, got into a few scrapes when total strangers could be violent because of your hair length, and caught my share of tear gas, but it's a whole different order from being under fire, in that context day after day, and coming home with those kinds of wounds. And for the record, I never spit at a returning soldier. Ever.

1967 at the 169 W. 1st St. Home for the Bewildered.
Is this a future Canadian MP?

In personal terms, I was already clear about each of us making the best decisions we could at Christmastime the year of the Christmas bombing, when our families were trying to be cheerful and live in happy America, and my best friend from high school and I were talking about what we were going to do about our draft notices. His decision was to accept induction, to request non-combatant duty. If he was ordered to Vietnam as a combatant, he would refuse to go.

I understood his decision and supported him, as he understood mine and supported me. We were as close to being brothers as I've experienced. Eventually he was inducted and sent to Korea as a chaplain's assistant. I wrote to him and sent him packages, which considering the shape I was in at the time, was considerable effort.

Later, I expanded this horizon and it happened like this: I was hitch-hiking at the edge of a highway, and saw a guy in an army uniform running towards me. This didn't look good---me with my long hair and guitar case. But I stood my ground and waited. When he got to me he was beaming. He had just gotten out, and he was happy to see anybody who looked like me. You guys were right, he said.

Shortly after that I began hearing about Vietnam Vets Against the War and this guy named John Kerry. They were at the next big demonstration in DC, so I marched behind them. My band of brothers had expanded.

Of my old friends from home, three had been in the Army, two of them in Vietnam. One was decorated for bravery under fire as a medic. The other, the kid from the African American family next door who I played war with when we were little, was an officer and also a hero. He saved a bunch of lives, and did all kinds of good things back in the states. There was a street named after him somewhere. As I'd generally been his commanding officer at home, being the one who made up the story we played out, I took some satisfaction in this.

My college housemate moved to Canada--I drove a van load of his stuff to his new home. He still lives there. He's thinking of standing for the legislature. Another protestor I knew from college used to be the chief of staff at the White House. After working to register voters for LBJ, I'd protested against him, and that burned my political bridges back home.

We all made our decisions, we all lived our lives. I don't judge others' choices, even though a lot of judging still goes on. Some Vietnam vets have never forgiven civilian protestors, even after reconciling with their adversaries in the field of battle. I don't understand that exactly, but I accept it. Still, many vets and protestors did reconcile, did come to a common understanding that we all make choices, according to circumstances we found ourselves in; according to the cards we were dealt. And we all have to accept the consequences.

In the heat of the moment, some men in Vietnam committed atrocities. They have to live with that, and with whatever judicial consequences ensued. I don't entirely agree that given the same circumstances we all would make the same decisions, but I was sure that I would not allow myself to be put in the position of having to make those kinds of decisions. Not in that war. That these guys in Washington wanted to put me in that position still makes me angry.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Somebody who I respected, an older established writer named William Eastlake who was a World War II vet and opposed to the Vietnam war, cautioned me against becoming a pacifist, because you never know, a righteous war might just come along. It was pretty unlikely, but possible. I went with the unlikely part. I went with what I knew about the people leading the government then.

I believed concretely that to deprive an unjust government and an immoral war of your body as a weapon is a moral act. I believe that in the abstract it is wrong to do anything to further an immoral war. But I made decisions on just how far I would go with that, and others made different decisions, if they even believed that. Nobody had to pass any sort of test to march against the war, or vote against it when they got the chance.

I honored and supported war resisters then, both in and out of the armed forces, and I do now. I don't judge the soldiers who are in Iraq, not without knowing their story. They're only a pawn in the game of the Masters of War. I've got a relative there now, the husband of a cousin's daughter. We pray for his safe return. My best friend's daughter is married to a Iraq war vet. She's a wonderful kid and she's helping him adjust. I haven't met him yet but he sounds like a great guy. He's working in alternative energy.

It all makes me think of the introductory chapter to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, in which he and his friend sit down with a bottle of whiskey to recall the war, but the friend's wife is hostile. Vonnegut asks her why. She says because you were all just children then. Vonnegut agrees, and he subtitles the book, the Children's Crusade.

Look at the faces of the Americans over there, especially the dead. They are children. Now some of them are dead children.

1971 March in Washington led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War