What happened to the men who wanted to dodge the draft?
Vietnam '67
I Picked Prison Over Fighting in Vietnam
Growing up in Fresno, Calif., I believed in "my land, right or wrong," simply like everyone I knew. I could not have anticipated that when I came of age I would realize that my country was wrong and that I would accept to do something about it. When I did, everything changed for me.
I went from Fresno High School Boy of the Year 1963, Stanford Grade of 1967, to Prisoner 4697-159, C Block, maximum security, La Tuna Federal Correctional Establishment, virtually El Paso.
I was amidst the quarter-million to half-one thousand thousand men who violated the law that required u.s.a. to register for armed forces service and face deployment to Vietnam — the typhoon. Nearly 25,000 of usa were indicted for our disobedience, nigh 9,000 bedevilled and 3,250 jailed. I am proud to have been one of the men who, from behind bars, helped pull our country out of its moral quagmire.
I was simply 20 when I first stepped outside the police force. After months of late-night dorm-room conversations and soul searching, I decided doing and then was my duty as a citizen. It was 1966 and draft calls were escalating every calendar month as the American Ground forces in Southeast Asia built up to half a million men, dozens of whom were coming home in coffins every week. I had but been elected Stanford student trunk president on a "radical" platform calling for an terminate to the university's cooperation with the war, and I had already refused to accept a student deferment that would have allowed me to avoid the draft and probably sent a poor person in my stead. But I knew that even such valuable protestation was an insufficient response to the moral arithmetic of sending an regular army thousands of miles from domicile to kill more than than two million people for no skilful reason.
At stake was non just the nation'southward soul but mine too. So I took the draft card I was required past police to have at all times and returned it to the government with a letter declaring I would no longer cooperate. Carrying that menu had been my terminal contribution to the war effort. If the law was wrong, and then the merely option was to become an outlaw.
Some would phone call me a draft dodger, but I dodged nothing. At that place was no evasion of any sort, no attempt to hibernate from the consequences. I courted arrest, speaking truth to ability, and power responded with an lodge for me to written report for military service. While delaying that society with a succession of bureaucratic maneuvers, I helped constitute the Resistance, an organization devoted to generating civil defiance against conscription. Three or iv of us lived out of my car and crashed on couches, going from campus to campus, gathering a crowd and making a oral communication, looking for people willing to stand upwardly against the incorrect that had hijacked our nation.
On October. 16, 1967, the Resistance staged its outset National Draft Card Return, during which hundreds were sent back to the regime at rallies in 18 cities. We staged more rallies and teach-ins. Hundreds more than draft cards were returned, at ii more national returns as well as individually or in small groups. We provided typhoon counseling for anyone, whether he wanted to resist or not.
At draft centers, nosotros distributed leaflets encouraging inductees to turn around and go abode. At embarkations, we urged troops to refuse to go earlier it was also late. We gave legal and logistical support to soldiers who resisted their orders. We destroyed draft records. We bundled religious sanctuary for deserters ready to make a public stand up, surrounding them to impede their arrest. We smuggled other deserters into Canada. We fifty-fifty dug bomb craters in front of a city hall in Florida and posted signs saying that if y'all lived in Vietnam, that's what your front end lawn would look like.
Then we stood trial, one after another. Most of u.s.a. were ordered to report for induction, then charged with disobeying that gild, though there were soon and then many violators that it was impossible to prosecute more than a fraction of the states.
I was among that fraction. On Jan. 17, 1968, I refused "to submit to a lawful guild of induction." I had my day in court that May. As was the case in almost every typhoon trial, my judge refused to allow me to present any testimony about the wrong I had prepare out to right, proverb the state of war was non at upshot. Nonetheless, my jury stayed out for more than eight hours earlier finally convicting me. I was sentenced to three years. I appealed my conviction, only abandoned that appeal in July 1969 and began my judgement.
My fellow resisters and I brought our spirit of resistance to the prison organization, organizing around prisoner issues of wellness care, food and visits. I was a ringleader in my first prison house strike while withal in San Francisco Canton Jail, pending transfer. Afterwards being sent on to a federal prison camp in Safford, Ariz., I was in three more than strikes, at which point I was shipped to La Tuna. My first two months at that place, I was locked in a punishment cellblock known as "the hole" with three other ringleaders from Safford. When I was finally moved upstairs, I learned that our Army had expanded the war into Kingdom of cambodia several weeks before.
My home was 5 feet by 9 feet. I was frisked when I was sent to work in the morning time, when I returned from work in the afternoon and when I both left for and returned from evening recreation.
Doing time well required a Buddhist state of heed, of being present where y'all are and not thinking of yourself in places where you lot couldn't be. The latter is slow torture for a prisoner. Doing fourth dimension well besides required being your own person despite the guards' efforts otherwise. "They've got your body," we used to say, "only they tin simply get your mind if yous requite information technology to them." The outcome, in my case, was a running series of disciplinary violations for the likes of refusing to make my bed and render trips to the penalization cellblock.
Nonetheless, the parole board released me on March fifteen, 1971. The war was still going on; not long afterwards I start reported to my parole officeholder, a group of Vietnam veterans protested the war in Washington and threw the medals they'd been awarded onto the steps of the Capitol.
Typhoon calls were now steadily shrinking as air power replaced ground troops, and armed forces conscription would before long be gutted altogether. My parole ended the following summer. I stopped organizing eight months subsequently when peace agreements were finally signed.
Several years after that, I was invited to evidence at a Senate hearing considering pardons for our draft crimes. I told the senators I had no use for their forgiveness, merely I would take their apology. I'm however waiting to hear back from them on that.
I am now 71 and the war that defined my coming of age is deep in my rearview mirror, only the question it raised, "What do I exercise when my state is wrong?" lives on.
For those looking for an respond today, here are some lessons I learned:
We are all responsible for what our country does. Doing nothing is picking a side.
We are never powerless. Nether the worst of circumstances, we control our ain behavior.
We are never isolated. We all have a constituency of friends and family who spotter us. That is where politics begins.
Reality is made by what we do, not what we talk about. Values that are non embodied in behavior practice not exist.
People can change, if nosotros provide them the opportunity to do and so. Movements thrive by engaging all comers, not by calling people names, breaking windows or making threats.
Any the risks, we cannot lose by standing up for what is right. That's what allows us to be the people nosotros want to be.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/vietnam-war-draft-protests.html
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