1969 - 36,152

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I was doing so well. Then the old pattern emerged. I could feel it start to creep up, the pressure building. I kept the lid on the best I could but finally, the top blew, the springy clown- colored snakes went flying out of the can and into the air every which way. It was not a good time or place for this to happen.

"Left down this hall, then another left, and second door on the left." The late middle-aged receptionist had pointed.

"No rights in this building, eh?" Her expression didn't change, perhaps a flicker of disdain in her eyes, but I couldn't be sure behind the somber face. I was too proud of the remark to worry about her. Indeed, it didn't even occur to me that another intellect besides my own was anywhere on the premises, and certainly not one that could match wits with me.

The opening questions were innocuous. I thought I was going to be home free. A mere test of endurance. If you hang with it through the system, then the rubber stamp comes out. After all, it had taken me over a year to get to this point. I had labored through several preliminary rounds making sure I had all the required documents in the correct order and gone to countless appointments with selective service counselors. I was intent on their counsel although it was sometimes contradictory. One counselor told me it was important to have letters of support, another said letters of support meant nothing since they're almost always the same anti-war clergy and academicians by now familiar to the panel. I was as prepared as anyone could be. I'd read the books, heard the arguments against the war, been convinced of my moral rectitude, and seen clearly the righteousness of my convictions. Like any of that mattered once I'd opened the door to the hearing.

If you've ever bought a new car, you know the feeling. You're on their territory. They saw the heap you drove up in, the one that dropped the back axle onto the pavement as you pulled on the parking brake. You came to buy, they didn't appear at your door opening the windows and begging you to smell the upholstery, you came to them. That premise underlies the entire transaction, like it or not, take it or leave it, close-out sale or liquidation. You're going to part with some money in exchange for a vehicle, that's the given, the question is simply how much. If not you, then the next guy through the lot. And I wasn't buying a car, I was buying my life and they couldn't have given a rat's ass whether they sold it or not to me. These boys already had a buyer.

The man asking the initial questions had a sincere likable tone to his voice. He wasn't confrontational and seemed only interested in the facts. He confirmed that mine was the dossier opened before him, had me restate my reason for the hearing, and asked if anything had changed since I had submitted my appeal. Then he began to pick through my application.

There's a game I play when I encounter authority intent on exercising its prerogatives. I like to dress my judges in different robes than the wise black flowing judicial ones they see themselves in. I do not do this for their benefit. It let's me remake myself in response to their imagined apparel. I began with the obvious. My inquisitors were detectives giving me the third degree. "You want me coppers, come in and get me," I said to myself. If I can get in the proper frame of mind, I can move from the victim to the perpetrator. Sometimes this is an effective defense. Sometimes it leads me into serious trouble.

"Do you attend church regularly?"

I answered in the affirmative.

"Which one?"

I mumbled.

"Not the denomination, the name of the church you attend." These questions on religion were not meant to be ice-breakers. They were meant to establish credibility. A claim for a conscientious objector deferment did not require religious assertions as a base and a religious organization as support. Supreme court rulings had widened the acceptable grounds for a C.O. but those rulings were like giant spotlights pointing out the possible ambushes in the escape route. I mean if it took the finest legal minds to interpret, understand, and validate your defense, what chance did you stand with Larry, Moe, and Shemp sitting on the draft board.

"How long have you attended that church?"

The pre-hearing study began to pay off, I knew enough to answer that I'd always attended that church. I didn't want to have to explain any recent religious transformation. I felt I could convincingly claim I was St. Paul after the trip to Damascus but I wasn't so sure I could produce the horse.

"Do you go home every weekend?"

I reformed the question in my mind, "Do you have an alibi for the Sundays in question?" I answered in the negative, no alibi, but no need for corroboration.

"Who is the pastor of the church in Santa Barbara when you attend church there?"

"I don't attend church in Santa Barbara."

"Then how can you affirm that you attend church regularly?" The bad cop had finally spoken and I could feel the heat from the spotlight begin to melt my brow.

"I attend church regularly which means as often as I am home. I go home regularly."

"Do you believe that attendance at church is instrumental to religious upbringing?"

"To some degree. A study of religious doctrine and text is instrumental to religious upbringing."

"And do you study the Bible?" He still had the grandfatherly voice going.

"Yes, but not so I can quote verses but more as a roadmap for the soul." Oh, I was so pleased with myself, "...a roadmap for the soul." That sounded so good. Almost like I wasn't wading through cow manure to milk the answer at the other end of the pasture.

"Do your studies lead you to believe that each person must make his own roadmap?"

My studies lead me to believe that you can belong to almost any organized religion as long as you belong to something. No non- joiners need apply. I should have said I was a Muslim, a black Muslim. They'd have a tough time questioning me on articles of faith when they didn't have a clue what those articles were. Of course that hadn't helped Muhammed Ali. I formulated my answer, "There are individual differences in beliefs if that's what you mean."

"Let me try again: Can a person interpret the Bible for himself?"

A C.O. status is predicated on that assumption. I knew it and I knew they knew it too. Although killing was not expressly condoned in the Bible, nowhere did it say thou shalt not make war. "Certainly a person must come to his own conclusions on articles of faith."

The pendulum with the sharpened edge swung across my heart. They weren't the fuzz anymore. They had become high-ranking members of the Inquisition and I was strapped above a pit with the pendulum slowly descending intent on opening up my chest. The one with the benign voice wore an old padre hat with its wide circular brim. The one in the middle who never caught my eye but stayed head bent and eyes glued to the pages in front of him wore the skull cap of an old friar and the one who was formerly the bad cop, the one who never looked down at the pages but stayed transfixed on me wore the upright hat of a Pope or a Bishop.

The man in the Bishop hat lunged forward, "You mean any person no matter how psychotic or sociopathic can interpret which commandments to obey?"

The blade of the swinging ax sliced my shirt. I was in front of the church hierarchy and I was being asked if I thought my powers of righteousness were greater than theirs; being asked if I had a direct line to God and if so what was the number, everyone would like to place the call. I might as well confess my sins, repent, and let them kill me. Sure, I'd be dead but at least I'd be redeemed.

I collected my thoughts. I'd been briefed on this line of questioning. They baited me with the first question and now they were throwing the net. The wrong response could ruin my appeal. If I answered in the Catholic tradition that all inquiries of faith must go through the church, then the board pronounces me fit for service, I cough, bend over, don the uniform, and I board the bus since no church hierarchy had come out against the war. Oh, sure individuals had raised objections but no national assembly of Baptists, Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics, or the like had organized opposition. When the national organizations spoke out at all it was only to point at the American flag standing by the altar and to sanctify the holy crusade against the Communist non-believer. Hell, even Nixon was a Quaker. Any heritage could be emptied of its value. A conscientious objector had to share his dance card with both individual responsibility and clerical precepts. He could not be seen dancing cheek to cheek with either, yet he had to embrace both. And the pulpit always carried a sermon on the devil in dance.

Perhaps it was ironic that if you believed that a better life awaited you after this one passed, then the board would try to defer your deliverance and if you believed that you were obligated to make the best of this world, then they'd put you in the worst of it. But the draft board had no room for irony and it wasn't about beliefs. It didn't matter what you believed. After all, if it had been about beliefs, all you would have had to do is check the box that said: "No. Thanks for the invitation but I don't believe I'll show up for induction."

My retort was deliberate because I wanted them to listen while they recoiled the mesh. "The mores and laws of a civilization are dictated by tradition. Neither lawmakers nor individuals should be able to violate those traditions. Yet, within those traditions, religious, as well as secular, an individual makes his interpretations."

Like a frieze, a still-life of righteous terror, my interrogators were painted in their places. Even backed against the wall in a one-dimensional silhouette they were not without artifice. This was their room, their proceedings, if they had to pause to recoil, then they'd pause. They could afford the time. They weren't in any hurry. And nothing I said or would say would be anything that they had not heard before.

Again they threw the net. I was the Christian in rags balanced before the gladiator.

"I read here that you consider yourself a pacifist. Is that right?"

I nodded in agreement.

"Is that a tradition in your family born out of religious conviction?"

"No."

They waited for me to elaborate.

I held back as long as possible but then I broke before their deliberate stares. I think it was the first instance since the proceedings had begun that I acknowledged that I was sucking wind. I could feel the familiar flush rise to my face. "It is certainly a tradition seeped in western culture and religion."

"Son, that wasn't what I asked. What is the history of your family as it pertains to military service?"

I'm the first of the craven cowards bent on saving his own sweet ass, you self-righteous prig. "My father served in the Navy during World War II."

"And does he support your petition for conscientious objector classification?"

I was in no way prepared to be on this track of questioning. I didn't see the relevance to my case and I wanted off it, the sooner, the better. I didn't have a reply. My old man's support? You mean after he calmly sits down with me and asks who cut off my balls? Or do you mean the times he looks at me and screams that I can't come to dinner dressed as a girl so cut that damn hair of yours if you expect to eat at this table? Or is it the constant quote, 'I never thought a son of mine would ...' and then fill in the blanks to fit the occasion.

I knew I was getting punchy and bewildered and I knew I'd better snap out of it. I went smart-ass, at least to myself, if not in reply to their questions. You ever wonder why youth is so wise-mouthed with its replies. It's because that's all it has. It knows it speaks with no authority, with no experience, so it's haughty, nonchalant about serious matters and serious about silly ones so it can't risk contradiction by its elders. There is only one reply to the scolding coming down the nose of a parent or teacher or judge or jury. Only one reply that saves the speaker and it lingered on my tongue. I had just enough control left to not use it but I screamed it in my thoughts, "I don't give a shit."

"I believe my father has confidence in the decisions that I make. He knows I don't come to these conclusions without much deliberation and introspection."

"Do you think your father as a young man was wrong for joining the Navy to fight Hitler?"

Ever wonder why they draft 18-yr-olds? It's not because they're the most fit at that age. Professional athletes are best from around 25 to 32. It's because they're dumb and pliable and uncommitted, most important, easily cowed.

One would think that a father who served in a World War might get a pass for his son in the next conflict but one would be thinking wrong. Instead it establishes a history of warring rather than a history of peacemaking.

"I think he was in the Pacific."

"Don't quibble over earnest matters, son. The question remains the same. Was his choice morally wrong?"

I should have known it would come to this, it always does. You see the underpinning of this line of questioning is that there are not unjust wars and just wars, there are only wars and when your country says "shit" you must only ask "where". You can't study the issues and decide if you're going to serve or sit this one out. Sane and happy men would never chose to fight any war but previous ones, since previous ones are over.

"No. His choice was not morally wrong."

The man on the end dug his eyes into me and let a volley rip, "So your father had courage and was duty bound and yet when you're country calls, you're not prepared to be the same."

The other man spoke, "Surely, son, you would consider alternative service. I see here on your petition that you failed to state that."

It was HUAC all over again, complete with Tailgunner Joe, "are you now or have you ever been able to clear the mush out of your brain". It was coercion of the totalitarian kind. Not the jackboot thuggery type but the democratic type. Not the gun to the head and "march" brand but the "I know what's right and I know you want to do what's right" brand. They'd take two unethical choices and make you choose so you'd validate them. It was their need. You became a participant whether you wanted to or not. And when you chose, you signed on to their side. You became complicit.

It finally dawned on me what the game was. I was already complicit. I had suited up when I gleefully accepted their invitation. It was smear the queer and I was the one with the ball.

The man in the middle, the one who hadn't used his voice, finally spoke. "I'm a Jew. How many of us are you going to let die before you decide it's time to fight? If everybody thought like you, we'd all be dead or under German oppression."

I wasn't a pacifist. I knew it and when they looked at the murder in my eyes, the murder I could not hide, they must have known it too. They'd made me a pacifist because that was the only way out. I wasn't a boy either. I knew that you made choices and compromises, that you sometimes had to chose your evil. But I wasn't choosing theirs. "If everybody in the civilized world thought like me, you would never have been in danger," I parried. "If its military might that protects liberty, then shouldn't those countries where the dictators have the strongest militaries have populations that are most free. But we know that isn't the case. The military doesn't strengthen the people's power in those countries, they subvert it."

The one on the end opened up on me again, "We're not talking about other countries, we're talking about America. I don't think you comprehend the debt you owe. You breeze in here like a spoiled brat, taking what you have for granted. Your father and others did your dirty work for you. Now it's your turn to grow up and be a man." He was pointing his finger and spitting his words at me. He didn't like me much. "You are a member of a community. A community with a history of citizens who have fulfilled their obligations. You're in college and yet you haven't studied your own history. American citizenship is a privilege. It must be earned. Your freedom isn't free and it's about time you've paid for it. Living in the greatest country in the world and reaping the benefits of the oldest and most advanced democracy in the world, you've gotten a free ride up till now. You live under the umbrella of the Constitution that guarantees your freedom. If you won't honor the flag, at least honor the Constitution from which your rights are derived. It's time you paid something back. You owe it to yourself and to your children to pick up that torch and stand up for the country that has given you so much. Stand up for the nation that has given you your liberty. Stand up and be an American."

That's when I lost all semblance of decorum. The pattern always seems to pop out sooner or later in any discussion, debate, or even conversation. I can't seem to suppress it. Even with girls, I'll start out suave, debonair, boner vivant, then my true self begins to head towards the surface, gasping for air. I drank in a lungful of air and then exploded. "Are you kidding me? Gives us liberty? Allows us to be free? Since when are inalienable rights chartered. You aren't patriots, you're fascists in the guise of patriots. Patriots stand up to the tyranny of the state, fascists bend over and take it up the ass."

"The state makes children of us all. That is its function. So that we come when we're called, spanked when we get out of line, and branded as incorrigible when we run from it. It can not afford to let us grow. We can not move from its reach. It does not want us to leave home.

"History is the state's family portrait album. Uniforms and suits, great men, great leaders. Always there when history calls, when it's time for a photo opportunity. I'm not pictured - I don't play dress-up.

"Scan the portraits. Only righteousness peers silently from their eyes. That's the legacy. Upright, look in the camera and stare down the contradictions. Even if a genetic pattern is evident, no one's gonna draw circles around their own family's insanity, the cast is too long. Murderer, pillager, genocidal maniac. We hear, 'He was a black sheep anyway, everyone has one, harmless really.'

"One big family in the same boat, sailing the same rough seas, keeping watch for the same pirates. And if old dad's a little off course, just hang on because the sails will trim and the breeze pick up and the ship of state will soon be back on the main. Metaphors, like family pictures, take on truths that smother the assumptions. I never signed on for the voyage. It was an act of birth over which I had some output but absolutely no input. I want off the boat. Leave me on the docks, you bastards, I have no wish to steer into your dark skies. And I got news for you, the captain's not just a little bit quirky, he's a flaming lunatic madly spinning the wheel through his hands. I've been shanghaied, pressed into service, made to salute stripes I can't fathom the meaning behind. I've been dropped onboard and forced to work out my passage as we endlessly circumnavigate.

"The Yale men and the Harvard men walk the bridge and curse the decks below like every problem stems from the galley slaves oaring too slowly. Nevermind that they and theirs have been and are the officers, that they and theirs take the compass readings, that they and theirs set the course, that they and theirs maintain the rations.

"And when you're down in the galley with the drum pounding in your ears? Then history is what's done to you. And the captain and the officers are who's doing the doing. You're murderous to all around you. The guy next to you stinks and babbles in your ear. But if you get one free chance, just one open opportunity, you're gonna wrap the chains around the neck of the cracking whip. You know that no one with an oar in his hand is going to intercede. He may not help but he's not going to hold you back from squeezing the breath out of the overseer. Whereas one officer holds check on another. One rank sits on the other. A junior officer is taught the stability of that order. Taught the hierarchical balance. And taught that the cream rises. That eventually his place bubbles up to the surface. Don't look towards a junior officer to start an undercurrent. But lots of things float. Offal and refuse, scum and slop, excrement, dead fish, all will rise to the surface. Besides equilibrium is the fairest of natures. At rest with existence, neither bloated nor leaden, in unison with the universe, not at odds, each movement a reverberation, not stuck in place, but so deep within the pocket that destination is meaningless, no up, no down, no order. It was the condition I desired when I was forced to register for the draft. It is what I desire now, to be left alone.

"The state is a living organism. Like any living thing it will fight for its survival. It will multiply in the path of no resistance and it will seek to dominate its environment.

"A state begets law as a natural process like ingestion begets defecation. To live outside the law is to live outside the contrived order and the state can not have that. If you're not part of the progress, then you're in the way. Clear the tracks cause there's a train a comin'. All aboard, we're pulling out and aren't coming back this way again. There's track being laid up ahead and we're moving on and following in the cars are the latest in medicine, computer technology, warfare, communication systems, microwave ovens, sound systems, blenders, toasters, foot warmers, rubbers, fast foods, automobiles, rockets, digital clocks, vibrators, shoe trees, automatic firearms, TV's -- stop. I remember the old pictures, they were horrid, no less entertaining but the background swam, the picture was a small oval black and white torso and the voices squawked. Today's television is colored and super-real. But what it broadcasts is no better, by any definition, than what went before. No better because better is not necessarily riding on that train.

"It is nice to believe that creation runs down a line toward an end. That it's hooked on behind our engine. That creation may get a little breathless and pause but then it hitches up its pants, fixes its eyes down the track, fills the coal bin, stokes the boiler and picks up its stride once more. Journeys, stories, streets, and even lives stretch out linearly. And, we believe, history. A truth not self-evident to medieval minds. The wheel was the pattern of choice in the middle ages. What goes up must come down. Fortune rises and falls. The young are weak they rise to strength and fall back towards decay. Great nations rise and fall. It is a symmetry mirrored in the cyclical seasons of nature.

"Perhaps you're a believer, I mean a true believer. Then if you are on earth to be judged for the next kingdom and the essence of man can never change. One can struggle against that essence but in the interest of justice, the assumptions of the court can't deviate while court is in session. Man is a sinner. He battles the devil for points. His environment changes. His standard of living changes but he does not. He remains a sinner. The Congo, Ireland, Dachau, Auschwitz, Armenia, Nanking, Siberian Archipelago, the Red Guard, South Africa, Wounded Knee, Bangladesh, Syria, it is a formidable list of massacre, fratricide and murder that touches every year in the last hundred, most recent included. And forget about racism, Communism, Fascism, anti-Semitism, any ism of any kind as a root cause or overwhelming impulse to bathe in blood. Ideology isn't even needed as an excuse. The African Yorubas massacred the African Ibos not because of any ideological differences or skin color differences. They murdered because they were from a different tribe. There is no difference between an Irish Republican killer and an Irish Protestant killer. Nope, there's homicide in every eye waiting for a proper invitation. It's enough to make a believer out of even the most depraved backsliding television evangelist.

"The Christians aren't the only religious sect with a vested historical perspective. The Manichean's put a name to the philosophy of opposing life forces, oh, the yin and yang of it all. Evil dances on the stage while its foil waits for the entrance cue. In America it's the wild west theory of history. A bad man comes along and shoots up the town and threatens the church-going people and takes hostage of the sheriff's daughter. Then another man comes along who is usually very like the first except he's the good guy, better looking with whiter whites and cleaner bullets. While the townies all stand by shivering in their fear, the two players swagger and pose and ricochet their lines around Tombstone. Finally, they call each other into the street and shoot it out.

"The state, any state, always puts on the white hat when it straps on its guns. When you ride out onto the range, Marx might be driving cattle along with Medieval monks but the cattle are all carrying a brand and that brand is registered at the state capitol. It's the state who designates the rustlers and appoints the legitimate cattle barons. The state chooses the colors. The state writes the history.

"And by jingo, this is more than a rhetorical device to get school kids to memorize the Pledge of Allegiance. It's a top down perspective that shouldn't be lost on us subjects. The carnage of the Second World War owed everything to Hitler and nothing to the hundred of thousands of good Germans who tramped off to their adventure. Napoleon gave the orders, it was his fault. Stalin had spells of paranoid dementia and during those spells sent hundreds of thousands to starvation gulags, if it weren't for mean old Joe. Little dictators sack their treasuries and turn island paradises into steaming hells on earth. Lieutenant Calley lost control over his boys, it was his responsibility. It's the government's line on history. Excepted and propagated because it tells those who serve that they were born to serve. For the cannon fodder it is only a matter of place, of boundary, born to a side of a political demarcation. So thank fate for the side we're on because our Churchill is saner than their Hitler, our Patton fiercer than their Rommel. Consider this then, once the word was given by Eisenhower that the D-day invasion was a "go", he did not give another order that day. It was the individual actions of thousands of men who secured the beachheads. That is true and it follows then that it was the individual actions of the Germans who slaughtered those on the beach, who wanted to throw them back into the sea, who were willing to use their lives as a Nazi weapon. I'm not impressed by the argument that their order was "fight or die". Did they believe that they could serve the devil and never be asked to stoke the fires of hell? If they postpone the decision until they're faced with the gun barrel in their face, they have so narrowed their choices so as not to chose at all and abdication is a choice of the default. More likely, they never confronted the opportunity. Raised to be good nationalists they deferred to the state, the expert of record on all matters especially policy matters. And indoctrinated to believe the Third Reich was as genuine a force as any Darwinian corollary like manifest destiny, they never considered the wave they were on.

"Where I come from we understand waves for what they are because we ride waves. We wait for the biggest days. Wait for the big uncontrollable body of water moving towards land to fold on itself. It feathers and then breaks and then boils tumultuously to shore. We know that if you scratch hard enough or wait long enough you can paddle yourself over or under that crash and if you've got the nerve and the skill, you can slide down that face of water and howl. A surfer stays on top of the water. He doesn't exist submerged either in policies or beliefs. He is alone with the choices he makes seeking neither approval nor permission for his actions. He rides because that is what he is and that is what I will remain.

"I grew up under the influence of two great struggles for the soul. Civil rights happened when I was a boy and I still hold the images of the white fear standing on the steps of the courthouse when the state said "nigroes" do not belong here and the larger state exercised prerogatives to force business long ago started and yet unfinished. That struggle taught me that individuals could be dreadfully evil. The other awakening, coming on the heels of the first, was the more difficult to grasp; that collectively, people capable of so much benevolence could be murderously wrong."

That's how I reconstructed my draft board appearance, later, long after the event. But I didn't say all of that, just enough. Just enough to be categorically denied my C.O. If it had been legal, they would have dispensed with the formalities, reclassified me 1-A, tried me as a draft dodger and sent me to San Quentin right there on the spot. But draft boards, like judgeships, like congressional seats, are like military officers, they are gentlemen. They bow before they execute. So with their heads bent downward and their eyes cast away from me, I slipped their grasp. I filed an appeal.

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