She handed me the phone.
“All right, you little prick,” he said, sounding like he was gritting his teeth. “I’m sorry.”
“You fuckin’ oughta be,” I said, again shocking the secretary.
I put down the phone, thanked the secretary and left.
A month later, to my astonishment, instead of FBI agents at my door, I got a letter from my draft board. It was a card declaring me to be IV-F—“unfit for military service.”
Clearly, there was no medical justification for my rejection. My leg bones healed up just fine a few months later, and I spent part of the next year loading heavy boxes in a warehouse and driving semi-trailer trucks. I suspect that, it being 1969, and the army in Nam being by then in a state of near insurrection, the Army had concluded it didn’t want people like me anymore. Perhaps a year earlier, before Tet, I might instead have been sent into infantry.
I tell this story because while it may not be heroic, and while many other war resisters paid heavily for their stands, I nonetheless think it contrasts well with the likes of a Dick Cheney, who hid through the war years behind student deferments and his wife’s skirt, or of a George Bush, who joined the Air National Guard and made care to check a box saying he would be “unavailable for overseas duty”—something the poor guys in the Guard now doing multiple tours in the Iraqi desert didn’t have the option of doing.
I don’t apologize for my opposition to the Vietnam War. And while being prepared to go to jail for a principle may not rank on the courage meter anywhere near to standing one’s ground under fire during an enemy assault, or jumping on top of a live grenade, I’m proud that I did my best to oppose it, and that I never once tried to duck responsibility for my own actions. Furthermore, I’ll stand my actions up against any of those in the Bush administration or in Congress who are so quick to support wars, but who hid behind student deferments or used powerful connections to avoid military service or combat duty themselves when it was their turn to “serve.”
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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