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By Joe Volk, Executive Secretary, FCNL
November 11, 2008
Forty years ago this fall, the U.S. Army released me from its Stockade at Fort Carson, Colorado. I had refused to go to Vietnam in "Project Red Diamond" the summer of 1968 but had only been convicted of AWOL (absent without leave), i.e. not being where I was supposed to be. Although sentenced to six months at hard labor, two thirds forfeiture of pay, and reduction in grade to E-1, I had spent only about three weeks as a "soldier in confinement."
The Army had not had a "change of heart" toward me. On the contrary, it just ran out of room at the stockade, and they needed "manpower" - what today is called "boots on the ground." I refused to carry a weapon or be shipped abroad. The army decided they'd rather have me working at something than use scarce resources to convict me in a third courts martial. After negotiations between me and the commander of the Special Processing Detachment at Fort Carson, I was sent back to duty. Although my MOS (military occupation specialty) was 11-B-10, light weapons infantryman, and I had come from a mechanized cavalry outfit - a trooper - my new duty assignment made me a social-worker at a psychiatric clinic at the fort.
My two years' active duty and two months' "bad time" in the Army was my graduate school. My three weeks inside that Fort Carson Army Stockade was an intense practicum. I went before a military kangaroo court and suffered its judgment. I got new insight into the phrase "cooped up" by spending several days inside a chicken wire room under military armed guard. As a "minority" white guy in a predominately black population of soldiers-in-confinement (we were not "prisoners") and because it was only months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I got a "taste" of "how the other half lives." White racism and its consequences weighed on me in many ways in there.
Later, the social work-psychiatry clinic put me face to face with "clients" whose problems I'd only heard about or never knew existed: alcoholism, drug abuse, sado-masochism, schizophrenia, child abuse, domestic violence, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), as well as more ordinary and less damaging psychological adjustment problems.
My "Road to Damascus" experience happened in 1967 on an army bayonet training ground at Fort Jackson, S.C. When, in 1967, I refused my draft deferment for teaching and accepted being drafted into the Army, I knew I would refuse to go to fight the U.S. war in Vietnam, but I did not know then whether I was with Reinhold Niebuhr's just war approach or with King's active nonviolence. I knew I wouldn't fight in a particular illegal and unjust war in Vietnam, but maybe I'd use armed force to achieve a good purpose in some war.
In bayonet training, our sergeant yelled "What's the Spirit of the Bayonet?!" We yelled back, "To Kill!" Our sergeant yelled, "And what does that make you?!" We yelled back, "Killers, Yap! Kill!" The Army's bayonet training brought me clarity: the very preparation to kill other human beings for good destroys the good. I laid down my bayonet and rifle for good. My sergeant tried in vain to help me. He said, "Boy, you're just in for a lot of trouble if you do that."
I suppose it has been a lot of trouble these last forty years working in peoples' movements to apply active nonviolence for change, but that trouble has been put to a purpose. That makes all the difference to me. The trouble has meaning, and I can see progress due to a lot of people all over the world willing to trouble the waters. When the trouble gets too big, we can "hand it over" as the gospel song says. We don't have to do this work all by ourselves. We can't.
That summer of 1968 in the Army, I learned that faith is a practice of risking one's beliefs in action, in ways that answer to that of God in everyone. I also learned that doubt ministers to faith and that, without active doubting, faith is rigid, brittle, and sometimes brutal. I remind myself that, because I am human, I have not and never will "arrive," but, though I will never arrive, my journey still makes sense to me. I want to discover how far the journey will take me.
The route from armed forces to active nonviolence has some traffic. FCNL is a prime example. E. Raymond Wilson served in the U.S. navy during WWI. Ed Snyder served in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s. I served in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1969, during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Perhaps the next FCNL Executive Secretary will be Coast Guard or U.S. Marines! On the other hand, the route from active nonviolence to the use of armed forces also has traffic. A prime example is a Philadelphia Quaker. The U.S. Marine Corps was founded by a Philadelphia Quaker, during the Revolutionary War. However, the center of the Religious Society of Friends holds, and the Society of Friends upholds the Friends Peace Testimony
Forty years ago, sitting on my bunk in the stockade, I certainly did not imagine myself at work for peace and justice on Capitol Hill. Now, I sit where two other veterans once worked at FCNL. Oddly for a Quaker organization, FCNL has had three Executive Secretaries in its 65 year history, and all three have been veterans of the U.S. armed forces. Each advocated active nonviolence and worked to end the war system. I can hardly believe the journey brought me here. I am privileged to be one of them.
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Reviewed:
11/12/2008
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