I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam

I don’t remember just when I became aware of the war in Vietnam, but 1964 seems like a good year. That’s when the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, in effect, authorized the country to provide military aid to South Vietnam (in its war against North Vietnam) without Congress having to pass a formal declaration of war. The war in Vietnam had begun.

I have a vague memory of being in the basement recreation room, where the TV was. I forget just what I was watching, perhaps a news report on the war, perhaps something else. My father was there. I think he’d just come down the stairs and was looking into the rec room, but wasn’t actually in the room. As I said, things were vague. I recall saying, “Don’t worry, if I have to, I’ll go.” While there had been some anti-draft protest before passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, protest activity increased after the resolution and in a year or two became large-scale protest against the war.

I would certainly have been aware of that activity – perhaps that’s what prompted my remark to Father. But I would also have been skeptical. I’d been reading Bertrand Russell by that time. I’m pretty sure I’d read his 1963 Playboy interview, in which he discussed nuclear disarmament and civil disobedience. Thus, regardless of what I actually said, that remark was surely an expression of my skepticism and uncertainty. I entered Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1965. My skepticism would grow, but it wasn’t until 1969 that I was forced to choose.

Johns Hopkins and the antiwar movement

I don’t remember just how I came to join the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There were a number of political clubs. I assume there was some organization based on the Democratic party and another on the Republican. I know there was a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Wikipedia says it was founded in 1960 at a meeting in the home of William F. Buckley. I thought of it as the right-wing near-crazies. None of those appealed to me, but I liked the sound of “participatory democracy,” so SDS it was.

I don’t remember much about SDS. We had meetings. A guy named Pete Davidovich was a sort-of leader. He had some kind of relationship – friend, girlfriend, I don’t recall – with a cool fair-haired blue-eyed blonde who went to Goucher College, an elite women’s school in Towson that functioned as a “sister” school to Johns Hopkins. There was another guy, tall, sandy-haired, dark glasses, whose politics led him to drop out in his junior year and take a job in the steel mill at Sparrows Point. And I remember that I somehow was asked to lead a meeting. So, I sat on a table at the front of the room and led the meeting. Davidovich remarked that I was the first hippie to lead an SDS meeting. I guess I was something of a hippie. I certainly had the long hair.

We went on anti-war demonstrations in Baltimore. I don’t recall how many or how often. I do know that I didn’t go to the big demonstration in Washington, the October 1967 march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in The Armies of the Night. It’s during this anti-war activity that I hooked up with the people I mentioned in my post, Breaking Down Monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s.

I also hung out in the Chaplain’s Office. Well, it wasn’t the Chaplain’s Office at first. It was just the Johns Hopkins branch of the YMCA, directed by Dr. Chester Wickwire, one of the most remarkable men I’d ever met, and who had a tremendous influence on me. He was from Denver and had toured as the tenor with an evangelist early in his life. He’d had polio and walked with a pair of arm crutches, you know, the ones that had cuffs that went around forearms and handles you gripped in each hand.

During the 1950s he led student trips to the Soviet Union in the summers. One summer his group was arrested for subversive activity of some kind and put on trial. They were acquitted, of course. It was just a sham, for propaganda. It radicalized Dr. Wickwire, who we knew affectionately as Chet the Jet. He became determined to see that that never happened in the America.

When he returned to America, he threw himself heart and soul into the civil rights movement, which is another story. When the antiwar movement emerged on campus, he championed it. When SDS held meetings, we met in Levering Hall, which was owned by the YMCA. That’s probably how I fell into Chet’s orbit.

He also ran a coffee house on Friday and Saturday nights, The Room at the Top. It was open on Friday and Saturday evenings and featured mostly local musicians, many of whom were quite good. The walls were covered with graffiti and line art, including an elaborate five-foot caricature of a 17th century aristocrat with an elaborate coat and a wig two feet high. In 1968-69 a local artist, Robert Hironimus, covered the walls with an elaborate psychedelic mural:

 

But I digress.

The point is simple, Chet the Jet had his fingers in a lot of pies, including the anti-war movement. When the Selective Service system instituted a lottery in December of 1969. Since I had graduated in the spring, I no longer had my student deferment, a status granted to full-time college students making them exempt from conscription. As I had drawn the number 12 in the lottery, I was certain to be drafted. What could I do?

I’m drafted

I weighed my options. The easiest thing to do was simply to enter the military. But I objected to that, not simply because it was convenient, but because I objected to this particular war and to war in general. I was a pacifist. As a practical matter, with my education, I would not have been drafted into a combat unit. But I didn’t want to enter the military at all.

I could pay a psychiatrist to write a letter that would likely exempt me from service. I knew people who knew people and I was attached to one of the greatest universities in the world. If I’d wanted to, I could have done this. But it was undignified and dishonest. I could also have gotten messed up on drugs the day before my pre-induction physical in hopes of failing the drug test. This was iffy at best, but rumor had it that it sometimes worked. This was too was dishonest and distasteful.

There was another possibility. I could become a conscientious objector. That was a status established by the Selective Service System for people who were pacifists through religious belief. However, I had no conventional religious belief. I was a member of no church and didn’t attend religious services.

But I was a child of the sixties. I was attracted to mysticism, the idea that the universe is governed by an unseen and unknown power that pervades all things. Mystical beliefs had become highly developed in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but not so much in the so-called “Religions of the Book,” Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Still, one did not have to be an adherent of a recognized religion in order to be a mystic.

I sought Dr. Wickwire’s help. We talked about my beliefs. He was willing to support me and he put me in touch with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), who had a free and highly respected draft counseling service. The Religious Society of Friends, that is, Quakers, were pacifist and had established the AFSC in 1917 to help their members in dealing with the military.

I worked with an AFSC lawyer to draft my petition to my local draft board to grant me conscientious objector status. Much to our surprise, I received that status without question. Then we had to determine what kind of alternative civilian service I would be performing. The type of jobs that were acceptable was loosely defined, but the basic requirement is that they had to be of a humanitarian nature. Hospital orderly was a common job. Given the looseness of the requirements, it seemed to me, Wickwire, and my draft counselor (whose name I forget), that I should be able to work as an assistant to Wickwire, who had become the university Chaplain by that time.

That’s what I proposed to my draft board. To help things along Wickwire drew on his political connections and got two Maryland congressman, Parren Mitchell (one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus) and Paul Sarbanes, to write letters on my behalf. My draft board was convinced. I worked as one of Wickwire’s assistants from 1970 through the summer of 1973.

What did I do with Wickwire? Lots of things. I helped with his class on world religions, I worked on the two film series we ran (ordered films, worked as a projectionist), helped with The Room at the Top, and a bit of this that and the other. This post explains how we presented three concerts performed by inmates of a medium-security prison. And this post explains what happened when I accompanied Wickwire to a luncheon where the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance hosted Sargent Shriver, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1972. Shriver had a reputation as a superb orator, but he was no match for the man who introduced him, a political science professor named Homer Favor. Favor may not have been a preacher, but he spoke like one. His speech had the cadence, the rhythm, the music, and the fire of a speech by Martin Luther King. He was that good.

Years later

Though I left Baltimore in the fall of 1973 to attend graduate school at SUNY Buffalo, I saw Chet two more times. Sometime in the early 1990s he finally published a book of the poetry he’d been writing over the years. When I worked with him in the 1960s and 70s his poetry seemed pretty amateurish. But he’d gotten good. He wanted me to play the trumpet for him at a reading he was giving. I was happy to do so.

A couple of years after that my father died in late November of 1998. My sister and I invited Chet to deliver the eulogy. He was happy to do so – but we had to pay him. Of course. It was a matter of courtesy.