Let Those Hillbillies Go Get Shot

...Those who escape, by and large, are those with the means to continue their education until they reach the ‘safe’ age of 26...

...At the very least, the tone would have been critically different...

...The only way to ride a motorcycle was in your T-shirt, with a pair of big dark glasses...

...Seeking to understand internal pressures is a way of releasing energy rather than neutralizing it, and whatever else one has to say about “the movement,” it is now motionless, somehow invisibly impeded, like a ship in irons...

...The editorial page of Life magazine stated in 1965, “The frustrating vital halfwar in Vietnam makes the need for a well-trained efficient U. S. military establishment more obvious than ever...

...Then and now, nothing strikes me as more ludicrous than the sages who interpreted the antiwar action as simple adolescent revolt against authority, as though the really appropriate response would have been to send us all off to shrinks, rather than, for instance, ending the war...

...Reading those names for the first time, and then again and again, standing on that same platform and reading new ones, the columns growing plaque by plaque, that sense of straightforward corporate effort would cave in...

...The same hypothetieal confrontation would be considerably more difficult if you had to say to him that you had gotten out by hiring a lawyer which he couldn’t afford, or by pleading C. O., which he, less trained in verbal skills, could not hope to do successfully...

...While the scene at Chicago in ‘68 was horrifying, the minute one stepped back from it to look at the larger picture, it looked more like a brawl than a battle...

...James, I noticed something new on the familiar platform...

...We all had friends killed on motorcycles...

...The latter effort, in which The Resistance was active, also led them into another confrontation with the artificiality of the struggle from a position of privilege...

...Burning a draft card had impact because it was iconoclastic...

...Most draftable people, quite understandably, held the attitude which prevailed in the ghetto toward the draft-you try to beat it-and were otherwise fairly fatalistic about it...

...Of those drafted between December of 1965 and February of 1966, only 2.1 per cent were college graduates, while 85.7 per cent ended their education short of college...

...And that threat caused every young man who professed to be against the war to ponder what he would do if he were inducted...

...An indication of the fundamental self-doubt was the murmer that went around last Mayday...

...When real death came at Kent State, whatever illusion had existed was utterly stripped away...

...Also, after the graduate deferment was abolished, everybody there are no statistics, it’s my strong impression that the abolition of that deferment changed things very little...

...On inspection, it turned out to be a small brick memorial to the Vietnam war dead...

...And yet the way we select our soldiers to fight such wars could scarcely be more unfair than it is today...

...Until it was made clear they were not in the running, girls pledged to purposely do badly in order to give their male colleagues a better chance...

...Even the rhetoric of the non-violent Resistance is shot through with reactions against those tremors: “Be a Man, Don’t Go...

...As objection to the war mounted, the issue, though never abandoned entirely, became somewhat blurred...

...Whatever else you might say about them, it was clear that the Viet Cong and the Panthers really meant what they said, and further, were willing to put it into action, a clarity and internal freedom which was by no means easy for the middle-class concerned person to achieve...

...And the war went on...

...Otherwise there was a lot of talk about “this war is being fought by poor people and blacks” (countered by some curious statements by members of the Johnson Administration to the effect that the Army offered a great opportunity to poor people and that it was a wonderful example of integration), and some genuine efforts to get draft counseling into the ghettos and to the working classes...

...Now, with the lottery, the draft is more fair and calls are precipitously dropping as the fight is shifted to the air...

...One doesn’t have to think very far to see that if the ranking was “Darwinian” and “discriminatory,,’ the whole 2s deferment was much more grossly so...

...An article in the New York Times magazine reported that “faculty and students [at the University of Michigan] argued that since college students as a class reflect the culturally and financially advantaged, the only way to elminate ‘social bias’ from the draft is replacement of 2s havens with an unbiased lottery...

...where most people had not thought things out as clearly and thoroughly as The Resistance leadership, that violence became not just acceptable but admired...

...There were almost insuperable problems with this program...

...This , reaction, in turn, was generated in many in the antiwar effort because they were protected by inequitable draft laws and other less-explicit forms of privilege...

...A fundamental part of the style was riding motor~ycles,’t~h ey write, and then, quoting David Harris: “I have a conception of what you do in emergencies that’s gained from motorcycles...

...The effort was to link conscience to political action, but the safety catches made it difficult *to gauge the depth of one’s convictions...

...The inequity issue was not entirely muffled, however...

...possible, even, for one college student to remark to another, as overheard by a friend, “Let those West Virginian hillbillies go get shot, they won’t take me,” without registering the implication of his words...

...While actual violence was employed by only a very small faction of the movement, there was throughout, at least among the young, and especially among the men who faced possible induction, the pervasive sense of testing oneself, which lends itself very neatly to the classical endeavor of “proving your manhood...

...Although the directives to draft boards stated that delinquents, or people who had shown signs of being uncooperative, were to be the first inducted-those classified 1 A coming second-the army apparently caught on very early that it was not in its interest to cooperate with this new type of non-cooperation...

...Even the effort to help people outside the privileged sanctuary to beat the d.raft was pointless, though, because for every person you got out, another would go...

...It makes sense that in this vaguer zone...

...The gestures ceased to have meaning because even though a law was passed to make burning a crime (causing outcries about freedom of speech), and purposeful non-possession was already illegal, very few burners or returners ever got their comeuppance, another example of the frustration of being protected by the system you challenge...

...Secondly, even fewer went than tried to, because, for one reason or another, they were never prosecuted...

...Cathartic Courage The militancy of the protests escalated along with the war, so that the images of cops beating kids were always superimposed on the immeasurably more violent images from Vietnam...

...The St...

...Though in the end very few were inducted out of college, and the issue of ranking faded, perhaps it is more than coincidental that right around this time (spring of ‘66) several figures from the academic world spoke out strongly against the 2s deferment...

...Darwinian selection, said still others...

...To some, at least, the “riots” were a great success, for it made “them” show their true colors in a “confrontation...

...Nowadays, there are all of these laws, you have to wear helmets, jackets...

...In the gang I ran with in junior high school, carrying a weapon was considered ‘chickenshit.’) I am for salty, rugged, virile nonviolence...

...The test favors utilitarian skills, said others...

...It’s easy now to say that militancy failed abysmally as a tactic, and that the greatest effect the tactic had was to isolate the movement from the general public...

...Anyone wrestling with the prospect of induction will wonder how much fear plays a part in his desire not to go...

...Another issue raised was that students from poor backgrounds tend to be less well prepared for the challenge of the classroom and hence would be discriminated against: more blacks will fail, said Adam Clayton Powell...

...Students will try to take easy courses and apply to lesser colleges, said some...

...Kingman Brewster of Yale described “the endless catacombs of formal education where a man may meander for years while eluding the draft that catches his unlucky contemporaries...

...In my experience, veterans of the political wars of the sixties respond in a very negative, almost hurt way to this probe, suspecting immediately that you are looking for such motives in order to discredit the seriousness of intention and the authenticity of the anger behind the activism...

...Words may seem trivial, but the lack of them in this instance signifies a huge, uncharted territory, a mine field ever interposing itself between those in power and the stopping of the war...

...Bringing up the inequity of the draft often produces pique...

...The lottery probably has defused some fervor because it eliminates suspense...

...It’s hardly an indication of hypocrisy that very few ever actually went to jail...

...It seems reasonable that worn nerves are sensitive to the abrasive of criticism when the once-new activism finds itself washed up, fading and defeated on the shores of the seventies...

...So you lose your bearings, feel as though you are drifting backwards towards a waterfall, and the only way to regain direction is to snap out of it and grab that old paddle of intelligent discussion and protest...

...End the war, you say to yourself, and you will also end this problem...

...The incidents, however, provide a perfect image: certainly those who left sit-ins for tests, and even those who merely heard about the incidents, must have suffered at least a mild case of that confused paralysis that sets in where earnest desire to end the war met the inequity of the draft...

...Wearing a black arm band with the number of dead printed on it, for instance, was in a way taking unfair advantage of dead men, because, were they able to Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The few isolated instances of conviction made the situation only more Kafkaesque...

...This is one of the most rousing calls to nonviolence I have ever come across...

...When you did escape, you just felt lucky, not especially inclined to examine the ethical validity of the manner in which you escaped, particularly if it was legal...

...But the suspension of disbelief was fragile, for as it happens, an ambulatory youth in an army jacket with a bandaged pate suggests a soldier, leading one to remember that outside the theater of the campus people were facing real and terrible wounds, not bumps on the head...

...Yet, to the extent that the men in the two Administrations which have overseen this disaster were motivated by humane considerations, that anguish was, and still is, the barrier which arises every time withdrawal is contemplated: how can you tell the people to whom the coffins have been delivered that those sacrifices were for nothing...

...another (and related) tender spot is touched by suggesting a connection between the violence of the young left and the rejection of what has become a traditional rite of passage in this country, going to war...

...In those discussions and marches one sensed frustration, yet there was always the feeling of pitching one’s energy, however frail, into a corporate effort to stop the war...

...that if the distinction between better and worse students is unjust, surely the distinction between students and nonstudents is an outrage...

...Everybody who did go was chickenshit...

...So deciding not to go to a war, no matter how watertight your objection, will tend to set off tremors in the area of self-esteem...

...Then all the professors and columnists and editorialists and people in government who wanted to end the war might have been struggling with that barrier, metaphysically speaking, they could all have helped the President write that speech in which he announced withdrawal to the public who had suffered most from the war, helped him search for the words with which to bestow a Congressional Medal of Honor on bereft parents after he had made the announcement...

...Pre-war critics of the system emphasized that the end result was to protect the prosperous, but they also objected to the fact that the very disadvantaged, who might best benefit from the army, were also out of the running due to the medical screening and the “intelligence tests,” which disqualify the lowest quarter of the pool...

...But there’s significance in which nerves are sore, and perhaps some clues as to why we find ourselves beached...

...I do not mean to imply that the desire to test oneself and to link one’s commitment to action is unworthy, nor to discredit generally the use of militant tactics...

...Perhaps one reason was that many who spoke out against the inequity did so while still believing in the war...

...In between the Life editorialist and The Resistance was a vast gray zone of antiwar sentiment in which the issue was barely recognized...

...Professors refused to submit class rank, or gave uniform grades...

...but also because it was an alternative open to anybody, rich and educated, or not...

...The way to outwit the draft was to out-nitpick it,” says one experienced objector...

...But whatever arguments could be made for militancy, they were powerfully reinforced by a need for it...

...Yet, at the time, that almost inevitable conclusion was largely avoided, a disembodied spectre hovering over the deferment test protests, as it hung over the whole antiwar movement...

...James memorial, however, put me in double jeopardy of those feelings because I was also protected from the reality because of class: those boys probably died because they didn’t have the options of going to college, hiring lawyers and doctors, or facilely expressing their conscientious objection...

...Then the train came and took me to New York-to Columbia Universityto intelligent discussions of foreign policy, passionately antiwar friends, rallies in Sheeps Meadow, marches on the UN...

...Fear of getting killed or maimed is a sign of health, but the courage to take such risks has become jn this culture the mark of a man...

...There is no defense on a motorcycle...

...While the hope that they might actually hurt the army’s supply of manpower quickly died, jail was the measure which allowed you, hypothetically, to face the guy who filled the quota in your stead because he, too, could choose it...

...The test selected out of the undergraduate pool the less-academically successful students, threatening, at one point, to take the bottom half of the freshman class, bottom third of the sophomores, and bottom fourth of the juniors...

...For one thing, the recommended course demanded a measure of saintliness which could never be widely expected...

...When all is said and done, the gruesome truth that the less advantaged were sent to die in this war will surely rank high among the depravities spawned by the venture...

...Asking themselves “what more can we do,” they concluded, not illogically, that “more” meant something more shocking, more than just symbolic, more risky-to convince the warmakers of their seriousness...

...Graduate and occupational deferments, paternity and hardship exemptions further reduced the pool...

...Nevertheless, though the deed is done and part of history now, it still remains a roadblock on the route to withdrawal...

...Giving up deferments made no sense to the ghetto-dwellers...

...Only crackpots saw it as a bona fide life-and-death battle, in which at last “they” were fighting back...

...It became obvious that it was pointless to say you ‘won’t go’ if you weren’t being asked to,” wrote a member of The Resistance...

...Protecting the Prosperous Consciousness of the inequity of the draft was alive, in a minor way, before the Vietnam war heated up...

...It’s a small town, but I’d gone away for high school so I didn’t recognize any of the names-a few could have been people I’d known in grammar school, but as their surnames were Kelley and Jones, I couldn’t be sure...

...Or this sudden declaration in the course of a recent, fairly low-keyed discussion: “Put it this way...

...But the shock effect of the measure must have been that bright students had to face their less advantaged friends and realize that the difference in their ability might possibly mean the difference between life and death, prison or freedom...

...Not suffering .that anguish themselves, they were cut off from the huge numbers who did, and therefore imagined that the best way to get out was to admit it was a mistake and withdraw...

...Perhaps it’s asking too much of the limited energies of the peace movement to say that it should have put pressure on the government to make the draft just-in effect to draft its own-rather than devoting all its force to simply stopping the war...

...The sense of being protected at the expense of others is a nasty feeling...

...The same spectres hung over the accusation of professors by students that when they flunked students they helped man the war effort, or the outrage of those who said that when Columbia expelled Mark Rudd the administration had might as well have sent him to the front lines in Southeast Asia...

...The draft presented the same problem...

...Darwinian Selection The deferment test, an inroad on the undergraduate sanctuary, resurrected at least a glimmer of the overall inequity issue...

...In those all-night bull sessions, formal symposiums, and interior mullings which accompanied that mass pondering, many shifting perspectives were probed-the problem of sorting out plain fear from ethical objection, the efficacy of going to jail, the consequences of going to Canada, the willingness to do either...

...Yet, fighting the actual system of selection, the only logical way to tackle the problem would probably have been seen as not only a diversion of energy to a subordinate issue, but an implicit blessing of the whole operation of sending people, fairly or unfairly, to Vietnam to fight...

...Those who belonged to The Resistance, or who wrestled with the same awareness, seeking to reconcile not going to Vietnam with their abhorrence of an unfair draft, and the public figures like Brewster and Kennedy who tackled the problem as a separate issue, never linked up...

...Those who continued to sit in probably could afford to because their high rank made it unneccessary to take the test...

...Elsewhere they quote him again: “The nonviolence came as a function of a vision of adventurous, hell-bent, wild-west manhood...

...And so, the next time, you pushed yourself further...

...It was only when I had to face the possibility of being drafted and began talking the problem out that I became aware of the unfairness,” comments one who faced the draft in 1968...

...The undergraduate deferment weathered even the institution of the lottery, though that deferment has since been abolished...

...The irony of being protected by the system you were fighting against was one of the constantly disconcerting conditions of the left-wing struggle in the sixties...

...Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say NO...

...To imply that Hams spoke that way because he was insecure about his masculinity would be absurd: would that all men could transform their sense of masculinity from aggression into this kind of winsome, half-laughing at yourself, self-testing...

...The cold war needs were so low that every conceivable deferment and exemption had been thought up to cut down the eligible numbers and still preserve the argument that the draft was necessary...

...The same thing happened to draft-card burners and people who turned in their cards...

...Let Those Hillbillies Go Get Shot by Suzannah Lessard Some years back, waiting for the Long Island Railroad to pull into my hometown of St...

...Plaque by Plaque The terrible irony of all this is that the militancy which made it absolutely impossible for the movement to attract mass support was, in part, a reaction to not going to war...

...To say that the institution of an impartial lottery is counterproductive to the war effort and therefore to be condemned, makes as much sense as the following elliptical remarks, written after the graduate deferment had been abolished by Dorian Fliegel, then an Amherst student, in The Nation : The poor, who are now disproportionately unable to meet these standards, will now become the outstanding exempt group...

...This was not a stand which would appeal to a draftable young man against the war...

...Seniors applying to graduate school had to make the top quarter of the class or take an army test...

...The debilitating effect of the problem, the need to simply push it out of one’s mind, was further aggravated by the fact that the people making those sacrifices tended to support the war...

...But it cannot be coincidence that a group which bent its resources towards resisting a war, the traditional proving ground of manhood, should develop a style so emphatically uncowardly and masculine...

...A veteran of the civil rights movement says, “You always knew that you had a home-free base...

...And the enemy confonted there was so fearsome and oppressive that even during the buildup, as well as afterwards, in all seriousness we demanded that they give us amnesty and “drop charges...

...The antipathy soon took on a life of its own, influencing even the moderate, and making it possible years later for hard-hats to beat up peace demonstrators when they themselves believed we should get out of Vietnam...

...In the process of any serious discussion, the question of those who were going, and why, would almost inevitably come up...

...Outside The Resistance, style was somewhat sloppier, but the emphasis on masculinity was almost equally intense, and, I suspect, often a lot less secure...

...Yourself go, or worse, urge your menfolk to go over there and die for something you deplore...

...Mendel Rivers, for instance, was Kennedy’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, vowing to stop those loopholes through which “buzzards and vermin” were escaping...

...Then it became as empty a gesture of defiance as burning a baseball card in protest against organized sports...

...We never would wear any of that...

...An indication of the insensitivity to this hidden horror of the war is the attitude, prevalent now among radicals, that the lottery is a perpetration of the warmakers...

...But one cannot be afraid to look for apolitical motives in political behavior...

...In the end, the awkward stance of demanding prosecution for oneself was relieved by a Supreme Court ruling that punitive reclassification was unconstitutionalanother bizarre twist since those who pressed the case were in a way pressing to have their protest made less powerful...

...What happened in this particular case, though, was that there was bitter frustration bred by the gnawing sense that one’s militancy was trinkety and by the disconcerting effect of finding it constantly defused...

...yourself against the wrongdoers, you were likely to find feather pillows instead of your own cutting edge...

...The more radical young, meanwhile, reaffirmed their identity by picking up Viet Cong flags and turning their cause from antiwar to pro-North Vietnam, further separating themselves from those who had died by North Vietnamese bullets...

...But even inside that age group, awareness was generally very low, and as the gray zone expanded to include older and more conventional people, nothing much was heard from them on the subject...

...Nor would the privileged have been as likely to cut themselves off from the general population, for they would have sensed the need the peace movement never faced up to-the need for getting out of the war, yet dealing at the same time with the anguish of those whose sons, brothers, husbands, and lovers had died in it...

...Cases were sidetracked, endlessly postponed, ignored, or for some reason unresolved, and resisters found themselves tactfully forgotten in what they had thought would be their moment of confronting the war machineliterally, sometimes, finding the courthouse closed...

...Appropos of the Veterans Against the War who were camped illegally on the Mall, the word was “this time the cops are really scared...

...Blatantly contradictory as their behavior was, it’s hard to get outraged at those who left sit-ins designed to discourage people from taking the test in order to take the test themselves, because the consequences of not doing so would have been so drastic, and because so few had really thought out their feelings about the system of selection...

...The crew, what’s left of it, does little to get itself out of the predicament by pacing those decks, wistfully spinning ofttold yarns about the glorious days when they all were ripping along under full sail, savagely responding to any suggestion that threatened to taint that glory...

...At the time, people were confronted with the fact that mild strategies had little effect...

...SDS split with The Resistance over the value of going to jail, on the grounds that it was martyrdom and therefore apolitical, and that you should use your privilege to mess up the system...

...Opposing the draft means beating it,” a resister wrote...

...Some in the sanctuary faced this...

...The indignation of those beaten up became tinged with the self-pity of spoiled children, because what some suffered there was nothing compared to what others suffered in the jungles of Indochina, or, for that matter, to what black people all over the country suffer daily, and also because it had, in a way, been sought out...

...This attitude resulted in the peculiar role reversal of defendants pressing for prosecution while the prosecution strained to avoid conviction...

...And not only might those angry hecklers on the sidelines be their brothers and sisters, parents and wives, but the failure of the movement to attract their supportthe great middle of the population from which the army was drawing its manpower-had everything to do with its ineffectuality...

...What happened was that in order to meet increasing manpower needs, the escapes most available to the ordinary Joe-marriage and paternity-were eliminated while an absurdity like the graduate school deferment was not abandoned until much later...

...But the obvious way to object was to refuse to take the test, a measure which, if your rank was low, entailed losing your 2s status for sure...

...We all knew that we could be killed...

...Yet because most of them never seriously faced the inequity of the draft (it was, after all, their children who were protected), they never really wrestled with the problems of how we could get out of the war and not horribly violate those whose kin had died in it...

...The recommended way of resisting was to give up whatever class-related deferment you might have, thus precipitating induction, and then refuse induction, be prosecuted, and go to jail...

...Charging and being charged by cops may have been cathartic, but it involved a rather mild form of courage...

...It made for bad press, and further, if they ever were inducted, these people were likely to be more trouble that they were worth...

...The lottery, though by no means eliminating all the options available to the well-off, is clearly a step towards fairness...

...Biting the Bullet It’s worth noting that with a few exceptions, whatever protest did exist originated among those who were protected by the draft laws...

...Coming up against that barrier, the mind recoils and seeks other routes-escalation, going in for victory, or even half-hearted, wasteful continuation seem more acceptable...

...And indeed, if one believes that sometimes wars do have to be fought, then you hope, for the sake of your self-esteem if nothing else, that under such circumstances you would pick up your share of the burden...

...The medical standard and complicated legalisms for the most part remained on the books, and while application became lax, the standards were there for those able to hire professionals and use them...

...most evaded or distorted it...

...No one thought “this is what it’s all about...

...speak, they might well condemn your peace effort...

...Facing the highest military medical standard in the world, one out of two men were rejected as 4F...

...Every time you sought to pit...

...What, after all, can you do about it...

...The Privileged Sanctuary _____ ~~ The fatal class rift had yawned as soon as students and liberals began to decry the war as “immoral...

...Egalitarian Imprisonment Another area in which the issue was kept alive was in The Resistance, a group which sought to end the war through resistance to the draft, and which began to grow as general opposition to the war escalated and students no longer could be sure of escaping in the “endless catacombs...

...Rectangular steel plaques with names engraved on them had been affixed in one-and-a-half columns...

...As a result, many of the demonstrators who had been blocking the doorways actually got up and went in to take the test...

...Yet, with startling uniformity, radicals I spoke to about the relation of the unjust draft to the failure of the antiwar movement, retaliated with the statement that the lottery has defused the movement, as though, by implication, a more unjust draft had been in favor of the movement...

...Protected because of your sex, all you can do is bear it: not taking those risks yourself, even your protest is somehow unpersuasive...

...That speech still has to be written...

...But the realization and the discomfort seemed to lead nowhere...

...That year, Senator Edward Kennedy opened hearings on draft reform which ended finally in the lottery...

...Set on that course, the monster only got bigger as frustration drove the movement into more desperate postures, while more and more sealed boxes were silently flown back to central points from ‘which they were quietly shipped to less than posh sections of cities and towns in the countryside, where little war memorials were being embellished plaque by plaque...

...I think my decision for nonviolence was to be a Gary Cooper who didn’t need guns . . . . I think of all these things as strengths and out of them brewed up the style that makes sense to me...

...In The Resistance, by Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, the authors stress the gutsy macho style which the group cultivated...

...As though the non-soldiers making the comment were soft, were children...

...The question of who had been taking Rudd’s place, and why he was there instead of Rudd, never quite got asked...

...There was always this feeling that I have to live up to the cutting edge, the Viet Cong and the Panthers,” said a young man recently...

...To a white, middle-class person who wants change and wants to put his desire into action, the system can be like a padded cell...

...They’re against our boys,” came back the angry retort, and thus the pejoratives began to fly between the more extreme representatives of both sides: traitors-pigs, cowards-facists, faggotswar criminals...

...The outcry was immediate...

...And that inequity was the cause, at the very beginning, of the original split between the antiwar crusaders and the general population over, essentially, whether one was for or against “their boys...

...Those guys are really tough...

...Partly the feeling was the sick helplessness most women experience when faced with military deaths...

...But if at the very least we had merely recognized the atrocity of sending the less well-off to die, then we would also have seen the importance of facing the needs of those whose friends and relatives had given their lives...

...When challenged, the system played the role of protector at every turn, and people’s frustration at this tended to blind them to the actual effects of their particular form of action...

...What that implies about the motivations of antiwar crusaders aside, it seems highly likely to me that if a lottery had been in effect in 1965, and consequently far more sons of the rich and the intelligentsia were being inducted, profound and urgent opposition to the war would have developed far faster from those groups...

...Jail was chosen primarily as the most effective protest, based on the idea that the nation would become unbearably disturbed to see a lot of “nice young men” imprisoned for their beliefs (more disturbed than by a lot of others coming home in coffins...

...I used to do things like get on my motorcylce and ride as hard as I could ride, taking every corner as fast as I could go until I nearly dropped it...

...We had all gone through experiences on motorcycles when we knew we came close to dying...

...The army test itself, which one took if one’s rank was borderline, or if one wanted to challenge a low rank, became a focal point for protest and a rash of sit-ins at induction centers where the tests were given broke out across the country...

...Yet the issue runs through the decade of activism, a mocking grimace, an elusive but crucial factor in the wrestling match with the angel of conscience, and possibly a clue to why that match ended in disheartened exhaustion...

...A couple of times in demonstrations I was really scared and then you came out of it and there was the good old Washington Monument...

...After the graduate deferment was abolished, there were still lots of safety catches, but the small, hard chance existed that they would all fail...

...There are a bunch of Marines out there, fresh from combat...

...A fairly active movement grew to stick together and thwart the measure...

...Obscured, though always lurking, was the fact that it was “their boys” who were over there to be for or against, who were coming back, more and more often in coffins, while the antiwar forces decried the cause in which those sacrifices had been made from the sanctuary afforded by grossly inequitable draft laws...

...Lots and lots of people striving for peace, especially the older people, many of whom were in positions of power or positions from which they could command an audience, did not em brace militancy (phlegma ticism might be a more appropriate word), nor adopt a locked posture of antipathy towards the hawkish population...

...For whatever reasons, very few people I know, or know of, have ended up inducted, suggesting that some hidden mechanism has continued to protect the advantaged...

...Out of them I’ve found a truth that is stronger without weapons than with...

...After teasing death for a while you came to feel immune to it...

...After it was all over you could go back to your nice home...

...Yet of all the areas in which people tried to confront the government, the draft was the least manufactured...

...The gasp of horror was at what clearly had been a tragic mistake brought on by nervous, confused youth with bullets in their guns, meeting their frustrated, confused peers...

...This fact, especially reveals the hypocrisy of a society which meets the problems of structural inequality by exposing the educated and better-off to the draft to fight a war which is waged at the direct expense of the poverty programs and the burden of which is borne by the poor through inflation and an inequitable tax structure...

...far fewer are spurred by personal threat because most know right away that their chance of going is remote...

...The morning after the Columbia bust, another great success, those with bandages around their heads were heros sporting their red badge of courage...

...Other SDSers suggested that the proper course was to go into the Army and organize from within, “a position I do not reject in principle,” wrote a member of The Resistance, “but which never seems to go anywhere because its proponents never volunteer and because they are usually unacceptable to the Army anyway...