In 1940 the poet Robert Duncan tried to avoid the draft by claiming to be a Taoist conscientious objector. I’d love to see him try that with my old draft board.
In 1970, my local board had a reputation for eating COs for breakfast. The chairman was a man named Duffy who owned an Army Navy store in town. Mr. Duffy had a scar running down the left side of his face, which, the story goes, he had received during the invasion of Normandy in 1944. This gave him an intimidating appearance, and also suggested his opinion on the importance of things military.
I was studying overseas on December 1, 1969 when the first Selective Service Lottery was held. I still remember all the American students at our hotel huddled around a copy of the overseas edition of the New York Times, reading the list of birth dates and call numbers assigned to them. It is all but impossible for young men today approaching what used to be called draft age to understand the impact of this single event on the lives of all of us in those days. It was the prime topic of conversation at college campuses all across the country. Young men who had been content to drift along in school with little thought of the draft or its consequences were often “radicalized” by a low number, which meant an early call. Thousands of other young men who drew numbers in the 300’s (deep in the final third of numbers, and virtually immune) felt as if a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders. It was somehow characteristic of the times that we all breathlessly awaited the outcome of what can only be described as a kind of National Bingo Game.
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time that offered an unusually rich mixture of the tragic and the ludicrous. Martin Luther King was shot; Robert Kennedy was shot, and so were four students at Kent State University. George Wallace was shot by a young man who asked, as he was being led away to jail, “How much do you think I’ll get for my memoirs?” There were riots in the cities and on campus, and at the Democratic National Convention, and the Justice Department issued guidelines to help us all distinguish a major riot from a mere disturbance.
Governor Romney declared he had been brainwashed about the Vietnam War, and everyone agreed he probably had. The White House Plumbers were engaged in their Abbot and Costello burglaries, and the White House guards were ridiculed in their Gilbert and Sullivan uniforms. People burned draft cards and brassieres and set off bombs around the country, even in the men’s room of the Capitol. There were many frustrating failures, from the Paris Peace Talks to Vietnamization to the midi skirt, and a few shining successes at places as disparate as Woodstock, New York, and the moon.
Above all, there was Vietnam. General Westmoreland assured us he could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that light proved to be only the raging fires of Tet. We read about Khe Sahn and Da Nang and Hué and the unlucky town of Ben Tré, which, according to the Army, it became necessary to destroy in order to save. The Army, with no real victories to point to, counted bodies and pointed to them. It was a frustrating, confusing war, and the easy bravado we had always mustered in the past failed us. We learned that we were not always triumphant, or sensible, or right, or even very nice, but the lesson went down hard. The nation was split in two. On one side were the Yippies, the Weathermen, and the SDS, and on the other, the American Legion, the hard hats and the Silent Majority. Neither camp would give an inch, and the few voices of moderation could scarcely be heard amid the New Left cursing at the cops and Spiro Agnew baying at the moon. The government tried to indict the peace protestors, General Hershey threatened to draft them, and the President of the United States called them bums. It was a funny, sad, grim and crazy time, and everyone was frightened of everyone else.
And so it goes.
My draft number was 122, almost exactly on the line of demarcation between the first and second thirds. Half of my friends told me that I would probably escape being called. The other half assured me that I didn’t stand a chance. I received all sorts of advice about jumping from walls to flatten my feet or sticking an ice pick in an ear. However, before you could be called, you had to be classified. This was the heart of the matter, for the right sort of classification would keep you out of the Army no matter what your number was.
There were the I-S classification, a student deferment, which most of my friends and I had in 1969, and all the permanent classifications: IV-D, the ministerial exemption, IV-A, sole surviving son, III-A, a hardship deferment, and the dreaded I-A, which made you fair game. There was also IV-F for those not fit to serve, which was the aim of the ice picks and jumping from walls. There was also the curious category into which my brother was placed because of his heart condition: I-Y. This classification meant you were available only in times of national emergency. Our father always referred to this as “the bottom of the barrel”.
The classifications I sought were those for conscientious objectors, or COs: I-A-O and I-O. I-A-O was the category for non-combatants serving in the Army. Most of these became medical corpsmen. I had attended training classes in Selective Service run by the War Resistors League, and had spoken to several medical corpsmen returned from Vietnam. They assured me there were no non-combatants in that unhappy place. No matter what the local board, or even the Army, might say, medics over there were given guns and expected to use them. The grunts in the firebases took a dim view of anyone not willing to keep them from getting shot, but willing only to patch them up afterwards, and I can’t say I blame them. All this convinced me that the only suitable classification was I-O, which resulted in performing two years of civilian alternate service.
Americans, like everybody else, are prone to equate patriotism with war. Pacifism is not a comfortable position for us to uphold. One thinks of Walter Brennan urging Gary Cooper to overcome his qualms of conscience and go on to become Sergeant York, or Alan Ladd, in The Deep Six, discovering that a Quaker can shoot people up and still be at peace with himself. I was not a Quaker, or even a Taoist like Mr. Duncan. I had been raised a Roman Catholic, a sect not officially pacifist. But I did believe in a God who never meant us to go around killing each other, and I did not believe in any exceptions to this. The mood of the nation, however, was different. We believed then that there was a point to what we were doing in Vietnam, and an end in sight.
According to Selective Service, a conscientious objector was one who was “opposed to war in any form by reason of religious training and belief”. This meant opposing war for the approved reasons, and opposing all wars going back, one supposes, to the time of Julius Caesar. It was not enough to believe that Vietnam was immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid. That smacked of political protest, and would result in a denial. To be fair, the boards were stuck with the unenviable task of sifting out applicants with genuine religious convictions from those acting from the perfectly normal (although not necessarily religious) motive of not wanting to be killed. Many local boards were deeply suspicious of CO applicants, who seemed to be cowards or traitors or both. I would have to convince them that I really believed what I said I believed. Like Linus in his dealings with the Great Pumpkin, it was my sincerity I had to prove.
So it goes.
I had to write a statement of my beliefs and provide references. The board supplied a lawyer to review my materials in light of the regulations. He told me I had a well put-together case (The War Resistors had taught me well), but pointed out one weakness that, sure enough, the board picked up on when I went for my initial hearing. More about this later.
Mr. Duffy was there, scar and all, along with four other men, seated behind a long table. They were brusque and businesslike, but certainly not hostile. They asked a great many questions, including what I would do if a Viet Cong attacked my mother. This questions and other like it followed a pattern familiar to pacifists-the belief that moral opposition to war means opposition to all forms of violence in all situations. (It can, but it doesn’t have to, and that’s not what the regulations say. The best advice the War Resistors gave me was that I was not there to debate philosophy; I was there to show I fit their guidelines for conscientious objection.) Some boards were known to bait applicants, trying to trick them into outbursts that could be taken as political and therefore disqualifying. I told the truth and refrained from any smart-ass remarks, and things seemed to go well enough.
Then the weakness the lawyer had warned me against came to the fore. In my freshman and sophomore years in college, I had participated in ROTC. Although my school was not a land grant college, ROTC was mandatory for all males during their first two years there. I still don’t know why. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do about it. (By the time I became an upperclassman, the ROTC requirement had been abolished. Unpleasant requirements were always being abolished after I had gone through them.) I tried to explain the situation to the board, but they remained skeptical.
If the War resistors hadn’t cautioned me against smart-ass answers, I might have told them that any connection between the ROTC I went through and the military was purely fanciful. The fellows who were in it with me compared it to the Boy Scouts. We were all issued uniforms and told to keep the buttons polished and tramped around the campus in a sad parody of marching. There were three companies in our section and I was in F Company. Our company commander, Captain Morgan, was insistent that we were F Company, not F Troop, a popular TV comedy of the time depicting a cavalry outpost manned by buffoons. Captain Morgan had good reason to worry, for we were a sorry lot indeed. He was an unhappy upperclassman, cursed with a weak and high-pitched voice ill-suited for making announcements to large bodies of men in an open field. I can still hear him squeaking out the orders of the day.
My platoon was commanded by a rabbity Junior named Quinby. He was a lieutenant and wore an officer’s cap, the kind with a stiff brim that shaded the eyes. This cap always caused problems for me at inspection time. Inspections were held once a week. The platoon leader and his sergeant would walk down the rank (or file, I always got those two mixed up), stepping in front of each man and looking him over to see if he had neglected to shave or had his coat on backwards or something. It was a complicated procedure consisting of two stiff steps, a sharp 90° turn to the left and one step forward; then the inspection, one step back, another 90° turn to the right, and on to the next man. The inspection took place at a distance of about six inches, and this is where my problem occurred. I was a good deal taller than Lieutenant Quinby and found myself staring at the top of his cap whenever I was inspected. It would apparently have been a severe breach of form for him to have stepped back to see me properly, or to have inclined his head, so he spent all his time staring at my tie. This was unfortunate for me, for I could never learn how to tie my tie in approved military fashion, and always got demerits.
Once during my freshman year, I got a part in a school play, a costume drama that called for me to wear my hair longer than regulations permitted. I had to hunt up Captain Morgan to ask permission to do this, which he grudgingly gave. A few weeks later, at inspection, Lieutenant Quinby made his 90° turn and took one step toward me.
“Your hair’s too long,” he said to my tie.
“I have permission to wear it this length, sir,” I said to his cap. I couldn’t figure out how he could see my hair.
“Oh,” he said, and took one step back, made a 90° turn and took a step toward the next man. He paused, though, and then took one step backward made another 90° turn and stepped toward me again. The whole maneuver made him look alarmingly like a wind-up doll with an overwound spring.
“Permission from whom?” he said.
“From Captain Morgan, sir.” I said.
“Oh, “ he said, and then to the sergeant, “Tie.” I was marked down for my tie again. I was hoping he hadn’t noticed.
Once, while walking across campus, I was hailed in passing by someone I had never seen before. It took me a full two minutes to realize it had been Lieutenant Quinby in civvies. I hadn’t recognized him without his cap. I was surprised he knew me, since I wasn’t wearing a tie.
In addition to being unable to tie my tie properly, I couldn’t march correctly, or hit the target on the firing range, or put a rifle back together after someone had taken it apart. I was so awful they put me in a special unit known informally as the “goon squad”, along with all the other misfits. This unit was turned over to an unlucky lieutenant named Wheatly whose patience was sorely tested every week as he attempted to “whip us into shape” as he put it. I suppose if I had thought of it, I could have gotten a letter from him to show my draft board certifying me as a hopeless incompetent who should under no circumstances be allowed anywhere near the real Army. He would have written it gladly. I didn’t think of this, however, and had to get a letter two years later from the Dean of Students verifying that ROTC was mandatory for all underclassmen. This seemed to satisfy the board and they did not raise the matter again.
In May, 1971, I was granted I-O status by a vote of three to two and sent a list of positions from which I was to choose the alternate service at which I would work for the next two years. The jobs consisted of things like sweeping floors and cleaning bedpans. It seemed to me there were better ways for a college graduate to serve his country. I had heard of a Teacher Corps program in a nearby town, and wrote to the board suggesting that I serve there. They wrote back explaining that I had to pick a position wherein I would not compete with others in the job market. In obtaining a CO status I had apparently become a creature apart who was not permitted to interfere in the lives of real people. Certainly the jobs they had waiting for me were the sort for which few people would want to compete. They seemed to be jobs designed to make you sorry you hadn’t gone into the Army. And, in point of fact, that was so. Local Board Memo #64, amended in 1968, directed that CO civilian work “constitute a disruption of the registrant’s normal way of life comparable to the disruption of a registrant who is inducted into the Armed Forces.” This stemmed from the prevalent belief that COs were trying to get away with something. It was more important that alternate service be punitive than useful. I disagreed and wrote the board again saying I wanted to join the Teacher Corps.
Then a strange thing happened. The board stopped writing to me completely. It was too much to hope for that my letters had swayed them to let me do what I wanted. I had a crazy idea that they had forgotten about me, that my file had been lost or accidentally destroyed, so I did not write them to ask what had happened. In the meantime, I was accepted into the Teacher Corps and began my training that June. I had just begun to believe that everyone had indeed forgotten about me when I received an Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination.
My classification had not changed, and I briefly considered not going, but the exams were run by the Army, not Selective Service, and the Army didn’t care what your status was. In those uncertain times, I thought it wiser not to get anyone else mad with me.
I reported to the Federal Building in downtown Newark along with several hundred other young men whose numbers, as they say, had come up. We were herded into groups and given pencils and forms and told to sit at some tables and fill out the forms. As I was filling out mine, the fellow sitting next to me nudged me with a beefy elbow.
“Hey,” he said, “you got glasses. What’s this?” He held up a form labeled ARMED FORCES SECURITY QUESTIONNAIRE. The form contained three columns of small print that took up most of both sides of the paper. These columns were identified as the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.
“They want to know if you’re a member of any of those organizations,” I told him. I wondered what my having glasses had to do with anything.
He studied the form for a moment and placed a stubby finger beneath one of the entries. “What’s this here one?”
“Dai Nippon Butoku Kai,” I read.
“What the hell’s that?”
“I think it’s Japanese.”
“I ain’t no Japanese.” He looked at me as if I had called him Japanese.
“I’m sure you’re not,” I said quickly.
He turned away and stared at the form, shaking his head. “I ain’t no Japanese,” he said again.
I checked through my forms, but I had not been given a Security Questionnaire, perhaps because as a registered CO I was already suspect.
When the forms were completed, we were directed to a locker room and told to remove our street clothes. Then we all filed out in our underwear and walked around the floor, stopping at each of the examination stations, some of them in rooms, some just tables in the hall, presenting our forms at each one. The examiners questioned us and looked at and listened to us with their instruments. They took samples of our blood and urine. One hopeful soul had swallowed something that turned his urine bright green. The Army doctors were unimpressed, having seen this sort of thing dozens of time before, and told him he would have to return for another physical when his bodily fluids were of a more conventional hue.
In order to test our hearing, they put us by fives in a small soundproofed room and gave us headphones to wear and signal buttons to press, like contestants on Jeopardy. We had to press the buttons when we heard a tone in the earphones and release them when the tone stopped. One of our group, a shaggy Puerto Rican, proceeded to press whenever he pleased and release whenever he pleased. The sergeant kept coming into the room and explaining the procedure, but he just stared at him with damp, bovine eyes and continued to press and release whenever the mood struck him. They finally yanked him from the room and the test went ahead without him.
When you are wandering the halls of a large building in your underwear, you look for diversions to take your mind off your current situation. I thought about two fellows I knew who had just graduated from Colgate. They had added their names to a document stating their refusal to serve in the Armed Forces if drafted. The names were read out at Commencement, and it got on the evening news. The fact that one of these fellows was deaf in one ear and the other was allergic to almost everything God had created, including house dust, of course made it no less noble a gesture.
I also thought about my friend Carl, whose request for CO status had been denied by his local board. He reported for his physical while preparing his appeal. Carl has borderline low blood pressure, and three hours of standing in line made it dip below the acceptable level. He wound up IV-F instead of I-O, but he was just as happy.
And what about Robert Duncan? His draft board told him that Taoism was not a religion. When he assured them it was, they said it wasn’t American, which was just as bad. Mr. Duncan consulted the I Ching, which counseled non-resistance, so he let himself be inducted. A short while later he received a dishonorable discharge as a “sexual psychopath” (read: gay). This was back in the days before “Don’t ask; don’t tell”. This was in the days of “Aha! Gotcha!”
I spent time talking to one young man who was hoping to be rejected because of his weight. If you were found to weigh too little or too much, you were rejected provisionally-you had to come back in six months for a re-examination. This fellow told me each time he received a notice to report he would stop eating two weeks before the exam date to bring his weight down. This was his third examination, he said, and he was worried he had lost enough. I wished him luck.
After the last medical exam, we were allowed to put our clothes back on (for which I was grateful) and filed into another room for the Mental Examination. This sounded ominous, but it turned out to be merely a series of written tests. There was a word definition test, and a test in which they showed you a picture of something and asked what it would look like if it were turned up side down or inside out. Another test had various line drawings of mechanical things we had to identify. They might have been parts from an automobile, or a lawn mower or a toaster or anything at all, as far as I was concerned. I left whole pages of this test blank. I wondered if I was going to fail the test and be considered not fit to bother about from then on. I later found out that, although I had scored only a 67, the passing grade was 31.
So it goes.
The last room into which I was directed was a small one and contained a young officer seated behind a table. He had my forms on the table in front of him.
“Congratulations,” he said, “you have been found fit for military service.” He said “congratulations” like a college dean might say it to the final graduate of a commencement class of 2000.
I thanked him, not knowing what else to do, and left. On my way out I met the young man who had given up eating. He had been rejected again.
I began teaching primary school under the auspices of the Teacher Corps in September, 1971, still without having heard from the board concerning the acceptability of the job. I thought it might have been a consolation for them to know that working with a room full of second graders had disrupted my life considerably, but I never wrote to tell them.
Throughout my draft adventures, my fiancée was loving and supportive, and we were married in May, 1972. Three days before the wedding I was reclassified by the board as 1-H. This was an administrative classification, a “holding category”. It seemed to mean they did not know what to do with me, but they still were not going to forget about me, either. Not the bottom of the barrel, but not exactly first-string either.
The local boards had other things on their minds at the time because the pressure was mounting to end the draft completely, and it finally was ended in 1973. People were becoming increasingly tired and ashamed of the Vietnam War, and the draft was too closely associated with it to survive. It would still be a long time before this attitude would become widely accepted or openly expressed.
The problem of what to do with the young men who were less fortunate than I and had fled the country or gone into hiding to escape the draft surfaced almost at once. There was still a strong feeling that such fugitives were at best cheats, and at worst criminals. A Gallup poll taken in the fall of 1973 indicated that most people were in favor of amnesty “with some sort of punishment”, which is a curious sort of forgiveness. Most of the draft resistors resisted amnesty as well, contending they had done nothing wrong. People in those days had a hard time believing that, just as they had a hard time not believing there was something craven or disloyal about COs.
The whole period was summed up best for me in a remark made by the mother of one of my fiancee’s friends. Her daughter had told her of our impending marriage.
“Isn’t she worried he might be sent to Vietnam?” asked the mother.
“No,” said the friend, “Jim’s a conscientious objector.”
“Oh, no,” said her Mom, “that’s worse than marrying a nigger.”
So it goes.
The Deaf Dog's Almanack 